Girl of Light

By Elana Gomel

A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors. Girl of Light is a dark fantasy with a Slavic punch based on an even darker history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vraeyda Literary
• Release date: May 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781988034294

Book preview

GIRL of LIGHT

Elana Gomel

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Vraeyda Literary

Copyright © 2022 by Elana Gomel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information browsing, storage, or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Edited by Lis Goryniuk-Ratajczak

Cover by Sapha Burnell

ISBN 978-1-988034-29-4 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-988034-28-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-988034-33-1 (Hardcover)

Vraeyda Literary sends authors to events, virtual events, Book Clubs & interviews. For promotional consideration, large-volume orders, please contact Lorie at [e-mail].

Girl of Light

Dedication

Preface

Part 1

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Part 2. Dark and Darker

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Part 3. The City of Light

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Afterword

About Elana Gomel

Also By Elana Gomel

Also From Vræyda Literary

This book is dedicated to my grandmother Ethel Starominskaya who survived the monsters depicted in this book, and to my grandfather Eliezer Kagansky who did not.

Preface

How do you choose between wrong and wrong?

Enter the world with no black and white but only shades of grey. Enter the world where self-sacrifice breeds horrors. Enter the world where your mirror reflection may be your best friend or your worst enemy. 

This book shares some situations and characters with my novella Little Sister (Crystal Lake Publishing 2021). But it is entirely independent of the novella, and can, in fact, be read before it, as it provides a much deeper understanding of the world where Svetlana, the Girl of Light, fights the darkness of her own making. 

Part 1

The Voice in the Mirror

The sky was coiling in red and black. He breathed the smoke in and coughed when the rough edge of makhorka hit his sinuses. 

The two women in the cutting were shovelling dirt, bending over and straightening up in strangely choreographic motions, dipping headscarves telegraphing their intensity. One of them slid off the woman’s head, disclosing sparse grey hair. He wanted to jump down and help her, but Trofim told him to stay put and he slouched against the tank, feeling the purring warmth of the mechanical beast against his back. The women were laying tracks, building a new supply branch toward the Pohorovka field.

A black cruciform silhouette flew against the inflamed sky, and he tensed, ready for the explosion, the metal egg blossoming in a plume of fire and smoke. The women did not even break their rhythm. 

Yesterday he had seen a woman and a child lying among the blue anemones. The woman has been shot in the head but the child – about a year old – had been blown apart by a stray bomb. He wondered how long the child had crawled by its mother’s dead body before a Messerschmitt accidentally dropped its load in the open field.

Fritzes are coming, Trofim said unnecessarily. Tomorrow it all starts.

He shrugged. The tank behind him bore a white hand-painted inscription: For Stalin.

Tomorrow it all ends, he said.  

1

The Intended

Kneeling on the cold floorboards, she lit a candle. Shielded with her palm from the draught through the rattling sash window.

Guilt washed over her like a tidal wave. But, Svetlana told herself, I am not doing anything wrong. 

Maybe it’s not wrong but it’s not bright.

She had to go through with it. She could visualize Tattie’s malicious smirk if she did not. They had known each other for too long. Echoes of playground taunts still rang in her ears. Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat…

Recently Tattie hung out with a tight clutch of girls at the back of the classroom: girls whose fathers were POP commanders, or LightHouse officials, or factory managers; girls with traces of lipstick on their full mouths which they hastily wiped off at the school door. They only talked to Svetlana when they needed to copy her homework. Tattie, a Ranger’s daughter and Svetlana’s childhood friend, was her entry ticket into their privileged company. But did she want to join them? How soon before their vanity and selfishness tipped them over?  Their pretty faces sliding off, disclosing the snarling beast beneath…

No, she should not think this way. Fear is the Enemy’s gateway. 

And so is superstition.

It was a bit of harmless fun. Not that she believed you could see your Intended in the midnight mirror. 

And why would she want to she was only fifteen. The legal age of marriage was eighteen. Yes, MotherLand needed children. But in wartime, it needed soldiers, and workers, and battlefield nurses. And this was what Svetlana wanted to be.

