Steampunk World

The Firebird Emily B. Cataneo

Elena, bright rage twisting in her chest, felt her tail creak under her coat as she faced the man in the snow.

“That’s not enough.” The man jabbed his fat fingers at the three gemstones pinned to burgundy velvet that Elena clenched in her gloved hand.

Elena wished she could spit in this man’s face, watch cold spittle drip from his frozen whiskers. If only she could trade for the oil with someone else, as she had all autumn, but winter fell hard over Novgorod and today he was the only merchant left in the market—all the other stalls stood shuttered in the long purple shadow cast by St. Sophia’s gold domes.

“It’s more than enough.” Elena dangled the velvet between them; snowflakes pocked the fabric. Sell me the oil, you fat bastard. They had run out of oil more than a week ago, and Nina was fading away.

“I’ll need twice as many. Price’s gone up.” The man cradled the glass bottle, black oil sluicing inside.

“Do you have any idea what these jewels are worth?” Elena’s tail creaked again, stretching the cold skin around her tailbone; she ground her teeth as the corroded feathers spread apart. She willed her tail to stay down, to stay hidden, but anger coursed through her and she felt the spreading feathers lifting her coat’s frayed hem. “The Empress Catherine gave this sapphire to my great-great grandmother, and this emerald—”

“It don’t mean you get to tell me what to do no more.” The man stomped his feet as snow drifted around his boots. “Your kind aren’t even people. Commissar says so.”

Elena hated the way his mouth twisted in a smile around the words. Once upon a time you would have ducked out of the road for our family’s motorcar. Where were you the night of the fire? Stealing vodka from our cellars or holding a torch?

I can’t lose Nina too, the way I lost my parents.

Sell me the oil.

“Seven gemstones, or nothing,” he said.

Her tail twitched, this time lifting her knee-length coat like a boat-sail—she felt the wind bite her thighs. Wincing, she turned her head and out of the corner of her eye saw the rubies on her tail winking in the falling dusk.

The man’s mouth spread into a smile of missing teeth and triumph. “Cout-ments. I see.”

“They’re called accoutrement,” Elena snapped.

“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’ve been hoarding the people’s property?”

They ripped off accoutrement, without ether—Elena had heard men like this one talk about it in the market, about how some nobles died from the pain. She would make them shoot her before she let them take her tail, or take Nina’s lungs.

“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’re bartering for jewels with a noblewoman instead of reporting me straight to him?” Elena’s tail was now fully lifted, the feathers spreading apart and bristling, visible under her coat, but she didn’t care. He already knew she had accoutrement.

He shrugged. “You have nothing anymore. The commissar don’t care what you say.”

Elena lunged forward and jammed her fingernails into his throat, wanting to hear him howl, because he wouldn’t sell her the oil she needed for Nina, because he was a face of the faceless millions who had risen up and destroyed her home, her family, everything.

He grappled with her hands and threw her off. She skidded over ice, the swollen skin around her tail grinding into the snow as her coat rode up.

She pulled herself up using the low branches of a pine tree, then skidded towards him, pulling up her coat-sleeve to reveal the thick brass opera glasses installed on her left wrist. She swooped her arm down on his head.

He screamed. The oil bottle rolled into the snow. She snatched it up and ducked away from his stomping boots. He was still screaming, and she hit him again, from behind. He tripped, rolled into the snow with a red line spidering up his forehead.

Elena jammed her black-buttoned boot into his side. He wasn’t dead, but he should be.

A shout, and shadowy figures marched around the church, coats buttoned tight and hammer-and-plough hats pulled low over eyebrows. Elena ducked behind the silver bell hulking on a frozen patch of dirt beneath the birches that lined the market. She pressed her back against the frozen metal, remembering when this bell had hung in the belfry of St. Sophia’s, before the city’s new commissars had taken it down to melt it for metal.

Elena peered around the bell: the soldiers clustered around the man she had hit. She slunk around the other side of the bell, then raced towards the kremlin gates—her tail aching in its socket with every step she took—towards the road that would lead her back to Nina’s raw cough and to the boxcar, the only home they had left.

In Elena’s girlhood of lemonwood dressers and ice skating parties, her favorite folktale was the story of the firebird, the wild creature that men hunted through the dark Siberian forests. In the best version of the story, which Mother didn’t like her to read, the firebird turned vicious when it was caught, lighting villages aflame and clawing out the necks of the men that captured it. She always knew when she came of age and received her accoutrement, as all aristocrats had since ornamenting oneself with the tails or wings of folktale creatures had become fashionable in the last century, she would receive the jeweled tail of a firebird.

Nina, on the other hand, had always loved the story of the rusalka, the drowned women who mope around after lost lovers in marshy rivers, and so the summer of Nina’s debut she had received fish scales on her arms along with the customary opera glasses. Of course, consumptive Nina, who grew tired even after an afternoon of playing the piano, already had another accoutrement: the pair of brass lungs she’d received when Mother and Father had sent her to a spa in Switzerland one summer.

As Elena trudged along the road towards the boxcar, the blackened gold tower of the horseshoe-shaped house loomed on the other side of the hill. She clenched her teeth, remembered Mother’s peppermint perfume, Father playing the piano, his epaulettes quivering on his shoulders. They were nothing but fading sepia photographs now, and she and Nina, the last Trubetskoys, were countesses only of an abandoned wooden boxcar hidden on the outskirts of what had once been their estate. As dark fell and the boxcar loomed behind the copse of trees, Elena’s thoughts crashed over and over into the images of the life she was supposed to have: seasons in Petrograd with daring affairs, a year traveling the Continent, Mother and Father growing old in the house and Nina living in their sky-blue palace by the canal in Petrograd, filling the rooms with lilies and books of poetry.

We will never have any of that, now, Elena thought as she yanked open the boxcar door. I’m the woman who uses her opera glasses accoutrement to beat peasants instead of to watch the Ballets Russes.

“Oh thank goodness, you’ve returned,” Nina said. Several dark-stained handkerchiefs wilted on the sawdust-covered floor around her feet. She was draped in a fur coat, the only one that Elena hadn’t nailed up around the boxcar windows for insulation. A book—one of the ones their great-grandfather had had signed by Pushkin—dangled from her fingers. “Were you—”

Elena held up the bottle of oil, and Nina clapped.

“I smashed up one of them, too.” Elena peeled off her gloves, scooped a set of pliers and a wrench out of a carpetbag. “I hope wolves eat him.”

“Elena, that’s not very—”

“Hush, don’t become agitated. It’ll only make your cough worse. Now hold still.”

Nina sighed and hunched over the back of her chair. Elena peeled down her sister’s dress to reveal the brass door fitted into the flesh between her shoulderblades.

“I despise this part,” Nina whispered. “I hate when—”

Nina jerked up, barking out a cough that bounced through the boxcar and shuddered her body. She grappled for a handkerchief, her cheeks puffed out and darkness filled the white cloth.

“All right, you’re all right.” Elena’s head swam as she watched Nina cough up blood. She hated that Nina, who had once curled beneath blankets by fat radiators, now had to live in this drafty boxcar, her cough wracking her body whenever they ran out of oil.

After the coughs subsided, Elena unscrewed the brass plate on Nina’s back, lifted it up with the creaking of rusty hinges. The smell of old metal and pus drifted through the boxcar.

“This isn’t much oil.” Elena shook the bottle, then positioned the spigot over the gaping hole that revealed the rusted swell of Nina’s brass lungs. “And it’s not good oil, either. It’s just gun oil, not even accoutrement oil. Not worth giving up jewels.”

“You stole—”

“What else could I do?” Elena shook the bottle and oil dripped into the seam between the lungs. “It’s all corroded back here.”

After she finished Nina’s lungs, Elena oiled the creaky scales on Nina’s arms. She cleaned the blood off her opera glasses, then oiled her feathers and the crease between her back and tail. She flexed her tail and at last the skin that anchored it to her back didn’t pull painfully tight.

She put her feet on the woodstove while Nina curled in her fur and they shared porcelain cups of tea and a chunk of rusk.

“This is a far cry from picnics in the Crimea,” Elena said.

“Oh, picnics when you would pilfer jam from the—”

“From that old cook who despised me? You were self-righteous about stealing even then, dearest. Yet you always ate the jam, didn’t you?”

