Miira Kiianmies, widow of Elias, mother of Marta, was dead as the proverbial doornail; the sad thing was how few people regretted this fact except insofar as it hurt Marta. Even Reynir, whose life she had (almost certainly unintentionally) saved through her death, was only mildly sorry that the abrasive woman was gone from amongst them.
The irony of it all was that it could all be traced back to a stuck zipper.
*
The kitten was dancing across the wooden boards that made up the floor of the sleeping compartment, her high-pitched mewls audible even above the sounds of the battle raging outside, but Miira ignored the frantic feline because she was fiddling with the zipper of her coat, which was stuck halfway.
Everyone who has dealt with stuck zippers knows the halfway point to be the worst possible place for it to happen: if it sticks lower down, you can treat it like it’s open; if it sticks higher up, you can treat it like it’s closed. Halfway, however, works against either of these expedients, which was why Miira was ignoring everything else in her efforts to shift the recalcitrant bit of metal either up or down, but it just wouldn’t give over to her.
So instead of prudently sitting still and quiet beside Reynir on the lower bunk, Miira was standing and fiddling with her zipper not a foot from where the troll burst through the floor. The sizeable splinters they later found piercing the back of her head probably killed her instantly, but just her presence so close to the troll caused it to concentrate on her long enough for Lalli to come in and kill it before it could go after Reynir as well.
*
Before the battle, it had been nearly a week since anyone on the team had spoken to Miira, which she actually counted a blessing. All of them (the ones who understood Swedish, anyway) had been shocked by the vile, foul and vicious things Miira had told Marta over the radio—Marta, her daughter, who was barely six years old! After that, Miira began to live out the true meaning of the word “pariah”.
Fortunately, Lalli had been getting more and more proficient in his basic Swedish, even though Finnish continued to elude the others.
*
Miira’s death crystallized something for Tuuri: she no longer wanted to run right out into the Silent World, and the reason was a six year old bundle of mischief who was determined to join the Cleansers and had just been orphaned. Now, Tuuri was not about to admit this to Onni yet, as she knew her brother would take at least a year to get the “I told you so” out of his system. No, she would play this cool for a while, at least around him.
The three of them had already found their own place, as neither Hotakainen could abide sending Marta back to the orphanage where Miira had dumped her, so that had already been settled. The only thing left in the wake of Miira’s death was going through the formal adoption process, which proved to be a fairly streamlined affair.
Sorting out Onni’s affairs in Keuruu was another matter…
