The buses moved in a column, winding away from smoke stacks that belched warm plumes into the driving snow. Zoya sat by the window on the third bus, eyes closed, shivering on her frost-covered plastic seat, gloved fingers tucked between her thermal-clad legs. Snow shifted across the road, wind blowing it back and forth, whistling around the bus as it jostled its contents and received weary sighs in return. Ice crystals hung in the air, sparking in the twilight of a polar night that bathed the crumbling old city in blue.
Zoya shifted away from her seatmate, a bulky man who smelled like grease and melted metal, although there was little chance she smelled much better. The bus reeked of workers, soot-streaked and exhausted. If Zoya opened her eyes, she would be met with walls of snow stacked high along the road, hiding the feet of abandoned buildings. Snow capped the windows, sloped over roofs, burst out of doors left open.
Only snow lived here.
Ahead of them was the gate, a puncture hole in the wall that wrapped the new city in a tight embrace. Above it was the old era sign in blocky blue text: Норильск. Norilsk. Beneath it: ЗАТО. Closed.
The buses came to a whining halt, the engines rumbling. The doors hissed open, letting in a blast of frigid air that Zoya felt through all her layers. The NKVD boarded, as they always did, in pairs. One officer for each side of the bus.
The door stayed open during inspection, snow collecting on the stairs as each passenger was barked at to lift their right wrist. Lift, scan, beep. Lift, scan, beep. Zoya listened until the heavy footfalls made their way to her seatmate. Lift, scan, beep.
She waited, eyes closed, for the demand.
“Lift your right wrist,” the officer commanded, voice bouncing on the frozen walls. Zoya flinched at the tone, and mourned having to remove her hands from warmth. She hesitated—a mistake. The split second of stillness was enough, and the officer found her elbow, forcibly yanking her hands from their position tucked between her thighs.
The bus fell into silence as her glove was peeled off, dropped onto the muddy floor.
Scan.
“Zoya Ivanova,” the officer said, gripping her wrist harder, expecting a reaction.
Zoya opened her eyes.
Beep.
Pink stained snow covered cars left in the courtyards along Pavlova Ulica, created discolored mounds along the stretch of apartments—an old era rectangular block painted lemon yellow. Workers scurried home, huddled in their coats against the rising wind that threatened to knock their feet out from under them. Zoya stumbled into the narrow plaza entrance of building 21, stopping along the way to dig for the vodka she kept stashed in the snowdrift nearest to the door.
The liquid burned cold in her mouth, followed with a flash of welcome heat. Zoya pressed her lips together, replacing the cap and pushing the bottle back into its hidey-hole on her way to the open building door.
Muddy tracks trailed down the hallway, the carpet worn down to concrete. The once bright green walls now dimmed by dust and time. Her neighbor sat slumped against his front door. A half-empty vodka bottle was cradled in his hands as his head tipped forward toward his chest. Zoya stepped over his long legs and bent to wake him, hand on his shoulder.
“It’s too cold in the hallway, Nikolai,” she said after he yanked his head back, knocking it against the door. “Go inside.”
She found his key on her chain and unlocked his door, watching him roll onto his knees and crawl inside without so much as a word. It was their unspoken understanding. Nikolai would arrive home too drunk to comprehend his keys, and Zoya would let him in when she found him, as she almost always did.
When she turned to her own door, wondering what state she would find her mother in this evening, her phone trilled in a way that made her heart stop. It was a noise she hadn’t heard in a week as she waited for news. She groped for it, the face of the phone lighting up with the message.
You just made things harder.
Zoya huffed, irritation flooding her.
Explain, she typed.
No reply was immediately forthcoming, and forever impatient, Zoya shoved the phone back in her pocket. She opened the door to her mother lying on the kitchen floor, giggling at the ceiling, her graying black hair swirling amidst the crumbs that littered the linoleum. The UV lamp blazed in the corner of the living room, lighting up the contents of her stash on the coffee table. Zoya passed her mother without comment, turning off the UV lamp before returning to the kitchen.
“Mama,” Zoya said, sitting on her knees next to her mother’s head, picking a piece of cereal out of her hair. “You know what the NKVD will do if they find you this way.”
Mama’s giggling reached a fever pitch. “Put me down like a dog?” she asked through a smile. “They are the dogs.”
Zoya did not argue that, not when her mother’s only crime was being the wife of an innocent man, convicted on gossip. The drugs, on the other hand, were punishable by death. They sowed weakness among the workers, and weak workers could not survive the mines. Mama insisted she was clean on her workdays, but Zoya suspected otherwise when all of her few hours off were spent on the kitchen floor.
