Girls in Black by Vesna Kurilic

Author:Vesna Kurilic [Vesna Kurilic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shtriga
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“We need to talk to the dark-haired girl,” Lina said when there were finally just the two of them again, alone in the second floor dorm room, just a few short steps from the bathroom, now scrubbed perfectly clean.

The bunks were cramped a bit closer to each other than she remembered, probably a side-effect from losing the west wing in the bombing. The one she hadn’t even thought about, when it happened, even though she must have heard the news. Back then, everything connected to her life in the House seemed like a particularly ugly nightmare.

“Emilia. She let us onto the grounds the first time we came here, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. The pigeon was a nasty idea.”

“Is it possible that someone’s playing a practical joke, like your friend said—but on her? Not the whole…” Karol waved her arm around.

“She does have enemies, I guess, in this day and age,” Lina agreed, reluctantly, but still unconvinced. “Murder, on the other hand…”

“Drowned with blood,” Karol said. “Choked, to be more precise. I’m no physician, but the whole scene left almost no place for doubt about that.”

“So, there is someone, out there—”

“—in here, more likely—”

“—who’s after the people in the House.”

They were silent for a beat or two while Lina went through the meager contents of the chest at the bottom of Clotilde’s bed—a couple pieces of scrap paper, a yellower-out paperback adventure or two, a rather big, although mismatched set of watercolors, the yellows and reds almost worn down to dregs—and Karol walked the length of the room. She didn’t touch anything, as if she was unwilling to pry into the girls’ private lives.

“This is going to be hard for the other girls,” Karol said quietly.

“When I was eleven, a few girls died of scarlet fever. We never really got over it.” The House moved on, as it always did, but the girls remembered. Looking back at it, crying herself to sleep for a few days in a row wasn’t as insane as it felt back then—nor as childish as the nuns had tried to make her feel.

When she turned back to Lina, Karol’s bright eyes were full of sympathy. “I hate that you had to go through that. That you were raised without access to regular medicine. That you had to live through a war, too… I almost wish…”

“What?” Lina smiled sadly, her thumb locked in the middle of an opulent notebook full of progressively better pencil sketches. “That you could’ve hitched a ride to this side when we were kids and whisked me away to the promised land?”

“No, when we were children… when I was a kid…” Karol shook her head, and the sun from the southern window played in her short side part, just long enough to cover one of her eyes. “You were probably better off here.”

“Even without vaccination?” Lina asked darkly.

“You had friends,” Karol said.

“You had a family,” Lina countered, her stomach doing a weird little dance, not entirely pleasant. “Even after our parents died. You had Freddie and—the people who took you in.

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