RUSSIA 1986
MIKHA HAD BEEN DIGGING the grave for several hours, and still the snow held firm.
He worked methodically, heating coals on a fire and then spreading them over the permafrost. Once it had melted slightly, he raked off the coals, dug as deeply as he could, then repeated the process. The steam of his breath swirled around his fur hat like cigar smoke.
We lived in one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, colder even than Mars. Every gulp of pristine air was liquid silver in the lungs.
Under the starry Siberian sky sprawled miles of rugged taiga, black conifer forests muffled with blankets of white. The aurora borealis glowed science-fiction green above us. We were finally coming out of the obsidian winter – when daylight disappeared for two straight months – but the cold was still enough to make your bones ache.
‘How long do you think she has left?’ I asked, sipping home-made cherry liqueur from Mikha’s hip flask. The sweet burn licked down my throat. Beside me the bonfire crackled and spat, warming the exposed skin on my face enough to thaw my eyelashes.
‘A few days, at most.’ He finished laying a fresh batch of coals on the snow and crossed back to sit with me on the felled tree trunk. Our enormous fur coats pressed together, and even through the layers of thick mink, my blood fizzed at the touch.
I scraped at the permafrost with the sole of my reindeer-skin mukluk boot. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Nyet.’
I supposed he’d lost countless mothers. He just couldn’t admit that.
Instead, I cupped his jaw with a gloved hand, mouth quirking with an unspoken question. He turned his face towards me with a slow smile, then lifted a suede glove to my jaw. I loved his face in this life: narrow black eyes and dark, fluffy brows, with a wide, flat nose and smooth ochre skin.
We angled our bodies together, and as his lips brushed mine, I flinched.
They were freezing.
Even though everything in me wanted to keep kissing him, to let this moment roll on and on like a tundra, the overwhelming desire to protect him made me pull away. ‘You’re too cold. We should go home. Finish this tomorrow.’
A subtle test.
Tomorrow was my eighteenth birthday, and I had my suspicions about this grave.
Yet neither of us had admitted knowing each other’s true identities.
Here, we weren’t Arden and Evelyn. We were Mikha and Nadezhda, two simple Siberians who’d fallen in love at fourteen when our fathers took us ice fishing. I still remembered the bolt of adrenaline when I’d first seen Mikha; the visceral knowledge that we had met before. The raw magnetism pulling us together, like I was a planet he would always orbit.
‘I’m fine.’ There was an anger to the words I didn’t quite understand.
‘Mikha.’ I laid my hand over his on the rough tree trunk. ‘After what happened to your fingers, I –’
‘I said I’m fine, all right?’ He pulled his hand out from underneath mine; the hand that had succumbed to last winter’s frostbite. He’d been rescuing my dad, who had been injured while out hunting, and lost track of the cold ache in his body. The nearest hospital was two days away, so his brother had cut off his pinkie and the better part of his ring finger with nothing but a bottle of vodka for anaesthesia.
I took another sip of the cherry liqueur, relishing the fiery sweetness. ‘Come on. I know you better than that. Is it about your mamushka?’ I’d always liked the Russian word for mother; the way it bounced over your tongue like a folk dance.
‘Eh. We never really got along.’
I offered him the hip flask, and he shook his head. Probably the first time in this life he’d said no to a drink.
Shrugging, I screwed the cap back on. ‘She’s still your mamushka. The village shop won’t be the same without her.’
‘Ah, yes. Who’ll scowl at people as they buy reindeer milk now?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I’ve never quite got used to the way smiles here are earned, not given.’
We both froze; a minor slip.
If he’d only ever known Siberia, there would have been nothing to get used to.
My chest started to pound. An inevitable climax was building, and I wasn’t ready. I never really was, but I’d grown fond of this life. Of milking the reindeer with my mama as the peach-pink sun rose over the taiga. Of visiting my toothless grandfather and hearing his stories of the railway construction. Of curling up in bed next to Mikha, my head heavy on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, no words spoken but some invisible current pulsing between us.
