Chapter 14: Catwalk, Car, Gate

"Viktor," I said. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what you want me to show you."

"Nika," said Luka.

He said it quietly, from his knees, with the barrel against his temple.

"Stop," Viktor told him.

"She doesn't need to pretend for me, Papa."

Viktor's pale eyes flicked down. "What are you saying?"

"Nothing you'd understand."

Luka lifted his head, careful of the gun, and looked straight at me across the gravel.

"Signal house first," he said. "He's already got his rifle back up."

I didn't move.

I stood there in the gray cardigan with my braid over my shoulder and my mouth a little open.

"Then the man on your left with the shotgun," Luka said. "Then the one by the freight car."

"Be quiet," said Viktor.

"Do it, Nika."

It was the order he had never once given me.

It wasn't the Nika-love, go help my aunt kind of order. It was the kind he gave a man he trusted.

I understood in that moment that he was not asking me to save him.

He was telling me the order I would have chosen myself.

My right hand went under the cardigan.

The pistol cleared against my ribs. I turned my shoulders, and the sweet girl went out of my body all at once.

The first shot took the man on the catwalk through the throat.

His rifle went off into the sky, and he folded over the rail.

Luka's elbow came up into his father's wrist.

I had not seen him gather himself for it. He had been kneeling there, bleeding, waiting for exactly that shot.

The revolver fired. The bullet went over my head into the dark.

The man on Viktor's left had swung up a shotgun.

I put one round through his chest and one through the bridge of his nose, and he went backward over a coil of chain.

That made three. I pivoted for the freight car.

The man beside it had the pistol up and the sight on Luka.

I shot him once, and the pistol dropped out of his hand and rang on the rail.

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