“I only ate the jam because you forced me to eat the jam.” Nina was laughing, and already her cheeks flushed healthy in the woodstove light. “You always forced me to eat your pilfered jam and to play the princess—”

“Because you wanted to play the princess. And I wanted to play the knight.”

“Until you fell running and skinned your knees and cried for Mother, because you’ve always pretended to be tougher than you are.”

Elena jabbed her sister in the ribs, but warmth and comfort tugged at her. At least Nina was here, Nina had survived, and for now Nina’s cough had subsided and she was laughing.

But then Elena reminded herself of how much they’d lost, of how she must already start thinking about where their next bottle of oil might come from, and how her anger burned in her chest, an eternal flame.

Within a week, Elena had shaken the last drop of oil onto Nina’s lungs. Nina grew pale again, and barely slept; Elena woke sometimes in the night to the sounds of Nina coughing as she clattered around the boxcar.

As Elena wrapped herself in her coat and pulled her mink hat over her ears, Nina said, “I would like to come too.”

Nina hadn’t gone to Novgorod since the one week in autumn when Elena had been deliriously ill with influenza, and yet every time Elena ventured to the city Nina asked to accompany her. “Whyever would you want to come?”

“I…” Nina’s cheeks flushed. “I miss the fresh air, and the look of the sunlight on the—”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Please.” Nina widened her cerulean eyes and pouted. “I don’t want to perish never again seeing the city.”

“Dearest, you are dramatic to beat the band,” Elena said, her stomach sinking. “Very well. Wear the fur-lined coat.”

Elena and Nina crunched through the deep snow around the boxcar, out from under the copse of bent bare trees, then onto the southern road towards Novgorod. The sky was pale blue like the tulle on a ballerina’s skirt, the air deadly cold on the thin strip of Elena’s skin between her kid glove and her coat sleeve.

As the brick wall and squat guard towers of the kremlin loomed before them, Elena tugged Nina’s coat sleeve down to hide her scales. “Keep these hidden,” she said. “And if anyone gives us trouble, I’ll—”

Her boot crunched against something stiff. She bent and pulled a piece of paper from beneath her boot heel. She shook shards of ice from the paper.

It was a flyer, warning the citizens of Novgorod that a noblewoman with accoutrement had attacked a brave defender of the Revolution, and that anyone who sheltered her would be executed.

The flyer showed an etching of a woman with black-buttoned boots and a coat billowing over a brass bird’s tail.

The flyer shook in Elena’s hand. “How dare they.” She wished she’d killed that man. She should have killed him. She could have done it, no matter what Nina thought about her toughness.

Nina began coughing, her arms pressed against her ribs as she twisted into the hacks that convulsed her body. Elena dug her boot-toe into the frozen snow, waited until Nina’s cough subsided.

“Shall we go home?” Nina hiccupped the words.

“We can’t. We need the oil. Come along. We’ll be careful.”

Nina and Elena picked their way towards the kremlin. Between the guard towers, two men barred the gate, both wearing Red Army uniforms.

The flyer quaked in Elena’s hand. She had always seen policemen, not soldiers, guarding the gate.

“Papers,” said the older of the two soldiers, his face twisting around the words.

The younger man cocked his head at them—at Nina. Of course. Elena had once garnered her share of attention—glasses of champagne and trysts in the greenhouse—but Nina was the kind of woman men wrote sonnets about. This particular admirer had a face still round with youth, but he bore a scar beneath one eye.

Elena hated the way he gazed at her sister.

“Papers,” he echoed, but the word sounded like an afterthought. Nina stiffened and licked her lips. Color suffused her cheeks.

“I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we seem to have forgotten our papers,” she said.

The older soldier spluttered, phlegm dripping from under his nose-whiskers, his hand twitching around the barrel of his revolver. “Roll up your sleeves,” he wheezed.

Elena grabbed Nina’s hand, wondered how far and fast they could run before the bullets caught them, reminded herself that she wasn’t scared.

“Gleb,” the younger soldier said, still staring at Nina. “These are girls from the city. They live just on the other side of the church. I recognize them.”

“They’re those nobles,” Gleb said. “I can tell. Look at the kid gloves. Nobles, stealing from the people—”

“I’ll take them home,” the younger soldier said. He looped one gloved hand under Elena’s elbow and one under Nina’s. Elena hated him touching her, but what other choice did she have? She forced herself to stay still.

