“Let me put it this way: if you bandage her fast and I drive faster, I can have it back before he realizes it was ever gone.”
Jouncing over shell-pocked roads, my strapped torso a blaze of agony. Kitsenko’s hand on my lolling head when he could spare it from the wheel. “Come on, Mila, you’re not letting a few splinters take you down . . . talk to me, tell me about Bogdan Khmelnitsky. If you die, who’s going to drone at me about the Pereyaslav Council?”
A brief side-slip into unconsciousness, and then the shadowed hell of Medical Battalion 47, a complex maze of bandaging rooms, isolation wards, and sickrooms dug into underground tunnels like a kingdom of moles. “She needs blood—” a doctor’s voice, weary. “Fuck, how many more coming in? The blood reserves are—”
I don’t need blood, I tried to say, I’m dying.
Kitsenko was rolling up his sleeve. “I saw her tags; we’re the same blood type. Tap a vein.”
“She’d be better off getting stabilized and dispatched to unoccupied territory. The next transport ship—”
“My company loses Lyudmila Pavlichenko, they’ll riot. Get her an operating table, then a bed here.”
“But—”
“You need blood? Her whole battalion will be in here rolling up their sleeves, just keep her here.” An operating theater: blinding lights overhead, four surgeons slaving over four separate tables. The last thing I saw as I was wheeled in, before I tumbled down a tunnel of darkness, was a man shrieking as a burly aide held him down and an artery gouted; an exhaustion-slumped surgeon turning with blood down the front of his smock. Even with my hearing receding into the black after my eyesight, I recognized the voice: “Kroshka, what are you doing here?”
Oh, for the love of—
And I was gone.
THE FIRST FACE I saw when I woke up was Alexei Pavlichenko’s, and I recoiled so hard he nearly had to peel me off the ceiling.
“Not very flattering, kroshka.” He put a hand to the base of my throat and pushed me back flat on the hospital cot, sitting closer beside me than I would have liked. Of course, if he’d been sitting on a bed in Vladivostok he would have been closer than I liked. “Considering I saved your life three nights ago.”
I started to say that it was Kitsenko and Lena who had saved my life—he by carrying me out of the front lines, she by strapping me up so I didn’t bleed out on the way here—but I went into a fit of coughing instead, every cough a stab of agony. Alexei took my pulse as I coughed, counting beats, watching me hack with a detached expression.
“How bad is it?” I managed to gasp out at last. “My wound?” I had about as much strength as a kitten; my elbows were pocked with needle marks from blood transfusions; and my back and shoulder felt like they’d been dipped in acid, but if it was three days later, I didn’t seem to be dying very fast. I yanked up my blankets, realizing that I was freezing cold.
“A splinter the length of your foot plowed from your right scapula to your spine,” Alexei said matter-of-factly. “A few centimeters deeper, you’d be dead or paralyzed. I dug it out, stitched you up, pumped blood into you.”
“Thank you,” I said, in part because he paused pointedly, in part because he’d without doubt done a fine job. Alexei Pavlichenko might be a bastard, but he was also a superb surgeon.
“It was the blood loss that nearly did you in,” he continued, noting my various vital signs. “That lieutenant who brought you in, he dropped about a liter straight into your veins . . . who is he?”
I ignored that, trying to sit up. “The German attack, is it—”
“Ongoing, but we’re holding them off. Von Manstein won’t be toasting the new year in Sevastopol as he planned.”