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FICTION

A Frozen Hope

Frunze, Sakha Republic, 2075

Rumor has it if you cried here, your tears could freeze your eyelids shut. Minuscule ice crystals would form, and a kaleidoscope of rainbow would be the last thing you’d see for a while. Maybe forever.

I wasn’t planning on finding out.

Smoke pierced my nostrils despite thick puffs of snow. Some of the girls arriving this morning were as young as twelve, the age of accountability. Nadia’s age now. The same age I had been when I was arrested four years ago. I wanted to scream for her, but screams were no better than tears.

“Surely they know what happens here, and yet they refuse to deny their allegiance to Bog,” Alexandra said, emphasizing our Russian word for God, a mischievous curve forming around the corners of her lips.

“Well, I, for one, certainly wish we would have. I don’t relish the thought of more ignorant rebels,” I said.

“You don’t mean it. You’re just worried —”

“They’re just words, Alex.” Were they, though? Words that could have kept me out of this arctic hell. Words that would have kept me watching over Nadia at our home in Yakutsk. Ice cold and comfortable. But now we were forced 70 miles north.

I, at least, was nowhere.

I felt the train’s familiar rumble under my feet as we assembled into the poorly insulated shack with its leaky roof and rotting timbers. The guards, their ushankas cozied atop their heads, eyed us for signs of defiance as we began slaving over the rough diamonds. I wasted my days looking for beauty in a world where there was none to be found.

The draft stole the feeling from my fingers as I thought about this morning. One of our elders had been caught and whisked away over nothing but a whispered prayer. We wouldn’t see her again. It didn’t take long for anyone here to realize it wasn’t worth it.

The brilliant diamonds were now slivers of ice between my chapped fingers. I was shaking. Alex put her hand over mine. “If she’s here, she’ll be fine …”

A guard I didn’t recognize narrowed in on us. “What is going on?” he demanded.

“Nothing, sir.”

He furrowed his brow but walked away.

A new recruit? Alex shrugged, and I turned back to sorting the gems.

Please don’t let her be here, I sighed. It took me by surprise. Praying had become foreign.

In the evening, we began our trek back to our living quarters. The rough wool scratched my frost-bitten cheek as I tightened my hood against the gnawing wind. This was no place for Nadia. Please.

I held my breath as I scanned the young girls, huddled together, eyes wide and innocent. My eyes stopped when they reached her blonde braids, laced with frost. Yet I’d know that face anywhere. It was a copy of my own. “No!” I breathed.

The guards appeared at the door. The one who had questioned me earlier approached with our dinner. Broth. His badge read Fyodor. “You,” he said to me. “Distribute this.” There was a softer tone to his growl now. I made my rounds with the watery soup. When I served Nadia, her eyes held my gaze. I nodded.

“That girl mean something to you?” Fyodor asked as I handed him the emptied soup pot.

“No one is anything to me,” I said sharply. A little too sharply. “Not anymore, sir.”

“Hmm. Some resemblance, though, huh?” He knew. They would all know soon enough.

That night, I had my chance to go to her. The candles were fewer, and so were the guards. I would tell her how sorry I was for abandoning her.

“Katya!” she whispered and draped her arms around my neck. “I came for you!”

For me? “You shouldn’t have.” I wanted to tell her I loved her and would get her out of here. “It was foolish,” was what I said instead.

“Papa said it is never foolish to believe.”

I hushed her then, squeezing her hand, and maneuvered back to my place by Alex. Her eyes gleamed against the dim candlelight. “You’re lucky to have someone who loves you, someone to live for.” It wasn’t lucky. It was dangerous. Alex was only two years older than me but had taken up looking after me. She had no one but me. And I was no one.

My sister moved robotically across the room as we worked the next day. Her fingers were stiff, and she fumbled with the diamonds. Was this her fate? A six-year-old Nadia danced before my mind’s eye, giggling, her long blonde hair wild and free. We had lost our mother when Nadia was just a baby. I had mothered her as best I knew how. When the state had finally outlawed Christian practice, I had promised her I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

Yet here she was. Death churned slowly, freezing us from the inside out. I slammed my fist against the table, scattering the last of my unsorted diamonds, and with it, the last of my resolve.

“Pull yourself together! Fyodor is coming,” Alex said.

“That’s enough!” he barked. “To isolation.” He hauled me by the crook of my arm to the empty cell, my feet nearly asleep and fighting to keep up. “I had a little brother once. I had Bog, too. I lost one of them.” And then he slammed the door, leaving me in the darkness that paralleled my thoughts.

The light had come through the narrow window on the ceiling and was already fading again before Fyodor brought me some leftover broth.

“Not hungry.”

“Eat. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.” The door thudded behind him.

Sighing, I picked up the bowl. Underneath was a slip of paper. I seized it and quickly read: There is surely a hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. From the Biblia? On the other side: There is a way. South, when the snow tracks no more. How far can you run?

I shoved the paper into my pocket and swallowed the soup in a stupor. Fyodor came back to lead me to the sorting shacks. “There are no guarantees,” he whispered as he nudged me through the door.

Alex and Nadia anticipated our secret escape as the snow became slush and a myriad of fragrant colors speckled the land. I doubted if any of it could be true until the morning it actually happened. Fyodor kept us in the back of the marching line to the shack and shut the door in front of us, cutting us off from the rest of the girls. He ran to the back door and unlocked it. “Run now, until you can’t anymore.” I pushed Nadia ahead of me and turned around for Alex.

But she was still inside. “I was never going,” she said, smiling when she shouldn’t have. She addressed Fyodor but did not move her eyes from mine. “Shut the door and holler out for backup. Say I tried to escape.” She was still smiling at me as Fyodor, mouth agape, closed the door.

“Katya.” Nadia grabbed my hand then. “It’s time to go.” Her hand trembled as she tugged me forward. And then we ran until we couldn’t anymore, Alexandra’s scream piercing me with each beat of my heart. When we could no longer run, we walked.

Hope flooded her eyes when we saw the cabin emerge in the distance. We were at a near crawl now. But we kept on moving until we collapsed, exhausted, on the porch.

“We’re here.”

The porch light came on. And then the door opened.

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Candace Behrmann is a mom to four kids, nine cats, and a handful of backyard chickens. Her youngest son is non-verbal. He inspires her to stretch her creativity and think outside her words in new ways every day. Candace loves the Lord and gives all glory to Him with all she writes.

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