PROLOGUEJuly 1942
Rudniki Forest, Lithuania
Fireflies bobbed through the night sky, their greenish glow adding to the low, banked radiance of the fire. Resting against the log, I felt in my pocket for the smooth metal wire left over from the mine I had nestled between the train tracks. We had been nearly a kilometer away by the time we’d heard the crash, but even now, hours later, I felt like I could still feel that explosion slamming through my body in the excited drum of my heart and the nervous jolt of the blood in my ears.
My heart only pounded faster when Akiva sank down next to me, close enough that his hip brushed against mine. Discs of firelight danced across his ice-blue eyes, stoking them with a violet flash when he leaned forward to shrug his rifle’s sling from over his shoulder. He propped the gun against the log and stretched out his legs by the fire.
“We did good tonight,” I said, lightly tapping my foot against his. Our secret signal.
“You did good, Chaya.” A smile curved his lips. “Which reminds me...”
He reached into his pocket and unveiled a small rectangular slab wrapped in blue wax paper. My mouth fell open. It couldn’t be.
“A way to celebrate more dead Nazis,” Akiva said with a chuckle.
On the log next to us, Kuni leaned forward, the younger boy’s eyes gleaming in awe. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Chocolate, yeah.” Akiva broke the bar into four, a square for each of us.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, hardly able to believe it. Food was constantly on my mind, as much a part of our nightly discussions as which train routes and military bunkers we should target.
“When we ran across Volkov’s men a few days ago, I traded it.”
“So you’re telling me you’ve been warming it with your ass all week,” I said, and Akiva rolled his eyes.
“Since when did you ever have a problem with my ass?”
I shoved him lightly in the side, chuckling helplessly.
He gave a piece to Kuni, and when Yael came over, handed her one as well. But when it came my turn, he hesitated and smiled at me, holding it to my lips. A challenge.
Rolling my eyes, I leaned forward, took the morsel of chocolate in my teeth. His fingertips brushed against my lips, calloused but gentle, teasing.
Yael shook her head, rising to her feet and brushing the dust from her pant legs. “While you two lovebirds enjoy yourselves, I’m going to get some sleep. Try not to offend the child now.”
“I’m no child,” Kuni protested. “I’m almost twelve!”
“She’s right,” Akiva said, pulling away. “You should probably go to sleep, too, kid. We have a busy day tomorrow.”
Sighing, Kuni rose to his feet.
“Kuni?” I said.
He looked back.
“You’ve got a bit of schmutz on your face.” I pointed to the chocolate smeared by one corner of his mouth.
Kuni wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a blush already creeping across his cheeks. He made it no more than five steps before the night’s peaceful quiet was shattered by a gunshot in the direction of our dugouts.
For the briefest, perfect moment, we froze simultaneously. It couldn’t have been more than a split second, a single moment when the clock stopped ticking, and the night went still, and the silence that poured into place in the echoing reports of the gunshots was as heavy as a deep-sea void. And then I found myself on my feet, the taste of chocolate lingering on my tongue. Even as I reached for the revolver nestled in my coat pocket, Akiva was already jacking a round into his rifle’s chamber.
“Yael!” Kuni screamed out as more gunfire shattered the night, and Akiva and I lunged for the cover of nearby trees. Kuni just turned and ran from the glade, the pistol Akiva had given him forgotten beside the fire.
“Kuni, wait—” Akiva began.
The boy didn’t even reach the tree line. A gunshot took him off his feet, drove him facedown. Akiva ducked behind the cover of a tree. As another gunshot echoed through the forest, I followed his example and pressed my back against a thick pine.
“Kuni, get up!” Crawling on my hands and knees, I tried to reach him. I hardly made it more than a meter before a volley of shots sent me scrambling back against the tree.
The firelight illuminated Kuni’s face in garish detail—hazel eyes wide and sightless, an ooze of blood spilled down his cheek, the top of his head—
Bile flooded my mouth.
His head.
As Akiva crouched behind the tree next to me, his gaze met mine. Panting breaths pushed through his gritted teeth, his eyes burning like pale fire. A slick, muddy shadow had bloomed across the front of his coat, and slowly, it dawned on me.