“Get up,” Zoya commanded, taking Mama’s hand and standing. Mama’s head tipped back as she laughed. “Get up!”
Mama yanked her hand away, falling back and spitting. “Do not tell your mother what to do.”
“I must if she spends all day on the floor.”
Mama lashed out a foot, kicking and hitching into a scream. Zoya jumped back, raising her hands in surrender.
Her phone trilled, and Zoya was happy to retreat, pulling it from her pocket.
Meet. Mechanika.
How will I find you? she typed.
We will find you.
Under the frozen layer of tundra twisted the mines. The oldest, long since abandoned, curved under the city, and when an intrepid child found an emergency shaft into the pitch-black cauldron it was transformed into Mechanika. Electrical lines were wired, a trickle of running water supplied, all under the knowing eye of the NKVD.
Let them have their fun, someone must have said. So it was.
Zoya dressed in something appropriate. Black boots, thick tights that sagged around her hips, and a black sweater made of dense wool so long it passed as a dress. She shrugged into her coat and pulled her dark hair out of the collar, letting it hang down her back as she glanced at herself in the mirror.
She looked like death. Pale skin and dark smudges around her hollow eyes. The polar night was taking its toll.
Without saying goodbye to Mama, Zoya let herself out of the apartment and softly locked the door. Mechanika was a long walk into the night, and she wrapped her neck and face with a scarf that was damp seconds after stepping foot in the snow.
In the pale blue light, she could make out the smokestacks through the storm. The trio loomed over the candy-colored buildings around her, stark reminders that captivity was her life—if the wall and the razor wire weren’t reminder enough.
Zoya was going to leave this place. If she couldn’t get out by following the rules, she had to find another way. For as long as Zoya could remember, the wall cut them off from the rest of the country. No roads or rail connected to the mainland, and no flights had left with citizens since the last test took the best and brightest of Zoya’s classmates to freedom. The rest of them were meant to work, to mine the world’s largest nickel deposits out of the destroyed tundra.
According to the test, Zoya wasn’t the best or brightest of Norilsk. So she would work at The Combine, taking care of the machines until she grew sick or old. When Mama wasn’t seeing stars on the ceiling, she told Zoya that it was better than most people got. She knew the machines. Her father had taught her that much before he’d died. At least she wasn’t in the mines.
But she was still here, imprisoned in Norilsk’s winter.
The building sitting atop the elevator to Mechanika was a peeling rusty red, its steps to the front door crumbling. Zoya stepped inside gingerly, watching her feet, so preoccupied she ran into the back of the line.
“Watch out, now,” the girl in front of her laughed, grabbing Zoya’s wrist to steady them both. Her clothes were all sparkles, boots ending in spiked heels that pushed her well above Zoya’s height. Glitter swept across her eyelids, and the tips of her white blond hair were chalked red. Zoya mumbled an apology, but the girl waved it off.
“I’m Irina,” she said, whispering conspiratorially as if her name was a dark secret.
Zoya whispered her name right back as the elevator arrived, the metal gate cranking back to allow the next flood of people. Irina pulled Zoya into the overcrowded space, pushing the gate closed behind them. With a mechanical shriek, the elevator began its descent, sinking into the earth.
Hooking her fingers around the grate, Zoya breathed in the lingering scent of metal through the heavy perfume of the crowd. Irina, who chattered about meeting her friends for someone’s birthday, smelled the way Zoya had imagined summer would smell, undercut by the wafting air of the ancient mine.
“I will buy you a shot,” Irina declared, Mechanika’s thump and pull beginning to reverberate over the grinding of the elevator. Zoya, heart thumping quickly, ignored Irina as she watched the party come into full view.
The mine was strung with lights, tiny white lines dangling along the curling ceiling while strobes flashed drunkenly over dancers. Cages hung from the ceiling, and dancers within crawled and climbed the bars. Puffs of smoke lifted from the crowd, acrid like the rain. Zoya backed away from the grate when the elevator jerked to a halt, letting someone else open it. People streamed around her, dispersing into the party like ravenous wolves.
Zoya stepped off and stood stalk still.
“Have you never been to Mechanika?” Irina asked, giving her a quizzical stare.
“Yes,” Zoya said, scanning the crowd. “Of course.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Irina put a hand on her hip. “I said I’d buy you a shot, and I’m following through.”
“I’m looking for someone,” Zoya said, clipped. “I have no time for this.”
