CHAPTER 32
Brenna was struck with blinding force.
Grace plowed into her from the side, miraculously not knocking her over. Grabbing fistfuls of her jacket, she shouted at her to run, and half-dragged her alongside herself. A force not to be argued with, Grace raced over the hard surface and pulled her into the shelter of the next building.
Pinning her against the interior wall, Grace gasped: “No, goddammit! No.”
Feeling curiously detached, Brenna studied her.
Her face reflected sunlight on one side, shadow on the other—a high-contrast image.
Her brows were furrowed, her worry intense.
The sweat running down her face looked like tears.
Of all the times she had seen Grace’s fear during their journey, she had never seen it so stark.
Click, she thought automatically. Great shot. So much emotion.
“Sweetheart?” Grace took her face between her hands. “Brenna.”
She smiled up at her wonderful, beaten face and focused on her apprehensive blue eyes. “Hey,” she murmured, resting her palms on Grace’s clavicles. She was vibrating like a live wire. “You look a wreck.”
Grace groaned and pulled Brenna against herself with intense ferocity, the kind you saw when people were reunited after a traumatic separation.
Slipping her hands beneath Grace’s jacket, Brenna circled her arms around her waist and rubbed her back reassuringly. “I’m fine,” she said calmly. “Truly.”
Grace buried her face in her neck and shook her head.
Out of the corner of her eye, Brenna saw the shadows shift. Ever stealthy, Jasha had slipped past and now waited beyond them. She lowered her hands to Grace’s hips. “Jasha’s mom.”
Grace reluctantly relinquished her full-body contact with her, and took her face in her hands. “This will be over very soon,” she said. “We just have to get through the next few hours, okay?”
Tch. She was so worried. Worry didn’t change anything. It just wore you out. She leaned into her and planted a kiss on her mouth. “My sweet Grace,” she said, tapping her breastbone. “A woman who wants to live should never come to a place like Kav?ak.”
The trenches at the far side of the building reminded Grace of World War I trenches, except this was no helmeted, uniformed army.
This was a ragtag collection of Kav?ak Separatists leaning against crumbling hand-dug trenches, firing into the pall of gray-white smoke drifting over the open ground while a tide of refugees slipped behind them with their bundles, fleeing the territory the three of them were trying to enter.
The front lines.
Jasha led, still carrying Brenna’s camera.
Grace crouched low, hand on the back of Brenna’s head, making sure she stayed down. She wasn’t counting on her instinct of self-preservation anymore.
A missile whooshed toward them.
“Get down!” she shouted, and ruthlessly pushed her to the ground. She lay atop her, covering her with her body.
The earth shook. Dirt rained from the sky, pummeled her back, stung her scalp.
Rockets, loosed in rapid succession, roared toward the trenches.
She scrambled, pulling her up. “Go! Go! Go!” she shouted, her voice disembodied in her own ringing ears.
Above them, the arc of the missile dropped.
A woman and two boys racing toward them switched direction as abruptly as a school of fish, and ran in the opposite direction.
Hard thumps pounded the ground behind Grace.
She was hurtled into a swirling cloud of hot smoke.
She lost her grip on Brenna and fell face-forward to the ground. A body landed on top of her.
Oh, Jesus.
Panic welled up through her. Brenna! She heaved herself upward, straining to extricate herself from the dead weight. Oh, Brenna. No! Her arms trembled from exertion. She was so heavy.
Wait. Not soft. Not a woman.
She got her hands beneath the body and arched her back.
The body atop her slid onto the ground with a hard thump.
Through a break in the smoke, she glimpsed the blackened face beside her.
A Separatist soldier, eyes staring blankly skyward, mouth opening and closing like a gasping fish. Not dead yet. But soon.
“Brenna!” she bellowed again. Her voice was lost in the screams of the others, the popping of gunfire, the mortar explosions. “Brenna!!” She lurched clumsily in the loose dirt, found a foothold, and stood.
“Aah.” A loud groan rose from beneath her.
She looked down.
She was standing on an injured man!
“Shit!” she cursed, leaping aside. “Shit.”
Brenna appeared out of the smoke, her hand stretched out. “That’s such an unladylike expression,” she said, shaking her head.
Grace grabbed her hand—elated, dismayed, horrified.
Brenna tugged. “Come on. You can relive the nightmare later.”
Grace ducked, running beside her in the smoke. “How much further?” she shouted.
“Quarter of a mile? A little more?”
She ran, holding onto Brenna. Ahead, she glimpsed Jasha, also running.
The trenches deepened and led down to a hole sledge-hammered through the foundation of the apartment building.
Once inside, Grace bent over, coughing. Brenna raked her fingers through her hair.
Soil rained out. Jasha’s face was grit-covered—and grim.