This was the end.
CHAPTER 1February 1943
Mikašiūnai, Lithuania
I was born on scraps of paper. Loose pages, torn parchment, holy scrolls severed from their dowels. Before Ezra gave me a tongue, he taught me how to read.
Aleph. Mem. Taw.
“There is a mark on your forehead, and it means truth.”
Aleph. Mem. Taw. Emet. Truth.
I felt the word thrum in the empty space where Ezra would sculpt my mouth. With my fingertip, I traced the three letters he’d jotted across the floorboards, copying them into the dust.
The corners of Ezra’s lips twitched upward in a smile. It meant he was pleased or amused. The expression seemed ill at ease on his face, in conflict with his severe cheekbones and hard gray eyes.
“Yes, Vera. Very good.” Ezra wiped away the first letter, making תמא into תמ, met, dead, before blotting out the rest into a ghostly smear nearly as pale as the breath that left his lips.
Even with the walls insulated by old horse blankets, the winter chill still managed to intrude into the hayloft. From how he shivered, I could almost believe the cold had found its way into his bones as well, like the way I felt ice crystals form and crackle within me on the most frigid winter mornings, veining my insides as sharp and fine as splinters.
Clay and chalk sullied Ezra’s hands. On his right hand, he was missing his pinkie finger and the last two knuckles of his ring finger, his leather gloves snipped and sewn to fit. Not unfinished like me, he had explained, but torn from him by the same shrapnel that had turned his right leg to wood and leather from the knee down. He fumbled with the stick of chalk as it dwindled into a nub. Even so, my handwriting was a spidery scrawl compared to his.
Truth. True. Trust me. Trust that this is for the best.
When the sun set, our lessons came to an end. Ezra curled up on the pallet in the corner, just a shadow in the darkness. Candles were precious things, reserved for Friday evenings or when he woke deep in the night, biting his own arm to stanch his wrenching sobs.
To soothe himself from those haunting dreams, he would explain to me what he had seen. A tide of smoke rolling across a pockmarked field, or soldier boys without limbs or innards, or his daughter before he had buried her. It helped him to give his fears a name and face, as though only by talking about them was he able to convince himself they weren’t crawling through the stalls below.
Ezra slept with his back to me, buried beneath layers of blankets to keep out the cold. He had taken off the leather leg and rested it on the floor beside him. From my nook across the room, I couldn’t stop staring at it—Prosthesis, Vera, it is called a prosthesis—thinking of how my own legs must have looked before he had attached them to my body. Had he shaped them in pieces, first the feet and then the calves? And if it had taken him several months to do that, how long would it take for him to sculpt my mouth?
The thought made me restless. Ezra had given me my second leg less than a week ago, and I had spent plenty of time pacing the room since then. He had even allowed me to venture into the hayloft once, although I had been too frightened to clamber down the ladder to the stalls below. As I rose to my feet, I was pleased by how smoothly I stood. Walking was getting easier every day.
There was scarcely enough room to move. All along the walls were moldering scrolls and prayer books, stacked so that whenever Ezra climbed through the hidden doorway into the greater hayloft, he was forced to step over them.
A desecration, he would say, both to leave them on the floor and to step over them, but necessary.
He used the same phrase when talking about his creation of me.
Bats chittered in the rafters above, stirring like black handkerchiefs. They were my only companions aside from Ezra, and I longed to have their freedom. Some nights, I imagined climbing up to their perches
and following them through the cracks between the roof slates on wings made of parchment and scroll dowels. I would soar past the fields and forests, and follow the twists and turns of the Neris River until it flowed into the Baltic Sea.
With the hidden panel wedged firmly in the hayloft’s northern wall, I was confined to this room. For now, I could only hear the outside world. It was quieter at night, but not silent. The lowing of the cows below; their wet snuffles and shifting bodies. Squawking chickens and barking dogs.
The noises both seduced and taunted me. They sounded so close. If I could just speak, maybe I could shout loudly enough for someone else to hear me, for someone to answer. Anyone would do. The man who Ezra chatted with while tending to the livestock, or the girl who called the chickens by name. Even the cows and horses would make welcome companions.
