10
A SPECIAL SORT OF VOLUNTEER
“But my clothes are warmer than this,” Sasha protested. They were nicer, too, but he didn’t voice that. Homespun and not much to look at, but much more durable than the cheap factory-made shirt Feliks was trying to shove into his hands.
Feliks made an exasperated sound in his throat. “They make you look like–”
“I’m from Siberia?”
“Ugh.” Feliks grimaced and threw the shirt in his face – but Sasha saw the edges of a smile tweaking his mouth. “I liked it better when you were afraid of us. Nikita,” he said when his captain walked into the room, “tell this man he looks like my grandmother in that sweater.”
Nikita was dressed and immaculate, the cheap factory clothes looking tailor-made to fit. Who knew – maybe the Cheka were given custom uniforms. A row of water droplets stood out dark on his pressed collar where his slicked-back, bath-damp hair had dripped at the ends.
He paused in the process of buttoning his cuffs and regarded the two of them. “Let him wear his clothes,” he said, and Feliks groaned again. “They know he’s from Siberia; what’s there to hide? Might as well look authentic. Besides, his will be warmer.”
Sasha smiled.
“Here, though.” Nikita finished the last button and stepped in close to him, a movement that seemed both unexpected and potentially sinister. He smelled of harsh chemical soap. He reached with both hands – clammy and cold from bathing – and scraped his damp fingers back through Sasha’s hair, pushing it into some semblance of order. “Hmm,” he murmured, frowning to himself, fingertips dragging against Sasha’s scalp in a way that felt shockingly intimate. “We don’t have time to cut it. Shame.”
When he stepped back, surveying his work, Sasha reached to tuck a stubborn lock behind his ear. “I like it longer.” His voice came out small. “It keeps my head warm.”
Feliks snorted a laugh.
One corner of Nikita’s mouth twitched. “I suppose it does. Go brush your teeth. And make sure your hands are clean – get beneath the nails.”
Sasha nodded.
In the bathroom, Ivan stood in front of the mirror, shoulders spanning the distance between the wall and the tub – he wasn’t built for the indoors; he belonged, Sasha thought, in a logging camp somewhere, hauling felled trees by chains like a draft horse. His huge fingers were careful as he styled his hair, though, an open tin of pomade balanced on the edge of the sink.
He caught Sasha’s gaze in the mirror and winked. “This is American. Good stuff.” He wriggled his sticky fingers. “Want me to do yours?”
“No.” Sasha smoothed a palm across the crown of his head, feeling a residual dampness from Nikita’s hands. “Thank you.”
Ivan shrugged and washed his hands. “It won’t be so bad, wolf pup. They just want to look you over. Let Nik and the old man do all the talking, yeah? You don’t need to be nervous.”
“I’m not,” he lied.
Ivan put the pomade tin away in the medicine cabinet and turned to him with a smile. Clapped his bear paw hand down on Sasha’s shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. “Say that enough and maybe it’ll be true. It’s what I’ve always done.”
His heavy footfalls moved out of the room, his voice booming as he joined the others and demanded breakfast.
It seemed like Ivan had used up all the oxygen in the bathroom, because Sasha’s chest was tight, his head spinning. He braced his hands on the edge of the sink and stared at his wild reflection. His eyes looked like dirty glass under the harsh electric light. His hair was already trying to creep back into its usual disarray, unfurling from the little finger-shaped tunnels Nikita had raked it into. He looked monstrously out of place, here in this place of concrete and factory smoke, frayed and windswept, smelling of the wilderness. The idea that he had a part to play, that he was needed, rattled him down to his foundations. Who was he? What could he do that harder men couldn’t?
He took one shaky breath, and then another.
Last night he’d watched a man conjure fire. Today he was going to the Kremlin.
He lived in an age of miracles. He thought it might just take one to get him back home.
~*~
Monsieur Philippe was in excellent spirits – too excellent, considering there was snow on the ground and they were walking down sidewalks lined with barbed-wire and anti-tank barricades.
“Beautiful morning,” he said happily, rubbing his gloved hands together.
Beside him, Nikita shook his head. He’d never cared for the cold.
