The woman at the counter looked up from the game show.
She was around seventy and thick through the middle, her hair dyed a hard black that fought with the gray at her temples. She wore a floral housedress, a pilled cardigan the color of old rose, and fluffy slippers with cartoon cats on them. With a huff, she got off her stool and shuffled toward Harper.
Her eyebrows, penciled with a heavy hand, were drawn together in annoyance that the store door had opened. Her lipstick was a shade of coral that had been discontinued in the late 1970s. She held a cigarette in her left hand, burning down toward the filter, the smoke curling upward to mix with the herbal stink of the shop.
She assessed Harper with the expression of a woman whose day had just become way more complicated than she wanted it to be.
“Dobry den,” Harper said, summoning her best Russian.Good day.
The woman grunted.
Her eyes went to Harper’s face, then tracked down over her jacket—took in the grime, the bruise on her jaw, the split on her lip that had scabbed.
Harper took a deep breath and asked for antibiotics. Amoxicillin if they had it. Anything for a bacterial infection, a spreading one, urgent.
The woman exhaled smoke through her nose. Her cigarette had burned to the filter, and she stubbed it out in an ashtray already half-full with lipstick-stained butts.
“Nyet.”No.
“No amoxicillin?”
“No antibiotics.” The woman shook her head and sighed.
Harper swallowed, her mouth dry. This was not going according to plan. This was a pharmacy. How could they not have antibiotics? She schooled her face into something approaching calm. “Anything? Anything at all?”
The woman shrugged. A Russian shrug—shoulders lifting with an eloquence that said this is how it is, this is how it has been, this is how it will always be. “People buy. Hunters, loggers, miners. They don’t come back. No deliveries for two months. What we had is gone.”
Harper’s stomach clenched. “Please. I can pay. I have?—”
“No antibiotics.” The woman held up her empty hands. “You want bandage, gauze, painkillers? I have those. Antibiotics? No.”
Harper gripped the counter. The wood was worn smooth. Pav would have known what to do.
She stayed small even as panic welled up inside her. Calculations ran through her head, the timeline of Pav’s infection, the sepsis clock already running—hours, not days, and Pav did not dohourswell. He would push through damage until his systems failed.
“The nearest pharmacy that would have them. How far?”
The woman’s eyes angled to the window, to the street outside and then back to Harper.
“Proper pharmacy? Krasnoyarsk. Three hundred kilometers.”
Three hundred kilometers.
Pav wouldn’t make it.
She locked her elbows to still her trembling hands.
The woman lit another cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke. The game show contestants on the tiny television gave a muted cheer. The radiator rumbled as the store door opened with a chime of the brass bell above.
Harper didn’t turn. She kept her face down, shoulders rigid under Pav’s jacket, eyes on the counter—just a woman buying cold medicine.
Freezing air rushed across the back of her legs. Heavy boots paced across the worn floorboards.
A man’s voice. Russian. Friendly, almost. “Good afternoon. How is my favorite pharmacist today?”
Harper’s blood went cold.
She knew that voice—like something buried snapping awake inside her.
