It’s cruel of the soldiers to come when Mama is so sick and so pregnant. I tell this to Dijkstra, and she agrees. Then she goes to Mama and clambers into her lap, which is now too small to hold me and almost too small to hold Dijkstra, and says it in a sweet sad voice as if it’s her thought, not mine. Mama smiles and strokes my sister’s straw-colored hair.

Watching that makes my stomach feel like a boiling pot, so I go watch the window instead. The soldiers are here, but we can’t see them yet. Mama says they are somewhere in the woods around our house, stalking between the winter-stripped trees, their big heavy boots punching through the crusty snow. Maybe they are in the orchard, peering down into the fruit trench Mama dug before she got too back-stiff and belly-big.

The lemons and mandarins crawl very cleverly through the dark dirt, staying low enough to be safe from the killing frost. The lemons Mama squeezes into her murky brown tea, and the mandarins she peels for us with her strong sharp fingernails—they are hard, but sweet. Maybe the soldiers are eating them now, squirting juice down their bristly chins.

Surely they are hungry. It’s been a hard winter, and there are signs of an even greater cold to come. Mama and I used to list them together: stones cracking in the field, skin cracking on the bottoms of her heels, metal nails squeezing from the wooden walls of our house, northerly winds that feel like metal nails in our eyes, wolves that howl more fiercely at night, like they want to be let in.

I peer through the frost-webbed window, into the bony gray trees that nearly blend into the blank gray sky, and I do not see the soldiers but another thought comes to me, a frightening thought. I say it myself so Dijkstra can’t steal it.

“What if the soldiers find Volka?”

Mama’s throat is too swollen to speak, but she wears a smartglove. Her finger dances patterns in the air, striking keys, and when it pauses she looks like the painting of Mary Pantocrator that hangs over our door, solemn and beautiful.

“Volka is a clever dog,” her electric voice says. “He’ll stay away. He’ll be safe.”

Dijkstra nods wisely, as if she knows. I get my hands ready to grab her straw-colored hair and pull hard, because it will feel so good even if Mama swats me for it after. Then there’s a sound like a thunderclap, and the house shakes, and through the window I see a dozen black birds sweep shrieking into the sky.

I grab onto Mama’s leg, and Dijkstra buries her face in Mama’s armpit. Everything is silent until I hear a distant ragged voice, a man’s voice, bellowing from pain. It’s been a long time since Papa was able to visit. I forgot how deep and loud a man’s voice can be when he is bellowing.

Mama’s finger plucks the air.

“They stepped on the mine,” her electric voice says. “You did a good job hiding it, Boolea.”

That makes me feel so proud, so happy, that I almost forget what mines do.

We have not always lived in this house in the woods. Sometimes if I shut my eyes and try hard, I can remember the apartment in the city.

Here is my memory list: the ornate box like a cage that took us up and down, the railing with flaking red paint that crackled when I reached to run my hand along it, the dark room with a cozy bed that smelled like Mama, the soft staticky clamp of the headphones she put over my ears to make the bombs quieter.

She carried me most places strapped to her back, so I must have been a baby still. Then suddenly she carried squashed wailing Dijkstra instead, and I walked along holding her hand. There were train stations and trains, a sputtering truck that only drove at night. Then there was the house in the woods, where Papa was waiting in his puffy white suit.

It was Papa who made Mama pregnant, Papa who made her sick. But he didn’t want to do it. They fought and fought until Mama made him.

It’s getting dark and the soldiers still haven’t knocked. I can see their electric torches sweeping back and forth between the trees, shimmering the frosty branches. Mama has turned the radio to a channel that is mostly static, but every so often, I hear the soldier’s voices like whispering ghosts. From the rhythm I think they are arguing.

Before Papa stopped visiting, he and Mama argued about a lot of things. Most of them I didn’t understand, but I liked the sound of the words when I rolled them all around inside my mouth: backpropagation, incubation periods, scale-free chaos, disease vectors. More than anything else, they argued about the war.

When I decided to explain the war to Dijkstra, I explained it like this: the war is a game for soldiers, but they make everyone else play, too. It is impossible to win the game, but there is a way to end the game, and that is what Mama is thinking about when she takes her tonic and lies stiff on the floor and stares up at the ceiling.

