“I am here.” Yona leaned in and put her hands over Jerusza’s, an expression of solidarity, but Jerusza shook her off.
“First, you must never venture outside the forest. Not while the world is at war. You must promise me, Yona.”
It was the deal they’d had since the bombs had begun to fall two and a half years before, and Yona had stuck to her side of it. But once Jerusza died, she would be all alone in the darkness. What if she craved human contact once in a while? “But if I need food…”
“The forest will provide, child!” Jerusza let out a great, hacking cough that shook her whole body. “The forest will always provide. You must give me your word.”
It would have been so simple to just agree, but Jerusza had taught Yona long ago never to lie unless her life was in danger and an untruth was the only way out. “I can’t do that,” she whispered.
Jerusza struggled to sit up. Her eyes were blazing, even as the life seeped slowly out of her. “Then you are a fool, and you will put yourself at great risk.”
“But maybe great risk is the only way to a better life,” Yona said. “Isn’t that what you’ve told me about our existence? Life in a village would be easier, but we take the risk of living in the woods because it gives us a bigger life, here under the stars.”
Jerusza’s upper lip curled. “It appears the student has become the teacher at last.” Her voice was raspy and growing weaker. “Well then, I suppose there is something else you should know, too. Of course you are already aware that I am not your real mother.”
“Of course.” A sudden ache of loneliness shot through Yona. She had tried asking about where she’d come from several times over the years, but Jerusza had always stormed off, calling Yona an ungrateful wretch. Yona had come to believe, over the years, that she must have been abandoned by heartless parents in the woods, and that the old woman had saved her life.
“I stole you,” Jerusza continued, her tone even. “I had no choice, you see.”
Yona sat back on her heels, sure she had misunderstood. “You stole me?”
“Yes. From an apartment in Berlin. From a woman and a man you were not meant to belong to.” She delivered the blow as calmly as if she were remarking on the weather.
“What?” Yona stood abruptly, shaky on her feet, disbelief mixing with an inkling of a sense that there was a small part of her that already knew the story. Berlin.
“Sit down, child. There’s no time for your dramatics now.”
Yona took a few gulps of air, her body tensed to flee into the forest, where she wouldn’t have to swallow the pain of whatever Jerusza was about to say. But she couldn’t. She knew she couldn’t, because the old woman would be dead before she returned, and she would never hear the things she needed to know. “What did you do, Jerusza?” she whispered, sinking back down.
“What did I do? I saved you, child.” Sweat was beading on Jerusza’s forehead now, and her breathing was becoming more labored, a series of staccato swallows and hisses. “Your parents were bad people, you see.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“The way I know everything.” Jerusza’s words bit like a whip. “The forest told me. The forest, and the sky.”
“But—”
“Their names were Siegfried and Alwine Jüttner,” Jerusza continued, rolling right over Yona’s grief-stricken protest. “They lived in an apartment at Behaimstrasse 72 in Berlin.”
The apartment with the wooden bed and the warm blankets that haunted her dreams. Yona swallowed hard a few times, a thousand questions bubbling within her. The one that forced itself to the surface, though, was, “Am I meant to go back to them now? Is that why you’re telling me this?”
“No!” The old woman’s eyes flashed, and she sat up. Her torso wobbled unsteadily, like a blade of wheat in the wind, and Yona resisted the urge to reach out and steady her. She didn’t deserve that. “No!” Jerusza repeated, her voice so loud and sharp that Yona could hear a startled congress of crows lifting off outside, squawking in outrage. “You must not.”
“Then why tell me at all? And why now?”
“Because it is…” Jerusza trailed off, her words dissolving into a wet cough that wracked her body. “… knowledge that may spare your life—or another’s—someday.”
“What do you mean?” Yona leaned forward.
“We are all interconnected, Yona. You know that by now. Once fates intertwine, they are forever linked. Lives are circles spinning across the world, and when they’re meant to intersect again, they do. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”