“They scream when you rip their wings and tails off.” Gleb licked the mucus off his upper lip. “And—”

“Stop.”

Gleb ground his boot against the snow, grumbling.

“That’s an order,” the younger soldier snarled. He led Elena and Nina through the gate, marching towards the church.

“Where are you taking us?” Elena said. “Why are you helping?”

“Go out the west entrance of the city,” the soldier said. “Ivan’s on the gate, but he’ll be too drunk to question you. He’s always drunk since his wife starved during the famine last winter and left him alone with the children. And don’t come back to the city. Get out of here, fast as you can.”

“Why are you helping us?” Elena demanded, but she already knew the answer. The soldier was staring at Nina again, who demurely brushed blown snow off her cheek.

He led them towards the west gate of the city. They dodged around a line of kerchiefed women clutching baskets or children’s hands outside a crumbling storefront.

Elena cast her eyes over the line, searching for the man she had beaten with the opera glasses, or for one of the many peasants who had once worked on their family’s estate and had risen up against them.

A woman stood in the line, about Elena’s age, her green eyes sharp under her bedraggled fur hat. A threadbare brown dress peeked out from under her coat-hem, the dress of a peasant. Her bare fingers, which clenched around the handles of an empty basket, were just as red and chapped as Elena’s, just as callused from chopping firewood and scrounging for food.

The woman’s cheeks were hollow, the same hollowness that had sagged Nina’s and Elena’s cheeks these past months.

This woman didn’t murder my parents.

She shook off the thought. She couldn’t start showing mercy. Father had shown mercy, the night of the fire, had tried to reason with the mob instead of shooting at it.

She hurried after Nina and the soldier.

A few steps from the west gate, the soldier seized Nina’s hand and pressed his lips against the protruding veins there.

“Let’s go.” Elena grabbed Nina’s other hand, dragged her towards the gate.

They trudged through knee-deep snow around the shadow of the kremlin, concealing their faces under their fur hats, until they rejoined the southern road through the marshes back towards the boxcar.

“That man.” Elena’s tail creaked erect again, stretching the swollen skin on her lower back. “The way that man looked at you, Nina. I can’t stand it.”

“Aleksandr.”

“Pardon?”

“Oh…he said his name. Aleksandr.” Nina stared at the snow beneath her shoes.

“When did he say that?”

“At some point. You weren’t listening, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s good that Aleksandr was there,” Elena said. “It’s good, because otherwise we wouldn’t have escaped. But my God, only helping us because he wanted to stick—”

“That’s quite enough.” Nina cradled her right hand with her left and tightened her jaw. “I won’t listen to this anymore. Not all of them are bad, you know, he wasn’t bad, he saved our—”

“Am I offending your delicate sensibilities, dearest? If I hadn’t been there, what might he have done to you? We’re lucky. But don’t confuse it with romance. This isn’t a novel.” That man only helped us because he wanted Nina. He’s not like us, and neither is that woman. They’re nothing like us. Nothing.

“In any case, whatever are we supposed to do now?” Nina said. “He said not to return to the city, and we need—”

“I don’t care what he said. We’ll wait a few days. Then I’ll sneak into the city at night. We need oil, and it’s our city besides. I won’t let them stop me.”

Elena rummaged in her carpetbag, pushed aside their grandmother’s diadem, a tangle of shawls, her father’s book of maps of Novgorod. At last her fingers closed on cherrywood, and she pulled it out: the 1895 double action Nagant revolver-cuff. Her chest hurt when she remembered the night news of the Tsar’s abdication had reached them and Father had summoned her to his study.

“You’re the son I never had, Lena,” he had said. Was he joking? She never found out. He had handed her the revolver-cuff, reminded her that she could use it without clamping it to her arm.

“Oh, you’re bringing the gun?” Nina extracted her nose from the Pushkin book. “You’re not going to…that is, you know if you affix it to your arm—”

“Yes, dearest, I’m aware of the history of revolver-cuffs.” Everyone knew that since they were first used in the war against Napoleon, revolver-cuffs had been permanent additions to the body, both to discourage foot-soldiers from deserting and to allow officers to show off their bravery.

She had heard tales of Red Army troops chopping off Tsarist soldiers’ arms and commandeering their gun-cuffs.