I used to think she was looking at the dried oilberries strung up there, or the dried reindeer meat she sliced so carefully with the sharp knife we are not allowed to use. But now I know she doesn’t see anything.

Before her throat got clogged, Mama told us wonderful stories. Stories about the Moon, who loved the Shadow and chased him everywhere but could never touch him; he always slipped just out of her lovely silvery fingertips, or stories about the Decorticated Cat, who stalked mice all through the fields at night but could not eat them, only pile up their fat sleek bodies as her own grew dreadfully gaunt.

Lately she forgets about me and Dijkstra, and thinks only about our baby brother, who she says will be very different from us and not just because he is a boy. Her belly is getting fatter and sleeker, and her hands are getting dreadfully gaunt. Her fingers look like spider legs creeping as she turns and turns the radio dial.

“Will they shoot me, Boolea?” Dijkstra asks, joining me at the window. She puts her hot snuffly face so close to the glass it makes fog; I have to wipe it with my sleeve.

“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t care.”

Mama says Dijkstra and I have to love each other, because when our baby brother comes we will have to take care of each other. But I love Volka more, and I am worried about him. Maybe the wolves will stay away, because the soldiers are making too much noise and light, but it still gets very cold at night and usually Volka comes inside to be warm.

I imagine him cracking, like the stones in the frozen field. I imagine his bones squeezing out of him, like the metal nails squeezing out of the wooden walls.

Volka is my dog, more than he is Dijkstra’s or even Mama’s. I have to make sure he is alright.

When Mama takes the tonic, which is actually medication, she cannot move for a while. Papa called it tonic immobility once, and laughed like it was a joke. Mama is going to take it tonight, even though there are soldiers roaming in circles around our house, because nothing is more important than our little brother.

Mama’s gaunt finger strokes the air.

“Stay close to me, girls. No noise, no light.”

She prepares the tonic, then the injector, then lies down on the thick warm aurochs rug. I help her clear a little space on her neck, bending back the slippery stalks. The injector is shiny and sharp and bites deeper than any of the little beetles in the woods. Dijkstra dreams about the injector lately; I hear her murmuring about it in her sleep.

Mama doesn’t sleep when she takes the tonic, but she doesn’t see or hear either. So after Dijkstra nestles up beside her stiff body, I whisper in my sister’s ear that I am leaving.

Dijkstra’s eyes flare big and wide. “No! No, Boolea!”

“I have to find Volka and bring him inside,” I say. “So he’s warm and safe from the soldiers.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” Dijkstra whines.

“You’re not alone,” I say. “You’re with Mama. You love Mama.”

The mean part of me wants to say you get her all to yourself. But I don’t say it, because I know how lonely it feels lying beside Mama when she cannot move or speak, and that’s usually when me and Dijkstra hold hands. I find one of hers in the dark now, and squeeze it.

“I’ll be back really soon,” I say. “Stay here with Mama and be good.”

I put on my winter coat and hat and boots and gloves. My electric torch is just like Papa’s; he showed me. I check its battery, then leave out the back of the house.

The woods are full of ghosts at night. Dijkstra and I decided. When Mama stopped telling us stories I told them instead, with Dijkstra helping. First stories about the Decorticated Cat, then stories about the little ghosts of all the dead mice she piles up but can’t actually eat, then stories about the ghosts of all the dead people the war piles up but can’t actually eat.

I see glimpses of them between the trees. My torch makes little bursts of light when it touches the frosty leaves, and for half of half a second I can make out pale faces, or fluttering hands. Sometimes I even see them in my own breath. But I’m looking for Volka, who must be very cold wherever he is hiding. Not for ghosts.

“Volka,” I call, but quietly, so the soldiers won’t hear. “Volka, inside! Volka, home!”

I can’t stay outside for long. My nose and cheeks are stinging already. My eyelashes are sticky. Usually when I’m in the woods, Volka finds me—he hears me, or smells me, and comes bounding up to see me. But if he’s hiding from the soldiers, maybe he’s scared to move around too much.

I am getting scared I won’t find him. Volka is important, because he is a good black dog with soft white fur on his belly, but also because Papa brought us Volka on the last visit before he stopped coming. If Volka freezes to death, or if the soldiers shoot him, I think it might feel like those things are happening to Papa, too.

