“No time!” Lumikki yelled.
They pounded down the stairs.
Jiři tossed the camera aside. Nothing unnecessary.
“Follow me!” Lumikki yelled and started weaving along the only path that wasn’t yet a sea of flame.
She heard the sound of fabric ripping behind her. Jiři was tearing strips from his shirt. He handed one to Lumikki.
“Here! Put it over your mouth.”
They arrived at the stairs to the basement. Going underground felt like pure insanity with a house built entirely from wood blazing around them. Just then, the sound of something large collapsing came from behind them. Probably the stairs. There wasn’t time to think about what was crazy and what wasn’t. They rushed down the stairs.
Storage rooms. A food pantry. And one room with a locked door. Jiři and Lumikki looked at each other, nodded, and then kicked the door as hard as they could. The wood gave way a little, but not enough. They kicked again. The door complained, but held.
The temperature of the air around them was climbing alarmingly fast. A fiery furnace. A lake of fire. Hell.
Lumikki’s eyes were watering. As if through a veil, she saw Jiři crouch down and run into a storage room. After moments that felt like eternity, he returning carrying a heavy chain saw.
Jiři jerked the starter rope several times, but the saw didn’t make a sound. Lumikki could tell that he had never started a chain saw before. Lumikki had used them more times that she could remember at her cousins’ summer house in Åland. She rushed over to Jiři and bodily pushed him away from the saw. There was a time and a place for politeness, and this wasn’t it.
Lumikki wished the saw had been recently used, because then starting it would have been easy. She held the saw against the ground by placing her left foot halfway through the rear handle and holding the front handle tightly in her left hand. With her right hand, she made a few short pulls on the starter rope and then one good, long pull to finish.
Nothing.
Start already. Start.
Lumikki tried again. Three short pulls to draw fuel mixture into the cylinder. Then one long, fast pull.
The chain saw growled into life.
It was heavy, but Lumikki managed to lift it up into the right position. Her arm muscles trembled with effort when the blade dug into the door. Lumikki turned her face away as slivers and sawdust began flying. The noise was deafening. She succeeded in cutting a large gash in the door before her strength gave out.
“Move!” Jiři yelled behind her.
As Lumikki got out of the way, Jiři took a few running steps and kicked the spot she had cut. The door split down the middle.
People lay on the floor of the room. Lumikki quickly counted seventeen. They looked dead, but when Lumikki touched the neck of an old woman lying nearby, she felt a pulse.
“They’ve been drugged,” she screamed.
The fire was crackling so loud above them that it was hard to hear.
“Adam Havel isn’t here,” Jiři called back.
“It doesn’t matter. Help me save Lenka!”
Lumikki had found her among the others. She tried to lift her up, but Lenka’s body was limp and heavy. Jiři came to help, and together they got her into Jiři’s arms. Lumikki also swung Lenka’s arm over her own neck to take some of the weight.
Slowly and carefully, they started climbing the narrow stairs. Stinging smoke assailed their eyes and noses and lungs. The heat slammed into them.
The ground floor was an inferno, but they could still see the side door. Slipping out from under Lenka’s arm, Lumikki tapped Jiři on the back and screamed over the blaze, “Run!”
Jiři took off running. Lumikki followed right behind. Suddenly, a burning board fell from the ceiling. Lumikki just barely managed to jump backward. She watched through the smoke as Jiři made it to the side door and out to safety with Lenka in his arms.
The fire shrieked and sang around Lumikki. She felt it licking her shirt and thought her back was on fire.
Closing her eyes against the smoke, Lumikki just ran and ran and ran through the fire, out the door, and threw herself on the grass, rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling until the burning on her back was out. She saw Jiři lying on the grass, coughing. She saw Lenka, who lay on the grass in deep, peaceful sleep.
The flames licked at the sky.
And over the roar of the fire came the sound of emergency sirens in the distance.
EPILOGUE
THURSDAY, JUNE 23
Lumikki looked at the white cotton balls, whipped cream mountains, and blue depths through the airplane window as she let Shirley Manson sing in her ears about a big, bright, shining world. The song was uncommonly sunny for Garbage, but right now Lumikki liked that.
She let her thoughts rest on the view outside. Rest. That’s what she needed now more than anything. She wanted to lock herself in her apartment and sleep for a week. That wasn’t an option, though. Her family’s Midsummer get-together was coming up. She would have to tell everyone what Prague had been like.