Unlike Ezra, I had no need to rest, and the only time he put me to sleep was when he sculpted my form. To pass the time and distract myself from the temptations of the outside world, I plucked a book from the stack nearest to me and flipped idly through it. A commentary on the midrash. My thoughts strayed and the words buzzed through my mind like gnats. The verses were meaningless to me, as was the rest of the scripture. Even the passages which marked my own limbs.
I had seen Ezra peruse most of the books in our hideaway, and every week the strangers below brought him newspapers or Polish language novels with colorful paper covers. But he refused to touch the loose parchments in the corner, the ones heaped in a crudely hammered lead box so old the metal had turned white and chalky with age. Hebrew and Aramaic, and another Semitic dialect that I couldn’t quite place, even though I could read its letters. He wouldn’t let me touch the lead coffer or its contents, but once or twice, I’d snuck a glimpse, and the sight of the water-stained pages had made me feel vaguely dizzy and unstable, as if my core had begun to liquefy. I couldn’t quite put it into words, except that it had felt like looking at the dirty picks and scalpels or the clots of clay smushed into the floorboards. A part of myself, torn free and dripping.
I set aside the book with a sigh, contemplated the volume of poetry beneath it, then continued my lazy search for something else to pass the hours. Briefly, I amused myself by playing with Ezra’s prosthetic leg, figuring out how it attached to his hip and practicing buckling and undoing the straps. It interested me to touch it, something crafted so much like myself—just the shape of a leg—and yet unmoving and silent.
I traced the word emet into the false limb’s calf, half hoping it would jerk awake, that the straps might writhe like the centipedes that had crept from the woodwork before winter had banished them into hibernation, or the blockish foot might cleave into separate toes. But it remained still, just a lifeless husk of leather and wood. I had expected as much, only I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment—and above all, loneliness so deep and gnawing, it seemed to burrow into the center of me.
As I set the limb down, my gaze caught in the small mirror hanging on the wall. Several
times a week, Ezra would use the mirror to shave, balancing a bowl of water in one hand and his razor in the other.
The mirror’s silvery sheen transfixed me. Every opportunity I had, I loved to touch it, tracing its icy smoothness and the pockmarks of tarnish. As I came closer, I could see parts of myself reflected in its surface—arms covered in black letters lifted from the parchment when my skin had yet to dry; the word for truth, תמא, inked beneath a widow’s peak of dark curls; deeply-set eyes the dusky gray of dawn; a nose as sharp as Ezra’s; and below all that, the smooth expanse where I felt my mouth straining to be.
Soon, Vera, soon.
Gaze fixed on my reflection, I tried to form my lips myself. My fingers mashed uselessly against my face’s cool, unyielding surface. The fingernails Ezra had so carefully laid into my skin were useless. I couldn’t even dimple it.
Ezra always put me to sleep before working on my body, but I had once glimpsed the instruments he used to create me. Picks, shears, blades, and awls encrusted in chalky clay. Sponges used to buff my skin until it was as smooth as the mirror itself. Bundles of human hair, braided to keep from tangling.
Maybe I just needed to find something sharp. A snapped dowel, perhaps, or one of the nails studding the floorboards.
No. My fingers curled into fists. Then he’d know.
Ezra had never hurt me, but I was afraid of what he would do if he found out. He might take away my fingers until he knew I wouldn’t disfigure myself, and my legs until he was sure I wouldn’t run away. If he wanted to, he could turn me back into clay and start anew. He wouldn’t return me to the river; I would be thrown out, left to muddle with the horse manure and filth all winter long, then baked to a crisp in the summer sun.
So, no nails or broken dowels. I must bear without a mouth for a little while longer.
I just needed to wait.
I despised the wait.
An icy crackle stirred me from my daze. I looked down to find the mirror spider-webbed to pieces around my fingers. Shards studded my skin, leaving behind pinpricks that sealed up in an instant.
Until now, I had used my hands only for the most mundane tasks, to pick up things or rearrange them, and to laboriously copy Ezra’s handwriting. A strange flash of excitement rippled through me as I realized that I CHAPTER 2
When Ezra woke the next morning, his face hardened at the sight of the shattered mirror. He picked up the shards one by one, cradling them in his cupped palm.