I hunch down, so my eyes are where Volka’s eyes would be, and start looking in the snow-tufted bushes for good hiding places. It’s so cold I’m crying, and the tears freeze to my eyelashes and make it even harder to see. When the man in the puffy white suit steps out from behind a tree, my heart does a jolt.

“Papa?” I say, half happy, half scared.

But then another man steps out, and I see their big heavy boots and their bristly black guns. One of them says a curse word. The other squats down, so his eyes are nearly where mine are. His face is shadowy inside the helmet of his suit. A little red light on his forehead blinks at me.

“Little girl,” he says. “Do you believe in Revanchism?”

There are some questions that when a soldier asks you, you must always say yes. Even Dijkstra knows this. “Yes,” I say, with my heart thrumming, thrumming. “I believe in Revanchism and the Administrative Father.”

He unfurls a phone and shows me a picture. “Do you know this woman?” he asks.

Mama used to look so different: her cheeks were full, her arms were strong, and her skin was soft and smooth with nothing growing out of it. Even though her hair is buzzed short in the picture, like a soldier’s hair, she is so beautiful it makes a knot in my throat.

“Is it Mary Pantocrator?” I ask.

The soldier who curses makes a snorting snarling noise, like he wants to spit but can’t inside his helmet. The soldier who asks questions straightens up, becoming tall again. The red light on his forehead blinks off.

“Playing stupid is a way of lying,” he says to me. “Lying is sinful.” Then, to his friend: “Facial rec matches train cams. This is one of her daughters.”

“No contamination?”

“No. But we should bubble her anyway.”

“We should burn her.” The soldier does not look at me when he says it. “They should burn this whole forest.”

The other takes a machine off his back; it starts self-assembling in the snow, and I do not know if it is a bubbling or a burning machine but I know—in my bones, how Mama says—that unless I run now I will never see her or Dijkstra or Papa or Volka ever again. But when I picture me running I picture the soldiers shooting me, and that makes my legs feel like soft bendy twigs.

The machine comes trundling toward me. I am scared.

“Volka!” I shout, loud as I can with my throat pinched so small. “Volka!”

“Who is Volka?” asks the soldier who is always asking me things.

Volka comes leaping through the trees, like Moon leaps at Shadow, and sinks his wonderful teeth into the soldier’s leg. I run, even though it was meant to be me saving Volka, not Volka saving me. Cold air slices at my face and the tears on my cheeks turn to ice but the rest of my body is hot, hot, afraid. I dropped my electric torch, so I run with no light toward where I think the orchard should be.

I keep running even when I hear gunshots, crack-crack-crack, and a whimper I know is Volka. The soldiers are shouting, crashing through the bush—there are more of them now, coming from different directions, all of them in Papa’s puffy white suit. One nearly catches me, but he doesn’t know about the fruit trench; it swallows his foot and he falls in.

“Boolea!” It’s Dijkstra shrieking my name. She can be very loud. “Boolea, where are you?”

I don’t have air to shout back, but I run to her voice.

The soldier’s torches are carving through the dark all around me. I run past ghosts and ghosts and ghosts. The frozen hump of a tree root trips me, but I know this tree root and it means I’m close to the house. I push myself up and keep going until the woods end and I finally see my sister.

She’s standing on the stoop in boots but no coat, with the door open behind her even though it’s winter and the lights on even though Mama said no noise, no light. All the warm air is gushing out of the house, and the pale yellow light makes a halo of her straw-colored hair. I can almost feel it under my fingers.

Then suddenly a long arm swoops me up, so my legs are kicking air instead of running, and clamps me tight. I can feel the crinkle of the suit, and for half of half a second it feels like Papa giving me a hug. But Papa would never squeeze so hard, or curse under his breath.

“Come away from the house, girl,” he orders, talking to Dijkstra. “Come to your sister.”

I go limp, wait, then squirm hard as I can. But the soldier knows that trick—maybe he is someone else’s Papa—and keeps hold of me. Dijkstra doesn’t know what to do. She takes a little step forward, then takes one backward. Mama must be lying on the rug still, not seeing, not hearing.

“Boolea,” Dijkstra calls. “Will they shoot us? I heard a gun.”

They will either shoot us or bubble us or burn us, but the soldier interrupts me before I can tell her so.

