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Yeah?
Ned hopped out of the truck, and the woman had walked up to the door, opened it. He followed her inside.
She turned on the light and shed her hat, her coat. She had dark hair, a sort of bowl cut, her body a little on the stout side. She turned to him. “Are you hungry?” She possessed good English. Interesting.
“I could eat,” Ned said.
Fraser came in after him, and they both sat and took off their boots.
“You can change in the back bedroom,” the man said. “Ve vill dry your clothes.”
“Change into what?” Ned said.
“I vill get robes,” said Sasha and headed to the back.
The place was small—an entryway, a kitchen off the main hallway, a family room with a large coal furnace pumping out heat in the middle, and two more rooms, bedrooms maybe, off the family room.
Small, but warm. Cozy. Artificial flowers were tacked to the wall in a string around the room, almost like a trellis, and a picture of a little boy, maybe age five, hung at an angle from a hook near the ceiling. Worn brown-patterned furniture, and a tall standing lamp, the light on, bathed the room.
Fraser turned to Pavel. “Thank you for saving us.”
“Of course. Moose is my friend.”
“I’m glad for that.”
“And it is good you are here. Your vife is…she is in danger.”
Ned didn’t bother to correct him. “What do you mean?”
“She has made enemies at zhe prison,” said Sasha as she came out carrying two thick woolen robes.
Ned took one, Fraser the other. Well, he wouldn’t attack a ship in them, but they’d do for the night. “How do you know this?”
Pavel looked at his wife, back to them. “Because Sasha is a guard at ze prison. And she has a plan.”
* * *
Today,she would not die.
Shae stood under the sunshine of the day, her belly full of Kasha and tea, her hands wrapped in a pair of rags that were left by her door that morning, and decided that today, she would also believe in miracles.
Maybe it was the presence of Judah with her. He had ridden in the truck with her, and grabbed a shovel and handed it to her, and maybe it had been Vikka’s, because the woman glared at him. He just met her gaze, then turned to Shae and gestured her toward the pit.
They had progressed maybe fifty feet as a group since they began digging four days ago. She couldn’t imagine trying to dig a trench through Siberia. This stony ground fought their attack, much of it made of old lava, which took blasting to break through.
They dug the trench twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide to hold both the supports and the massive pipe, which they levered in with a crane, although Judah told her how they’d moved them by hand across much of Siberia.
“Where cranes fear to tread,” he’d said as he dug. He was slow, methodical, and hummed as he worked.
Such a strange man. Unruffled by the guards who walked by them, armed, occasionally yelling. He seemed at peace in his world, although she knew firsthand that he was plotting an escape. And a violent one at that, probably.
They took a break at mid-morning, got hot tea from a barrel with a spicket. They had to share glasses—no paper here—and she stood in line for a glass, took it to where he sat. He had pulled his hat off, and she noticed how inside, it had been lined with plastic. He held it in his hand, like a busker, almost, waiting for alms as he drank his tea.
In the distance, the sky had turned pewter and the far away peaks white during the night. Smoke twined into the sky, and the wind carried the scent of smoke.
“It’s going to storm,” Judah said quietly. Someone walked by him, one of the men who packed the blasting caps for the lava banks, and he looked up, nodded at him.
Put his hat back on his head.
