A night passed. Dawn had come and gone, but Pashkov’s fraction of army showed no signs of moving. Through the window of her cabin-turned-prison, Yael watched as men bathed in the river and cleaned out their rifles. The door to her old cabin (the one that still held Felix and Luka) had been set back on its hinges, but even that hadn’t been able to keep Felix’s screams from tearing through the village. That morning alone the unit’s medic had crossed the threshold over a dozen times. Every trip he held something different: rolls of gauze, bottles of pills, a canteen of water, a bloodstained Hitler Youth uniform that went straight into one of the soldiers’ fires (along with the parachute). Yael tried to gauge the boy’s well-being through these clues, but the task was impossible.
She gathered more questions than not, watching Pashkov’s soldiers. War was what these men and women were armed for. Some of their equipment was over a decade old. Relics from the first invasion of the Reich. Yet a good deal of their weaponry was newer, fresh from the factory crate. Yael spied a few men walking past with Arisaka rifles slung over their shoulders. Type 30s and Type 38s: dated in name, but shiny in appearance.
What were the Soviets doing with so many new-old Japanese guns?
What were the Soviets doing here at all?
Comrade Commander Pashkov had refused to talk to Yael after he returned from his radio session. His only words had been for his men: “Keep Volchitsa under observation at all times. We mustn’t have her swapping faces on us.”
A trio of armed guards had whisked her away into one of the more intact cabins. They sat and watched Yael. They did not let their fingers slide from their triggers. They did not speak.
What were they waiting for?
There was little question they were waiting. The guards had the telltale signs of restless men: twitching feet, eyes flickering to the doorway. Outside, Pashkov paced the path between the cabins, from the caravan of parked ZIS-5s to the bones and back again. Every few steps, he craned his neck up to the cloudy sky. It looked almost as if he was praying.
At noon, the heavens brought their answer. Airplane engines droned through the sterling clouds, passing over the village once, twice, thrice before circling a final time and disappearing over the horizon. Comrade Commander Pashkov stopped pacing, his stare fixed on the woods.
It wasn’t a what the men had been waiting for, but a who. A woman emerged from the trees, dressed in the full garb of a Soviet commander: coat, cap, a colorful collection of badges. She was far from old, but there was nothing young about her. She moved in a way that conveyed authority—clipped steps, set shoulders. Her greeting to Pashkov was perfunctory—an exchange of nods and a few words—before he pointed her toward Yael’s cabin.
Yael couldn’t help but notice how the guards shrank when the woman entered the room. All three took a subconscious step back.
“Out,” the woman ordered them.
The middle soldier swallowed. “But Comrade Commander Pashkov said—”
“Leave us,” she cut him off. “I will not ask again.”
The guards shuffled through the door, leaving the unarmed newcomer with an unbound Yael. This situation should have read to Yael’s advantage: tackle, knock out, change her face, change her clothes, make a break for it. But the evenness between them only made Yael uneasy. There had to be a reason this woman was fearless.
“You are Volchitsa?”
“I am.” There was no use in Yael denying it. Not with one hundred eyewitnesses and their lives on the line.
“A very interesting name.” The more this woman spoke, the more Yael could tell Russian wasn’t her first language. Her words rose and fell in a cadence that did not quite fit. “How did you acquire it?”
It was a strange question to open an interrogation with. Yael had expected something along the lines of What are you doing here? or Who are you working for?
Those might have been easier to answer.
Volchitsa. Russian for “she-wolf.” It was Yael’s code name within Reiniger’s resistance, but its origins went deeper than that. It was another one of the Babushka’s gifts, handed to Yael along with extra crusts of bread. Volchitsa, the old woman used to call her. The girl who was special. The girl who would change things. The girl who was as fierce as a wolf.
Yael had never been able to put these memories into words. She tried, but found only eleven: “A friend gave it to me. A very long time ago.”
“Your friend spoke Russian?”
Yael nodded. “We were in a camp together.”
“You had different names on the television. Inmate 121358ΔX. Yael.”
“I have a lot of names.”
“That must explain why you’re so hard to find. I’ve been looking for you, Volchitsa.” The woman’s accent suddenly fit her words; she’d switched languages to German. “For many, many years.”
Yael’s heart beat—faster, faster, faster—until the rest of her could not keep up. The woman drew so close that Yael could see the tiny ridges of her incisor teeth, the peach fuzz hairs on her earlobe, the premature strands of silver threading through her dark braid. HAZEL was the box the Soviet commander might check on an eye-color questionnaire, but even that wasn’t broad enough to cover the gold—dusted and glittering—inside the woman’s irises. Her skin lacked the scars most soldiers bore. It smelled like powdered lilies.
When the Soviet commander held out her left arm and lifted her uniform sleeve, these finer details faded. Yael’s vision tunneled, erasing everything except the numbers on the woman’s skin.
121048ΔX.
Numbers as crooked and dark as Yael’s had once been.
Numbers she knew.
Numbers that belonged to Miriam.