The city was ecstatic. Karen was ecstatic. Their nightmare seemed to be over. Soon their heroes in the Red Army would liberate them.

But despite the bucket brigades, despite the individual sacrifice of Red Army soldiers, despite the promises of the mayor, the next morning, on January 24, the State-run bakeries closed. It wasn’t about the water, after all. City officials had lied. There was no more flour. The rationing was over because there was nothing left to ration.

There was no public outcry, no riot in the streets. Starving people are too weak for that. All that was left now was to lie down and conserve their strength—to try to preserve what little energy they had left, to try to simply survive until the trucks brought more flour over the Road of Life.

The end of rationing in early 1942 was a great tragedy for Leningrad. But it was, from a selfish point of view, fortuitous for Karen. With the closure of the bakeries, her potatoes became that much more valuable. In addition to the potatoes, she had two extra ration cards. They weren’t as valuable now that the bakeries were closed, but so long as people still believed the bakeries would eventually reopen, they were still worth something. And, of course, she still had her aunt’s seeds. She no longer needed a garden—not where she was going—so everything she had, all the possessions that might mean the difference between survival and starvation in this city, were on the auction block.

She didn’t want anything physical in return. There was nothing physical, other than food or the means to produce food, that was worth anything in Leningrad, anyway. But the two things Karen needed most weren’t objects. She needed access, and she needed information.

The soldiers were her best hope. Even the soldiers were beginning to starve. They had always been hungrier than their German enemies, but now they were growing as desperate as the civilians. And so they were more willing to provide information than ever before. The citizens of Leningrad weren’t told much, of course, and the information was often contradictory. For the cost of three potatoes, sliced into quarters, Karen got twelve different versions of where the Germans were, what villages they still occupied, where and how they patrolled, and how far they had advanced past Leningrad. It was by comparing and contrasting these stories that, newly equipped with a map for which she traded the seeds, Karen was able to piece together what was really happening beyond Leningrad’s borders.

The 65th Rifle Division had come from Manchuria, traveling thousands of miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and had arrived just in time to save Moscow from German capture. Then they had taken the train north as far as the German lines. There they had attacked the Germans and won, thanks to one heroic soldier who refused to abandon his Katyusha battery. They drove the Germans out of Tikhvin, a village southeast of Leningrad and an important railroad hub. When the Germans had occupied Tikhvin, they cut off the Leningrad–Moscow railroad. By recapturing Tikhvin, the Red Army reopened the rail lines all the way to Lake Ladoga. Tikhvin was a shattered town 135 miles southeast of Leningrad. The sole purpose of its existence was to serve the Leningrad–Moscow railway. This also made it a supply hub for the entire northern front and a valuable prize for both the Germans and the Russians.

Karen could now confirm that the Tikhvin railway station was in Russian hands. If she was just able to get there, the rails were open all the way to Moscow and beyond. Getting on that railroad would be difficult, however. It required a ticket. Karen’s inquiries eventually led her to a nurse at Leningrad Hospital. Some of the wounded soldiers evacuated from heavy fighting around the Nevsky Bridgehead had tickets. From Leningrad Hospital they were to be transported across the Road of Life and then by rail to the retraining and recovery battalions. But a lack of medicine and food meant most never survived their stay in the hospital. So the nurses stole their train tickets. After all, they weren’t doing the dead soldiers any good.

Karen traded her two extra ration cards—her real ration card, and Sasha’s—for three of the train tickets. Not Inna’s, however. Karen was still pretending to be Inna, and keeping her card made her false identity seem more legitimate.

To get to Tikhvin meant crossing Lake Ladoga. She first needed to get to Osinovets and then onto the evacuation trucks. No path across that ice was safe, not with Luftwaffe raiders flying overhead. Leningraders had begun to refer to it as the Road of Death. But the road was safer than trying to cross alone, without antiaircraft gun protection, on foot. Without access to a truck, Karen knew she would get lost and freeze to death long before she reached Tikhvin.

Karen had all her plans in place before she visited the Moscovsky Rail Terminal again. She knew that, once she got there, the supply sergeant could get her on a truck. All he had to do was write her name in the book. But he wouldn’t do it for free. And he didn’t want food. Why should he? He was in charge of unloading the supplies and inventorying everything that came across the lake. He stole all the food he needed. He didn’t ask, not directly, but Karen could tell exactly what he wanted from her. He looked at her the way the Leningrad trader had, but with even more directness. The supply sergeant clearly wanted far more from her than a kiss.

Fortunately, Karen had something he wanted more: an extra train ticket. The supply sergeant might have been better off than any ordinary citizen of Leningrad—he might not be starving—but that didn’t mean he liked it there. His life was still in danger. He was still cold. And he could still freeze to death. And Leningrad was beyond depressing. Even the grand faux-Renaissance Moskovsky Rail Station was gloomy. Dark clouds hovered beyond its Venetian windows, and silence echoed against its Corinthian columns. The clocks had all stopped at different times. And, without electricity, its station platforms were dark and grim. Only during the departure or arrival of trains or trucks to or from Osinovets did the station come alive. At all other times it was empty.

The supply sergeant hated it there. He had an aunt in Moscow—Karen had heard him talking about it. There, at least, he could finally laugh again. But although he could easily write his own name down in the book, secure his own place on a truck across the ice, what would he do then? Once he was across the lake, he’d have nowhere to go.

Karen’s offer of a train ticket changed all that. With a ticket, he could escape just like her. So he accepted her offer, took her extra ticket, and Karen watched as he wrote her name—Inna’s name—in the book.

It was now the last day of February. It had taken more than a month of planning, of wheeling and dealing, but Karen had finally made it. She still had a long road ahead. She still had to figure out how to escape Russia. But she was confident she could tackle that problem later. After all, America and Russia weren’t that far apart, were they? Perhaps she could get to the Bering Strait. That was how the Eskimos had made it, across the Bering Strait to Alaska and then to America. The hardest part was getting out of Leningrad. If she could do that, she could do anything. And she had done that. Her truck across the lake was leaving in the morning. Just one more night of hunger, a short trip from the Moskovsky Terminal to Osinovets, and the nightmare would be behind her.

As she left Inna’s apartment building for her early train from Moskovsky Rail Terminal, Karen saw a glow in the sky. At first she hoped it was the aurora borealis. But it wasn’t. It was the reflection of flames. People were now too weak with hunger to watch their stoves. Those untended stoves, stoked with garbage instead of heating oil, were catching fire. And since the city’s pumping stations weren’t operational, there was no way to fight the flames. The fires spread from apartment block to office tower. The city would burn for days. At the front door, Karen stopped on the top step and watched the flames. She was fascinated, not frightened. She thought she was no longer a part of Leningrad, her fate no longer tied to the dying city.

But she was wrong.

A man was sitting on the bottom step of Inna’s building. Despair washed over Karen, for she knew he was State police. He had to be. She didn’t know how he’d found her, but she did know that her plans were ruined. She’d participated in the black market. She’d bribed public officials. She’d forged a name on important documents. She would be arrested and imprisoned, maybe even shot. But she had to keep a straight face, had to remain calm. She couldn’t let this man see fear or panic, because if there was any way out, any way at all, it would be by pretending. Pretending to be what, she was not sure. But she’d figure out something. She’d have to.

The man stood. “Inna Kerensky?”

Karen nodded. “Yes, that’s me.” She took one step down to him.

The man stared up at her, suspiciously. Karen knew he was trying to place her imperfect Russian accent. “You live alone?” he said.

Again, Karen nodded, relieved for the opportunity to lie about her accent. “My mother is dead, my father works in Chelyabinsk, and my grandparents still live in Azerbaijan.”