Soon she was at the front of the queue. Before her was a table, and behind it sat a clerk. He was dressed in a striped prisoner’s uniform, just like the men they’d seen in the shed, though he was less gaunt than they had been.

He barely looked at her before posing the same questions she’d been asked in Bolzano.

“Name. Alter. Geburtsort. Beruf.”

She had to dig deep to remember enough German to answer. “Antonina Mazin. Vier und . . . vierundzwanzig? Venedig. And, ah, Landwirtin?”

Another room. Another queue.

The women were searched by men with rough, grasping hands. Nina had nothing but her clothes, no money or jewelry or any other belongings, and she was glad of it. Glad beyond measure that she’d left her wedding ring with Rosa.

The woman next to her cried out when her earrings were snatched from her pierced lobes, leaving them torn and bleeding. The man who’d hurt her was a prisoner, too, but shrugged away the woman’s shock and pain. What sort of man had he been, Nina wondered, before he had come to this place?

They joined the end of another snaking queue.

Nina reached the front. Her arm was pulled forward.

Her name was replaced with a number.

She could only stare, astonished, at the blank-faced man with his needle and pot of ink. At the marks he was driving into her skin. The pain was nothing compared to the sight of those indelible digits.

She had been reduced to a number. A line in a ledger. A piece on an assembly line, only here, in this place of death, she was being taken apart, layer by layer, until nothing but her soul remained.

The soul unto its star returns.

Onward they were driven, and those who stumbled or fell were harried to their feet with threats and kicks. “Sauna,” someone said.

The guards were shouting, and around her women were undressing, removing even their underwear, and those who balked or moved too slowly were punched or kicked or forcibly stripped.

So Nina shed her clothes, and when she tried to shelter herself from the guards’ leering eyes her hands were slapped away by a dead-eyed man who first shaved her head and then every part of her body.

And the worst of it wasn’t her nudity in front of rabidly staring men, awful though it was. It was the loss of her beautiful hair. The glossy ringlets that Nico had so loved had been shorn away, stolen, and her stubbled skull felt cold and unfamiliar beneath her questioning fingers.

Again they were propelled forward. Naked, shivering, she stood in a tiled room and waited. Stella was at her side once more, the smallest of consolations, and they held hands as they waited . . . for what?