ONE

  UNDER FIRE

  MOSCOW • OCTOBER 15, 1941

  Łucinda!

  The voices reached her in the murky darkness.

  Come back!

  Wait!

  She ignored them, pressing further. Echoes of her name bounced off the shadowy walls of the Announcer, sending licks of heat rippling across her skin. Was that Daniel’s voice or Cam’s? Arriane’s or Gabbe’s? Was it Roland pleading that she come back now, or was that Miles?

  The calls grew harder to discern, until Luce couldn’t tell them apart at all: good or evil. Enemy or friend. They should have been easier to separate, but nothing was easy anymore. Everything that had once been black and white now blended into gray.

  Of course, both sides agreed on one thing: Everyone wanted to pull her out of the Announcer. For her protection, they would claim.

  No, thanks.

  Not now.

  Not after they’d wrecked her parents’ backyard, made it into another one of their dusty battlefields. She couldn’t think about her parents’ faces without wanting to turn back—not like she’d even know how to turn back inside an Announcer, anyway. Besides, it was too late. Cam had tried to kill her. Or what he thought was her. And Miles had saved her, but even that wasn’t simple. He’d only been able to throw her reflection because he cared about her too much.

  And Daniel? Did he care enough? She couldn’t tell.

  In the end, when the Outcast had approached her, Daniel and the others had stared at Luce like she was the one who owed them something.

  You are our entrance into Heaven, the Outcast had told her. The price. What had that meant? Until a couple of weeks ago she hadn’t even known the Outcasts existed. And yet, they wanted something from her—badly enough to battle Daniel for it. It must have had to do with the curse, the one that kept Luce reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. But what did they think Luce could do?

  Was the answer buried somewhere here?

  Her stomach lurched as she tumbled senselessly through the cold shadow, deep inside the chasm of the dark Announcer.

  Luce—

  The voices began to fade and grow dimmer. Soon they were barely whispers. Almost like they had given up. Until—

  They started to grow louder again. Louder and clearer.

  Luce—

  No. She clamped her eyes shut to try to block them out.

  Lucinda—

  Lucy—

  Lucia—

  Luschka—

  She was cold and she was tired and she didn’t want to hear them. For once, she wanted to be left alone.

  Luschka! Luschka! Luschka!

  Her feet hit something with a thwump.

  Something very, very cold.

  She was standing on solid ground. She knew she wasn’t tumbling anymore, though she couldn’t see anything in front of her except for the blanket of blackness. Then she looked down at her Converse sneakers.

  And gulped.

  They were planted in a blanket of snow that reached midway up her calves. The dank coolness that she was used to—the shadowy tunnel she’d been traveling through, out of her backyard, into the past—was giving way to something else. Something blustery and absolutely frigid.

  The first time Luce had stepped through an Announcer—from her Shoreline dorm room to Las Vegas—she’d been with her friends Shelby and Miles. At the end of the passage they’d met a barrier: a dark, shadowy curtain between them and the city. Because Miles was the only one who’d read the texts on stepping through, he’d started swiping the Announcer with a circular motion until the murky black shadow flaked away. Luce hadn’t known until now that he’d been troubleshooting.

  This time, there was no barrier. Maybe because she was traveling alone, through an Announcer summoned of her own fierce will. But the way out was so easy. Almost too easy. The veil of blackness simply parted.

  A blast of cold tore into her, making her knees lock with the chill. Her ribs stiffened and her eyes teared in the sharp, sudden wind.

  Where was she?

  Luce already regretted her panicked jump through time. Yes, she needed an escape, and yes, she wanted to trace her past, to save her former selves from all the pain, to understand what kind of love she’d had with Daniel all those other times. To feel it instead of being told about it. To understand—and then fix—whatever curse had been inflicted on Daniel and her.

  But not like this. Frozen, alone, and completely unprepared for wherever, whenever she was.

  She could see a snowy street in front of her, a steel-gray sky above white buildings. She could hear something rumbling in the distance. But she didn’t want to think about what any of it meant.

  “Wait,” she whispered to the Announcer.

  The shadow drifted hazily a foot or so beyond her fingertips. She tried to grasp it, but the Announcer eluded her, flicking farther away. She leaped for it, and caught a tiny damp piece of it between her fingers—

  But then, in an instant, the Announcer shattered into soft black fragments on the snow. They faded, then were gone.