The cherry liqueur made everything a little blurry, but one thing was crystal clear: it all came down to tonight.
‘You know it’s for us, right?’ Mikha said grimly, staring into the ash-white coals on the bonfire. ‘The grave. You know who I really am.’
Heart lurching like a sled, I gulped back a wave of desperate emotion. ‘I’ve always known. I just thought maybe this time I could change your mind.’
He scoffed, half his face in shadow from the orange glow of the flames. ‘So you never really loved me. It was all a ploy to save your skin.’
‘You don’t believe that for a second.’
The thermal spring – our village’s lifeblood – babbled mournfully nearby.
‘I just want to know why,’ I whispered, trying to keep the pleading note out of my voice. ‘Can’t you give me that, at least?’
He peered up at the sky, as though searching for solace in the glowing green light. ‘It’ll hurt you more to know.’
‘Did I … do something to you? In one of those long-ago lives that I can’t remember but you can? Is this about revenge?’
‘It’ll hurt you more to know,’ he repeated rigidly.
My vision swam, from the liqueur and from fear.
Surely he wasn’t going to do this. Not this time.
‘I wish I could remember, Arden. You don’t think I spend every day of every life mentally combing through the last thousand years? It’s just … with the earlier lives, it’s like trying to recall memories from when I was a baby. Sometimes I catch a sound or a sight or a feeling, but it’s gone before I can pull it out of the periphery. I don’t know where my soul began. Where we began.’
Silence settled around us, pulling the air taut. When digging into the permafrost to make a grave, you had to be careful not to hit a pocket of methane or it’d cause an explosion severe enough to crater the ground. This conversation felt like that; the quiet devastation of digging a grave, made infinitely worse by the threat of detonation.
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, pulling out a brown leather notebook he spent long nights writing feverishly inside. He clutched it to his chest, as though its contents could warm him through.
‘I don’t want to do this, Evelyn.’ His voice cracked on my name, and my heart fissured with it.
I grabbed him by both shoulders, forcing him to look at me. His eyes were like the mouths of volcanoes: deep and dark, with something eternal and deadly churning below.
‘So don’t. What happens if you just … don’t?’ I shook my head ferociously, locks of snow-crisp hair wisping free of my fur hat. ‘What happens if you don’t kill me, and I don’t kill you, and we can be together?’
I could see it so clearly, the life we might lead. A small, simple wedding by the frozen lake. Teaching our wildling children to milk the reindeer, to feed minnows and waxworms on to fishing rods. A house of our own, front door painted red, only a few yards from everyone we held dear. I wanted it so badly.
My fingernails would’ve dug crescents into the ridges of his shoulders had there not been several inches of fur and suede between us. ‘Why can’t we just … be?’
Regret played out like a silent movie across his beautiful face. Could he see it too? The future unfurling before us, if only he made a different choice? Or was he so hell-bent on this course of action that he wouldn’t allow himself even to imagine ?
With a pained grimace, he gestured to the hip flask. ‘It’s too late.’
All the stubborn hope in me withered.
The cherry liqueur, spiked with sleepy poison.
‘I knew my willpower would falter at the last minute,’ he whispered, every word a puncture wound. ‘We’re eighteen tomorrow. It had to be now.’
‘Why?’ The question floated out on a plume of breath. ‘Not the big why . But why eighteen?’
‘We can’t live to … We can’t. It would ruin us.’
I let go of him, my limbs growing sleepy. ‘Have I lived to eighteen before?’
A terse nod. ‘Twice.’
‘And? What happened?’
Yet more silence. I slid off the tree trunk on to the icy ground, leaning my head back against the wood. The lovesick teenager in me wanted to throw my arms around his calves, to spend my last few minutes in this life pressed against his body before we were wrenched apart once more.
Instead I said, ‘You piss me off, you know that?’
