Benedikta and Uncle Andrik shoved steamer trunks back beneath their bed. Springs creaked above Celka as Ela scrambled into her bunk.
A fist hammered the door. “Tayemstvoy. Open up!”
“Freezing sleet,” Aunt Benedikta cursed, sounding like she’d been startled awake even as she heaved the last steamer trunk into place. “What time is it?”
Grandfather opened the door with far less alacrity than he had moments before. “What’s going on?” He sounded muzzy with sleep.
The Tayemstvoy soldier Celka had disrupted shined their dark-lantern in Grandfather’s face. “All hail the Stormhawk!”
Grandfather squinted and turned aside.
“All hail the Stormhawk,” Celka echoed with her family, mingling fervor with fear.
The second Tayemstvoy clomped inside. “Everyone up. Move!” Pistol in one hand, lantern held high in the other, they herded Celka’s family into the sitting area where the scratched wooden table and two banged-up chairs left nowhere to hide.
Stomach tight, Celka shuffled obediently into place, eyes on the floorboards. She struggled not to look at her aunt and uncle’s bed. Instead, she stole glances from beneath her lashes while the Tayemstvoy ripped through their sleeper car. When they dragged out the steamer trunks, Celka prayed they wouldn’t realize that the space beneath Aunt Benedikta and Uncle Andrik’s bed was too narrow. She thought frantically for some sousednia trick to help, but she doubted even Pa could have changed the outcome now. Sousednia had limits, and all of Pa’s skills hadn’t helped when it really mattered.
She crushed the thought as the Tayemstvoy flung clothes out of her trunk. At least if they were making a mess, they weren’t pulling aside the false paneling beneath her bunk where her family stored illegal documents.
Minutes crawled past, feeling like hours. Then the soldiers stomped over and started asking questions.
Celka tried to calm her frantic pulse. Stay quiet, look scared, let Grandfather do the talking. They were safe. They would be safe. Grandfather had been outwitting the Tayemstvoy for years. Two young soldiers would never catch him in a lie. Celka imagined touching her storm pendant, praying that remained true.
CHAPTER TWO
THE TROOP TRANSPORT lurched through a pothole, leaf springs squeaking, and a chill wind gusted exhaust fumes into Gerrit Kladivo’s face. Evergreen branches slapped the transport’s sides, spraying him and the five other Storm Guard cadets with remnants of last night’s rain.
Gerrit ignored the cold droplets. They could have ridden in comfort—as much as the term ever applied to wooden bench seats in the back of a transport truck—but they’d deliberately folded back the oil canvas tarpaulin to give them a view.
For half an hour he’d been straining for his first glimpse of a bozhskyeh storm. Written accounts from earlier storm-cycles described Gods’ Breath as subtly different from electrical lightning—flashing coppery carmine rather than bluish-white, though supposedly only a bozhk with a strong storm-affinity could see the difference.
Evergreens still crowding the horizon, Gerrit swallowed a grimace, his mouth tasting strange—gritty, somehow, with a metallic tang like touching his tongue to both leads from a voltaic pile. He dismissed it at first, but as it grew stronger, he turned to Branislav and Hana, seated on the opposite bench.
They were storm-blessed like him, capable of seeing and using sousednia and—more important now that the bozhskyeh storms had returned—trained to draw Gods’ Breath into themselves and use it to imbue magical objects. Nothing about their olive drab battledress uniforms gave them away; Storm Guard imbuement mages wore the same lightning bolts on their collars as every other Army bozhk. But Gerrit had trained with both Hana and Branislav ever since the Storm Guard detected hints that the bozhskyeh storms were returning early.
Staring at the sky, Hana focused mostly on true-life, her sousedni-shape—visible to other storm-blessed mages—bleeding through only weakly. To Gerrit’s eyes, it left her with a ghostly overlay in true-life, festive in a red sarafan, brilliant with emerald and cobalt embroidery. In true-life, she wore her dozens of black braids pinned at the nape of her neck, but in sousednia, they cascaded over her shoulders, sparkling with glass beads, rainbow colors matching her luxuriant earrings and contrasting with her skin’s rich umber brown.
Unlike Hana, Branislav looked much the same in both realities, dressed in uniform. True-life’s cloudy sky left his beige skin a little darker than beneath what must have been a sunny day in his sousednia, and his sousedni-shape had discarded his olive jacket and didn’t yet wear an earring. He’d chosen his pronoun later than most children, and his sousednia must have formed before he’d made it official with the single earring; in