Harper dreamt of the Zaykov revolver she dropped in the dust, pointed at her forehead, heartless grey eyes staring back at her. A handsome smile before he pulled the trigger, killing her in the dream. Her heart raced as woke, brushing a lock of messy red hair from her eyes, damp with cold sweat. She felt a void where her index finger had once been, the stump still wrapped in its sixth bandage. That’s how she had begun to count the days since the Hail Mary landed in Crantown. A fresh bandage every day.

  The shack she had spent her recovery in was just one big room: a fireplace with an icon of some Orthodox saint hanging over it, a tiny kitchen with a scavenged old world oven and a wooden bed with a mattress made of animal hides.

  The hut had electricity thanks to the wind generators in Crantown, but no running water. So Harper had to wash her face in a wooden tub filled with well water in the kitchen. She still felt a dull aching from the bullet wound in her shoulder, but at least she could move her arm again.

  She had slept in her underwear and a baggy worn-out grey t-shirt decorated with the fading logo of a smiling yellow monkey holding a can of beer. That shirt was one of her first disappointments… she expected the villagers to look exotic in some way. But mostly, they wore old hand-me-downs from New Helsinki, the shirt among them, with the exception of a few roughspun linen, fur, and wool clothes.

  She had spent the first four days in bed. It was impossible to stop replaying Payton’s death in her head, to stop thinking about how Jason and Rita would be worried sick about her not being home yet, to stop thinking about Mirko and the fact she didn’t actually see him die.

  Harper stared at her reflection in the water, as it grew still again. Walters was getting anxious to leave. Anna’s recovery was even slower than hers. It was the last few days here, she knew it. Maybe her last few days as a duster. She clenched her fists, gripping the sides of the tub.

  The door opened, startling her out of her thoughts. The fright caused her to pull the whole tub down on the floor. Water splashed all over her shirt and her legs and flooded the wooden floor, creeping into the old rug and soaking it to the core. “Ah shit!”

  She scrambled to get the tub back in place, grabbing the nearest towel from the kitchen and getting on her knees to soak it up. It didn’t do any good. The towel soaked through instantly and her shoulder began hurting again.

  The woman who opened the door laughed as she leaned against the frame. “Do not worry about it mī?otā, you just rest up, ja?” She was in her late forties, just a touch over five feet tall, her long black woolen coat nearly reaching to her ankles. It almost seemed to meld with her long, wild dark hair.

  “Alma, I’m so sorry…” Harper said, sitting back on her knees as her face turned nearly the same shade as her hair.

  “Do not worry, I say, ja?” Alma said again as she took off her coat and kneeled next to the young woman, using it to mop up the water. “Sit, eat… there is still zupa in the pot.” The villagers spoke a strange pidgin of English and Latvian. Harper struggled to understand them. She’d picked up a few words of old Finnish, but that was of no use here. Alma’s speech was just about the clearest of the lot.

  Harper wanted to protest, but the pain in her shoulder was winning over her sense of duty. “Fine… sorry again.” She stood, opened the pot and filled a bowl with the soup. Drein meat, cranberries and potatoes, seasoned with herbs from the woods. The young duster took another bowl and filled it for her host as well, the least she figured she could do.

  “If you must apologize, apologize for being out of bed, mī?otā!” the local woman said, rising up a few moments later and stretching her sore bones. She kept the door open and hung her drenched coat over it to dry. Then she moved to take her bowl and a wooden spoon, pulling out a chair at the table in the center of the room.

  Harper sat and swallowed a spoonful of the lukewarm soup. Even though it was the same meal she had eaten every day in Crantown thus far, it was just about the only thing that let her feel something other than anxiety for the past week. Real meat was a luxury for the rich in her world. Protein in New Helsinki was usually dried sprats or maggots ground into patties.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “I can’t sit around for another day,” she said after a few spoonfuls, “Sorry. Don’t care if my arm takes another week to heal, I need to get the hell out today.”

  “Ma company is not good enough for you?” Alma said with a raised eyebrow.

  “No, it’s not that…”

  “Hah! Do not worry!” Alma said, then laughed, a glint in her deep blue eyes. “You remind me of mana meita… daughter.”

  “One who used to live in this shack?” Harper said, then took another spoonful of soup.

  “Ja, ja…” Alma said, stirring her bowl with her spoon and staring into it as if it were a wishing well she had just dropped her last coin in. “Tecla. Always getting in trouble, always looking to leave. Your own mamma waiting for you at home?”

  “I never met her,” Harper said. The response didn’t usually hurt, she was used to giving it her whole life. But today the words felt heavy. “She died, well, giving birth to me.”

  Alma nodded, a small reassuring smile on her face as she reached across the table to touch Harper’s bandaged hand. “And your tētis… your father that is?”

  The soup did not feel quite so appealing anymore. It was easy enough, telling folks she didn’t have a mother. But she had known her father, and loved him.

  “Dead too,” she said, letting go of her spoon and pulling her hand away from Alma. “Suicide… Kept it up until I was sixteen, working himself near to death to keep me and my brother fed, distract himself from his grief. Guess… when we were ready to take care of ourselves, he just…”

  Harper’s leg began to shake under the table, both hands lacing in her hair as she rested her elbows on the table. Squeezing, just a little bit, hoping it might slow her mind. “Sorry… it doesn’t usually hit quite so hard. Just, losing Payton too…”

  “Was he a good man?” Alma asked. She did not touch her hand again, but her voice was calm, guiding her towards better memories.

  “You mean Payton? Or my dad?” Harper asked, looking at her through a curtain of red hair, “Well, doesn’t matter. Answer’s the same either way… Yeah. Only knew Payt for, what, a month or so? You know, couple beers, couple weeks of training. And then he was gone. And I’m…”

  “You’re still here,” Alma said. Her tone was no doubt meant to be reassuring, but right now, it felt the opposite.

  “Yeah. And just like with dad, I’ll spend my whole life wondering if it was my fault…”

  “Ja,” Alma said, “You might, mī?otā. You will.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to say I shouldn’t?”

  The small villager laughed at that, leaning back in her chair with one arm propped over the backrest. “And what good would that do? It will not stop you, will it? Just like me telling you to stay in bed and eat your zupa will not stop you. Nē…”

  “So, what? What should I do?” Harper said, narrowing her eyes.

  “Nothing. You live. You do not control that you live, you do not even control how you feel, so how you control if anyone else dies, ja? Control is not life, living is life. What a boring place the world would be if it was up to us to choose all.”

  Harper found her gaze falling on the icon of the saint. A bearded man with a halo, wearing some sort of fur cloak. “So, what? Leave it in the hands of Jesus over there?”

  Alma looked confused for a second, but then burst into laughter again when she realized Harper was talking about the icon. She didn’t bother correcting her young friend. “If you like, ja? I do. I like thinking that everything happens for a reason. You would not be meeting me if you control everything, probably someone prettier and younger instead, ja? But maybe you needed an old granny.”

  “You’re hardly old, Alma,” Harper said and found herself smiling again despite herself, infected by the self-proclaimed elder. “Wish I could believe, but I doubt there’s any ‘reason’ I could find for him dying that wouldn’t make me pissed off. At myself, or God.”

  “You don’t have to, mī?otā. If things happen for a reason, then it must be a good one, but if they not, well… you find your own reason.”

  Something clicked in Harper’s mind then. She wasn’t sure if it was what her strange host had been driving at, but she did find a reason. Or rather, she remembered it. “Yeah? Well, I best check on Walters and the Hail Mary then. Found myself a job, after all. Be a shame to quit so soon.”