A few yards off the trail, snow had drifted deep beneath the upturned roots of a fallen spruce. Anna crawled there and started digging with both hands. She needed space for two. Snow packed into her sleeves and numbed her fingers, but she kept going until she had hollowed out a deep, arched shelter protected from the direct wind.
Then she went back for Mike, grabbed him by the belt, and dragged him inch by inch to the shelter. Somehow she got him inside.
In the snow cave it was dark and almost quiet. The storm outside became a dull roar. Anna ran her hands over his clothes. Mike’s coat was frozen stiff, a shell of ice. He couldn’t stay in it. It would pull the last heat out of him.
With fingers cramped from cold, Anna began unfastening his coat. The buttons wouldn’t move. She pulled out the knife and cut through the heavy fabric, stripping off the frozen coat and then the wet sweater beneath it. She shrugged out of her own sheepskin coat and outer sweater. Left in only a thin shirt, she pressed herself against Mike and wrapped both arms around his ice-cold body. Then she pulled her dry coat over both of them, tucking the edges under their backs to keep out drafts.
His skin burned with cold. Anna began shaking so hard she could barely breathe, but she held him tighter, trying to warm his chest where the heart still beat faintly. She buried her face in his beard.
“Don’t you quit on me,” she whispered into the dark with dry lips. “You hear me? Don’t. We’ve come too far. I’m not letting you go.”
She talked to him all night. When she ran out of words, she simply breathed against his neck, warming his skin with her breath. By morning the shaking had passed. Anna felt only a crushing, leaden exhaustion and the first real warmth beginning to come back into Mike’s body. He groaned and shifted his shoulders. Alive.
By morning the storm had spent itself. The wind dropped, leaving broken branches and drifts waist-deep. The trip back took nearly five hours. Mike came around, but he couldn’t walk on his own. He leaned heavily on Anna, every step dragging out a painful rasp from his chest.
When they finally stumbled into the cabin, Anna could barely stand. She got him to the bunk, pulled off his boots, and lit the stove. But the cold, plus the hours trapped under snow, had done their damage. By evening Mike was burning with fever. His face flushed red, sweat stood on his forehead, and he began to cough. At first dry and harsh. Then deeper, wetter.
Anna sat beside him with her fingers on his wrist. His pulse raced well over a hundred. His breathing was shallow and labored. She opened his shirt collar and put her ear to his broad chest. She had been a surgeon, but she knew internal medicine well enough. In the lower parts of both lungs she heard crackling and wet rattling. Old weakness in the lungs had flared under the strain.
The diagnosis was obvious and merciless. Bilateral pneumonia. Anna straightened up. Everything inside her tightened into a hard knot. As a doctor, she understood the picture in full. His lungs were filling. The fever would climb. Without treatment, oxygen would drop, then the heart would fail. She needed a strong antibiotic. Needed proper doses. Needed IV fluids to fight the infection. Instead she had rendered fat, dried raspberries, and pine needles.
The next three days became one long, exhausting battle. Anna did not sleep. She brewed herbs, spooned liquid into him whenever he could swallow, rubbed his chest, laid compresses, did everything she knew. She fought for him with the fury of someone watching the one thing that mattered being taken away. But the illness did not retreat.
On the fourth day Mike coughed so violently his whole back arched. He grabbed the edge of the bed and tried to draw breath. Anna held a clean cloth to his mouth. When the fit passed, he breathed harder and weaker than before. The herbs were doing nothing now. The disease had moved into the stage where folk remedies meant nothing. Mike’s body was losing ground. His face had gone gray. The skin around his mouth had turned blue from lack of oxygen.
Anna went to the washstand and splashed her face with cold water. Dried her hands on a rough towel. The decision came at once—clear, hard, final. At that moment she was not a fugitive hiding from the law. She was a doctor and a wife, and her duty was to save her husband.
She went to the corner, pulled out her winter clothes, and dressed quickly. Pants. Sweater. Boots. Mike forced his eyes open and focused on her.
“Where are you going?” he rasped. His voice was weak as dry leaves.
Anna turned to him. Her face was pale, but her eyes were sharp. “I’m going to the lower station. It’s twenty miles. I can make it in a day. They’ve got a working radio there.”
She came to him and took his heavy, burning hand in both of hers. “I’ll call for a medevac. I’ll give them my name. They’ll send a helicopter from the regional hospital, Mike. They’ll get you out.”
Mike looked up at her from the bed. “They’ll arrest you.” He had to pause between words.
“I don’t care.” Her voice broke, and tears sprang to her eyes. “I don’t care about prison, or Saveliev, or any of it. I’ll serve whatever they give me. But you’re going to live. Do you hear me? You’re going to live.”
She let go of his hand and turned to grab her coat from the peg. Behind her came a heavy rustle. Anna spun around. Mike was sliding off the bunk. His legs shook under him, barely able to hold his weight. But he did not fall. Bracing one hand on the table, dragging air into his lungs with a harsh whistle, he forced himself upright…