“But—”

“I’m not going to put it on.” Even though it would work better if I did. Elena examined the curved black metal clamps that flanked the revolver-cuff, imagined them chomping into her arm, burrowing beneath her skin. “But I’m bringing it with me tonight. Just in case.”

“Elena.” Nina sighed. “Are you positive…”

Elena dropped the revolver-cuff into her coat pocket. “I’ll go in through the west gate. That man who wanted you said the guard on that gate is always drunk.” She shouted over Nina’s cough. “I’ll simply act as though I’m supposed to be there. It’s our city. They can’t keep me out.”

“Have you considered…that is, do you envision…perhaps we should…leave?”

Elena’s stomach swooped. “And where do you think we should go?”

“Anywhere. We could try to leave Russia. We could—”

“We’re not even leaving this city. This is our land. I should’ve known that that man could make one comment and—”

“Some aristocrats leave, and have their accoutrement removed by doctors at the border, and they set up quite happy lives in—”

“Have you gone mad?” Elena’s nerves twitched as she imagined her body without her feathers’ sharp edges scraping against her thighs. “Remove our accoutrement? Perhaps I should change my name from Elena Sergeevna Trubetskoy. Perhaps I should forget who I am.”

“We wouldn’t have to sneak about, steal oil, subsist on rusk and tea, worry about being…being shot…we could have flowers and a townhouse and go boating…”

Elena imagined it, just for a moment: the life Nina had laid out, far from this place where their house and parents had burned. Would she be able to forget Russia, if they traveled far away and slipped into that idyllic life?

But Elena squeezed the revolver-cuff in her pocket. Nina’s notions were nothing but a fantasy, one that required papers and passports. She couldn’t be sidetracked, not if they wanted to stay alive. She couldn’t wonder if peasants and soldiers were suffering just as much as they were.

“I’ll return in a few hours.” Elena slipped the diadem into her other pocket, in case she had to barter for anything.

Nina snatched up her book and didn’t say goodbye.

The lit domes of St. Sophia cast ghostly light over the marshes as Elena marched on the western road towards the city. She climbed the snowy bluff along the river, then hurried towards the gate and the hollow light on the guard station.

The soldier leaning against the gate could only be Ivan—he stank bitterly of vodka, and his nose and cheeks were pocked with broken blood vessels.

Elena whipped a page, torn from a book, out of her coat pocket.

“Here are my papers,” she said through the scarf wrapped around her face. She thrust them at Ivan and shouldered towards him, but he held out a black-gloved hand.

“Lemme lookit this,” he slurred. He held up the yellowed pages, squinting. “This…this isn’t…”

“Yes, it is.” Elena pointed to the paper. “Don’t you see it? You should let me through, now.”

Ivan’s lips curled, and he shook his head. His watery blue eyes were sober enough to understand that the paper was only a book-page, that she was one of the Trubetskoys, that she had accoutrement.

Elena drew her grandmother’s diadem out of her pocket, clenched it so she could feel its diamonds through her gloves. “You’ll accept this, instead of papers.”

“No,” Ivan said. “I don’t want…” He raised his hand, opened his mouth to call his fellow guards.

Elena dropped the diadem and plunged her hand into her other coat pocket. She pulled out the revolver-cuff, curled her finger around the angry black comma of a trigger.

His children will be orphans. Just like me and Nina. The thought leapt into her mind, she couldn’t help it, but she looked at the hammer and plough on his cap.

I am the firebird. No one catches the firebird.

The snap of the safety, and then she pointed the revolver-cuff at him and pulled the trigger.

She expected the bullet to rip through his uniform-breast. She didn’t expect the bullet to make a small neat black hole through his neck.

She expected blood trickling from a wound, not dark liquid spurting from the bullet-hole, like something from a terrible theater production. Ivan clawed at his neck and crashed to his knees, then spilled onto the ground. His boots kicked against the frozen dirt beneath the harsh spotlight.

She couldn’t look. She slapped her hands over her eyes, then twisted away and clamped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear the swish swish of his stilling legs scraping against the ground, so she couldn’t hear the dying cries of this man, this enemy, this enemy who had children, children who would never see their father cross their threshold again…

Oil. I need to get oil. He’ll have oil for his gun. She crouched, her boots grinding into blood, and slid her hand along Ivan’s belt until she found a can.

