Splinter wounds, driving deep through tunic and undershirt to the flesh below as he wrapped his body around me, to protect me.
“Listen to that brass section,” he said, trying to smile, and then he toppled slowly sideways into the earth.
THE MEDICAL BATTALION again. I knew it so well now, it was like home. Only this time I wasn’t the one being wheeled into the operating theater on a stretcher. “Lyonya, breathe, just breathe. You’re in good hands now.” My hand hadn’t left his pale, sweating forehead on the entire jolting, rattling ride to this underground hell of disinfectant and glaring lights; now he was wheeled away from me and I felt his soft hair glide out from under my fingertips like a phantom.
Stupidly I started to follow and Kostia pulled me back. “Let the surgeon work.” He’d helped me carry Lyonya to the first-aid station on a blanket, and now he was pulling me away.
“Blood,” I babbled, remembering when it had been me who was wounded. “They’ll need blood for him, we’re the same type—” I tore my sleeve open, giving the nurse my arm for the needle. I’d have opened my veins with my teeth and funneled my blood right into Lyonya’s body if they’d let me. He wasn’t supposed to be injured, not a lieutenant who spent his days at the command post, and this wasn’t even a proper assault—it was the morning chamber music. Why then was he injured?
“Mila.” Kostia took me by the shoulders, his face blurring in and out, streaked with dried blood down one side like a harlequin mask. He had one sleeve pushed up too; the nurse was taking a pint of my blood and pint of my partner’s into the operating theater. “We wait now.”
And we waited. I paced the underground corridor; Kostia sat against a wall with his elbows on his drawn-up knees, frozen still as though he were on stakeout. Maybe there were others waiting with us; I don’t know. I just paced, counting the minutes as they ticked past like beads of frozen amber.
And then two surgeons came out, gloved in blood up to their elbows.
“Bear up, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.” The older man gave my hands a squeeze, face drawn. “His right arm had to be amputated. It was hanging by a single tendon.”
My breath went in and out, but I couldn’t breathe. Dimly I heard Kostia saying, “He can live without an arm.”
The other surgeon spoke up then, and with dull shock, I saw it was Alexei. “What’s much worse are the seven splinters in his back. I’ve taken three out, but the rest—”
I don’t remember what happened then. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I came back to myself in a room somewhere, sitting on a narrow cot. My hand fell to my holster automatically, and found it empty. “Where is my pistol?” I asked the nurse.
“Your weapon will be returned later when you aren’t so—”
“No.” With a wrench I managed to stand. “Give it back. Give it back right now.”
“Mila, stop.” Kostia’s voice, Kostia’s arms keeping me from lunging at the nurse.
“You think I’m going to shoot myself?” I screamed. “No. No, that won’t happen.” I stopped fighting, seizing my partner by the collar and yanking him toward me until our noses nearly collided. “Give me. My pistol.”
Kostia got it for me. I could see the terrible doubt in his eyes, the tension that coiled through him—but I only buttoned it back into its holster with numb fingers. I didn’t know how to be calm without a weapon at hand. I looked back up with swimming eyes. “Now take me to him.”
My love lay white-bandaged and still in a curtained-off cot. So still. I went to my knees at his side, reaching out to touch his one remaining hand. “Lyonya.” I tried to say it, clear and calm, but no sound came out, only my lips moving silently. His entire torso wrapped in bandages, his right arm ending in a gauze-capped stump just under the shoulder. His face was drained, empty, no sign of the laugh lines that crinkled his eyes or the humorous vitality that quirked his smile.