She could make up a tale for Tattie. She could describe, in dramatic whispers, a tall blond stranger smiling at her, dressed in a Ranger’s scuffed leather coat, a LightSword hanging from his belt…

But Svetlana did not have the imagination for a convincing lie. She was meticulous, smart, and reliable. Wrote down every new category of the Enemy in her careful round script and elaborated on its physical modifications, feeding habits, and degree of dangerousness. Did her homework in the dim light of a single bulb: her apartment, the last inhabited one in her partially sealed building, had its electric supply reduced to bare minimum. And still, she was the best student in her class because she saw the world as it was, not as she wanted it to be. 

Her name meant Girl of Light, and Light banished all deceit, ambiguity, and shadows. Light and Dark, human and Enemy, truth and lies

No, she would not lie. If she wanted to tell Tattie how the mirror-dowsing went, she would have to do it.

Svetlana turned to the mirror, conduit of the Voice, standing on the ancient bureau. It was decorated with red-and-yellow streamers and artificial carnations. Another wave of guilt washed over her. Breaking a mirror was a felony. How could it be bright to exploit a mirror for a stupid game?

But people did use mirrors for mundane things: women combed and plaited their hair in front of them; men shaved; kids danced. Some older women would genuflect and kiss their fingers after using a mirror to powder their lined cheeks, but Svetlana’s dad called it a damned superstition.  

She listened to her parents’ soft snores coming from behind the closed door of their bedroom. Taking a deep breath, she tugged down her worn nightgown. The fall of snow outside the window wrapped the world in a cocoon of cotton-candy magic. 

Sparing one wistful glance toward her bedclothes spread on the sofa which served as the family’s sitting area during the day, Svetlana stood in front of the mirror, the candle held aloft. Her features fissured with deep shadows and her blond braids slithered down her shoulders like dappled snakes. She grimaced. Her reflection looked alien, tainted by Dark.

Enough! Any more hesitation, and morbid thoughts would take her over, nesting inside and blossoming into a shape of monstrosity. Fear is the Enemy’s gateway!

She picked up the notebook Tattie had given her. Flicked to a drawing and a couple of rhyming lines which Tattie grandly called an incantation. Standing in front of the mirror, she read out:

Mirror bright, Mirror of Light

Let me see his face tonight!

Nothing happened. The tiny flame danced in the stream of cold air. Gooseflesh broke out on Svetlana’s arms. Outside, large fluffy clumps of snow floated noiselessly through the night, briefly illuminated by the misty streetlight. 

Mirror bright, Mirror of Light

Bring my fate into my sight.

Nothing. Svetlana sighed and blew out the candle, experiencing simultaneous relief and letdown. 

The fluffed-up pillows and the thick blanket on the sofa looked irresistible. She tiptoed through a puddle of silver illumination that lapped at her bare feet like cold water.

And stopped.

There was no moon tonight, and no streetlights outside their apartment building.

She looked back.

The mirror was a sheet of metallic brightness, reflecting nothing but casting harsh radiance into the room. The paper flowers on the frame shone like rubies and sapphires. 

Was the Voice about to speak? 

There were quick shadows darting inside the radiance like the blue after-images that float in the eyes if one stared straight at the sun. 

The silvery surface of the mirror mottled with indistinct darkish blobs which shifted like oil on water, spreading and contracting. They flowed together into a negative of a human face: black skin, white cavities of eyes and mouth. Svetlana gasped.

The mirror rippled, darkened, and brightened again as successive waves of radiance and shadow lapped at the tain. As if a curtain was being tagged by invisible hands from the other side.

The mirror flared spastically, the space inside stabilized and she saw something which made no sense: a receding mosaic of mud, brown and black; moving shapes that resembled giant lumbering animals; blossoming stars of brightness, almost like Light but harsh and lifeless…

Another flesh-coloured blob rose to the surface of the mirror. 

His cheeks were splotched with blood and mud; his unfamiliar uniform filthy; a military cap sat crookedly on his dark hair. His brown eyes met Svetlana’s blue ones; his chapped lips moved but she heard nothing. And then the mirror shuddered, and her own pale face stared back at her.

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Tattie was restless and hot. She threw away the blanket and got up, not turning on the electric light for fear her mother Nina would see the line of illumination under her door and barge in.