The can slipped from her hand when her gullet turned and she threw up. She grabbed the can and ran without wiping her mouth, crashing up to her knees in the crusty snow, racing back to the boxcar, the hole blossoming in Ivan’s neck over and over like a motion picture show she couldn’t stop watching.

Elena expected Nina to cry. But she maintained a stony silence as the oil dripped into her lungs, as she sipped her tea, as she curled in her furs, arms crossed and jaw tight.

“You used that oil on my lungs,” she finally said. “You killed a man for it, a man who wasn’t so dreadful at all.”

“He joined the Red Army.” Elena pressed her boots against the woodstove, trying to stop her legs from shaking. She was oiling the revolver-cuff, focusing on the metal and wood, trying, trying, trying to forget the hole in Ivan’s neck…

“Perhaps he didn’t have any other choice. I’m sure there are plenty of them that didn’t have a choice. You’re a murder—”

“That man betrayed us, just like all the other men in Novgorod. They put on red uniforms and rose against us. Don’t you side with him.” It was true, Ivan deserved it, he deserved to die like that, he was a bad man. He was.

“I—”

Elena slammed her feet onto the floor. “Mother and Father are dead. And you’re siding with their killers.”

Nina glared and puffed out her chest. “You pretend to be so very tough, Lena, but look at you, your hands are shaking.”

“Could you be any more naïve? I’m glad Mother and Father are dead, so they don’t have to see how you’ve betrayed us by saying these—”

Nina’s hand twitched back, and Elena’s cheek smarted. She lurched away as Nina raised her hand to slap her again.

“You listen to me,” Nina snarled, her voice ragged. “You’ve gone too far, and Mother and Father would be ashamed of you, not of me. You orphaned children, and you’ve gotten blood on your hands. What you did was terrible and wrong, and you know it.”

Elena knelt, ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. All she wanted was to be a girl again, in their house, pretending to be the firebird with Nina, knowing Mother and Father were reading in the parlor.

The hole appeared in Ivan’s neck, over and over again in her mind, the man whose children she had orphaned…

“It was terrible, Nina.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “Oh God, it was… I wanted to see him die, but then it was terrible…”

Nina’s hand rubbed against her back. “I know, I know. Don’t you see, though, we must leave Russia, we have to escape, because if we stayed, you’ll fall, over the line, into an irredeemable place.”

Elena felt brass feathers scrape her thighs, wondered if she would have to let them lop her tail off. “When I think of it… But we can’t leave, Nina. We don’t have any way to escape. We’re being hunted.”

Nina twisted her lips back and forth, frowning. “I’m quite sure we’ll sort something out. I’m sure we will. Perhaps you should sleep, and we’ll sort something out in the morning.”

Elena let Nina help her to her bunk, but even after she burrowed under her shawls, she couldn’t sleep. She watched the flickering light from the woodstove make bear-monsters from the furs of the boxcar walls. She turned first one way, then the other, as the candle burned low and…

Diadems dropped into the snow, and she tripped over them. Holes appeared beneath her boots, tiny holes that all joined together until there was no place on the ground for her to step. As Elena stumbled, the woman in the threadbare brown dress raced past her, leaping over the gaping holes opening in the ground. Everywhere she turned Ivan kept falling, and falling, and falling…

When she opened her sticky eyes to pale dawn filtering through the boxcar’s transom windows, she was determined. She couldn’t be the monster-firebird anymore. She and Nina would run, away from their estate and Novgorod, and once they’d reached one of the bigger cities, Moscow or Petrograd, they would blend into the crowd, find the papers and passports they needed to escape Russia.

Elena sat up to tell Nina her new plan.

But Nina’s bedclothes were thrown back. Her bunk was empty.

Elena pulled on her hat, shrugged into her coat, stormed out of the boxcar. She hurried towards the raised road through the marshes.

She scrutinized every lump of snow-laden grass, the dark maw of every puddle, her heart racing beneath her woolen coat, wondering where Nina could have possibly gone. She hoped Nina hadn’t ventured out to try to find papers and a passport herself. She hoped her sister hadn’t done anything foolish. She hoped she would return and the two of them could strike out across the snowy plains, run far away from the blackened gold tower of the house behind the hill, far away from bullet holes in necks and the demented dark firebird inside Elena.

