“Toma, are you ready?” Mikhail asked. I looked over. He had already exchanged his worn worker’s clothes for the industrial, sage-green uniform of the Fraktsiya. White shirt tucked into his brown gabardine pants, leather belt cinched and adorned with a brass buckle featuring the Fraktsiya’s broken chain motif. Underneath the leather brim of his cap, his cool gray eyes confronted me.

Beside him, Vanya offered me a small smile. Even more than Mikhail, he seemed at ease in his uniform, and I thought about how easily he could step from one part of his identity to another—always adapting, always moving. I envied that, his ease of transformation.

“Let’s go,” I said after fashioning my mother’s rushnyk into a makeshift headscarf. It wasn’t quite like the white veils worn by medics, but it would have to do.

We entered the same car I had passed through just minutes before. I avoided looking at the dark-haired boy who’d begged for water, though I could feel his gaze burning into me as we passed. The blond soldier was gone from the next car, leaving only the dying to observe our passage. Midway down the row of cots, the door at the other end of the compartment swung open and a young medic stepped out.

“You!” she exclaimed the moment her gaze landed on me.

“Me?” I stammered.

Her capelet was stained by a smatter of fresh blood, and her cheeks as well. Her black hair fell to her chin in a severe bob, framing dark eyes bordered by round gunmetal glasses.

“You have to come with me,” the girl said, her voice strict and no-nonsense.

“What? Why?”

“There is a medical emergency in car eight.”

“But—”

“This nurse is in the middle of assisting another patient,” Mikhail interrupted.

“With what?” the girl asked, arching a bold eyebrow.

“One of them asked for water,” I said weakly.

“How about you serve your fellow soldier and get him water yourself?” she snapped at Mikhail, before pivoting on her heel. “Please, come with me now.”

With a helpless look in the boys’ direction, I followed after the medic, adjusting the rushnyk that drew my hair back. I hoped that whatever the issue was, the blond soldier I had passed on my way into the train wouldn’t be there. Then again, he had barely looked at me. He probably wouldn’t even recognize my face.

Stanislav would be a different story.

27

The medical emergency in car eight was followed by another in car nine, and more after that. For three hours, I found myself dragged from station to station. I was no medic, but the waxed thread they used for suturing was no different than the thread I spun from flax. So, I closed gaping wounds and stuffed others with cotton, clamped perforated entrails, and salved burns. When we arrived at a patient whose foot had bloated within its boot to such a degree that we were forced to cut away the leather folds, I was the one who held him down as the other girl retrieved a bone saw.