Irina tilted her head, the glitter on her eyes sparking under the strobes. Then she pressed close, whispering into Zoya’s ear, “I can take you to Volk, Zoya Ivanova.”
Zoya pushed her away, catching Irina’s slow smile, as if she took pleasure in surprising Volk’s guests.
“Prove it,” Zoya demanded.
“You were one percentage point off from joining the rest of those darlings on the latest flight, yes?” Irina asked, looking bored. She ran her fingers through the red tips of her hair. “You couldn’t buy your way onto that flight, but you know something worthwhile because Volk wouldn’t bother otherwise.” She stopped fiddling with her hair. “Am I right?”
Zoya sighed, unimpressed but uneager to drag up her motives, which were so much larger than one percentage point. Irina raised an eyebrow, waiting.
“Take me to Volk, then,” she said and followed as Irina wordlessly turned and wound through the crowd.
Mechanika rumbled and flashed, dancers barely moving out of the way for Irina to cut a path. The music stuttered and switched to something intensely popular, wild shouts rising up in the crowd. Zoya ducked under flailing arms and sidestepped around a couple intimately wound up in each other in the middle of the dance floor.
Irina skimmed around the edge of the makeshift bar, glancing behind her only once to make sure Zoya kept up. She pushed open a heavy steel door behind the bar, the metal screeching in protest.
“Down there,” she said, motioning to the metal grate stairs that descended into near total darkness.
Zoya took one look at it and wanted desperately to laugh. She grasped the impulse and crushed it, refusing to let the dark scare her. She lived in Norilsk. Norilsk was the dark.
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her phone and turned it on, shining it into the hole.
“Are you coming?” Zoya asked.
Irina smiled. “No, darling,” she said, kissing her on the temple. “I did my part. The rest is for you alone. You’ll find Volk at the end of the hallway. Be impressive. Volk does not do this for everyone.”
Zoya already knew that much. The messages she’d received hardly played the concerned citizen. The Wolf of Norilsk spoke with her because she had something he wanted, and in return he would grant her escape.
She gripped the phone a little harder and headed down, pointing the beam of light at the crusty floor. Grit popped and scraped under her boots. When she turned the corner, faint light cast down the hall, illuminating the walls decorated with illegal resistance posters, brittle old photos of young people posing with Kalashnikovs during the Combine Strike when Zoya was a child, and a torn flag. Zoya passed the beam over it all, looking at the photos in awe. It was what she assumed a museum to be like, old things put on display like this.
A shadow fell across the hall, causing Zoya to shift the light abruptly to a boy maybe only a few years older than herself. He squinted, raising his hand to block his eyes. She turned off the light.
“Seriously?” she asked, shoving the phone into her coat pocket. “You’re Volk?”
“What were you expecting?” he asked her, crossing his arms. She could not make him out as easily with the light behind him, so she pushed past into his lit chamber.
It was an old office, windowless and dry. It smelled like dust and metal. Earthy things. Lights were strung across the ceiling, like the rest of Mechanika. The walls were covered in maps, notes and photos pinned to corkboards. Candles flickered on the table, next to warm cheese in its wrapper and an open bottle of vodka. A UV lamp sat unused in the corner by a torn leather sofa that looked original to the room.
“This is not a good space to hide,” she said bluntly, turning around to face him and stopping short. He watched her from the doorway, looking at her curiously. “What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. You are Zoya Ivanova and I am Volk. How I get out of here in moments of crisis is not your concern.”
“It could be if you’re helping me.”
“If I am helping you is still quite up to debate,” he said, striding into the room then and closing the door behind him. “Your stunt on the bus this evening put you on the watch list.”
“And?”
“It makes it harder to hide you,” Volk said, leaning against the desk. “It makes it harder to decide if you’re worth it in the end.”
Zoya pursed her lips, then took off her damp scarf, unwinding it and throwing it on the sofa, followed by her coat. Volk watched her impassively.
“Please, make yourself at home,” he said, nodding to the sofa. She let his sarcasm go, approaching him and stopping short of the desk.
“What makes me worth it, exactly?” she asked. “I am not a fool. This isn’t free.”
“No,” he agreed, pushing a hand into unkempt black hair. “It’s not.”
She looked down at the tabletop, noticing another old photo lying on top of a stack of papers as though forgotten. Her eyes caught on the men in the photo, standing around a lorry stacked high with food. Her father was among them, the spitting image of how she remembered him.
“What is the meaning of this?” she asked softly, picking up the photo, noticing the man that stood next to her father had to be related to Volk. The similarities were too many, in the sharp jaw and straight nose, thick black hair and same curving mouth.