“We’re not going to shoot you,” he says. “Come out. We have warm food, warm blankets.”

Dijkstra hesitates, rubbing her one boot against the other, arms wrapped around herself. I don’t know what to do either. I think Volka is dead, and maybe Papa is, too, and Mama is sick and pregnant, so—

“It’s time, girls.”

Mama’s electric voice startles me, and the soldier too. It’s louder than I’ve ever heard it.

“Your brother is coming early,” she says. “But you’ll be safe. Remember to take care of each other. Move, Dijkstra, darling.”

Dijkstra shuffles sideways and I see Mama’s silhouette in the yellow doorway. She is up from the rug, back-stiff, belly-big, and she must have gotten too warm because her clothes are off. I can see all the little stalks sprouting off her skin. They wave and ripple and make their own kind of halo, one I think is even prettier than Dijkstra’s hair.

The soldier must think so too. He gasps, and his grip goes slack, and I don’t have to squirm hard to get free. He drops me like it hurts to touch me. I land on my back in the crunchy snow, and when I sit up I see there are soldiers all around the house in a circle, all of them pointing their guns at Mama.

“Drop the blade or we shoot,” booms one of the soldiers.

Mama has a knife in her gaunt hand, the sharp one we are not allowed to use. She has told us many times that our baby brother will be different from us. That he will come out a different way. So when she puts the knife under the curve of her big swollen belly and starts to cut, I don’t make a sound and Dijkstra only whimpers.

“Madwoman, what are you doing?” asks another soldier, maybe the one who is always asking. “Get a tranq on her, she’s—”

Then Mama’s belly opens, and a rusty reddish-brown cloud comes pouring out of her, streaming into the cold winter air. Dijkstra does wail, then, as it coats her. Our baby brother has a million million bodies; I can see the tiny teeming things moving in time with each other, like the rippling stalks on Mama’s skin. They flow outward across the snow.

I flinch when the cloud touches me, when the warm scurrying stuff clings to my skin. But it only lasts for a moment, like Volka’s thick hot tongue licking my nose, then my baby brother slides away again. It’s only when he touches the soldiers that he starts to eat. They thought their puffy white suits would keep them safe, but Papa had the same suit and there is a reason he still had to stop visiting.

My baby brother digs little holes in the fabric, finding the soldiers’ skin, then digs little holes in their skin too. They wail and bellow. Then they start to bloom, stalks poking through their suits, turning sick and pregnant like Mama but so much faster.

Some of them try to run away, but every time my brother eats he grows bigger, another million bodies rushing out into the freezing air. He looks nothing like us, but he is hungry, hungry, so he must be a healthy baby.

When all the soldiers are lying in the snow and our baby brother has drifted away, I go back toward the house. Dijkstra is sitting by Mama’s body, knuckling her eyes. Her teeth are chattering from the cold.

“Mama’s dead,” she hiccups.

Sometimes Mama only looks dead, but this time I think Dijkstra is right. The stoop is covered in blood that is already turning into slush. I look into Mama’s blank eyes, and touch her mouth, and feel like my heart is sick. Steam is still leaking out of her open belly. Her body is still warm and soft.

“Put your coat on first,” I decide. “Then we can lie with her for a little while.”

We go into the house and shut the door behind us. I stand by the heater until my fingers and toes tingle, then I help Dijkstra button up her coat and wrap her scarf. I am not going to let her get shot like Volka. I am going to keep her safe. Before she puts her hat on I run my fingers through her hair, gentle, how Mama would do it, and don’t yank. She sighs.

“Will Papa come back now?” she asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “But we’ll take care of each other.”

We go back out onto the stoop and nestle up under Mama’s armpits. Her naked skin is turning purple now. I shut my eyes and see our baby brother roving through the woods, across the snowy fields, carried along on the strong northerly winds. I know what will happen when he finds the cities. It will make the bombs quiet, but everything else will be quiet, too.

Dijkstra is snuffling. I reach over Mama’s inside-out belly and find her hand and squeeze it. She stops snuffling. I hear wolves howling far away, then closer.

“Time to go inside, Dijkstra,” I say. “Time to go inside and tell stories.”

We roll Mama off the stoop and into the snow, then leave her how she is. We cannot spare a blanket.

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