“I’ll cover you from here.” Rat looks at her suspiciously.
“Why?” “Because I said I would,” Katya lies calmly. In truth, she wants the guards chasing a group, not one person.
The women will make a useful decoy. Rat nods and signals her people. One by one they crawl toward the ravine.
Katya stays put. She chooses a perfect firing position between the roots of a huge pine. From here she can see both the shack and the tree line.
The first to burst into the clearing are the dogs, then the guards. The surviving gunman in the shack sees new targets and opens fire on them.
A firefight breaks out. The guards hit the snow and start pouring rounds into the shack. The gunman answers with scattered blasts.
Katya lies behind her sights and waits. She does not need to shoot the guards. They’re soldiers, not her target.
She doesn’t need to shoot the gunman either. He’s about to be finished off. What she needs is Ivashin—if he came. And then she sees him.
The captain, head bandaged, stands behind the firing line shouting orders. He survived the brick and he is furious. He spots movement in the ravine and sees one of the women slipping away.
“Machine gun to the right flank!” he yells. “Cut them off!” The gunner swings the heavy weapon toward the ravine.
In another second Rat and the others will be shredded. Katya takes aim fast. Not at a man. At the gun itself.
Shot. The bullet slams into the drum and jams the weapon solid. The gunner curses and fumbles with it.
That delay is enough. Rat’s women disappear into the ravine. Ivashin whips his head around.
He’s looking for the source of the shot. His eyes land on the pine where Katya lies. He’s an experienced officer. He understands immediately.
Their eyes meet across distance. Ivashin raises his submachine gun. “Melnik!” he shouts over the gunfire. “I know you’re there. Come out!”
“I’ll forgive everything. Full amnesty.” Katya works the bolt again.
“No, you won’t,” she whispers. “You don’t leave witnesses.” Now she faces the choice that will decide everything.
She has five rounds left. She can try to kill Ivashin. That would throw the pursuit into confusion, but then she’d be hunted everywhere as the killer of an officer.
She can slip into the woods while the fight continues. Good chance of surviving the moment, poor chance of surviving the winter. Or she can do something else.
Something that changes the whole board. The situation is nearly impossible. Katya makes a hard call.
She sees two guards crawling toward the shack with grenades. In a moment they’ll blow it.
Inside are those military crates. The same crates she lied about. But what if they really do hold something valuable? Not gold—something else. Maps. Documents.
Then she remembers what Lute said. “They stole explosives.” If there’s dynamite in that shack and someone throws a grenade inside…
It’ll take out everybody. Guards. Gunman. Her. “Get back!” she wants to shout, but the gunfire swallows her voice.
One of the guards throws the grenade through the broken window. Katya flattens herself into the snow and covers her head. One second. Two. Three.
The explosion comes. But not like a grenade. The shack blows apart in a fireball.
A huge blast lifts into the sky, scorching the tops of the pines. The shock wave throws guards off their feet and knocks dead trees over. The shack really was full of dynamite.
A lot of dynamite. The ground jumps under her. Snow crashes from branches and buries Katya.
Darkness. Ringing silence. Her ears scream. She lies under the snow and doesn’t move.
Alive? Dead? Slowly sensation returns.
Cold. Pain in her back. She claws her way out and gulps freezing air.
The clearing is wrecked. A crater where the shack stood. Bodies everywhere.
The guards are stunned. Some groan. Some don’t move. Ivashin lies face down, his coat smoking. Katya gets to her feet, swaying.
She is the only one standing. She walks to Ivashin, turns him over. He’s alive.
Deafened, blood running from one ear, but breathing. His eyes are cloudy and don’t focus on her. Katya points the rifle at his face.
Her finger is on the trigger. One shot and it’s over. Revenge for the camp. For the humiliation. For the hunt.
No one would ever know. The blast would take the blame. She studies his face. Not a monster now. Just a broken man.
Inside her, the sniper who knows how to finish a target fights the part of her that won’t shoot the wounded. She lowers the rifle. “Live with it,” she says hoarsely.
“Live and remember who let you.” She takes his map case and his pistol. Both may be useful.