“It is what it looks like,” Volk said, and Zoya threw the photo down, anger cutting through her awe.
“Then tell me what it looks like,” she snapped at him. “My father was a mechanic in The Combine. He wasn’t ….”
“Nationalist,” Volk replied. “He was a Nationalist. He led them, and he died with them.”
Zoya laughed, backing away from him. “And here I’ve gone my whole life without knowing. Of course, that makes so much sense.”
“How do you think you’re here at all if not for Viktor Ivanov?”
She gave him a scathing look. “My father …”
“Your mother forbade anyone speak of it to you,” Volk interrupted. “You were too young when he died to know the truth, only that he died at The Combine, which is true for all intents and purposes.”
Zoya sat down with a rush on the sofa, the leather squeaking under her weight, and put her head in her hands. Volk walked across the room, squatting down in front of her. For several moments he was silent, watching the space between their feet.
“We played as kids,” he said, gruffly, as though he didn’t want to admit it. “You were three. I barely remember it myself.”
Zoya snorted, laughing into her fingers and wiped the backs of her hands against her eyes. “Says the people smuggler.”
He smiled grimly, looking at her with his forearms resting on his knees. She leaned back and shook her head.
“Let’s say it’s true,” she said. “It still wouldn’t be enough for you, would it? There’s a price to helping me. What do you want?”
Volk stood up. “Codes,” he said. “Door codes to all three plants. All that you can find.”
Zoya nodded slowly. “Easy enough. What will you do in return?”
“Cut out your microchip,” he said leaning down and pressing his thumb against the inside of her right wrist. She flinched and drew away, his hand falling. “I have a friend on the train to Dudinka. You’ll be smuggled out of the city by rail and put on the icebreaker Skopa with the rest of the freight. It’s scheduled to arrive in Hamburg in two weeks’ time. From there you have two options: forget all about this or do as your father did.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, standing up, steeling herself.
“Don’t forget,” he said and winked.
The storm continued into the next day. Snow came down yellow, streaked with gray soot. Zoya walked home in it, sliding every few steps with a gust of wind powerful enough to drag her into traffic. She steadied herself and kept trudging forward, shoulders up against the chill and heart pounding anxiously in her throat.
As she predicted, gathering the codes for Volk was simple. So much of the machines were operated by computer, like so many of the doors. Fixing a crusher machine, while more complicated than fixing a lock, still involved the same tools. It was only a few different clicks, and the codes were laid bare.
Zoya hid the flash drive in her boot, tucked into her sock so it nestled up against her skin. Boots tended to be ignored during random frisks. There were so many other parts of the body to grab.
Her phone chimed, and she dragged it out into the blistering wind.
?
She typed out, Yes.
A second passed.
Bring what you need. No more.
Turning the corner of her apartment building, she stopped to brush away the extra layer of snow from the vodka bottle and took a larger than normal gulp. The vodka raced to do its work, making what she would have to do now more bearable.
Zoya went through her routine, letting Nikolai into his apartment like a lost dog and turning to face her own door like she was walking to the gallows. The flash drive was warm against her ankle, a whisper of encouragement.
She opened the door to an empty kitchen, but the retching noise from the bathroom was all Zoya needed to know. Closing the door behind her, she made her way across the small living space and found Mama curled over the toilet, two bottles of vodka sitting on the floor. Mama’s tangled hair knotted across her shoulders as she heaved.
Zoya stood still, watching. When Mama was done, she leaned against the far wall and breathed a sigh, reaching for the less empty bottle and drinking the taste out of her mouth.
“Tell me about Papa,” Zoya said.
“No,” Mama replied.
“I know who he was,” Zoya said, pushing her hands deeper into her pockets. “Nothing you’ve done has protected me from not knowing.”
Mama pushed a shaking hand into her hair and pulled at it, a whine traveling up her throat. “No,” she said, repetitively, pulling at her hair. “No. He is dead, and you will not slander his name.”
“Tell me,” Zoya pushed.
“No!” Mama shouted, throwing the bottle against the porcelain tub, glass and liquor exploding across the floor. Mama pressed her fingers against her face, curling into a tight ball, high pitched cries muffled into her hands.
Zoya started forward and stopped, thought better of it. She left Mama crying over the broken glass, retreating to the bedroom they shared. She’d stashed her bag in the closet, far enough back that Zoya stood on tiptoe from the sagging mattress to hook a finger around the strap. It hit the floor with a thud, catching a water-stained envelope on its way down. Photos scattered out of it, flipping to the floor.