Tattie knew she was privileged to have her own room in a large apartment. Her father Miroslav was home no more than a couple of days every month. Tattie used to miss him ferociously. But not anymore. The simmering discord between her parents; the rumours of war going bad, all the more threatening for being so vague; her school; her friends; Tattie grew increasingly disgusted with her life. She longed for something else, but did not know what. 

She padded over to the large mirror on the wall, touched the streamers and paper flowers around its rim. Her father insisted on the house mirrors being treated properly, and she did, more out of habit than devotion. Even though, Tattie reassured herself, she was still in Light. There was not a shadow of Darkness in her soul, waiting to burst out like a poisonous boil, turning her pretty face into the mask of a monster.

Was there?

Fearfully enjoying the dimness that erased her features, she stared at the mirror, smudging everything into an indistinct oval silhouette, her untamed curls sticking out on the sides of her head like horns. Would it be how she would look if she became an Enemy?

Tattie quickly whispered an apology to Light at this un-bright thought, but she still did not move away from the mirror or turn on the electricity. Of course, physical gloom was only a metaphor of Darkness, just as electricity was only a symbol of Light. There was nothing to be afraid of in this strange shadowy world, dimly illuminated by the snow reflections from the street.

Was Svetlana doing what she asked her to do?

Tattie grabbed a chair and sat in front of the mirror, her head resting on her hands. The thought of her best friend being in danger sent a strange but not unpleasant tingle down her spine.

Not that there was a danger. It was a harmless game. What girl would not want to see the face of her future husband, her Intended? And after all, it was Svetlana’s fault for being so…so inflexible. So eager to parrot the latest interpretation of the Voice. So bright.

Girl of Light, indeed! Tattie was happy with her own name which meant nothing in particular.

The ceremony circulated in the school like winter flu. Whispered about at lunch breaks every time older girls sat together. They fell silent whenever a teacher or a group leader passed by.  Tattie received a piece of paper with the incantation, which she copied into her notebook. The girl who gave it to her swore she knew somebody who tried it and it worked. But Tattie was dubious. Well, not dubious, truth be told. Afraid. She knew enough about Enemies from her father and shuddered to imagine transformation into one of the creatures he boasted of burning into cinders. So, she passed the notebook to Svetlana. Svetlana was too good for anything to happen to her.  

But now Tattie began to doubt. What was Darker: trying a dubious piece of old magic herself, or giving it to her best friend out of cowardice?

Strange restlessness was growing in her. There was no hope of falling asleep again.

Tattie peered into the hallway at her mother’s bedroom’s closed door. All was quiet. A couple of times in the last month she heard laughter and a man’s voice in the middle of the night. A man who was not her father.

If she remembered the ceremony correctly, it called for a candle. She was sure her mother did not keep candles in the kitchen drawer. Why would she? They had enough electricity. Of course, in the rural Waste peasants had to resort to candles and wood stoves for illumination and warmth. Svetlana’s family, relegated to a partially sealed apartment block, needed this old-fashioned means of lighting in case their electricity failed. Not that it would do them much good…but Tattie forbade herself from following this train of thought. 

She may not be as bright as Svetlana, but she had more courage than her goody-two-shoes friend! She would do without a candle. 

As her eyes adjusted, she could see quite well. The silvery snow-glow filled her bedroom like cool water.

She stood up in front of the mirror and tried to remember the incantation.

Mirror bright…

No, that felt wrong. And the mirror was not bright, was it? It was dusky, alluring, and mysterious.

Mirror deep, Mirror of night…

Yes, this was better.

Mirror deep, Mirror of night,

Let me see the truth tonight.

Nothing.

Tattie’s own face stared back at her. Tattie studied the black eyes enhanced by smudged shadows; the tumbling chestnut curls; the lips curving in an ambiguous smile. Was it really how she looked? 

She shuddered. She was pretty; everyone said so. Better looking than her mother Nina who used to be a famed beauty. But why did her reflection seem alien and strange? Why was it mocking her?

Mocking? The girl in the mirror kept smiling, apparently satisfied with her appearance. Tattie clapped her hand over her mouth, feeling the tension of her pursed lips. The reflection kept smiling. Her hands lay by her sides.

Tattie leaped to her feet, backing away from the mirror. She tread on the hem of her long nightgown and almost fell backward. Her reflection did not move. Only now did Tattie realize the girl in the mirror was wearing a white shirt and a khaki skirt.

No! Tattie cried.  