Then she turns, straps on her skis, and heads north into the woods. Not after Rat’s gang. The other way. Now she is alone against the forest, the cold, and the whole system.
She is an escaped convict now. But she is free. Three days pass. Three full days since the blast at the shack.
Three days of white silence, brutal cold, and steady movement north. The cold doesn’t just bite. It gnaws.
Katya keeps going. She doesn’t know exactly where, but Ivashin’s map shows an old cut line. It should lead to a distant rail spur. That is her only real chance.
Reach the tracks. Catch a freight train. Go anywhere. South. East. Doesn’t matter.
Just far from this place. She has skis, a rifle with three rounds left, and Ivashin’s pistol with a full magazine. She used two rounds at the shack.
But she has no food. And no fire. Her matches got soaked when she went into the snow after the blast.
Sleeping in a snow hole at thirty below is no small thing. Snipers are taught how. Dig under the roots of a fallen tree.
Lay down a thick bed of spruce boughs and bury yourself in snow. Snow holds heat. Inside, it stays around freezing, which is the difference between life and death.
Katya sleeps in one-hour stretches. She dreams of her daughter.
In the dream the girl is alive, laughing, asking for bread. Katya wakes with a hoarse cry, mouth dry, stomach empty.
She chews pine needles and bitter young aspen bark. It knots her mouth, but it fools the stomach for a while.
On the second day she finds a frozen squirrel. Just a little body in the snow. Probably dropped from a branch in the cold.
Katya eats it raw. There’s no room for disgust. Protein is energy. Energy is movement. Movement is life.
Back at Colony No. 12, Captain Ivashin is writing a report in a shaking hand. His office is warm, but he can’t stop trembling. His head is wrapped in bandages. One ear no longer hears.
He writes: “A group of inmates led by repeat offender Melnik seized weapons and attacked the escort detail. In the ensuing firefight, the group was eliminated. No losses among personnel.”
He puts a hard period at the end. It’s a desperate lie. If his superiors learn he lost a trained sniper carrying a map and a pistol, he won’t just be removed.
He’ll be ruined. Melnik is walking evidence. She knows about his greed, his private gold hunt, his incompetence.
“Captain?” Sergeant Petrov steps into the office. The same Petrov whose life Katya saved from the bear. He’s the only guard who came through the blast mostly intact.
“What?” Ivashin snaps. “Trackers are ready. Local guide brought dogs. Says the trail is old, but twisted like a fox run.”
Ivashin gets to his feet with effort. Pain twists his face. “I don’t care if it twists like a snake. Get the team moving.”
“Five men. Submachine guns, skis, white camouflage. Feed the dogs raw meat. I want them mean.”
“We leave now. And listen carefully, Petrov. I do not want Melnik alive. I want a body.”
“Preferably one nobody can identify. No questions from the prosecutor.” The hunt begins again.
Ivashin does not take ordinary guards. He takes hard men, a search team used for escapees. Men who know how to kill and don’t mind doing it.
Leading them is an old local tracker named Ugryum. He has been told that if he fails, his family will be sent north to nothing. Ugryum reads snow better than Ivashin reads a newspaper.
On the fourth day of travel, Katya feels it—they’re behind her. Every good sniper knows the feeling. A weight between the shoulder blades.
The sense of being watched. The woods go quiet in the wrong way. Birds flush where they shouldn’t. She stops on a bare hilltop and looks back.
Far away, maybe two miles, black dots move across the white. Six men and dogs.
They’re moving fast. They have hot food in thermoses, fresh strength, spare gear. She has bloody feet and hunger hallucinations.
Katya understands the math. In a straight race they catch her by dark. She cannot outrun them. So she changes the game.
If you can’t get away, make the enemy stop. That’s a rule from sniper school. She leaves the old cut line and turns into a tangle of blowdown.
Skis are nearly useless there. You have to climb over trunks and fight through brush. It slows her too, but the dogs will struggle. The snow is deep and loose.
Katya starts booby-trapping her trail. She has no mines, but she has the woods. She finds a young birch bent low under snow.
She ties a strip of bandage to the top and rigs a simple trigger. Primitive, but effective.
