Page 101 of One For my Enemy

The corpse, meanwhile, shook its head.

“I will save her,” it said.

“From what?” Marya asked.

“The world,” the corpse replied. “And if not this world, then all the others.”

Marya frowned, glancing questioningly at her sisters for an explanation, and Irina stepped forward hesitantly.

“He’s a bit stuck,” she supplied.

He.Marya already knew it was a he, but still.

“Stuck in what?” Marya asked, eyeing it. “The past?”

“His death,” Irina clarified. “It’s why we had to bring him back.”

“He’s been following me everywhere,” Katya added. “Speaking to Irka. We had to do something.”

Marya glanced at Galina, who shrugged. “I was just bored,” she said in explanation, and Marya sighed.

“Fine. Galya, come here,” she beckoned, and Galina nodded, resting her hand on Marya’s shoulder. “And you,” Marya said to the corpse, “have a seat.”

The corpse sat. It was an obedient corpse.

“This may be a while,” Marya warned, and then, because it was true, she added, “It’d be quicker just to kill you again.”

“Funny thing about death,” the corpse replied. “It does something odd to time.”

Briefly, Marya felt the slow brush of Dimitri’s fingers on her cheek.

Dead things never stayed dead for long. Things were always being resurrected.

“Yes,” she said, laying her hands on the corpse’s eyes and closing her own, breathing out. “Yes, it certainly does.”

IV. 17

(Allies.)

To touch Marya Antonova was to grasp a strike of lightning. She was an electric shock, and Dimitri, paralyzed for having touched her, lay bare and alone in the twisted landscape of his sheets until the feeling returned to his limbs. Then he launched to his feet, taking briskly to the street and finding himself somewhere he’d been not so long before.

“Bridge,” he called brusquely, “about that change of heart—”

“Ah, excellent,” said Brynmor Attaway, turning from where he sat on his sofa. “We’ve been waiting for you, Dimitri Fedorov.”

Dimitri paused. “We?”

A young woman turned from where she was sitting across from The Bridge, sipping quietly at a glass of something. More death whisky, Dimitri guessed, and she smiled.

“You must be Dimitri,” she said.

The eyes were different. Outside of that, the resemblance was uncanny.

“You’re Marya’s sister,” he said, and sifted through his thoughts. Not Ekaterina, not Irina, not Liliya, not Yelena. Someone younger. Galina?

No. He knew precisely who it was. More importantly, he knew who it had to be, and what it must have meant that she was here.

“You’re Sasha,” Dimitri realized, and she smiled slowly.

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