Lovely.
Very Central European.
Lots of culture. I even went to a shadow play.
Relaxing.
And she could talk about the city’s hills and parks, all the bridges, the heat during the day that turned to a caressing warmth at night, the alleys of the old city, the statues, the cafés. She could tell them about all the good, easy things. And when they asked if she ever wanted to go back to Prague, she could answer honestly that yes, she’d go back anytime. What she would leave out was the two friends she had waiting there. She had spent the last days of her trip with Jiři and Lenka. Apparently, Vera Sováková had called the hit man off after the mass suicide attempt was over. Lumikki wasn’t a threat anymore. She wasn’t significant. And for that, Lumikki was extremely grateful.
But she knew that all anyone would want to hear about was the fire and the rescue. The entire local media had wanted to interview the “miracle girl” who had happened along and helped save people when the White Family cult was trying to commit suicide. Even though Lumikki had said as little as possible during the interviews and tried to direct the reporters to Jiři, she was the one they were interested in. All the reporters thought Lumikki was just the kind of sympathetic yet vulnerable hero the viewing audience loved. They showed clips of her on all the news reports with her soot-smeared face and blackened clothes.
Even now, she could see the man sitting on the other side of the airplane aisle reading a magazine with her picture on the cover. Her short hair was mussed, her eyes looked red and weepy because of the smoke, and on her left cheek was a scratch left by a splinter of wood from the door. Lumikki knew that, inside, there was also a picture of the chain saw and a description of how a “brave Finnish girl raised surrounded by forests” had broken through the door.
When the businessman lifted his eyes, Lumikki turned to look out the window again. Maybe no one would recognize her with a clean face and clean clothes. Still, she didn’t want risk having to rehash everything one more time for a curious stranger.
Her mom and dad and relatives were going to interrogate her, though, no matter how much Lumikki would prefer to forget. The news coverage of the staged tragedy revolted her, even though a much greater tragedy had been averted.
So there you had it. Vera Sováková got her headlines, but smaller ones than she’d planned. Not enough death, not big enough news. Only death can make a true legend. The firemen arrived on the scene too early. A bunch of miscellaneous burns wasn’t nearly as thrilling as an entire cult dying a fiery death—one old lady with third-degree injuries was the only real victim.
They didn’t catch Adam Havel. The police issued a warrant for his arrest, but Jiři suspected no one would ever find him. Adam Smith had also been a made-up name. There was no information about his real identity. He could be anywhere in the world. Maybe gathering a new group of needy people around him.
Of course, there was no evidence of Vera
Sováková’s role in events. When Jiři tried to twist her arm a little, she just observed what a long line of candidates wanted to become reporters at Super8. Jiři told Lumikki that maybe one day soon he would tell Vera to go ahead and pick someone from that line to replace him. But not quite yet. Now he had another person to take care of, and that took money.
When you save someone, you become responsible for them. That’s what Jiři had said when he invited Lenka to live with him. At least for a while. Until she could get her life started again.
At the airport, Lenka had hugged Lumikki long and hard.
“If I did have a sister . . .” Lenka began.
Lumikki had smiled and nodded.
Now Lumikki looked at the brightness of the sun and the whiteness of the clouds and thought that even though the trip hadn’t brought an answer to the mysteries of her past, it had provided hints. Lumikki was surer than ever that Lenka had landed surprisingly close to the truth with her concocted story about them being sisters. The dreams and memories that Lenka’s lie had awoken were true. Lumikki knew that she hadn’t imagined the Snow White and Rose Red game or any of the rest of it. It all happened.
Once upon a time, she had a sister.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2012 Karoliina Ek
Winner of the 2013 Topelius Prize, Salla Simukka is an author of young adult fiction and a screenwriter. She has written several novels and one collection of short stories for young readers, and she has translated adult fiction, children’s books, and plays. She writes book reviews for several Finnish newspapers, and she also writes for TV. Simukka lives in Tampere, Finland.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2012 Pekka Piri
Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian area studies from Indiana University. He has translated over thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the novels in the Maria Kallio series, My First Murder, Her Enemy and Copper Heart (AmazonCrossing), the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen (MacLehose Press), the thriller Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen (Hesperus), and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho (Norvik Press). He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, two dogs, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.
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