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“Don’t say that name again,” he said. “We don’t want to hear that name again. Or else you’ll disappear too. Then you’ll know exactly what happened to her. You want to know, Snow Princess? You want?”
She was too frightened to move. He stared down at her, smiling, liking it. Something ugly and horrible flexing inside him, growing big and strong. Reaching out to her, like sticky tentacles that made her dirty and ashamed. Inside, where she was most vulnerable.
She tightened her fingers around the smooth glass of the bottle, and twisted till she could see Marina again. “I have to go to Rachel,” she burst out, her voice high. “I have to give her the medicine. Please.”
Marina tamped out the cigarette. “Let her go, pig.”
Yuri’s laugh was ugly. “You like having the Snow Princess do all the work for you, ey? They picked a cunt for this job because you were supposed to be maternal. Marina, tucking the little angels into their beds, singing a lullaby. You’re no good for that. You’re no good for what other women are good for. So what are you good for? Worthless cunt.”
“Shut up, Yuri. You’re stoned.” Marina coughed out a cloud of smoke. “Let her go, before I knock out all your teeth.”
He did. Sveti fled down the corridor that led to the windowless, unventilated room where the children were penned. The din had abated. Rachel’s shrieks had dwindled to whimpers. Stephan and Mikhail had spent their energy as well. She was grateful for the relative silence.
Sasha held up his precious pen flashlight for her. Its batteries were almost dead, but it still cast a watery yellowish light as she used the bottle cap to measure out what she hoped was the right dose for a two-year-old.
Rachel choked and coughed and spat out half of the medicine on the sheets. Sveti was sobbing with frustration, fighting the desire to hit the child by the time she finally gave up. She curled herself around the little hot lump of Rachel’s shaking body, barely managing to stay on the narrow cot, to stare with wide, burning eyes into the impenetrable dark.
Mikhail was whimpering, thrashing in his sleep. He would wake up with screaming nightmares soon. He wet his cot and his clothes with such monotonous regularity, it seemed the whole world, including Sveti herself, stank of piss. Mikhail was five, as far as she could tell. So was Stephan. Dimitri was ten, and Sasha eleven.
Of the lot of them, only Sasha had been with her from the beginning, with Aleksandra, in that big, decaying apartment in Kyiv. But Sasha wasn’t very good company anymore. He had stopped speaking a couple of months ago. The little ones had come later, after Aleksandra had been taken away. None could talk much. Mikhail and Dimitri seemed as if they might be cognitively impaired somehow. It was hard to tell. She felt dulled herself, after the boat, after days in a hole with no air, no windows. Day and night were artificial; either the fluorescent lights were on, buzzing like crazed insects, or the children were left in the stifling darkness.
No sleep tonight. Never, when she had to deal with Yuri. She shuddered with dread. Dealing with him made her remember everything that Aleksandra had told her before she vanished.
Everything that Sveti had been so much happier not knowing.
Aleksandra had been taken from her parents as a reprisal, too, like Sasha and Sveti, but she had been taken months before them. She was two years older than Sveti. Worldly wise, cynical. And very ill.
She had been the one to point out what Sveti had been too inexperienced to see, after she saw how Yuri stared at the younger girl.
She’d nudged Sveti one night with her elbow before bed, flushed and shivering with the fevers she had every night. “Yuri likes you,” she whispered hoarsely, between coughing fits. “You better watch out.”
“You’re crazy!” Sveti had whispered back. “He hates me! He always hits me!”
Aleksandra let out a wheezing laugh and shook her head. “He likes you,” she repeated. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
Sveti, a sheltered twelve-year-old, had not known. So Aleksandra told her, in gruesome, exacting detail. Everything Yuri was going to do to her, with his thing. Everything he would expect her to do to him.
“It’s better to be prepared,” Aleksandra had told her sagely. “It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get to you. They always get to you.”
Sveti had been horrified, but Aleksandra had gone on to say that Sveti might as well get used to it, because probably all of them would be sold eventually. For that. That horrible thing that Yuri wanted.
“But we’re children!” she protested.
Aleksandra just stared at her, mouth hanging open, and then she started to laugh. She had laughed until she was sobbing on the bed, curled into a ball, her hair drenched with sweat. Shuddering.
Sveti had not slept for a week after that.
Soon after, doctors had come, and given them many tests. Machines. X-rays. Blood tests. No one would tell them why. It had taken days.
The next day, Aleksandra was gone. Sveti had awakened in the morning, and found the bed empty. The pillow still had the dent of her friend’s head.
Sveti cuddled Rachel tighter, till the baby wiggled in protest. She tried to breathe. The dark pressed down on her like a pitiless hand.
CHAPTER6
Nick had noticed this phenomenon before. Momentous events that had been dreaded for years and had taken on colossal importance in his head—when they finally arrived, he found himself cool to them. As if he were watching an old movie that did not particularly interest or engage him. His father’s death had been like that. A series of details to attend to, a long look at the body in the coffin. The sharp-boned face so like his own, but wasted, sunken. Etched with the lines of sour disappointment that he’d worn ever since Nick’s mother had died.
The look he had then turned upon his son.