He turned to me, his gray eyes cold and analytical. “You did this?”
Sitting in my nook in the corner, I nodded reluctantly. In the hours since dawn, I had stared at the mirror in terror. I had even tried fixing it. The painless gashes torn into my palms healed instantly, sucking the splinters of glass deeper inside me, but no matter how hard I pressed the shards together, they refused to merge.
“Why did you break it?” He studied me with disconcerting intensity. “Was it because of your reflection?”
The way he said it made something tighten inside my chest. He made it sound as though that was the expected reason, the inevitable one. I had seen the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, mostly with thinly veiled repulsion, sometimes with outright resentment, as if by just being alive—or the closest thing to it—I was to blame for what he had done to create me. But for the first time, I wondered if a part of him, however small, wished to return me to the dust.
Shaking my head, I picked up a chunk of chalk left over from yesterday’s lesson. On the floorboards, I wrote: It was an accident.
“Ah, I see. Of course.” Ezra chuckled, shocking me. He discarded the broken glass in the chamber pot in the corner. “You don’t yet understand your own strength, but you will in time. And you will only grow more powerful.”
From the box where he stored his belongings, he retrieved a small bundle and unwrapped its mud-stained folds. Steel glistened in the sunlight streaming through the knotholes. His tools.
I brushed away my writing and began anew, intending to ask him if he would give me my mouth today. I stopped midsentence when he held a slim pick out to me.
He pressed it into my hands. “Try to bend this.”
I did as he commanded. The rod held up a bit better than the mirror, but after a brief resistance, the metal bent in my hands. I tried to form it into a circle and succeeded halfway before it snapped in two. The sharp edges cut a gash into my palms, a numb line that began to mend immediately. Within seconds, all that remained was a ghostly imprint, until even that faded away.
“You are truly an incredible creation,” Ezra murmured, taking the pick’s broken pieces from my grip.
I wrote on the floorboards: Is it good to break things?
“Some things, yes. However, it is not the act of breaking that pleases me, Vera. It is your ability. Your strength. My first two attempts resulted in weak beings of slush and water, not even stable enough to rise to their feet, let alone pass as human. But you are perfect. I... I think it is time to finish what I started.”
Laying down the broken pick, he returned to the crate and took two glass jars from its depths. One was filled halfway with human teeth. In the other, a tongue floated in cloudy liquid. As he shook the teeth into his hand, sadness darkened his gaze.
“These were hers,” he said, his voice low and grave.
When I was still just a crude form, he had told me about her. Chaya. His daughter. She’d been sixteen when the war had begun, and seventeen by the time she’d died. For several months, she had lived with him in this hayloft, until the day a pair of young partisan fighters had taken refuge in the barn below—and she had been lured down by the sound of Yiddish voices. Familiar voices.
“The girl was a friend from school.” Ezra spat out friend with shocking bitterness. “And the boy was quick to become one. I wasn’t able to stop Chaya after that. They came back a second time, because knowing her—knowing that Tomas and his family had given us refuge—meant this was a safe place. That they could expect shelter here. And the second time, she left to fight with them.”
She didn’t last long. Just months after she vanished with the pair, Chaya was shot to death a stone’s throw from the same town she had been born in.
The partisan boy had carried her here in a desperate stagger through a muggy midsummer night, heavily wounded, already dying. But it was much too late to save her.
“She’s buried at the edge of the field. It was a sin and a crime what I did, but not as terrible as the one that had put her there. A desecration, but necessary. There could be no other way.” Ezra’s eyes lifted to me. Their gray color mirrored my own. “The dead must be buried whole. But if God is here, he is not listening. There is only you now, Vera.”
As he stepped toward me, I recoiled, my face straining with all the words I couldn’t say.
Make me my own teeth, I wanted to plead as he set the jars on the floor. Make them from river rocks or even clay. I’m not her. I don’t want to see this. Please, don’t make me see this again.
He sank to one knee and reached out for me.
“Sleep, Vera,” he murmured as his fingers brushed against the three letters written on my brow. The floorboards beneath my knees gave way to—
—wet soil. ...
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