Lahat ng Kabanata ng Little Sister: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

THE EYELESSWHEN SHE CAME TO, sluggishly and reluctantly, she found herself lying on the family’s shabby sofa. Andrei was sitting by her side. A sparse dawn bled through the window.“Mama,” she whispered.“She went after them,” he said. “I told her not to . . . It’s not a good idea. But she would not listen.”Svetlana stared at him. His face looked dusty. She noticed, distantly, a half-healed scar on his cheek.“They took my Dad, too,” he was saying under his breath. “A month before the war started. They said he was a cosm . . . cosmop?”“Kosmop,” she said. “It’s a kind of vermin.”“This is what they said. I can’t even pronounce it.”“My father is innocent,” Svetlana said dully. “It was not . . . it wasn’t him. Somebody made a mistake. I need to go and talk to them. Now!”She tried to get up but fell back onto the sofa again. Her head was spinning, blue spots rotating in her field of vision.“Hey, hey,” Andrei pushed her back.“You need to eat,

THE SPEAK HOUSETHE STREETS WERE empty the next morning as they trudged through the shivery frostbite of the crystal air toward the Speak-House. Svetlana was so cold that even her thoughts seemed frozen in her head. She clung to one certainty—she needed to talk to the people in charge and tell them what she had seen. Hopefully, then her parents would be restored to her, and everything would be as it used to be.But what about Andrei? He marched by her side, his face set in a frown. He was her witness. If her story of the eyeless was doubted, he could lend his support. Would he be believed? Wouldn’t he be suspected of being in the service of the Enemy? How could she know for sure that he was not? Okay, he could not be an Enemy himself; something deep inside her insisted on his humanity, but what if he was a foreign infiltrator of some kind?When they had woken up in the office, she had been unable to move, her limbs seized with the paralysis of chill. The fire had gone out in th

COMRADE KRASNOVSHE WOKE UP when the rocking of the train suddenly stopped. Muzzily, she lifted her head, marveling at the empty space around her. Then, she realized she had almost half the berth to herself because Andrei was gone.She was instantly alert, her heart hammering. The people below murmured uneasily. The twins on her berth still huddled together, keeping as far away from her as possible. The naked bulb above swayed in the smoky air but at least electricity gave some protection against the Enemy who might be hiding in the mass of the passengers.“Where are we?” she asked the twins, but they did not respond. They merely stared at her as if she had spoken in a foreign language.Where was Andrei? Had he left while she was sleeping? Svetlana bit her lip, torn between relief and consternation. Since their twilight meeting, her life had been a string of disasters, and she still was not sure of who he was. Not one of the Enemy, this was certain, but her previous explanatio

INTO THE WASTELANDSTRAINS DID NOT run anymore.They had spent a day at the Little Wells station, huddling around the small tin stove that filled the waiting-room with soporific heat. Outside, the ragged icicles were melting and dripping, fat drops of water drumming on the asphalt. The air smelled raw and tender. A thaw had come.They spoke little. After the confrontations with the Fists, Andrei seemed to have withdrawn into himself. He spent most of the time cleaning and reassembling the black fire-stick that he called the Nagant.Svetlana was repulsed by its oily sheen that resembled an Enemy’s skin, its aura of sly darkness. She had seen how deadly it could be, but Andrei told her that it only held two more shots to fire. What use was such a weapon compared with the generosity of Light? But Svetlana did not tell him that. The distance between them seemed to be growing with every empty minute they spent waiting for the train that did not come.Krasnov, laid up in his shabby

TRAITORSTHE CELL WAS FILTHY.There was dry vomit on the floor where its previous inhabitant had emptied his or her guts. The bucket in the corner filled the tiny space with stench. At least, it was too cold for flies. Svetlana could imagine the cell buzzing with insects in summer.She sat on the edge of the bunk that held a scrunched-up dirty blanket which she refused to touch, overwhelmed by the disgust toward its no-doubt-dead-now previous user. It was as if the blanket crawled with the detritus of the body that refused to recognize its demise.She was cold, though, so cold that after a while the idea of snuggling into this corpse-blanket began to appear rational. Why not? Would she be better off frozen to death? Didn’t she owe it to her city, her family, and the Voice to survive and learn as much as possible? A three-candles girl, almost an adult, there were more important things in life than getting a little dirt over her clothes, which were not the cleanest to begin with.St