30

I was torn from sleep by a shrill, undulating sob. Moisture ran down my face, gathering on my eyelashes and in the trough of my lips. My parched tongue found the droplets. Clean. Rainwater or tears.

Slowly, I cracked open my eyes. Overhead, layers of fog sifted through the branches. I caught the faintest whiff of wood smoke when the breeze changed directions, but its source was far from here.

The sobbing continued for a few moments longer, garbled and distorted. The cry of a newborn. I was too exhausted to feel more than a stirring of trepidation, much less summon the energy to sit up and wipe at the tears rising in my eyes.

Close to my ear, I heard the metallic click of a rifle bolt sliding into place. “Just the drekavcy,” Vanya murmured, not to me, maybe only to himself. “Do you think they feed?”

I watched the mist snake and coil through the pine canopy. Even after the drekavac’s cries died into eerie silence, the weight of them seemed to linger around me as though suspended in the fog.

The drekavcy were harbingers of death, my mother had told me on our doomed journey, and she had been right. I wondered if she knew it then, if she could hear it in the spirits’ screams—that they were singing a dirge for her.

After all this time, my memories were coming home to me, but over the years, they’d lost their substance and feeling. I had been so young then. I hadn’t even realized what was happening right before me.

Looking back, I felt divided—both the girl who had stood there watching, and another girl, a stranger one born to the wilderness. I wished I could leave those memories with the first girl, the child, Tomochka. For how much I’d thought I wanted to find myself, I wished I’d never gone looking at all.

Carefully, I eased to a sitting position. I rested in a natural windbreak alongside a dry riverbed, an overhang formed by the eroded bank and a net of gnarled roots belonging to the pine tree looming overhead.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” Mikhail said quietly from beside me, Stanislav’s rifle angled across his crossed legs.

“What happened?” I looked around, struggling to shake away my daze. “Where are we?”

“Mikhail and I dragged you as far as we could,” Vanya said, sitting at my other side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

“The train?”

Vanya shook his head. “I doubt it’s even there still, and if it is, we can’t go back. The screaming stopped about thirty minutes ago, but...” He trailed off.

Slowly, I sank against the dirt wall. I just wanted to go home, but I knew in my heart that without Galina, that place would never be my home again.

A couple of raindrops splashed on my head. I looked up at the rumbling clouds, wiping my watery eyes with the back of my hand. A miserable laugh pressed against the back of my throat. As if this day couldn’t get any worse.