It was a beautiful morning, though, in the way that a sharp knife could bring a smile to your lips. A westerly wind had swept the snow clouds away during the night, and dawn had arrived in clear, frostbitten layers of gray, the sun rising as a smooth disc of hammered steel above the clustered building tops. The factories belched black, rolling clouds of smoke. Ravens wheeled, cackling at one another, dive-bombing the markets and plucking scraps from the drifts of dirty snow. Most of the pedestrians were soot-streaked female line workers, trundling home with exhausted faces, bits of wild hair slipping loose from their kerchiefs and hats. Army lorries rumbled past, crushing the snow into icy slush, their exhaust flavoring air that was already tangy with ash and frost.
The sight of his city in the morning always stirred something light and almost-happy in Nikita’s chest. For those moments, with the cold air in his lungs and the snow under his boots, he forgot to be angry.
He glanced back over his shoulder as he walked to look at Sasha. The boy had been actively nervous back at the apartment – no longer terrified of them, like he’d been, but jittery as a kid on his first day of school – but was attempting to disguise it. He snuck glances from the corners of his eyes without turning his head; sucked at his lower lip and looked overwhelmed for flashes, then schooled his features again. The jagged ends of his too-long hair peeked out from his hat, over his ears and forehead. Bundled up in his furs, boots scuffing the pavement, he was almost childishly cute, like a lost puppy.
Pyotr walked on one side of him, chatting amiably and pointing out landmarks. Ivan was on his other side, interjecting with loud corrections and a sweeping arm movement that nearly knocked the hats from both boys’ heads.
Nikita caught Kolya’s gaze a moment and his second-in-command rolled his eyes.
He returned the gesture and faced forward again. “Assure me again that you aren’t going to do something terrible to this boy,” he said to Philippe.
“Would it matter if I couldn’t?”
His immediate answer was, “Yes.”
“Hmm. And after all the terrible things you’ve seen and done yourself. Interesting.”
“Can you still make fire with my knife sticking out of your throat?”
Philippe chuckled. “Rest assured, Captain, I’m not going to harm the boy. In fact, I’m going to make him very powerful.”
“Like you?” The mental image of Sasha holding a palmful of fire was disconcerting.
“Somewhat. Different, but perhaps stronger than me, in his own way.”
Nikita suppressed a shudder and told himself it was because of the cold. “Why can’t you use another volunteer?” He said the word mockingly. “Why not someone who’s already strong? Already battle-trained? Like Ivan.”
“It’s a complicated procedure, I’m afraid. It relies less on physical strength and more on the spiritual. The volunteer must be incredibly self-possessed, and have certain psychic inclinations.”
Nikita sighed. “Sounds like bullshit.”
“I imagine it does. But trust me: it has to be Sasha. I’ve been waiting a long time for him.”
Red Square was full of tanks and lorries mounted with machine guns, ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice. Other lorries trucked in crates of ammunition, freshly pressed and still-warm from the factory. The preparedness for war had consumed every aspect of the city.
But also.
The silver sunlight smoothed lovingly over the onion domes of St. Basil’s; turned to stardust on the clumps of melted snow gathered in its window ledges. Cast deep, rectangular shadows along the crenelated tops of the Kremlin wall. Gleamed off the white façade of the GUM. The red star at the top of the Spasskaya Tower winked.
There were many things an outsider could have said of his city, but no one could claim she wasn’t fiercely beautiful.
“Oh,” he heard Sasha say behind him, soft and reverent, and a cautious warmth bloomed behind his ribs. Oh was right. There really weren’t words on a morning like this.
Nikita’s mother, though she’d lived amid the splendor of Petrograd, had always said she felt small and awed when she stood in Red Square. After having been to Nicholas’s capital himself, now, Nikita could agree with the sentiment. Petrograd’s elegance was distinctly Western in tone. But Moscow’s red brick and Italianate architecture smacked of Ivan the Terrible. There was something visceral about its silhouette against the white sky. A punch-to-the-gut feeling when you thought of the vastness of time.
“Are we…going in?” Sasha breathed as they charted a course for the Kremlin’s main gates.
“Yes,” Nikita said, and felt a twist of fear in his belly. Not for himself, but for the boy.
He’d stopped worrying about his own fate years ago. When someone finally rolled his corpse into a muddy hole in the ground, it would be a good day.
~*~
The major general received them with a smile, standing up behind his desk as the doors opened, waving his secretary off to the side. “Let’s see what you’ve brought!”
But then he got a look at Sasha.