  “Great,” she muttered. “Now what?”

  In the distance, the narrow road curved left to meet a shadowy intersection. The sidewalks were piled high with shoveled snow, which had been packed against two long banks of white stone buildings. They were striking, unlike anything Luce had ever seen, a few stories tall, with their entire façades carved into rows of bright white arches and elaborate columns.

  All 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 figure came hobbling around the snowy street corner, Luce stared at the woman, trying to place her. She was very short and a little 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 kill 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 all the nights I get off work to find 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 fidgeted as her past life’s grandmother gaped at her jeans and ran her knobby fingers over the buttons of Luce’s flannel 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 chattering. “I didn’t know it was going to be so cold.”

  The woman spat on the snow to show her disapproval. She peeled off her overcoat. “Take this before you catch your death.” She bundled the coat roughly around Luce, whose fingers were half frozen as she struggled to button 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 muttered. “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 all. Few cars were parked along the road, but occasionally, down the darkened side streets, she heard the whinnies of carriage horses waiting for orders, their frosty breaths clotting the air. Silhouetted bodies scampered across rooftops. Down an alley, a man in a torn overcoat helped three small 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: soft-top jeeps with giant fenders, bone-thin steering wheels, and the Soviet hammer and sickle painted onto the doors. But aside from Luce and her grandmother, there were no people on this street. Everything—except for the awful rumbling in the sky—was ghostly, eerily quiet.

  In the distance, she could see a river, and far across it, a great building. Even in the darkness, she could make out its elaborate tiered spires and ornate onion-shaped domes, which seemed familiar and mythic at the same time. It took a moment to sink in—and then fear shot through Luce.

  She was in Moscow.

  And the city was a war zone.

  Black smoke rose in the gray sky, marking the pockets of the city that had already been hit: to the left of the vast Kremlin, and just behind it, and again in the distance to the far right. There was no combat on the streets, no sign that enemy soldiers had crossed into the city yet on foot. But the flames licking the charred buildings, the incendiary smell of war everywhere, and the threat of more to come were somehow even worse.

  This was by far the most messed-up thing Luce had ever done in her life—probably in any of her lives. Her parents would kill her if they knew where she was. Daniel might never speak to her again.

  But then: What if they didn’t even have the chance to be furious with her? She could die, right here in this war zone.

  Why had she done this?

  Because she’d had to. It was hard to unearth that small hint of pride in the midst of her panic. But it must have been there somewhere.

  She’d stepped through. On her own. Into a distant place and a faraway time, into the past she needed to understand. This was what she’d wanted. She’d been pushed around like a chess piece long enough.

  But what was she supposed to do now?

  She picked up her pace and held tight to her grandmother’s hand. Strange, this woman had no real sense of what Luce was going through, no real idea of who she even was, and yet the tug of her dry grip was the only thing keeping Luce moving.

  “Where are we going?” Luce asked as her grandmother yanked her down another darkened street. The cobblestones tapered off and the road became unpaved and slippery. The snow had soaked through the canvas of Luce’s tennis shoes, and her toes were starting to burn with the cold.

  “To collect your sister, Kristina.” The old woman scowled. “The one who works nights digging army trenches with her bare hands so you can get your beauty rest. Remember her?”

  Where they stopped, there was no streetlamp to light the road. Luce blinked a few times to help her eyes adjust. They were standing in front of what looked like a very long ditch, right in the middle of the city.

  There must have been a hundred people there. All of them bundled up to their ears. Some were down on their knees, digging with shovels. Some were digging with their hands. Some stood as if frozen, watching the sky. A few soldiers carted off heavy loads of earth and rock in splintery wheelbarrows and farm carts to add to the rubble barricade at the end of the street. Their bodies were hidden under thick army-issue wool coats that billowed out around their knees, but beneath their steel hats, their faces were as gaunt as any of the civilians’. Lucinda understood that they were all working together, the men in uniform and the women and children, turning their city into a fortress, doing anything they could, down to the very last minute, to keep the enemy tanks out.

  “Kristina,” her grandmother called, the same notes of panic-washed love in her voice as when she’d been looking for Luce.

