So she took the other woman’s hand, and she held it tight, the way you might hold on to a beloved child when crossing a busy road. And she tried to remember what it was to pray.

Chapter 27

The train traveled on, never stopping, through an entire day and night and another day, and as the sun set once more Nina could think of nothing save the maddening thirst that consumed her. The intervening hours had seen her migrate back to the side of the car, a pebble caught up in a turning glacier, and at some point—an hour ago? a day?—she’d noticed a few trembling beads of water on the bolts in the door. Condensation from the women’s exhalations over the past days.

Fear distilled.

She’d licked the metal dry, but it had done nothing save stoke the fire of her thirst. Soon they’d all be dead. To starve a person took weeks; to deprive them of water required only a matter of days.

The oldest and sickest of the women, no longer able to stand, sat huddled together in the middle of the car, and at first they’d talked and wept and prayed together, their voices rising and falling in an achingly beautiful lament. “Lead us in peace and direct our steps in peace,” they sang. “Guide us in peace, and support us in peace, and cause us to reach our destination in life, joy, and peace.”

But now they were silent, their prayers silenced by exhaustion and thirst. It had been hours since anyone in the boxcar had spoken.

The train stopped on the morning of the third day. The door was hauled open.

Around them, an empty plain of fallow fields and skeletal trees stretched to the horizon. A few meters distant, close enough for passing trains to rattle the glass in its windows, stood a house. It was abandoned now, its gardens overgrown, but the fountain in its forecourt was still pumping water. The merry sound it made was so incongruous, so obscene, that a croaking laugh erupted from her mouth.

One of the guards pointed at Nina and beckoned for her to jump down. “Wasser,” he said. Could it be possible their captors were allowing them to have some water?

Two more women, chosen from other cars on the train, had also been ordered to descend. She scrambled down and called out to the women still inside.

“Give me your cups—give me anything that will hold water. I’ll fill them for you!”

They handed her tin cups, an old canteen, even a little saucepan, the sort one used for heating milk, and she ran to the fountain and let the water fill them. And she drank, ducking her head low to the corroded spout, but after only a few gulps she was pulled away and shoved back toward the train.