Diana Pho - Steampunk World

But Elena squeezed the revolver-cuff in her pocket. Nina’s notions were nothing but a fantasy, one that required papers and passports. She couldn’t be sidetracked, not if they wanted to stay alive. She couldn’t wonder if peasants and soldiers were suffering just as much as they were.

“I’ll return in a few hours.” Elena slipped the diadem into her other pocket, in case she had to barter for anything.

Nina snatched up her book and didn’t say goodbye.

The lit domes of St. Sophia cast ghostly light over the marshes as Elena marched on the western road towards the city. She climbed the snowy bluff along the river, then hurried towards the gate and the hollow light on the guard station.

The soldier leaning against the gate could only be Ivan—he stank bitterly of vodka, and his nose and cheeks were pocked with broken blood vessels.

Elena whipped a page, torn from a book, out of her coat pocket.

“Here are my papers,” she said through the scarf wrapped around her face. She thrust them at Ivan and shouldered towards him, but he held out a black-gloved hand.

“Lemme lookit this,” he slurred. He held up the yellowed pages, squinting. “This…this isn’t…”

“Yes, it is.” Elena pointed to the paper. “Don’t you see it? You should let me through, now.”

Ivan’s lips curled, and he shook his head. His watery blue eyes were sober enough to understand that the paper was only a book-page, that she was one of the Trubetskoys, that she had accoutrement.

Elena drew her grandmother’s diadem out of her pocket, clenched it so she could feel its diamonds through her gloves. “You’ll accept this, instead of papers.”

“No,” Ivan said. “I don’t want…” He raised his hand, opened his mouth to call his fellow guards.

Elena dropped the diadem and plunged her hand into her other coat pocket. She pulled out the revolver-cuff, curled her finger around the angry black comma of a trigger.

His children will be orphans. Just like me and Nina. The thought leapt into her mind, she couldn’t help it, but she looked at the hammer and plough on his cap.

I am the firebird. No one catches the firebird.

The snap of the safety, and then she pointed the revolver-cuff at him and pulled the trigger.

She expected the bullet to rip through his uniform-breast. She didn’t expect the bullet to make a small neat black hole through his neck.

She expected blood trickling from a wound, not dark liquid spurting from the bullet-hole, like something from a terrible theater production. Ivan clawed at his neck and crashed to his knees, then spilled onto the ground. His boots kicked against the frozen dirt beneath the harsh spotlight.

She couldn’t look. She slapped her hands over her eyes, then twisted away and clamped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear the swish swish of his stilling legs scraping against the ground, so she couldn’t hear the dying cries of this man, this enemy , this enemy who had children, children who would never see their father cross their threshold again…

Oil. I need to get oil. He’ll have oil for his gun. She crouched, her boots grinding into blood, and slid her hand along Ivan’s belt until she found a can.

The can slipped from her hand when her gullet turned and she threw up. She grabbed the can and ran without wiping her mouth, crashing up to her knees in the crusty snow, racing back to the boxcar, the hole blossoming in Ivan’s neck over and over like a motion picture show she couldn’t stop watching.

Elena expected Nina to cry. But she maintained a stony silence as the oil dripped into her lungs, as she sipped her tea, as she curled in her furs, arms crossed and jaw tight.

“You used that oil on my lungs,” she finally said. “You killed a man for it, a man who wasn’t so dreadful at all.”

“He joined the Red Army.” Elena pressed her boots against the woodstove, trying to stop her legs from shaking. She was oiling the revolver-cuff, focusing on the metal and wood, trying, trying, trying to forget the hole in Ivan’s neck…

“Perhaps he didn’t have any other choice. I’m sure there are plenty of them that didn’t have a choice. You’re a murder—”

“That man betrayed us, just like all the other men in Novgorod. They put on red uniforms and rose against us. Don’t you side with him.” It was true, Ivan deserved it, he deserved to die like that, he was a bad man. He was.

“I—”

Elena slammed her feet onto the floor. “Mother and Father are dead. And you’re siding with their killers.”

Nina glared and puffed out her chest. “You pretend to be so very tough, Lena, but look at you, your hands are shaking.”

“Could you be any more naïve? I’m glad Mother and Father are dead, so they don’t have to see how you’ve betrayed us by saying these—”

Nina’s hand twitched back, and Elena’s cheek smarted. She lurched away as Nina raised her hand to slap her again.

“You listen to me,” Nina snarled, her voice ragged. “You’ve gone too far, and Mother and Father would be ashamed of you , not of me. You orphaned children, and you’ve gotten blood on your hands. What you did was terrible and wrong, and you know it.”

Elena knelt, ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. All she wanted was to be a girl again, in their house, pretending to be the firebird with Nina, knowing Mother and Father were reading in the parlor.

The hole appeared in Ivan’s neck, over and over again in her mind, the man whose children she had orphaned…

“It was terrible, Nina.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “Oh God, it was… I wanted to see him die, but then it was terrible…”

Nina’s hand rubbed against her back. “I know, I know. Don’t you see, though, we must leave Russia, we have to escape, because if we stayed, you’ll fall, over the line, into an irredeemable place.”

Elena felt brass feathers scrape her thighs, wondered if she would have to let them lop her tail off. “When I think of it… But we can’t leave, Nina. We don’t have any way to escape. We’re being hunted.”

Nina twisted her lips back and forth, frowning. “I’m quite sure we’ll sort something out. I’m sure we will. Perhaps you should sleep, and we’ll sort something out in the morning.”

Elena let Nina help her to her bunk, but even after she burrowed under her shawls, she couldn’t sleep. She watched the flickering light from the woodstove make bear-monsters from the furs of the boxcar walls. She turned first one way, then the other, as the candle burned low and…

Diadems dropped into the snow, and she tripped over them. Holes appeared beneath her boots, tiny holes that all joined together until there was no place on the ground for her to step. As Elena stumbled, the woman in the threadbare brown dress raced past her, leaping over the gaping holes opening in the ground. Everywhere she turned Ivan kept falling, and falling, and falling…

When she opened her sticky eyes to pale dawn filtering through the boxcar’s transom windows, she was determined. She couldn’t be the monster-firebird anymore. She and Nina would run, away from their estate and Novgorod, and once they’d reached one of the bigger cities, Moscow or Petrograd, they would blend into the crowd, find the papers and passports they needed to escape Russia.

Elena sat up to tell Nina her new plan.

But Nina’s bedclothes were thrown back. Her bunk was empty.

Elena pulled on her hat, shrugged into her coat, stormed out of the boxcar. She hurried towards the raised road through the marshes.

She scrutinized every lump of snow-laden grass, the dark maw of every puddle, her heart racing beneath her woolen coat, wondering where Nina could have possibly gone. She hoped Nina hadn’t ventured out to try to find papers and a passport herself. She hoped her sister hadn’t done anything foolish. She hoped she would return and the two of them could strike out across the snowy plains, run far away from the blackened gold tower of the house behind the hill, far away from bullet holes in necks and the demented dark firebird inside Elena.