Instead, she and the other prisoners were crowded into the basement of an old house. They were so tightly packed that there wasn’t room for them to lie down. Normally, lying on the cold floor would be unappealing anyway, but she was still weak from her ordeal. In her current circumstances, there was little she wouldn’t have lain on.
Some of the prisoners looked like criminals. Others like nobility. Had she once been so easy to spot? Filip and Dalek had discussed it back in Penza. Something in the way an aristocrat stood and walked and moved, regardless of the clothing they wore. A few priests were among the captives. They seemed safer to stand beside than the criminals, so she worked her way over to them.
The guards gave them no food. Nadia still had hers, as did some of the other prisoners. She shared a bit with a priest and his wife and with a woman who looked to be in her twenties.
“Thank you.” The woman chewed the dried meat slowly, savoring it. “You weren’t on the train with the rest of us.”
“No. I escaped once. About a year ago. The Cheka found me again.”
“They’re good at that.” The woman muttered a curse. “I’m Tanya.”
“I’m Nadia.”
“Thank you for sharing your food. The only reason I’m sitting on this freezing floor is because I’m too dizzy to stand. They haven’t fed us much since they stuck us on the train.”
“How long was your journey?”
“We come from Moscow. But our train didn’t have priority. We were on it for ten days.” Tanya shivered. “Someone tried to assassinate Lenin back in August. The Cheka were bad before that, but they’re worse now. They’ve unleashed a Red Terror. We’re but a few of the victims.”
Before the sun rose, guards herded them from the basement and rushed them to the town’s outskirts to dig trenches. The Bolsheviks supplied the shovels. Even with gloves, Nadia had blisters within an hour. Long before the day ended, her back ached and her throat was parched. But she was luckier than some of the others because she at least had warm clothes. As a reward for their labor, the workers were given a few slices of black bread. That night, they slept in a barn.
The next day, they cleared trees for a road. The day after, they shoveled gravel. Then they dug more trenches. Hard days turned into cruel weeks, and brutal weeks turned into hellish months.
“Where are we?” she asked the priest’s wife, Elena, one spring morning. They moved slowly but often. She wanted to pinpoint their position on the map in her mind.
“Just behind the front lines. If the Whites chose to, they could shell us.”
“Is the Czechoslovak Legion with the White Army?”
Elena shrugged. “Last I heard.”
Nadia paused for a moment and stared at the pile of dirt on her shovel, hating what her efforts were accomplishing. The Bolsheviks had prevented her return to her husband, and now they were forcing her to work against his cause.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Halt!” Filip leveled his rifle at the man trying to shove a bomb under the train switch.
The man bolted. Filip didn’t give chase because the man was running right at Anton and Petr. He was too busy looking back at Filip to notice them as they stepped from behind a discarded boxcar. They wrestled him to the ground and bound his hands.
Filip pulled the bomb out and held it at arm’s length, then handed it to Anton. “Is it set to explode?”
Anton examined it. Petr took a step back, as did Filip. “It’s not armed.”
Filip hadn’t really thought it was. Why arm a bomb before it was in place? “Right. I’ll let you dispose of that. I’ll take our saboteur in and see what Kral wants us to do with him.” Filip pushed the man on ahead of him.
“Do you want to tell me why you were planning to blow up the train switch?” Filip asked.
The captive just grunted. Filip didn’t press it. Interrogations weren’t his responsibility, and he didn’t want that burden. He could guess the man’s motives. Destroy the track either to help the Bolsheviks or to hurt the White Russians.
Filip and the rest of the regiment—what remained of it—were now stationed in Omsk. They’d been met with friendly crowds the summer before, but the locals were no longer so welcoming a year later. The Bolsheviks hated them. The White Army called them cowards for refusing to shed blood in a civil war that wasn’t theirs. And the peasants and workers were hostile because they were suffering.
Now that the legion had pulled back from the front, they were scapegoats for everything going wrong with the White Russian cause. And though the White Russians had made some progress, they’d had far more setbacks. Among their more significant failures was the collapse of their brief democracy and the establishment of an unlikable regime in its place. It shouldn’t have been difficult to do a better job of governing Siberia than the tsar or the Bolsheviks had, but the Whites were suggesting otherwise.