Faces stared up at her from the photographs, smiles that she didn’t remember happening in her family. With a pause, Zoya crouched down and gathered the pictures one by one, filing through her laughing mother, her beaming father, Zoya when she was a mere child. They were not so broken then.
She paused on a battered photo of her father. He was holding her, maybe just a toddler, bundled in down and wool against the arctic wind. Next to them was the man from the photo in Volk’s room under the Mechanika, gangly boy with dark hair sitting on his shoulders.
Zoya flipped the photo over, hoping for some identifying name and found light pencil marks on the slippery backing.
Viktor and Zoya. Dmitry and Alexei.
Zoya traced her fingers over the words. They were written in her mother’s precise handwriting from before.
Alexei.
She turned the photo over again and studied it, traced the lines in the face of a small boy who would grow up to be Volk. The Wolf of Norilsk. She looked at herself as a child, face barely showing through the coat, and could remember nothing.
Mama’s soft sobs drifted down the hallway, reminding Zoya that her questions had gone unanswered. Hastily, she threw the rest of the photos together and shoved them into her bag, keeping the photograph of Volk in her cupped palm. She paused by the bathroom on her way to the door, but she couldn’t make herself look in on Mama. If she did, she knew what she would see. What she would see might tempt her to stay, and there could be no staying.
She hiked her bag onto her shoulder and whispered down the hallway, “I’m going now, Mama.”
Zoya did not wait for an answer, and when she reached the door, the sobs had stopped. She hoped that somehow her absence would bring her mother peace, a little less of a reminder of what she’d lost. She swallowed down the instinctual urge to turn around, to check on her, and left the apartment.
When she headed into the storm, she recovered the vodka from its hole, tucking it under her arm. The walk to Mechanika was brisk, snow falling in large flakes and breaking apart on her chapped cheeks. The elevator carried her down into the bowels of the party, and she moved through the crush of people without ever seeing them, dropping down into Volk’s narrow hallway without the light and without Irina guiding the way.
She appeared in his doorway snow wet and shivering, throwing the bag down at her feet. He looked up at her and said, “Codes?”
“Hello to you, too,” she said to him, bending down and fishing the drive out of her sock. She tossed it to him, and he caught it.
“You’re efficient,” he said, turning to push the drive into the tablet computer sitting on the desk. She put the vodka on the table with a wet thunk. He nodded at the tablet screen and powered it down. “These are good?”
“They don’t change,” Zoya said, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “The Combine is far too powerful to care.”
“Our plans might change their mind,” Volk said and turned to her. She was ready for him, shoving the photo into his chest.
“My mother is sentimental,” she said, watching him as he smoothed the photo between his fingers. “By the looks of your wall out there, that is something you both share. Maybe you’ll want this for your collection.”
He smiled, a slow turn of lips. For a second, she could see the boy in him, the soft curves hidden in hard edges, but then it vanished, and he handed it back to her.
“You’ll want it for your journey, unless you join us,” he said. “Some of us have been waiting for you.”
She looked up at him, surprised. “For what? To be Viktor’s daughter, the Nationalist mascot? I have no interest.”
“The cause is interested,” he said, and she snatched the photo from him.
“I’m not,” Zoya said curtly, thinking of her mother where she’d left her. Guilt gnawed at her stomach, and she wanted desperately for it to be gone. Her Mama had left her when her father died, preferring a world that didn’t exist in her drugs and hallucinations. It was a place Zoya could not follow, and her mother would refuse to follow Zoya.
“Then keep it,” he suggested as she folded the photo and slipped it into her pocket. “You’ll want it more where you’re going, and I don’t need the memories.”
Volk picked up the vodka and took Zoya’s wrist, leading her into an alcove with a squat toilet behind a sheet of plywood and a cracked sink that trickled water. A trail of rust slipped down the drain.
“I have your papers,” Volk said as he busied himself setting out a knife, a pad of gauze, surgical tape. “The train is leaving with a shipment tonight, so we must be quick.”
He unscrewed the vodka and pressed it into her hands. She took two healthy gulps and gasped as she nodded her understanding. She pushed the vodka back at him and turned away, busying herself with the graffiti on the walls. Volk picked up the knife and held it over the open flame that lit the room with shivers of warm orange light.
“Lift your right wrist,” he said, and Zoya found herself smiling.
The knife bit quick, blood pooling and trickling into the sink. Zoya forced herself to hold still, forced herself to breathe deep, and made herself turn to watch as Volk finally worked the chip free.
