Escape by Varian Krylov Read Free Book Online Page A

they tied him to a tree, wrote the word traitor across the uniform jacket they'd stuffed him into, told him they'd kill him if he came back to the camp, and left him alone in the dark.
    Why did they dress me in the uniform of a Bokan soldier? Hard to breathe. At first he thought it was how they'd tied him, but then he realized it was because of how they'd beaten him. Maybe he had a broken rib. He wondered if this was what a punctured lung felt like. He hoped they'd only bruised him. Maybe the metallic taste was only because his lip was cut, and not because he was coughing up blood. Maybe it didn't matter; his life and death were out of his control, because no matter how hard he twisted his wrists and hands, he couldn't work himself free.
    With a strange sense of detachment, Luka knew he should have been scared. He should have been terrified. Because he was fucked. Pero had hurt him worse for less, but this, leaving him tied to a tree a few kilometers from the front in a Bokan Army uniform with the word traitor across his chest, was attempted murder, given that if Eršban troops found him, they'd kill him for the uniform, and if Bokan troops found him, they'd kill him for betraying it.
    Weird. Under the anger bleeding into the pain in his chest, under his worry and frustration and sorrow, he felt light and calm. For the first time since he'd hurriedly packed his bag and fled his apartment, and Pero and the Sovići Vega with their carmine uniforms and machine guns, he wasn't filled top to bottom with the unbearable weight of dread.
     
    He woke up, which meant he must have passed out. The sky was a rich, pre-dawn lapis. Gunfire in the distance; probably the sound had woken him. He had no idea how far away the fighting was.
    Luka waited for the fear to creep over him, but all that came on was a foggy anxiety that nobody would come, and he'd die slowly, thirsty and starving. The plastic cuffs they'd used to bind his wrists cut deeper through his skin when he started struggling again to get loose.
    He gave up. Went still. Listened to the lonely silence. Looked.
    Lapis yielded to sapphire, then palatinate; the horizon caught fire, singeing the edges of a thin trail of clouds and setting them in sudden relief against the brightening sky. As the world above him bloomed and burned in aureolin and jonquil, in amber and amaranth, the terrain before Luka pierced the darkness, spilling the molten sunrise over its stark, brutal face.
    Spread wide before him, a vast plane of grayish stone stretched and undulated toward the horizon in an uneven sheet like badly poured cement, sporadically spiked with a solitary tree, the trunk a massive column rising up into the incendiary firmament. Gnarled, twisted branches held up a nearly flat umbrella of foliage, blackish with the fire of sunrise behind, then lightening to artichoke and olive as the sky brightened and cooled. To his left, towers of whitish stone stained in lemon and tangerine jabbed at the clouds, tattered silk falling to shreds in the wind.
    It was his first time so far north. He'd always heard it was cruel, beautiful terrain. Startling, that the whole landscape could alter so drastically with an hour's slow drive over unpaved road. Or maybe the shock of the attack had muddled his sense of time while he'd been hooded and hyperventilating in the back of the truck.
    He didn't cry until it was getting dark again, and the pressure in his bladder had turned into pain, and he wet himself. Maybe that made him cry, because he was ashamed, even though it wasn't his fault. More than shame, though, it was grief wearing down his fragile stoicism. It was obscenely selfish, considering the country had split in two, each side armed and ready to slaughter the others' population, but he felt so fucking sad to realize that was all. Some joyful childhood moments, then adolescence and the sudden erosion of everything safe and warm and good in life.
    The kiss, though. The tickle of Josip's breath against