Nikita wasn’t sure what he’d expected of this interaction, but it wasn’t the sudden, almost comical way the major general’s face collapsed, slack-jawed and gaping. He turned to look at Sasha himself, wondering if they’d made a glaring error this morning, overlooked some deformity or flaw.
But no, Sasha looked the same as he had since that first moment in his family’s wooden house in Tomsk. Tall, a little too thin, shoulders broad like he might fill out some day, white-blond hair standing up in messy cowlicks now that he’d pulled his wolfskin hat off and held it between his white, long-fingered hands. If he’d been properly groomed and wearing real clothes, he might have looked like a ballet dancer. And–
Oh. That was the problem, then.
“What is this?” the major general asked, and when Nikita looked back at the man, he saw that his brows and jaw had set into a dark scowl.
“What you asked for,” Nikita said, tone flat, and caught the way Kolya darted a glance to him from the corner of his eye.
“Good morning, Major General,” Philippe said, stepping forward with his constant smile fixed in place. How he managed to look and sound genuinely happy, Nikita didn’t know. Maybe that was the most powerful of his magic. “I’m pleased to announce that our trip to Tomsk was a success. I’d like you to meet Aleksander Ivanovich Kashnivkov.” He motioned to Sasha with a flourish.
The major general paced slowly around his desk, so that he stood in front of it – and in front of Sasha. Sasha who swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple jumped in his throat, pulse fluttering just under his skin.
Nikita felt his hands curl into fists at his sides and forced them open again.
The major general looked at Philippe with mixed anger and disbelief. “This is him? This? Look at him! He’s just a boy. You promised me a weapon.”
“And he shall be.” Philippe held his ground. “During our last conversation, I told you that it would be a lengthy process, and that it would require a special sort of volunteer. That volunteer is Sasha. But.” He sighed, regretful. “I understand that you might have changed your mind–”
“Changed my mind? Ha! We threw all the boys in Moscow at the Nazis – and half the ones from Siberia too! – I can’t afford to change my mind. But you bent my ear for months about some weapon, and now you bring me this boy-heathen wrapped in wolf skin. One man can’t change the tide of war, Monsieur Philippe. It isn’t possible.”
Philippe’s smile was closed-mouthed and hard-edged. “I think you’ll find that it’s entirely possible, major general, if you’ll just have a little faith.”
~*~
Sasha felt sick. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed that the major general found him lacking, or if the spike of nausea in his belly was pure relief because he might be going home. Or, rather, the oily tang of dread, because even if he wasn’t suitable for Monsieur Philippe’s weapon, there was no way a young, able-bodied man would be allowed to return home when there were all those tanks sitting outside and the Red Army was in need of new recruits to fill them.
He sat forward on the bench that was tucked into a gilded alcove in this impossible, beautiful palace, rested his arms on his knees and put his head low, so he didn’t feel so faint anymore.
He startled a little when he felt a cool palm cup the back of his neck, soothing against the too-hot skin there.
“It’s alright,” Nikita said, voice low enough that the guards at the door couldn’t overhear. “I’m pretty sure the old man’s enchanted Stalin himself at this point to get what he wants.” He sighed. “We’re probably all enchanted too. The plan will go through.”
How could he possibly know that’s what had him worried? Sasha released a shaky breath toward his boots and whispered, “I don’t want to be a soldier.”
“You won’t be.” Nikita’s hand tightened on his neck, briefly, and then pulled away. “I promise.”
How can you get me home? he wondered. How can you promise anything when you’re caught in this trap too?
Feliks thumped down beside him on the bench. “I just want to know what they’re going to do with you.”
“Me too,” Sasha said. Feeling bolder, comforted by Nikita’s promise, he lifted his head and sent the captain a searching look. “Did he say–”
Nikita shook his head. “No, nothing. He won’t tell us.” He frowned into the middle distance, one leg cocked to the side, hands on his hips. His eyes slid to Sasha. “I’m going to make him tell us, though.”
“Oh. Well…” He didn’t want to start a fight. This situation was frightening enough without complicating it. “I–”
The doors to the major general’s office opened and Philippe walked through. Smiling. “Gentlemen,” he said when he reached them, clapping his gloved hands together. “The river should be navigable in three weeks’ time. We leave on the first cargo ship out, the Ekaterina, the moment we’re able, bound for Stalingrad.”