She crossed the thick ice of the frozen river that ringed the city on the west side, and slipped and slid halfway up the bluff on the river’s far bank. She peered over the bluff at the kremlin’s squat black guard towers and the plains around the city. Long black coats flapped around the base of the towers: guards, bayonets glinting.

Elena waited behind the bluff as the sun rose and descended in a small arc on the horizon.

As the gloaming fell on the kremlin, two figures detached from the cadre of guards by the tower and hurried along the southern road. Elena trudged down the river, tripping over lumps in the thick ice. She reached the southern road and hid in the rustling frozen reeds of the marshes, waiting for the two figures.

As they drew near, their faces resolved from shadow. One of them was the soldier who had saved them from the guards on the gate.

The other was Nina.

Elena forced dry cold air into her lungs and began to put the puzzle pieces together: Nina’s disappearance the night before. Her endless requests to go to the city. The fact that she had known his name.

Elena leapt out of the marsh. Nina shrank back, and the soldier drew his gun.

“No, stop, that’s my sister,” Nina said, as Elena whipped the gun-cuff out of her pocket.

“I know.” Aleksandr pointed the gun at her, and she raised the gun-cuff.

Nina’s head swiveled between Aleksandr and Elena. “Lena, listen to me. Aleksandr has obtained false passports, papers, train tickets to Berlin, for us.”

Nina, in the arms of a Red Army soldier. Elena felt her feathers spreading. “How long have you been sneaking around with him?”

“No, no, no, don’t become stubborn and contrary. I love him.” Nina cocked her head towards Aleksandr as though his reaction was all that mattered anymore, as though she spoke and breathed only for him.

Elena didn’t doubt that Nina believed she loved this soldier. But she swiveled towards Aleksandr, who lowered his gun slightly but tightened his jaw beneath his plough and hammer cap.

“How do I know these passports and papers are valid?” she said. If Aleksandr wanted a pretext to lure both Nina and Elena into the hands of border guards, this was the perfect opportunity.

“He loves me, Lena.”

Elena flared her frozen nostrils and thought of their chances. Nina may love him, but life’s not a novel where a soldier falls in love with you and puts you on a train to a new life. He might be plotting to betray us. “Why did you join the Red Army? Were you conscripted?”

“I volunteered,” Aleksandr raised his chin. “I never knew my father. He was shot by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday when I was a boy, and they sent me to an orphanage. I wanted to destroy the people that did that to me.”

So he hated nobles for the same reason that she hated peasants. “In that case, how am I supposed to trust—”

“Nina is an innocent, and you are her sister.” Aleksandr squeezed Nina’s hand. “They’re hunting you. You must leave as soon as possible. Tonight.”

Elena looked away from Nina’s reproachful pout. She thought of a nation of created monsters, destroying each other, and reminded herself of her resolution to flee.

“Very well,” she said, not taking her eyes off Aleksandr. “We’ll go with you.”

Her boots crunched through the snow as she followed Nina and Aleksandr towards the boxcar. The burned tower rose before them on the other side of the hill, silhouetted against the moon’s glow.

“I don’t like you sneaking around behind my back,” Elena said. “Has this been happening since autumn? How did you even meet him?”

“In the market, when you were sick, I—”

“Shh.” Aleksandr held up a hand, frowning. “What’s that sound?”

The whine of an engine, the roar of a muffler, and yellow headlights arced over the marshes.

Aleksandr leapt around Nina and stepped in front of Elena.

An automobile roared around the bend in the road, tires skidding on the snow. Before it even stopped, doors swung open and three figures with guns swarmed around them, hands yanking up Nina’s coat-sleeves to expose her wrists, snatching at Elena’s coat, twisting her arm so the revolver-cuff flew into the snow.

“The noble sisters,” wheezed the man who had seized Elena. It was Gleb, the guard from the gate, wearing the uniform of one of the special forces troops from Petrograd. Elena snarled, twisting, and her scalp screamed as Gleb seized her bun and twisted her hair.

“What is the meaning of this?” Aleksandr said, low and cold.

“What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of you taking one of these sisters out of the city without turning her over to the border guards?”

Aleksandr jerked Nina away from the two soldiers who held her, wrapped his hand around her forearm as though he might protect her forever with that simple gesture.