“Is this it?” Grace asked him. “Your mom’s building?”
Jasha nodded, tight-lipped, and glanced uneasily toward the interior. Now he would find out if she had survived the night.
How horrible it would be, Grace thought, not to know if your mom was alive or dead. She flashed on an image of her own parents, waiting for her back home in Maine, not knowing how she was.
Brenna put a hand on Jasha’s shoulder. “Ready?” She looked like she was back in form, but she still hadn’t reclaimed her camera.
Grace took it from Jasha. “Do we go upstairs?”
“No,” Jasha answered. “My mother is in basement. Safer. Maybe.”
After a left-right jig, the corridor opened to a straightaway that ran the full length of the edifice.
It was packed with refugees, like the last one.
All eyes turned their way.
Brenna froze.
Grace circled her shoulder with her free arm, pulled her against her hip, and stepped forward.
“Hello,” she said, nodding to an old woman with a headscarf tightly-knotted beneath her chin.
“Hello.” She wanted to give herself a human face, make personal connections to preclude a reprise of what happened in the previous building.
Jasha stayed close behind Brenna, similarly working the left side of the hall, speaking in Kav?ak.
People nodded back, pulled their feet out of the way, dragged their bundles closer to clear a path.
Toward the center of the corridor, a man with a pinned-up shirtsleeve greeted Jasha by name, then loudly called something out in Kav?ak.
A steel door just beyond him squealed open. A small thin-faced woman wrapped in a black coat stepped out. “Jasha?”
“Mama!” he exclaimed.
Her face lit up. She spread her arms. “Jasha!”
Jasha swept his mom up in his arms, inchoate sounds of relief catching in his throat.
Grace exchanged a smile with Brenna.
Jasha’s mom, keeping one arm around her son’s waist, turned to Brenna, and stretched a hand out for her.
Brenna obediently leaned down and allowed Jasha’s mom to peck her cheek. “Hey, Dr. J.”
Jasha opened his palm in Grace’s direction. “Mama. This is Grace Alcott. She is documentary producer from Washington, D.C. Grace, my mother, Doctor Jelena Suba?i?. She is professor of Balkan history at Kav?ak University.”
Grace held out her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Professor.”
She took it warmly. “Call me ‘Dr. J’, like Brenna does. I like this name. Very American. Respectful and warm at same time.” She made a gracious flourish, inviting her guests into her home. “Please. Welcome. I have coffee. My Jasha likes how I prepare it. I always have some when he comes.”
Jasha rested a loving hand on her shoulder.
His gesture made tears well up in her eyes. “I knew you would come.”
“I’ll help you,” her son said, following her inside.
Grace ducked through the low doorframe into what she guessed was once a storage room.
The space was a bomb shelter in thin disguise, a windowless burrow lit by a thread in a jar of oil.
The walls were bare concrete, the ceilings low and criss-crossed with utility pipes.
Two vent pipes crowded through a chiseled-out hole in the upper right hand corner of the room.
One inhaled fresh air—she could feel its chilly draft—the other vented a small, scrap-metal woodstove.
The meager pile of wood beside it looked like a splintered shipping crate.
A rough-hewn but neatly-made cot-sized bed hugged the interior wall.
A long bench made of gouged planks paralleled the bed like a tea table.
A battered rocking chair with a neat pile of folders beside it on the floor completed the living room ‘set.’
Two sharpened pencils and a rubber eraser rested atop the papers.
Whatever academic treatise Dr. J was working on, she was doing it the Abraham Lincoln way, with pencils and candlelight.
Brenna stood at the entrance. She was eerily calm. Content, even.
And that scared the hell out of Grace.
People who decided on suicide often appeared happier just before they committed their final desperate act.
They felt untouchable. Grace’s mom, who treated severely depressed patients as part of her clinical practice, said sometimes people moved subconsciously toward death, placing themselves in mortal danger without knowingly identifying the impulse.
They were beguiled by the promise of emotional peace.
Knocked over the edge by the attack in the corridor, Brenna was unraveling, just as Mariana predicted in the emergency room. Since Kav?ak had little to offer in terms of health care, all Grace could do was try to keep her alive until morning and get her on the Herc.
“I thought we’d interview Dr. J,” Brenna said, interrupting her thoughts. “She speaks English; she’s a native Kav?ak; and she’s an historian.”
It took Grace a moment to shift gears, to reconcile her doubts about Brenna’s psychological stability with her professional competence. “Would she do it?”
Her mouth worked over a stifled smile. “It’s pre-arranged.”
Brenna was a pro, even when she was all but dead in the water. “Okay,” Grace agreed. Dr. J would be a terrific subject. But also, the familiar rituals of camera work might settle Brenna.