Step by step. Agonizingly slow.
The cold would do her in, if she did not walk faster. She knew that every night people froze on the streets of St. Petersburg. People without money, without a place to stay. She, on the other hand, had an entire hotel for herself. If not for this wall that separated her from it. And the endless distance to the front entrance.
She would not make it. Never. With every step that she overcame, another one seemed to be added underneath her. An endless descent into the pitch-black Nowhere.
She did not even feel hatred for Maxim and the others. In her was only panic. All-consuming panic and cold.
And then she arrived at the bottom. The tips of her feet tested for the edge of another step, but the next one was sunk deep in the snow. She had reached level ground, the surface of the mass of snow that covered all of St. Petersburg.
She sank in, but not especially deep: She was too light. She stumbled over the hem of the coat, let out a sob as she fell against the wall of the hotel, and yet somehow kept herself on her feet. If she fell now, she would not get up. The emptiness above would press her down into the snow, like the boot of a giant.
Onward! Go onward!
She pushed herself along with her back to the wall. The wall gave her a bit of support and kept the outside world far away at least in one direction. That way she did not feel so entirely unprotected.
It was cruel torture to battle her way to the next corner. The narrow swath led into a wider alley. If the fire escape was found on the back side of the Aurora, then this had to be the side wall. From here, the way along it to the Nevsky Prospect and the main entrance seemed to Mouse to be as endless as if someone had demanded for her to walk to Siberia on foot.
Hopeless, whispered a voice inside her. You won’t make it. You’ll die. Better to just lie here in the snow. Freezing doesn’t hurt, Kukushka had said; you simply go to sleep.
She did not give up. Not yet.
Behind driving curtains of snow she saw a distant shimmer of light: the end of the alley, the shine of the gas lanterns on the Nevsky Prospect.
The soft snow under her feet and the much too long coat hindered her. With her back against the wall, both hands with fingers spread out on the stone, she pushed herself sideways. She kept her eyes closed now, to block out the Outside World. The cold ate at her like fire.
In the blackness behind her eyelids emerged a picture, like a painting, that drifted up to the surface of the dark ocean depths. A sharp-edged outline. Towers and battlements that thrust like knives into the raging sky of snow, high up on a harsh rocky cliff.
Mouse tore her eyes open. The vision faded away. Dream snow became real. The light had come closer, but she felt that her steps kept growing heavier. Would someone punish Maxim and the others, if she froze out here? Unlikely. No one would blame them. She was, after all, only the Girl-Boy, easier to replace than a broken window pane.
(Translation note of the day: There is a word in German, "weiter," that can be translated as wide, far, another, or high/stoned. I definitely got it mixed up in my first draft before I caught myself. Still, it's hard to decide whether a path is leading to a "distant alley" or a "wider alley" or "one more alley." Headache.)
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