Page 48 of White Wolf

Sasha wiped his hands dry and followed the captain out to the table behind the sofa, where Ivan and Feliks had made themselves scarce. He heard the murmur of voices in the bedroom, and realized they’d given them a moment of privacy, something hard to come by around here.

“What is it?” Sasha asked as he sat down. He’d long since given up on being timid or deferential with all of them. They’d welcomed him in as one of their own, and he didn’t question that anymore.

Nikita moved his chair around so they sat beside each other on the same side of the table, and laid out the paper he’d brought. The top sheet was a list of some sort – the names of cities, railway stations, villages. Nikita opened the book next and flipped it to a two-page spread that was a map of the Soviet Union.

“This is where we are now,” Nikita said, voice quiet. He touched the tip of the pencil to a far-west dot labeled Moscow. “And this is where you came from.” Tomsk. “Have you seen a map like this before?”

Sasha nodded, because he had, but it was always easy to forget what it looked like. Standing with your own two feet on the ground was so different from looking down at the entire country spready out as a sequence of lines and dots.

“This is where we’re going.” Stalingrad. “I’ve written out here the way you would go home.”

Sasha read the directions again, taking his time now, absorbing their meaning. He realized, as he read Nikita’s careful, step-by-step instructions, that at this moment, had the opportunity to get away and get back home to Tomsk presented itself, he wouldn’t have a clue how to start.

“It’s been a few months since I was in Stalingrad,” Nikita said, a note of apology in his voice. “And with the war on, some of the roads and metro stations might be closed. But I think you could travel overland well, yes? So here.” He produced a small silver disc from his pocket that he set on the table between them. A compass. “If you get lost, follow the river. The Volga will take you back to Moscow. And then you have to go east. The Trakt will take you all the way to Omsk, and once you cross the Ob, you’ll find Tomsk. Follow the compass, always east, Sasha, remember that.”

Sasha could only nod, staring down at the map, at the compass, at the painstaking bits of advice worked into Nikita’s directions, all of it written in a delicate, tiny font that belied everything his Chekist image projected. Sasha’s eyes started to burn, and then the page blurred. He blinked the tears away, not wanting Nikita to see.

But this.This. This was the moment, looking back later, when Sasha knew that he trusted him. A monster might take a boy from his home and drag him into a war. But only a kind man would give him the means to escape and run back home – only a friend.

Nikita put an arm around his shoulders, warm and grounding, and Sasha leaned into him. He missed his father terribly in that moment, fighting tears and the overwhelming weight of simple kindness.

“I promised I would look out for you,” Nikita said. “And I will. But if something goes wrong, and I can’t anymore, I want you to run. Run and go home. Okay?”

Sasha nodded, throat too tight to speak.

~*~

Pyotr was the one who did most of the shopping, his sweet face and kind smile generally enough to win over those staffing and waiting in the queues. The Cheka could buy most of their essentials at the Workers’ Cooperative Stores alongside the factory workers, but indulgences, like fresh fish and meat, had to be bought alongside everyone else.

One morning, human breath coalescing into a dense cloud above their heads, a small, wormy potato thunked into the side of Pyotr’s head. When Sasha turned to find the culprit, he saw an old woman in ababushka, all but three or four teeth missing. She looked away quickly, knowing that to strike an officer was a crime punishable by Siberian exile – or death, if she was lucky.

Pyotr shook his head grimly, and pretended it hadn’t happened.

~*~

Nikita finally did what Kolya had been warning of, and passed out one morning. They were walking as a group to the offices, not a hundred yards from the apartment building. Feliks asked Nikita a question, and the captain opened his mouth to reply – and then his eyes went skyward, the tension left his body, and he fainted face-first into a snow bank.

“Oh!” Sasha gasped, startled and alarmed.

The others looked on with exasperation and weariness.

“How many times have I told him?” Kolya said, bending to take hold of the back of Nikita’s jacket. “Huh? Eat breakfast. You should eat something. Have you eaten? It’s all I ever say. Stubborn damn fool.”

Kolya managed to drag him up with his hands beneath his armpits so that his face was at least clear of the snow, but it took Ivan to actually get him up in the air. The big man plucked his captain up like he was a doll and slung him carefully over one shoulder.

Sasha didn’t realize he was standing there like an idiot, breathing through his open mouth, worry skittering down all his nerve endings, until Feliks clapped him on the shoulder and said, “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“But he–”

“He didn’t eat breakfast. It catches up to him sometimes,” Feliks said, making a face that expressedwhat can you do?

And then Sasha understood why the others got so angry with him, why they badgered him about eating, because he felt the same way, suddenly, his worry hardening into the kind of impotent anger that clenched his teeth and curled his hands into fists.

“People are starving,” Sasha hissed. “Todeath. I stepped over a dead woman on the way to the market yesterday. And hechoosesnot to eat.”

Feliks’s brows jumped, a smile catching one corner of his mouth. “You gonna give him hell about it?”

“I ought to.”

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