If someone brushes the branch, the tree will snap upright and hit at face level with enough force to break a neck. She does it automatically, on the last of her strength.
Her hands barely work. Her fingers are white with frostbite. “Keep moving, Katya,” she mutters to herself. “You made it through the war. Don’t die here for that man.”
She makes a wide loop, returns to her own trail, and lies in wait behind the root ball of an uprooted spruce. Distance: three hundred yards. Wind in her face.
She takes out the rifle. Three rounds left. Three lives.
An hour later, the pursuers appear. First comes the dog, a big shepherd pulling hard at the lead.
Behind it walks the local tracker, careful, probing the snow with a stick. Behind him comes Ivashin.
Even out here he tries to look like a commander, issuing signals with one hand. Three armed men follow. Katya watches through the sights.
Her hands are shaking. Hunger tremor. A sniper’s worst enemy. To shoot clean, she has to slow her pulse.
But her heart is hammering. She takes a deep breath and holds it. The front sight wavers.
Her target is the dog. Cruel? Yes. But the dog is their nose.
Without it, in weather like this, they’re half blind. The sky is darkening again. Katya remembers the bear’s eye. Remembers Lute. Remembers every enemy she ever had.
“Sorry, dog. You’re just doing your job.”
She fires. The sharp crack disappears into the woods. The shepherd yelps, leaps, and drops.
Hit in the neck. Clean work. The tracker instantly throws himself flat and rolls behind a tree. Good instincts.
Ivashin’s men panic and spray the woods. Bursts of fire cut branches over Katya’s head. They can’t see her. They’re just making noise.
Katya does not fire again. No need to mark her position with another muzzle flash. She is already crawling backward, using the noise as cover.
They’ll stop. They’ll be rattled. Losing the dog buys her time. But Ivashin doesn’t stop.
When the firing dies, he runs to the tracker and jams a pistol in his face. “Get up. Find the trail.”
“Dog’s dead. You’re the dog now.” The tracker mutters something in his own language and shakes his head. The mountain spirits are angry, he says.
“I’ll shoot you right here and report escape,” Ivashin screams. “Move.” Katya hears every word. It gives her strength.
An angry hunter is a sloppy hunter. She keeps moving. Darkness comes fast.
The cold drops toward forty below. Katya knows she will not survive another night in a snow hole. She’s at the end of what the body can do.
She needs heat. Any heat. Fire. A cabin. Anything. Otherwise she’ll simply go to sleep and never wake up.
Then, in the deepening dusk, she sees smoke. A thin line of it above the trees. People? Trappers? Escapees? Another trap?
She has no choice. She heads for it. A mile later she comes to a strange place.
Not a cabin. A dugout, built into the side of a ravine. Around it stand odd totems made from animal skulls.
Antlers nailed to trees. Strips of cloth tied to branches. The place looks like the home of a hermit or a local healer. Katya walks to the rough door covered in hides.
She knocks softly. No answer. She pushes it open.
Inside it is dark and warm. It smells of dried herbs, fish, and human life.
In the center is a fire pit with glowing coals. On a bunk against the wall lies a very old man.
His face is wrinkled like dried fruit. His eyes are shut. He wears a strange mix of prison clothing and local native dress. When Katya steps in, he opens his eyes.
They are white. Blind. “You came,” he says, not asking who she is.
His Russian is rough and accented. “Death brought you. Or maybe you brought death.” Katya lowers the rifle. She no longer has the strength to hold it up.
“I just need to get warm,” she whispers, sliding down the wall to the dirt floor. “Then get warm. Fire belongs to everybody. Food’s in the pot.”
Katya crawls to the fire. A kettle sits there with something steaming inside. She scoops it with her hand, burns herself, and swallows.
Fish. Hot, fatty fish. For the first time in days, warmth spreads through her body. Her mind starts to drift.
“Gray men are coming for you,” the old man says suddenly. “I can hear the anger in them. They’re close.” Katya startles.
“Soldiers?” “Men with iron where the heart should be.”
“You won’t beat them with strength. You don’t have enough left.” “Then how?”
