to lay a few game traps, hands shaking too much to fashion more than the simplest of snares out of plane wiring.
Time kept bending and melding. Her waking hours were full of cramping muscles and watery bowels, heading to the stream to drink and then back to her shelter to curl around her jittering limbs. Her sleeping hours were full of nightmares. Over and over she lost control of the Rusalka over the surface of the lake, sinking through aquamarine water with lungs bursting. She imagined footsteps outside the shelter and erupted screaming, squeezing the trigger of her pistol over and over as she aimed it into the darkness. Too late she realized no one was there, and she’d just wasted all her ammunition. She could have wept, but tears were no good; she crawled back into the shelter only to dream of Yelena dying, going down in a blossom of flame. If she dies, you will never know it. Yelena was gone; Nina was never going to know if she lived or died or fell in love with another. She succumbed to tears then, sobbing in the haunted night.
She had no idea how long she was ill—the days and nights seemed to flash past in cycles. At some point her father disappeared, and Nina’s lethargy abated enough to strip off and wash her filthy overalls. Sitting naked on the stream bank waiting for her clothes to dry, she flexed her fingers in the sunlight. Grown thin, but they weren’t shaking anymore. That damned Coca-Cola, she thought. Her dreams were still terrible, she was still racked with sudden illogical convictions that someone was sneaking up behind her, but the muscle cramps had mostly disappeared, and she was strong enough to set a fire and cook the rabbit she found in her snare.
“Time to move,” she said aloud, because Nina Markova might want to die, but she was too stubborn to starve in a Polish forest. She climbed into her damp overalls, took down her shelter, began trekking west again.
And in the second week, she met Sebastian.
Chapter 39
Jordan
July 1950
Boston
Dancers mirrored endlessly across a battered barre—click. Pointe shoes rubbing through the resin box—click. Quietly Jordan moved around the fringes of the Copley Dance Academy’s advanced class. A taut-pulled bun coming loose midplié, a forehead leaned wearily against an arched foot. Click. Click.
“Did you get what you wanted?” Tony asked as they left the studio.
“I think so. I won’t know for certain until I look at the negatives.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over her shoulder. “You were very helpful.”
It surprised her just how helpful. Shooting pictures with Garrett had often left her annoyed; he kept sneaking kisses or else talking when she trying to concentrate. Tony had been different. He’d flirted outrageously, not with the dancers but with Madame Tamara, the eighty-year-old instructor who called him a naughty boy in Russian and ended up letting Jordan stay the entire class rather than shooing her out after ten minutes. Tony had gravely aped the dancers’ pliés as they began, and they laughed so much they forgot Jordan was there; she’d been able to start clicking away without waiting for her subjects to relax. Tony had then faded quietly back against the wall, handing her film before she needed to ask for it. “You were an excellent assistant,” Jordan said as they swung around the corner into Copley Square.
He smiled, lazing along hatless in the summer sunshine. Heat shimmered above the pavement, and through the square women blotted their palms inside sweaty gloves and men tugged at collars whose starch had gone limp. “Can we discuss my fee for the morning’s work?”
“Oh, there’s a fee, now?” Jordan adjusted her broad-brimmed summer straw. “What are you going to cost me?”
“A swan boat ride.”
“No Bostonian would ever be caught dead on a swan boat unless you’re being dragged by your little sister. It’s for tourists.”
“I’m a tourist, and my fee for hauling your bag and buttering up that old dame who claimed she was a White Russian countess who fled the Bolsheviks is a swan boat ride.”
Jordan took his arm, turning toward the Public Garden a few blocks away. “White Russian countess?”
“Her accent was Ukrainian, but I was too much of a gentleman to call her a fibber.”
“So you spoke Russian just now to Madame Tamara, and French to those Parisian tourists who came into the shop three weeks ago.” Jordan tilted her head. “And I’m sure I’ve heard you speak German to Mr. Kolb .