He chuckled bitterly. ‘I love you too.’
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it in this life, but it might have been the last.
‘Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji?’
‘Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji. Right through the eye. Couldn’t do it again if you tried.’
‘Do you have a crossbow handy?’
It was a joke, but his face folded into a pained grimace. He leaped to his feet like a snow leopard, hands clasped over his head. ‘Fuck, I don’t want to do this. I love you. I love you. What am I doing?’
‘Damned if I know.’ I laughed, but nothing had ever felt less funny. It was just sad . Sadder than anything else.
He started pacing back and forth in front of me, kicking up ice scrapings with his boots. ‘No. No, no, no. I need to undo this. No. I won’t let you die this time. We’ll … we’ll just have to figure the rest out.’
My heart bucked wildly. We’d been in love in countless lives, but this was the first time he’d ever changed his mind about killing me. The first time he’d ever changed his mind, period. A stubborn mule of a human, so doggedly determined in all matters, so unwilling to alter a course once it was set.
And yet it was too late. The knowledge was a bear claw closing around my ribs.
‘There’s no antidote?’ My insides churned, dread and poison melting together.
He stopped pacing and turned to face me, wild with despair. ‘Can you make yourself vomit? I’ll hold your hair back.’
‘What a gentleman.’ The night swam before me, my vision swooping and diving, his edges blurring. Nausea crept up my throat. ‘But I think it’s too late. Everything’s going … everything’s going.’
He choked back a sob. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘Why this time? Why is this the time you changed your mind?’
Maybe if I knew why, I could stop him in the next life.
‘Last night, when we were in bed … I can’t explain. No language I’ve ever encountered can express what we have to go through over and over again.’ He knelt before me, resting his forehead on my knee. ‘All I know is that I’d do anything to lie in that bed with you just once without thinking about how I’m going to have to kill you soon. That’s all I want. You. Alive. With me.’ He looked up at the sky as though pleading with some sadistic deity. ‘The thought of waiting another sixteen or seventeen years to see you again is too much to bear.’ His voice was soft and hoarse. ‘And I’m just so tired of this. I’m so tired , Evelyn.’
Anger throbbed at my temples.
How could he act like a victim when this was his choice to make over and over again?
‘I’m tired too, on account of the fact you poisoned me,’ I snapped, instead of what I really wanted to say, which was that I loved him too, despite it all. Then, quietly, softly: ‘Lie with me?’
As I climbed to my feet, all the blood rushed to my head, my pulse thin and watery. He held me steady, thick arms around my waist as we climbed into the grave.
Because he was about to die too. Whatever unnatural cord bound our souls together wouldn’t allow one to survive without the other.
Mikha lowered me to the frozen earth, the stars and the aurora swirling above. I turned to him as he lay beside me, existential pain etched in every contour of his face. I slid off his glove on the frostbitten hand, pulled off my own, and laced my fingers through his. My skin screamed at the excruciatingly cold air, but he squeezed me tight.
‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you,’ he whispered, hoarse, tortured.
My throat ached. ‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.’
Then, very seriously, he added, ‘I hope we don’t have to eat frozen reindeer in the next life.’
The sky seemed simultaneously very far away and right in front of me. I wanted to sink into the sounds of the babbling hot spring, to swallow down big gulps of liquid silver while I still could.
‘Normal souls don’t remember where they were last,’ I murmured, watching our whorls of breath float up into the night. I looked over at him, drinking in his outline one final time. ‘They don’t have hopes for where they go next. Why are we like this?’
He pressed his eyes shut and tears slid down his face, freezing like beads of glass just below his cheekbones. ‘Because of a deal made long ago.’
‘What did you …?’
Say, what did you say?
I begged my mouth to finish the question, to stay awake long enough to hear this new answer, but I was slipping,
slipping,
slipping,
and there,
in a grave colder than Mars,
next to the soul I’d loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one,
we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.