It fell into the sink, sticking to the porcelain. Volk cleaned away the blood and doused the cut with vodka, wrenching another hiss out of Zoya.
“I’m not sorry,” he said to her, pressing the gauze against the wound.
“Sadist,” she murmured, looking down at her wrist wrapped in his long fingers.
“To the core,” he smiled and put one hand on the crown of her head, looking at her with what she thought was a flash of affection.
“Alexei,” she started, beginning to shift from him.
“You are free, Zoya Ivanova,” he said, his fingers slipping out of her hair. “Now comes the hard part.”
The train carried her to the river of ice, and the Skopa crashed through it with bone jarring ease. Zoya curled herself into an empty freight container in the bowels of the ship, her bag a poor excuse for a pillow and the provided bucket a longing reminder that Hamburg was two weeks away. The Skopa rocked back and forth, the sound of ice exploding against the hull keeping Zoya from sleep. The first mate attended to her in secret, squirreling away pieces of bread and cups of water, slipping them into her crate. When she was too tired to move during these visits, he would kneel down and stroke grease-stained fingers through her hair.
“Where are we?” she would ask above her water cup, and he would only shake his head.
“The time goes faster if you do not know,” he said and took away the empty tray, leaving her with a flashlight to cut through the dark.
Zoya turned the flashlight on as soon as the container door shut and locked her in, the fragile beam bouncing off the metal and lighting up her rectangle of space. She sat in the middle, dragging her bag into her lap, and ripped it open with shaking hands.
She’d packed so few things. Underwear, a toothbrush, socks, the papers Volk had fashioned. None of that was needed in the crate. Zoya upended the bag, scattering belongings, until she came to the packet of photos and dumped them into her lap.
The hard part, he had said. Hardly. Entrapment on the open ocean was nothing to her ignorance. She went through the photos, sorting them, leaving finger smears on printed faces, searched the backs for information that was nearly always there and written in her mother’s hand. There was only one of Alexei, still sloppily folded in her back pocket, but many of her father. Viktor laughing, smiling, straight-faced, and stern. Only a few of her mother, the photographer, the keeper of the memories.
So many of Zoya. Zoya, aged 1. Zoya, aged 5. Zoya and Viktor.
There was a time, Zoya thought, when Mama loved her, maybe fiercely. The guilt rose up. Zoya was afraid it would burrow into her heart. She pushed the photos together, tucking them back into the envelope, when a lone photo slipped free and fell into her lap.
A photo of a cabin, surrounded by trees. Zoya had never seen trees.
Гавань, her mother’s neat handwriting said on the back. Haven.
And an address, words written in German that Zoya couldn’t puzzle out on the Skopa.
She flopped over onto her back and turned off the flashlight, letting the container plunge into darkness. It was her fault. She could have asked. She could have stayed. She had been invited, offered the secrets kept underneath Mechanika, and she’d said no.
She’d only wanted to leave. Even now, she still wanted only to leave.
So she slept, paced, kept track of the time in cups of water.
It was when the container lifted and swung, scattering her things and sending her rolling into the side with a sickening thud, that Zoya knew it was time. They landed on solid ground, and she stood shakily to her feet. Gathered her things. Blinked her eyes wearily at the door when it cracked open. She peered at it from under a dirty curtain of hair.
The first mate smiled at her wide enough to reveal one broken tooth.
“Welcome to Hamburg.”
The walk was long, but Zoya didn’t mind it. The winter was crisp here, the air blue and sweet. The snow gathered in white fluff, glittering in an untouched carpet as she stamped through it. On the way to the house, Zoya stopped every few yards to cup the stuff in her hands simply to marvel at it.
The house could be glimpsed in the distance, a cottage set in a limitless stand of trees. The trees towered above her, quaking under ice. Zoya ran her bare fingers over the bark, stared up in wonder at plants that grew taller than houses. She could hardly feel the cold. It did not soak into her bones like before.
Zoya checked the address again from the back of the photo. Mama’s writing seemed warm in her hand, and Zoya carefully slipped it back in her pocket before she walked up the slippery steps to the cottage door and knocked, not knowing what she would find inside.
Somewhere in the depths of the ice forest, a wolf howled. High and mournful, until others joined the call.
The door opened.
Mara Dabrishus grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks and currently resides in Northeast Ohio with her husband and two cats. Outside of writing, her favorite thing is riding horses in circles, loops, and perfect figure eights. Her debut novel, Stay the Distance, was released in early 2015.