III

A fresh pan of gingerbread sat on the ledge of the farmhouse window. The glass was cracked a few centimeters, just enough to let the cold in. The confection’s heat clouded into steam, carrying scents of clove and ginger and molasses all the way across the snow-covered yard, into the barn.

Yael tried her hardest to ignore the smell. She’d already settled down for the evening, taking shelter in the scratchy piles of hay. The barn was warm enough, and the handful of oats she’d scooped out of the horses’ feed bin kept the gnaw of her hunger away.

But the gingerbread…

Never in her seven years of life could Yael remember eating anything as good as that dessert smelled. Food in the ghetto had been scarce. Food in the camp had been scarce and rotten. (Bits of gruel, spoiled vegetables, moldy bread.) Ever since Yael escaped those barbed-wire fences by using her skinshifting abilities to look like the camp kommandant’s daughter, her diet was substantially better. During summer the woods burst with blackberry thickets and mushroom caps. Orchards were so fruitful by autumn that the farmers’ wives never seemed to note how the trees on the borders of their property lacked apples. Now that the weather was harsher, Yael took shelter in barn lofts, sustaining herself with horse feed, hoping the owners wouldn’t notice that their horses seemed to eat twice as much without getting fat.

She’d lurked in this particular barn for a week. It was an unusually generous length of time, but the family who lived in the house had been too distracted by holiday festivities to pay much attention to clues of her presence. Yael had watched the whole process from the safety of the loft. The decorating of the Christmas tree, the singing of carols, the baking…

She’d watched the mother stir the gingerbread together into a deep brown dough. One of her blond daughters (the same one who trudged across the yard every morning through blank-slate snow; whose breath frosted the air as she sang “Silent Night” to herself and milked the cow; who had no idea that Yael was listening in the loft above) popped the pan into the oven. The other daughter peeled potatoes. Their two brothers played Stern-Halma at the kitchen table—a game full of laughter and elbows.

The family was off in the dining room now, eating dinner and waiting for the gingerbread to cool. The oats in Yael’s stomach did not feel like enough as she watched them. She wanted to be in that house. Chuckling, full, and not alone.

That, of course, was impossible.

She was not one of them. She could never be one of them.

But she could snag a piece of that gingerbread.

The milking cow gave Yael a lazy, low greeting as she crept down the loft’s ladder. She made certain before she stepped out of the barn that her sweater sleeve was rolled down to hide the tattooed numbers on her arm. Her hair, tangled though it was, was as golden as the straw. Her eyes were bold and blue. No one would recognize her for what she truly was.

Snow was falling thick enough to cover her footprints for a short trip to the kitchen window and back. After a few minutes there would be no sign she was even there. Just a cracked window and an empty pan.

Yael slipped across the yard, ignoring the sting of the snow through her thin shoes. The smell of gingerbread was stronger now, the family’s laughter louder. She could hear one of the boys telling a joke—something about talking cows riding bicycles. The youngest sister giggled so hard she snorted.

Yael hunched under the window, reaching for the pan with hungry fingers.

“And then the first cow turned to the second cow and said—”

“OUCH!”

Yael, who was always so quiet, so careful, had not taken into account that a steaming pan meant the metal was still hot. She clamped her mouth shut, but it was too late. The youngest sister stopped laughing. Five different chairs scraped across the farmhouse floor as the family leapt to their feet.

“What was that?”

“Eric,” the mother said to one of the boys, “go get the rifle.”

Yael was off, sprinting across the field, leaving a whirl of footprints behind her. The farmhouse door opened to a yell. Yael did not stop. She did not look back. And it was a good thing, too, because—

KA-BOOM.

Silent night. Holy night.

All is buckshot. All is bright.

She was not one of them. She could never be one of them.

Yael could not go back to the barn (trigger-happy, cow-joking Eric would only follow the footprints, find her there), so she did what she always did.

She kept running.