Passion Read Free Page A

arches and elaborate columns.
    Al the windows were dark. Luce got the sense that the whole city might be dark. The only light came from a single gas streetlamp. If there was any moon, it was hidden by a thick blanket of cloud. Again something rumbled in the sky. Thunder?
    Luce hugged her arms around her chest. She was freezing.
    “Luschka!”
    A woman’s voice. Hoarse and raspy, like someone who’d spent her whole life barking orders. But the voice was trembling, too.
    “Luschka, you idiot. Where are you?”
    She sounded closer now. Was she talking to Luce? There was something else about that voice, something strange that Luce couldn’t quite put into words.
    When a gure came hobbling around the snowy street corner, Luce stared at the woman, trying to place her. She was very short and a lit le hunched over, maybe in her late sixties. Her bulky clothes seemed too big for her body. Her hair was tucked under a thick black scarf. When she saw Luce, her face scrunched into a complicated grimace.
    “Where have you been?”
    Luce looked around. She was the only other person on the street. The old woman was speaking to her.
    “Right here,” she heard herself say.
    In Russian.
    She clapped a hand over her mouth. So that was what had seemed so bizarre about the old woman’s voice: She was speaking a language Luce had never learned. And yet, not only did Luce understand every word, but she could speak it back.
    “I could kil you,” the woman said, breathing heavily as she rushed toward Luce and threw her arms around her.
    For such a frail-looking woman, her embrace was strong. The warmth of another body pressing into Luce after so much intense cold made her almost want to cry. She hugged back hard.
    “Grandma?” she whispered, her lips close to the woman’s ear, somehow knowing that was who the woman was.
    “Of al the nights I get o work to nd you gone,” the woman said. “Now you’re skipping around in the middle of the street like a lunatic?
    Did you even go to work today? Where is your sister?”
    There was the rumbling in the sky again. It sounded like a bad storm moving closer. Moving fast. Luce shivered and shook her head. She didn’t know.
    “Aha,” the woman said. “Not so carefree now.” She squinted at Luce, then pushed her away to get a closer look. “My God, what are you wearing?”
    Luce dgeted as her past life’s grandmother gaped at her jeans and ran her knobby ngers over the but ons of Luce’s annel shirt. She grabbed Luce’s short, tangled ponytail. “Sometimes I think you are as crazy as your father, may he rest in peace.”
    “I just—” Luce’s teeth were chat ering. “I didn’t know it was going to be so cold.” The woman spat on the snow to show her disapproval. She peeled o her overcoat. “Take this before you catch your death.” She bundled the coat roughly around Luce, whose ngers were half frozen as she struggled to but on it. Then her grandmother untied the scarf from her neck and wrapped it around Luce’s head.
    A great boom in the sky startled both of them. Now Luce knew it wasn’t thunder. “What is that?” she whispered.
    The old woman stared at her. “The war,” she mut ered. “Did you lose your wits along with your clothes? Come now. We must go.” As they waded down the snowy street, over the rough cobbles and the tram tracks set into them, Luce realized that the city wasn’t empty after al . Few cars were parked along the road, but occasional y, down the darkened side streets, she heard the whinnies of carriage horses waiting for orders, their frosty breaths clot ing the air. Silhouet ed bodies scampered across rooftops. Down an al ey, a man in a torn overcoat helped three smal children through the hatched doors of a basement.
    At the end of the narrow street, the road opened onto a broad, tree-lined avenue with a wide view of the city. The only cars parked here were military vehicles. They looked old-fashioned, almost absurd, like relics in a war museum: