How long did we lie there firing, our four hundred against their two thousand? Suddenly the sun was setting, lighting the feathered grass of the steppe to flame, and my ears hurt again with the boom of Romanian artillery laying down cover fire. The Romanians were stumbling back over their own wounded, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I lifted my eyes from my sights. I saw those hatched sight lines over my vision again, seemingly burned over anything I saw out of my right eye.
“What—” I began, and that was when a stray mortar shell screamed into the parapet of the trench, not two meters away. My rifle blasted into pieces, ripped straight out of my hands; I heard my own cry of agony that was all for my damaged weapon and not my own flesh. I saw a glimpse of the Siberian leaping toward me as I crumpled into the trench.
A fall of earth slid down over me, and then there was a familiar voice saying, “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
I peeled up my gummy eyelids and saw the blunt thin face of Lena Paliy, my friend from the train.
“No, you can’t get up,” she said, her voice sounding curiously distant—my ears were buzzing as though my head were a beehive. “No, your rifle didn’t make it. No, you are not fine, it is not just a sprain, you have a concussion and damaged eardrums, and your joints and spine got such a rattling, you’re going to be stumping around like Baba Yaga for at least a week.”
“What can you tell me that starts with yes?” I asked peevishly, realizing I was flat on my back in a hospital cot.
“Yes, you can go back to your division soon. Yes, you are going to do everything Lena Paliy tells you, because she is the best orderly in this medical battalion. Yes, you are an idiot for sneaking about under the moon like Lady Midnight.” Lena grinned at my frustration, relenting. “You’re in the field hospital, Mila. Your regimental mates dug you out and carried you here.”
“They shouldn’t have, not for a concussion and damaged eardrums,” I grumbled. “If I were a man, they’d have told me to shake it off, not rushed me to a stretcher.”
“Probably,” Lena agreed. “But now that you’re here, be sensible and look after your health.”
“Fate and fortune grant us health,” I quoted my mother. “For everything else, we wait in line.”
“Oh, shut up and enjoy the quiet. We’re far enough back from the front lines, you’d hardly know there was a war on.”
I wondered what had happened to the Tolstoy-reading Siberian, but Lena said no one else had been brought in with me. I wouldn’t know till I got back to the front, so I stretched my toes under the clean sheets, wincing as my neck lit up with sparks of pain. Long rows of cots stretched across the floor, and I smelled antiseptic over the coppery tang of old blood. I had the cot on the end, by a window; outside swayed a tangle of tree branches, as if the hospital had been erected near some abandoned orchard. Wind rustled the leaves, and there was a flutter of wings . . . little gray sparrows, black-headed starlings. Outside the world was tilting toward autumn, and for some reason that made my eyes fill up with tears. The last thing I remembered from the front was the hot spread of the steppe, those massed columns of fanatically singing enemies under the banner of their shrieking priest.
They will never stop, I thought. Not ever. Not until they’re all dead—or so many of them dead that the living can no longer clamber over the corpses.
“The attack—” I began, but Lena forestalled me.
“Pushed back. That one, at least. They keep coming like roaches, of course.”
And my division was still there, fighting without me.
“So,” Lena said, seeing how my eyes had filled, “you’re starting to rack them up, sniper.”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s getting around. A woman sniper, that’s different. What is it now, twenty on your tally?”