The surface of the mirror rippled like a pond somebody tossed a stone into. 

A wave of shadow passed across the tain, erasing her reflection’s mocking smile. She disappeared. The mirror flared up, flooding the bedroom with scarlet radiance. Tattie’s unmade bed looked splattered with blood.

Barely able to breathe and yet unable to look away, she saw fire, and bones, and iron. She saw naked corpses dancing in flames. She saw a black maw unconnected to a face or a body, opening wide and wider, as if about to devour the world. A black tongue flapped inside. It was speaking but she heard no words.

Like a mouse paralyzed by a snake, Tattie was powerless not to look. She took one tiny step toward the mirror.  The maw gaped and drew her in.

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The air was filled with swirling white. Sunlight filtered through the sparkling cottonwood seeds and broke into multicoloured shards on the pavement. He felt as if he were walking on rainbows.

Red flags were snapping in the wind. He heard the distant sound of a big brass band playing. Happiness was summer. It was the roar of an airplane above. It was the laminated card in his pocket.

What would his father say? Would he tear up? Would he touch the jagged scar on his cheek, the trace of a Cossack’s sabre, his memento of the Revolution?   

Would his mother be proud of him?

Would his sister smile? He was tired of her teenaged moods, but he was the big brother. And a Komsomol member. It was up to him to be responsible and mature. 

He had a gift for her, picked up at a flea market. He pulled it out and admired the workmanship of the old-style pocket mirror in an ornate frame.  

Feet bounded up the stairs.

The door to his apartment sagged, half-torn off the hinges. The eyes of the old woman who lived across the landing glittered in the gloom, but she ducked in and slammed her door when she saw him.

The mirror shattered on the floor. Rainbow shards crunched under his feet as he stepped into the empty rooms.

2

A Man and his Dog

Miroslav chafed his frozen hands over the crackling campfire made in the lee of a low hill that rose like a half-blown soap bubble from the uniform pall of white. There were a couple of scrawny pines and shivering willows, but the Waste in mid-winter was a field of ice and snow. Cracked by ravines and frozen creeks. In summer he imagined, the landscape of rolling meadows, spotted with clumps of wildflowers, but he would not be here in summer. A Ranger’s job was to go where he was sent, and by the beginning of the thaw this stretch of the Waste would be in no need of patrolling: either cleansed of the Enemy or fallen into Wulfstan’s hands.

He squinted into the thickening dusk the colour of a dove’s breast. Nothing moved; but Miroslav was not deceived. Enemies were everywhere; the physical gloaming a mere curtain over the moral Darkness infesting the land. And miles to the west - the war, creeping closer with his every heartbeat.  

For a moment, he felt helpless and lost. He knew the tales tattling old women and breathless young girls told about the Rangers’ powers. Not above taking advantage of his reputation when it suited him, he knew it was unearned, based on hope and ignorance.

A soft padding behind him ended the moment. His companion came over to the fire, his feet crushing the frozen grass. In his powerful jaws, Mikula held a feebly twitching hare. Its blood smeared his bare cheeks and dripped onto his whiskers.

Miroslav nodded his thanks and started skinning the prey animal. Mikula lay on the opposite side of the fire, his heavy head pillowed on tawny, shaggy forelegs. Hairless and sinewy, his hind legs were had prominent hocks and large carpal pads. His tail was also hairless – a long pale rope with a small rudimentary head at the end that occasionally bared its tiny teeth and hissed when Mikula was excited. Some Rangers believed the secondary head possessed magic powers, but Miroslav despised their un-bright superstitions. Loyalty was all the magic a companion needed.

The hare skewered on a branch above the fire and cooking, Miroslav started clearing a place for his tiny tent. Mikula could sleep outside: his solid body was protected against cold by a layer of subcutaneous fat and sparse fur. In cold snaps, they would occasionally huddle together to conserve warmth but there was no need for it now. The pregnant sky would deliver a snowfall, and snow meant mild temperatures. Unfortunately, it also meant poor visibility and more delays, and Miroslav was not happy about it. The news from the village of Little Wells was not good. 

Mikula’s pug-nose twitched, and Miroslav paused in his preparations, his hand creeping down to the belt where his LightSword hung. He had become so attuned to his companion, who having had his vocal cords removed, communicated by body language and soft grunts, he found incessant human chatter fatiguing. 

