An Ursus winter could freeze a person's bones into splinters of ice.
Yelena crouched outside the tent, using fingers stiff with cold to break a piece of black bread in half. It was hard as stone. She had to wrench at it several times before it finally split, leaving tiny cracks bursting open beneath her nails.
She tucked the larger half into her clothes and bit down on the smaller half, chewing slowly.
The bread was frozen so solid it felt like chewing shards of ice, but if you worked at it long enough, it would soften, and you could taste the faint sweetness of grain.
This was her ration for the entire day.
A cough came from inside the tent. It was Misha. He had started running a fever again last night, and it still hadn't broken. The guerrillas' doctor had examined him and said it wasn't Oripathy, just the cold, made worse by malnutrition. If he could hold out, he'd recover.
"If he can hold out, he'll recover."
Yelena repeated the words in her heart.
She had seen too many who didn't hold out.
Not far behind the tent, on the frozen ground, there were a few fresh mounds of earth. They were so small that one look was enough to tell who lay beneath them. Two children had died last night. One was seven. The other was nine.
The seven-year-old had frozen to death. The tent had leaked wind during the night, and he hadn't been able to endure it.
The nine-year-old had died of illness. Oripathy. It had dragged on for three months, and in the end, he still hadn't made it through.
The guerrillas had buried their bodies in the frozen soil and weighed the graves down with stones so wild dogs wouldn't dig them up. There were no coffins. No gravestones. Not even their names carved anywhere.
Yelena had stood there watching for a while.
She hadn't cried.
She had learned that back in the mines. Crying was useless. Crying would not bring the dead back. Crying would not save the one who drew the black lot from the knife that followed.
She had only looked at those two little mounds of earth and silently fixed their faces in her memory.
Mikhail, seven years old, liked chasing the dogs around camp.
Alisa, nine years old, could sing a few Ursus folk songs, and her voice had been beautiful.
That was all.
The wind came down from the north, slicing across her face like a blade.
Yelena shrank her neck and buried her face deeper in her collar. She had several layers on: innermost, a ragged wool sweater scavenged from somewhere unknown; over that, a resized military coat; and over everything, an old cloak the captain had given her. Wrapped up in so many layers, she still looked like a little ball—but the wind always found its way through the gaps, stealing away her warmth bit by bit.
She didn't dare light a fire.
The area was unstable. Ursus patrols passed through from time to time, and smoke would draw them straight in. The guerrillas could only travel by day and hide in sheltered places at night, huddling together for warmth.
Yelena shared a tent with three other girls. At night, they slept pressed back to back, each with two thin blankets over them. It was still cold, but at least they wouldn't freeze to death.
Sometimes, when she woke in the middle of the night, Yelena would hear someone crying for their mother in their sleep.
She had cried for hers too once.
But that had been a long time ago.
Three days later, the guerrillas reached a small village called Verkhoyansk.
Calling it a village was generous. It was really just a cluster of a few dozen wooden houses ringed by a waist-high fence. A few dozen families lived there, most of them Ursus, though there were a few of other races too. Yelena saw an elderly Liberi woman outside chopping firewood, and a little Caprinae child peeking at them from behind a window.
Captain Yulievich led several people inside to trade for supplies. Yelena went with them. She was small, inconspicuous, and sharp-eyed—useful for keeping watch.
Life in the village wasn't much better than life with the guerrillas.
The wooden houses were shabby and broken-down. The thatch on the roofs had been torn apart by the wind. Old cloth had been pasted over the windows to block the drafts. Each home had a pile of chopped firewood outside, but none of them were large. Trees were scarce out on the frozen plain, and what little wood people had needed to be rationed carefully.
Yelena saw someone out behind a house digging into the frozen ground. Beside him were a few shriveled potatoes. The frost-hardened earth was as hard as stone. One swing of the pick only scraped out a small patch of crumbled dirt.
She looked away.
The guerrillas didn't have much in the way of supplies, and there wasn't much they could trade. Yulievich exchanged a few sheets of metal scavenged from a battlefield for a sack of black bread, then traded a bundle of dry wood for several candles.
Yelena waited nearby, her eyes fixed on the direction of the village entrance the whole time.
That was her job. Watch.
If she saw an Ursus patrol or an inspection squad, she was to warn the captain at once so they could retreat.
She was watching the entrance when something at the edge of her vision caught her attention near a junk pile at the rear of the village.
It was an ordinary wooden crate, half-buried in snow, its lid covered in dust.
But what drew Yelena's eye wasn't the crate itself.
It was the blackness peeking out through the gap in the lid.
That blackness was moving.
Yelena narrowed her eyes and quietly edged a few steps closer.
It was alive?
The black mass moved slowly, like a lump of mud half-frozen stiff. It squeezed itself out through the gap in the crate, left a crawling trail across the snow—and then stopped moving.
Yelena crouched down and stared at it.
You Yi was staring back at her.
The split body was in terrible shape.
The long transport had drained almost all of its remaining energy. Ursus's killing cold had nearly frozen it into a block of ice. It had forced its way out of the crate after sensing traces of human activity nearby, hoping to find someone who could help it.
And then it had sensed Yelena.
A Cautus girl, around eleven or twelve by appearance, thin as a skeleton, bundled in ragged layers of clothing, standing only a few paces away and staring at it.
Her emotions were complicated.
Fatigue. Numbness. Caution.
And just a little curiosity?
"Help me…"
The split body pushed out the thought with all its strength, the voice faint as a guttering candle in the wind.
Yelena's pupils contracted.
She didn't step back. She had seen too many strange things in the mines. A black slime that could speak was far from the scariest.
But she didn't move closer, either.
At that moment, the sound of hooves came from the direction of the village entrance.
Yelena whipped her head around.
A squad of Ursus soldiers was riding toward the village. At their head was a man in a black uniform, an inspector's insignia pinned to his chest.
The Infected Inspection Unit.
Yelena's heart sank hard.
The inspectors didn't enter the village immediately. They stopped at the entrance instead. The man at the front dismounted, glanced over the dilapidated wooden fence, and spoke.
"Have you seen the guerrillas?"
His voice was loud enough for the whole village to hear.
No one answered.
After a few seconds, the man's expression darkened. He flicked a hand, and several soldiers rushed into the village, kicking in doors and dragging the people inside out into the open.
Yelena crouched lower behind the junk pile, barely daring to breathe.
She saw the elderly Liberi woman dragged outside and thrown to the ground.
She saw the Caprinae child yanked out by the ear, crying in terror.
She saw the men of the village forced to their knees in a row, their faces shoved into the snow.
The inspection captain walked over to them and looked down.
"I'll ask one more time. Have you seen the guerrillas?"
One man answered in a trembling voice, "Sir, we really don't know…"
The inspection captain said nothing.
He drew his knife and buried it in the man's chest.
The man's eyes went wide. His body convulsed a few times, then collapsed limply to the ground.
The snow turned red.
-------
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