“Neither, and you know it. For the love of Lenin, I just had a foot-sized splinter excised from my back.”
“You could have either one of them, and you know it. Amazing they haven’t started punching each other.”
“They wouldn’t. They’re friends.” Lyonya was the only one I knew who could crack Kostia’s silence, bring out his elusive, tilted grin. “And they’re my friends. Nothing more.”
“Kitsenko’s got plenty to do in the command tent without hustling up here every other day, with gifts.” Lena nodded at the little vial of scent my company commander had brought on his last visit, wrapped in a lace-edged handkerchief. “Red Moscow, not cheap. First a liter of his own blood, then perfume . . . He’d be bringing you diamonds if he had ’em. He’s courting, Lady Midnight.”
“You’re an advocate for front-line romance now?” I leaned forward so she could check my stitches. “After all our talks about fending off officers?”
“Fending off the asses and the brutes, yes.” Her fingers were icy; it was the eve of the new year, and the weather had turned biting. The only comfort in this bitter chill was that the Germans with their soft Bavarian childhoods would be feeling it far worse than we were. “The officers who think they’re entitled to have us flop on our backs if they so much as crook a finger, those are the ones to run from. But if a nice, decent fellow comes asking, I don’t always run.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Or at least I run slow enough so they can catch up.”
“I hope you’re careful.”
“I tell them straightaway they can glove it up or they can put it back.” She tugged my smock over my stitches. “It’s nice having a warm body to curl up with now the nights are cold, Mila. Give it a try. Either your lieutenant or your Siberian would be thrilled down to their socks if you climbed under their blankets.”
“Kostia doesn’t—”
“Don’t even pretend to be one of those stupid women who doesn’t notice when a man’s head over heels!”
“But he’s my partner,” I said softly. Hard to explain the bond between sniper partners to someone who wasn’t one. When we fell in at each other’s side at the dark hunting hour after midnight, we didn’t just move in unison: we breathed in unison, thought in unison, felt our blood beat in unison like a pair of soft-padding lynxes sliding through snow. We lived by the heartbeat whisper of Don’t miss. Introduce anything to disrupt that perfect working partnership, and one or both of us might make some infinitesimal, lethal error—might end up tossed in a hastily dug grave with our names misspelled on a red plywood star. No.
“Your lieutenant, then. He’s a dish, and no mistake.” Lena spritzed herself with Red Moscow. “Now, you’ll be out of here in two days. Promise me you’ll try to go at least a week without getting blown up again?”
“I don’t walk in front of mortar splinters just to keep you in suturing practice, Lena Paliy.” I didn’t tell Lena my superstition that the next wound would kill me. She’d just smack me with a bedpan.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t still feeling it, though: the hovering dread, the gray certainty that my luck had run out. Don’t be a coward, I lashed myself fiercely, but I didn’t think it was cowardice, precisely. Put a Hitlerite in my sights, I knew I wouldn’t freeze pulling the trigger. No, this was just a matter-of-fact voice in the back of my head, saying, Get as many as you can now; do as much as you can now—because your sand has almost run through the hourglass.
Well. Would that be so terrible, if Mila Pavlichenko did not survive this new year of 1942, did not live to see the age of twenty-six? I’d have done my part for my homeland, fought as long and as hard as I knew how. My son could be proud of me, and he would grow up with my mother and father, cherished with all the love I wouldn’t be there to give him.