  A girl appeared at their side almost instantly. “What took you so long?”

  Tall and thin, with dark strands of hair escaping from under the porkpie hat on her head, Kristina was so beautiful, Luce had to swallow a lump in her throat. She recognized the girl as family right away.

  Seeing Kristina reminded Luce of Vera, another past life’s sister. Luce must have had a hundred sisters across time. A thousand. All of them would have gone through something similar. Sisters and brothers and parents and friends whom Luce must have loved, then lost. None of them had known what was coming. All of them had been left behind to grieve.

  Maybe there was a way to change that, to make it easier on the people who’d loved her. Maybe that was part of what Luce could do in her past lives.

  The great boom of something exploding sounded across town. Close enough that the ground rocked under Luce’s feet and her right eardrum felt like it was splitting. On the corner, air-raid sirens started going off.

  “Baba.” Kristina took hold of her grandmother’s arm. She was near tears. “The Nazis—they’re here, aren’t they?”

  The Germans. Luce’s first time stepping through time on her own and she’d landed smack in World War II. “They’re attacking Moscow?” Her voice wobbled. “Tonight?”

  “We should have left town with the others,” Kristina said bitterly. “Now it is too late.”

  “And abandoned your mother and your father and your grandfather, too?” Baba shook her head. “Left them alone in their graves?”

  “Better we should join them in the cemetery?” Kristina spat back. She reached for Luce, squeezing her arm. “Did you know about the raid? You and your kulak friend? Is that why you didn’t come to work this morning? You were with him, weren’t you?”

  What did her sister think Luce could possibly have known? Who would she have been with?

  Who but Daniel?

  Of course. Luschka must be with him right now. And if her own family members were confusing that Luschka with Luce …

  Her chest constricted. How much time did she have left before she died? What if Luce could find Luschka before it happened?

  “Luschka.”

  Her sister and grandmother were staring at her.

  “What’s wrong with her tonight?” Kristina asked.

  “Let’s go.” Baba scowled. “You think the Moscovitches are going to hold open their basement forever?”

  The long drone of a fighter plane’s propellers sounded over them in the sky. Close enough that when Luce looked up, the dark swastika painted on the underside of its wings was clear. It sent a shiver through her. Then another boom rocked the city, and the air grew caustic with dark smoke. They’d hit something nearby. Two more massive explosions made the ground shudder beneath her feet.

  It was chaos on the street. The crowd at the trenches was disappearing, everyone scattering up a dozen narrow streets. Some hustled down the stairs of the metro station on the corner to wait out the bombs underground; others disappeared into dark doorways.

  A block away, Luce caught a glimpse of someone running: a girl, about her age, in a red hat and a long wool coat. She turned her head for just a second before she sprinted on. But it was long enough for Luce to know.

  There she was.

  Luschka.

  She wrestled free of Baba’s arm. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  Luce took a deep breath and ran down the street, straight into the roiling smoke, toward the heaviest bombing.

  “Are you crazy?” Kristina yelled. But they didn’t follow her. They would have had to be crazy themselves.

  Luce’s feet were numb as she tried to run through the calf-high snow on the sidewalk. When she reached the corner where she’d seen her red-hatted past self dash by, she slowed. Then she sucked in her breath.

  A building that took up half of the city block directly in front of her had caved in. White stone was streaked with black ash. A fire churned deep inside the crater in the building’s side.

  The explosion had spat out heaps of unrecognizable debris from inside the building. The snow was streaked with red. Luce recoiled until she realized that the red streaks were not blood but shreds of red silk. It must have been a tailor’s shop. Several badly singed racks of clothes were scattered in the street. A mannequin lay on its side in a ditch. It was on fire. Luce had to cover her mouth with her grandmother’s scarf to keep from choking on the fumes. Everywhere she stepped, shattered glass and stone cut into the snow.

  She should turn back, find the grandmother and sister who would help her get to shelter, but she couldn’t. She had to find Luschka. She’d never been so close to one of her past selves before. Luschka might be able to help her understand why Luce’s own lifetime was different. Why Cam had shot a starshot into her reflection, thinking it was her, and told Daniel, “It was a better end for her.” A better end than what?