Unfortunately, Nina did not share his appreciation of silence. 

Setting the thought of his wife aside, he concentrated on listening. The air filled with soft flurries like feathers from a ripped mattress. Snow! 

Mikula’s throat vibrated. 

To the left of them was a scraggly wood of thin pines, limbs like black scratches on the graphite sky. Miroslav checked it out before settling on his current campsite and found nothing untoward. But now Mikula’s hazel eyes swivelled toward the pines and his tail rose into the air like a question mark. 

Miroslav crept toward the trees, his valenki sinking into the fresh powder. He ducked under the black branches embroidered with hoarfrost. Night lapped at the scabrous trunks like stagnant water.

Voice, how he hated darkness! Even though he knew it was nothing but a symbol of moral Dark, he still longed for a bright electric beam to cut through the swarming tangle of shadows. Unfortunately, all he had was his LightSword, which was not to be used for illumination. He whispered to Mikula, and the companion trotted back to the campfire and returned with a smouldering branch in his mouth. It was not much of a torch but better than nothing. Miroslav walked deeper into the trees.

A gust of wind showered him with loose snow. His makeshift torch hissed and sputtered. Suddenly he could hear high-pitched chittering interspersed with wet pops. A sweet organic stink wafted toward him.

There was a small clearing ahead, surrounded by the skeletal limbs of raspberry bushes. And something squirmed under the bushes, something pink and glistening.

He came closer. A clutch of naked embryonic creatures thrashed and twined, crawling over each other. Their blank unfinished faces were pierced by black holes of open mouths making a plaintive chittering noise. Wet paws grasped at the air. They looked like newborn rats.

But each of them was the size of a three-month-old baby.

Miroslav swore and drew out his LightSword. He did not want to use it: Eagles occasionally ventured beyond the frontline, and a splash of Light would draw them like a beacon. But these little monsters had to be killed, and he did not fancy stomping on them with his new valenki. 

Something careened into Miroslav, shoved him onto the ground. A sharp cheesy stink assailed his nostrils. Bony hands locked around his throat. The LightSword flew out of his hand.

Miroslav aimed his knee up at the assailant’s crotch. It connected with a thwack but had no effect. The clawed fingers dug into his windpipe. He went for the thing’s eyes but could not find them, his fingers sliding off the lardy surface of the indistinct face.

The assailant was lifted off him. Miroslav scrambled to his feet, picked up his LightSword, and pressed the button on its handle. 

A fan of Light cleaved the thick darkness with piercing incandescence. The fan had clearly defined boundaries, ending abruptly a meter from its source. It illuminated nothing, scattering no wasteful radiance, while inside the flaming blade was a raging pure whiteness, too powerful for human eyes. Miroslav touched the wheel, turned down the power. It was still too bright to look straight on, but it grudgingly gave away some ordinary light that fell onto the figure thrashing under Mikula’s paw in the snow.

The creature was skeletally thin, its clawed arms almost as long as its scrawny body. Its legs were bent backwards like the legs of a cricket. Its pale skin was a mass of buboes and welts, and its face was peaky and hatchet-like, coming to the point of its giant curving nose. Broken yellow teeth gleamed in the lipless mouth. Miroslav saw why he could not hook his fingers into the creature’s eyes: they were set into the sides of the head like the eyes of a bird of prey.

The creature wore the ordinary clothes of a peasant: a homespun belted tunic with loose trousers. There were even the remnants of valenki on its fleshless clawed feet.    

A Lackey!

Miroslav raised his LightSword and cut across the creature’s midriff. The Light went through it like a knife through butter. The unclean flesh sizzled and parted, a tangle of grey intestines tumbled out. The Lackey gave an ululating cry that sounded almost human. Mikula dropped back to his haunches.

Miroslav studied the former man. The creature still moved, its clawed hands trying to gather the slimy guts and push them back into its stomach cavity. Miroslav had seen battlefield soldiers do the same thing, refusing to believe though they still moved, they already were dead. The memory made him increase the intensity of the Sword, until nothing was left but a charred smoking heap.  

He looked to the edge of the clearing where the Enemy spawn had been and swore.

The edge was empty; the churned-up snow glistening in the spillover of Light.