Something fell inside Elena. She had been wrong. The love this man felt for her sister had nothing to do with passports or aristocracy or power.

Am I so broken that I can’t even believe in love anymore?

“I’ll handle this,” Aleksandr was shouting.

“You think so, do you?” Gleb said.

“I’m ordering—”

“You don’t give orders anymore. I report to Petrograd now. So who orders who?”

Silence. Elena raked her feathers through the air, hoping to slice Gleb’s leg with them.

Then Gleb flung her aside. The snow rushed towards her and she rolled onto her back.

Gleb faced Aleksandr, drawing his revolver, as Elena snatched the revolver-cuff out of the snow.

“You’ve been fucking this noble girl and your head’s gone up your ass,” Gleb said. The two men who had grabbed Nina straightened their revolvers.

“I just said, I will handle—” Aleksandr said.

“You’re a traitor, to the Revolution.”

Elena locked her finger around the revolver-cuff’s trigger and aimed it at Gleb. The recoil hit her in the chest—

But Gleb spun, roaring, positioning his revolver, and she realized she had missed—the revolver-cuff never works as well when it’s not on your wrist—and she ducked into the frozen marsh-grass. I will spit on his boots as he shoots me.

An explosion, and Gleb stumbled, dropping his gun, and Elena gasped breath. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Aleksandr shove Nina towards Elena. Nina’s ringlets flew, and her nostrils flared, and her stained blue coat billowed behind her.

More gunshots rocked the raised road.

Screams, and heavy footfalls, and someone gathered her up, seized her beneath the elbows and began to drag her away.

Aleksandr’s face, sweat dripping from his hairline, eyes wild, loomed next to her. He was dragging her down the road towards the boxcar.

“Where’s Nina?”

“Don’t look back.”

But Elena looked: there, among the prostrate black-coated soldiers, blue lying on the bluish snow, ringlets spilled around her, a spreading puddle of blood and oil—

Gleb roared behind them. Aleksandr aimed a shot over his shoulder and Gleb howled and fell.

“Keep running,” Aleksandr said, but all Elena wanted to do was run, run until her burning chest exploded, run until she could no longer run anymore, run until she could arrive at a time before, when her house was whole and she could sit at a table with Mother and Father and Nina, Nina, her poem of a sister who now—

Elena stumbled and rolled, skidding off the road into the brittle ice of the marshes, her boot crunching into a freezing puddle, snowflakes sticking under her collar. Aleksander knelt beside her, shoulders stooped.

“You must still leave,” he said. “You must. Think of what she wanted.”

Elena raised her head. Aleksandr’s eyes were glazed with tears.

“She said she wanted to go someplace that smelled like flowers,” he said. “To have her accoutrement removed and forget everything that happened to her here. And, and she wanted you to go too. She said she was afraid for you.”

Elena cradled the revolver-cuff, crouched in the whispering frozen reeds of the marshes.

Could she cross the border from Russia into a new life of dried roses and Sunday promenades, after letting some physician remove her tail and opera glasses? Could she forget that she had once had a mother and a father and a sister, forget that monsters had taken them from her, forget that a monster had grown inside her too?

Could she ever allow it all to fade away?

That’s what Nina would have wanted.

But she felt her tail flex, feathers grinding on feathers, and she knew: something had broken inside of her forever, no matter if she never saw Russia again.

“Elena, please, she would have wanted—”

“My tail is just as much a part of me as her lungs were.” Elena leapt up, on her tiptoes, looming above him so he shrank away.

She slapped the revolver-cuff over her left wrist. She clenched her teeth as the metal rods curled over her forearm, scraping off her arm hair and digging in, reaching down to her bone. The wood settled against her skin and the trigger fitted into place just above her wrist-bone.

She shouldered around Aleksandr and marched towards the boxcar. She pushed inside, tore Nina’s shawls off her bunk, rummaged through the carpetbag and pulled out Father’s book of maps of Novgorod. She marked corners of the marshes where she could hide with her revolver-cuff and ambush soldiers, parts of the kremlin wall where she could throw homemade explosives, anywhere she could go to destroy the people who had killed Mother, Father, Nina, who had taken away everything, who had created the dark avenging firebird that could never stop fighting.