I stand up. My knuckles are bleeding and I don’t look at them.
The rage is still there, every bit of it, but it has a shape now.
A direction.
A name.
Sokolova’s daughter.
Wherever she’s running, it won’t be far enough.
3
LENA
Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.
I look back.
The street behind me is empty and that should be a relief. It isn’t, because empty streets in Vienna at seven in the morning just mean I haven’t spotted them yet.
That’s what two days on the run does to you. It doesn’t make you paranoid. It makes you accurate.
I duck into the doorway of a closed pharmacy and press my back against the glass and breathe.
Two days.
Forty-eight hours of hostels that smell like mildew and other people’s misery, of sleeping in my clothes on mattresses I don’t look at too closely, of waking up at three and four and five in the morning with my father’s face on the backs of my eyelids and my own screaming in my throat and my stomach already heaving before I’m fully conscious.
I’ve thrown up every single morning.
My body has decided this is its process and nothing I do interrupts it—I wake, I remember, I vomit, I sit on the cold tile floor and shake until I can stand.
He cried once.
When I was nine and we found a bird with a broken wing in the courtyard and it died in his hands before we could get it to anyone.
He sat at the kitchen table and cried over a bird.
The man couldn’t kill an insect in his own home.
He used to catch spiders in a glass and put them outside, talking to them the whole time like they could hear him, like they understood they were being relocated rather than evicted.
He was an accountant.
He moved numbers.
He had soft hands and ink stains on his fingers and he wept over a bird.
They beat him to the floor in his own living room.
My stomach tries to turn over again and I press my fist against my mouth, breathing through my nose until it passes.
Not here. Not right now.
I am hungry.
That’s the immediate crisis I’m allowed to think about—the bone-deep, slightly nauseating hunger of someone who hasn’teaten properly in two days because eating requires sitting still and sitting still feels like dying.