Now what? Go in pursuit? Clearly the Lackey diverted his attention from the spawn. Amazing how the Enemy imitated human emotions! Or was it because they retained some human emotions? No, impossible. The Voice was clear – insofar as He, or the wordsmiths who translated His words - were clear on anything! Miroslav banished the un-bright thought and forced himself to focus on his present conundrum. 

He looked at his companion.

Should we go after them? he asked. Or have our dinner?

The spawn could not have gone far. He could easily track them in daylight. And there was an additional consideration: his LightSword was running dangerously low on power. The nearest place with a LightPlant was home: the medium-sized industrial town Loadstone Rock. He was initially supposed to be there tomorrow. But if he wanted to check out Little Wells, he would be stuck in the Waste for an additional day at the very least. He needed to conserve the battery.

His decision made; Miroslav turned to go back to his campsite, but Mikula refused to budge. His rounded jug-like ears stood off the sides of his head and his black nostrils dilated.   

What’s up? he asked his companion impatiently. His stomach growled. The stink of charred flesh would have spoiled his appetite in times gone by, but you did not survive in the Waste if you were picky.

Mikula listened some more, and then tension went out of his sinewy body and his ears snapped back, lying flush with his skull. He trotted after his master who finally rescued the hare from the fire. Unfortunately, it had been burned into a dry shrivelled husk. Sighing, Miroslav cleaned away as much of the soot as possible and gave what was left to Mikula, who gnawed on the bones with a pronounced expression of distaste. Miroslav’s dinner would consist of a few sips from his hip flask. Even that was running low.

Better than nothing. Made sentimental by the momentary warmth in his belly, Miroslav contemplated the sad destiny of Ranger companions who could not relax with a rolled-up cigarette or a bottle of vodka: the way they were bred, tobacco and alcohol were poison.

Maybe the Voice can change you? he addressed Mikula who crashed a bone with a snap. Give you a voice, huh? Wouldn’t it be nice? The Voice giving you a voice! That’s poetry!

Mikula was not impressed, and Miroslav decided his companion lacked appreciation for fine arts. He was about to get into his tent when something rustled in the bushes.

What the hell? Miroslav was instantly on his feet, but Mikula seemed untroubled. That could only mean one thing.

And indeed, when the intruder stepped out into the clearing, she looked as innocuous as any peasant, which is exactly what she was: a sturdy, middle-aged woman, wearing a sheepskin coat over a faded dress printed with pink flowers. Her braids were wound up around her head in a fashion common to rural areas but almost forgotten in cities. She peered timidly at Miroslav.

I’m sorry, she said in a cracking voice, I didn’t mean to…Comrade Ranger, are you?

This place is like a fucking tavern, Miroslav muttered. "More people coming here than to the Mighty Blackbird. Well, maybe not exactly people. What are you doing, mother, blundering around at night? Not afraid of a Fist getting you?"

The woman untied a kerchief she was carrying in her hand and took out a loaf of freshly baked bread and a squat bottle.

They said there was a Ranger in the woods, she said. I thought…well, it’s cold and nasty here, and if I can do something for our defenders, why not? The Army is far away, and the city has enough food, but you, Comrade, you are alone here, and you could do with some dinner.

The aroma of straight-from-the-oven bread filled the air like the breath of angels.

Well, Miroslav said, it’s rather irregular but what the hell? Sit down, mother. What’s your name? And where is your village?

I’m Oksana, the woman spread her coat on the ground. From Little Wells.

This was fortune, he could get intel on Little Wells before tomorrow. 

Oksana drew a sausage and kitchen knife from her bottomless kerchief and started making a sandwich. When she was closer, Miroslav realized he overestimated her age. Firelight shadows made her weather-beaten face look furrowed. Her body was strong and firm, and a prominent swell of breasts under a washed-out dress made his eyes linger longer than was prudent. Miroslav had his share of liaisons in the field but as the trouble with Nina brewed at home, he did not need additional complications. 

So, mo…Oksana, he asked, how are things in Little Wells?

All quiet, she answered, her voice now sounding more throaty than hoarse.

Really? I heard otherwise.

The Enemy spreads many lies, she responded.

She gave the sandwich to Miroslav who bit into the warm crusty bread filled with a slice of home-cured sausage.