Wood creaked on wood as Eva pushed against a solid wooden shutter in the roof. Ivanov came up behind her and lent his strength to the task. The skylight squealed open, making him cringe, but the streets were already alive with confusion and noise. He could hear hundreds of men down there now, and dozens of vehicles. The dogfighting was over, seemingly coming to an end with the crack of a single pistol shot. He followed Eva out onto the roofline, feeling terribly exposed as he emerged into the bright starlit night.
To the south, the lights of Free Rome twinkled and shimmered like a vast illuminated sea lapping all the way out to the horizon. The dome of St. Peter’s, lit from below by spotlights, stood out in glorious relief. Even the guard towers of the Roman Wall twinkled as if wrapped in fairy lights.
“Follow me,” said the young girl. “Do not stray. A giant oaf like you will fall straight through.”
He did as he was told, carefully stepping not just in line with her, but as far as possible in her footsteps. The ancient tiles shifted and once or twice even cracked beneath his weight, but he could feel the solid, reassuring strength of a supporting beam directly beneath them. Eva flew across the roof like a cat.
They moved in tandem, as though tethered together by an invisible line. After reaching the end of the tiled roof, Eva vaulted up onto the neighboring building-a gymnast’s leap of at least her own height. For one crazed, disassociated moment, Ivanov imagined her in another life, in another world, where Stalin and Beria were already dead, as they should have been, and cousin Carlo’s little girl capered and played in the streets below. Perhaps she was a gymnast there, perhaps just a carefree child. But here, on the rooftops of Occupied Rome, she was a fugitive and his guide. She was almost certainly a killer as well, he reminded himself.
The special forces operative heaved himself up onto the next rooftop, taking considerably more care and time to execute the move than his diminutive pathfinder had. She was already running ahead of him.
This building was topped by a flat roof garden. Simple wooden furniture, trestle tables and benches, were scattered about between huge pots containing groups of herbs and simple vegetables like string beans and cucumbers. There was less of an imperative to track along in her footsteps here, but he did so anyway. They moved quickly, covering the length of the building in half a minute.
He was wondering how they were going to cross the gap he could see gleaming up ahead, when Eva accelerated toward it … launching herself into the air like a triple jumper, or perhaps a parkour adept. She sailed across the void between the closely spaced apartment blocks, landing softly on the far side. Ivanov did not give himself a chance to hesitate or overthink the jump. His longer strides ate up the distance in a heartbeat. He shortened his last step by a few inches, flexed his knees, and pistoned out into space. The gap was small, less than four feet across, but he felt his balls crawling up into his body as he sailed through clean air. Far below him, the hard, black cobblestones seemed to wait for him to miscalculate and fall.
He crunched down on the other side, rolling forward and coming up on the balls of his feet next to the little girl. She nodded as though he were a child who had passed a simple test.
They had landed on another flat roof, this one covered in washing lines from which sheets and blankets had been left to dry overnight. The bedclothes swayed in the soft breeze. Below, on the streets, the Red Army and NKVD paramilitary forces were kicking in doors, rousing the locals from their beds. A shot cracked out somewhere, followed by screams. First of terror, then of anger.
“Come, Russian, we must move quickly.”
Eva took off again, threading her way through the flapping laundry.
“Wait,” said Ivanov. “Look …”
He pointed to the south, where two gunships were hammering toward them. He could tell from their size and the deep percussive thrumming of the rotors that they were big monsters. Augmented-tech Mi-24s, at least one-and-a-half times the size of their uptime progenitors-partly because the Communists had not yet mastered postindustrial miniaturization, and partly because in Joseph Stalin’s psychology, quantity had a quality all its own. These flying behemoths seemed to claw through the air, as though they might lose their grip on flight at any moment, so loaded down were they with armament and armor. As Eva turned to face the threat, crouching, just like a cat on a ledge, columns of bright white light speared down from each of the choppers, searching and playing out over the city below with a strange, contrary beauty.
“They are heading right for us,” said Eva. She did not panic, but he could hear the promise of it in her voice.
The gunships were reviled wherever they flew. As Ivanov and his new Roman guide watched, the nearer one opened up on some unknown target, pouring down a bright yellow ribbon of tracer fire; a neon stream of destruction fired into the heart of one of the oldest, most densely populated cities in Europe. Two seconds, the burst lasted, delivering one thousand rounds of alternating tracer, armor-piercing, and high-explosive munitions. Smoke and flames rose from the impact point. The crash and rumble of collapsing masonry reached the two of them a second later.
Eva made as if to take off again and continue the headlong flight, as though they could simply outrun the airborne menace. Ivanov shot out one hand, grabbed the girl by the scruff of her neck, and yanked her back-ripping a blanket from the nearest washing line and driving her down. The leading helicopter was just seconds away. All four of its searchlights swept over the roofline of the church, three blocks away.
“Be still, be quiet,” he commanded, on top of her now, with the damp blanket covering them both. “And pray they do not have infrared sensors.”
Of that at least he was reasonably sure. Had the gunships been fitted with FLIR or LLAMPS vision, the pilots would not have been using old-fashioned spotlights. But you never knew. Perhaps they were just poorly trained.
The girl squirmed once underneath him, complaining that he was crushing her. But she lay silent and still as the miniguns roared again and the cold white light crept along their rooftop.
Ivanov waited to die, hoping only that the shield of his body might afford Eva a false sense of security. Because in truth, if the gunners opened up on them, they would be shredded instantly.
He clutched the blanket tightly around them, grinding his teeth together, as the Mi-24 seemed to hover directly overhead. The downblast of the rotor wash tried to rip the cover away from them, and he could feel the little girl giving in to her fears as violent tremors ran through her tiny frame. They endured a hell of sound and fury and supernova radiance … and then it was gone. The flying beasts moved on and left them in darkness and relative quiet.
He waited a full minute before throwing back the blanket. His ears hummed, and he blinked dust from his eyes even though he had shut them tightly against the violent rotor wash and the glare of the searchlight.
“Come, Roman,” he said gently to the girl. “We must hurry.”
She stood up slowly and shakily. Ivanov watched, impressed and somewhat saddened to see her gather up whatever fears had run wild, squeeze them all into a bitter little ball, and swallow it down.
“Yes,” she agreed. “We must hurry.”
She led off again and he followed her to the far corner of the building, where it all but kissed the corner of a neighboring apartment block. Eva stepped across the gap carefully, but her limbs were still shaking and she nearly lost her footing.
“Careful, little one,” warned Ivanov, as he steadied her with a firm hand. “You are still in charge here. I need you to get us out of this.”
The next building was possessed of a peaked roof, covered in terra-cotta tiles again, forcing him to attend to exactly where Eva was putting her feet. It was a difficult, anxious task, with the need to keep an eye out in case the helicopters swung back. For now, the Hinds seemed to be concentrating their search pattern around the part of the city where he had killed Borodin.