Chapter 1: The Unlocked Apartment
The light was wrong.
It cut across Vanja’s closed eyelids not in the warm, filtered gold of her Basel apartment, but in a thin, mean, greyish-yellow streak, diluted by cheap synthetic fabric. The air smelled of paint, the flat, acrid scent of fresh latex, and beneath it, the sweetness of sawdust. The mattress beneath her was thin, its springs groaning with a high, metallic complaint as she shifted.
Her eyes opened.
A white ceiling. Cracks in the plaster, hairline fractures like a map of nothing. She turned her head. The walls were bare concrete, unpainted in patches, and a single window framed a view of skeletal trees and a slab of grey sky. This was not her room. The panic was instant, a chemical surge that tightened her throat and made her sit up too fast, the wool blanket scratching her arms.
She was dressed in her own clothes—the simple black trousers, the cream silk blouse she’d worn yesterday. Her leather satchel was on the floor by the bed. Yesterday. The word echoed. Podujevo, 2020. The quiet, half-forgotten town. The Orthodox church of St. Elijah, its gates rusted shut. She’d been looking for records, for any trace of the Vranić name from before 1967. Her grandmother’s cryptic notes. A feeling of hollow stillness, as if the place was holding its breath.
Then, a dizzying lurch, like stepping through a curtain of cold water.
And now this.
She swung her legs out, her feet meeting a floor of cold, unvarnished concrete. The room was a box. A table, one chair, a small cooker, a sink. It felt like a safehouse, or a rental meant for people who didn’t plan to stay. On the table, next to her satchel, lay three items placed with deliberate neatness.
A dark blue passport.
A thick, cream-coloured envelope.
A plastic card on a lanyard.
Her hands were steady as she picked up the passport. Swiss. Cross and shield. She opened it. Her own face stared back, her own golden-green eyes, her sharp cheekbones. The name: Vanja Vranic. The birth date: 15 April 1972. She was thirty in this passport. Twenty-three years had been sliced from her life. She touched the page, the laminate cool under her fingertip. The production quality was flawless. It felt real. It was real.
The envelope was heavy. She tore it open. Deutsche marks. Stacked bundles of them, used notes, hundreds and hundreds of marks. More money than she carried in a year. The press card was from a Swiss-German newspaper she’d freelanced for once, years ago. It identified her as a foreign correspondent. The photo was the same as the passport.
A utility, then. A kit.
She stood, the documents in her hand, and walked to the window. The landscape outside was both familiar and profoundly alien. The skeletal trees were sharper, younger. A road below was muddier, pocked with potholes. A car, a boxy Zastava from another era, puttered past. The air through the ill-fitting window frame carried the distant smell of woodsmoke and damp earth, and something else—a taut, electrical hum of tension that hadn’t been there in the sleepy Podujevo of 2020.
On the wall beside the window, nailed crudely into the fresh plaster, was a calendar.
A glossy photo of a waterfall, too vibrant for this grey room. The month was October.
The year, printed in bold sans-serif type: 1997.
The sound that left her was not a gasp, but a slow exhale, as if she’d been struck in the stomach. 1997. Twenty-three years back. She was in Srbica, she realized, recognizing the lay of the land from old photographs. Not the bombed-out Srbica of the aftermath, but a Srbica living, breathing, and trembling on the absolute brink.
Knowledge arrived not as a flood, but as a series of cold, precise facts, clicking into place like rounds in a magazine.
The Dayton Accords were two years old. Bosnia was a raw wound. Here in Kosovo, the clock was ticking down to zero. The Serbian police were everywhere and nowhere. The Kosovo Liberation Army was a whisper in the hills, a name not yet on every newscast. Adem Jashari was a man, not a monument. And Prekaz… the thought was a physical chill. She knew the date. March 5, 1998. She had five months until the world would explode.
She was a Serb in Kosovo with a Swiss passport and a press card. She was a ghost with a blueprint of the future in her head.
“Okay,” she said aloud. Her voice was calm, a journalist’s voice assessing a scene. It betrayed nothing of the storm inside. “Okay.”
She moved with methodical speed. She counted the money, divided it, hid most of it in a folded seam inside her suitcase. She packed her few modern things—a phone that was now a useless brick, a wallet with Euros and cards that would not exist here for years—into the bottom of the case. She dressed in layers from the suitcase, practical clothes that blended. She slipped the press card around her neck, tucked the passport and a roll of marks into an interior jacket pocket.
She had to get out, to see, to confirm the reality of the air.
The apartment door opened onto a dank stairwell. The sounds of the building were sparse, isolated. She descended and pushed out into the sharp October morning.
Srbica, 1997, was alive in a way the 2020 version was not. It was crowded, tense, vibrating. The market on the main street was full of noise and movement—women in headscarves bargaining over potatoes, old men smoking in sullen clusters, children darting underfoot. But the eyes were watchful. Serbian police in their blue-grey uniforms stood at the corner, automatic rifles slung casually, their gazes sweeping over the crowd like searchlights. A group of young Albanian men passed them, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed ahead, not speeding up, not slowing down. The silence between the two groups was a living thing.
Vanja walked, her posture straight, her face composed. She felt every glance. To them, she was a stranger. A woman alone. Well-dressed. Foreign, but not quite. Her accent, if she spoke, would place her immediately in a dangerous, ambiguous space. She understood the calculus instantly: her passport was a shield, her ethnicity a potential death sentence, her knowledge a crushing weight.
She bought a bottle of water from a kiosk, using precise, formal Albanian. The old woman selling it looked at her a beat too long, hearing the flawless grammar, the slight, unplaceable accent underneath. “You are not from here,” the woman stated, not a question.
“I am a journalist,” Vanja said, tapping the press card on her chest, switching to German-accented Serbian for the benefit of a policeman who had drifted closer. The policeman’s eyes narrowed, assessing the card, her clothes, her bearing. He gave a slight, dismissive nod and moved on. The old woman said nothing more, but her change into Vanja’s hand was quick, her fingers cold.
The performance had begun. It was exhausting already.
She walked to the edge of town, where the asphalt gave way to rutted farm tracks leading into the hills of Drenica. She could feel it, the pressure in the landscape, like weather before a tornado. The fear was a taste in the air, coppery and sharp. She knew what these hills would become. She knew the names of villages that would soon be synonyms for massacre.
A distant rumble made her turn. A beaten-up Opel was lurching down the track toward her, trailing a plume of dust. As it drew closer, she saw the front tire was flat, shredded. The car ground to a halt twenty meters away, and the driver’s door opened.
An old man climbed out, moving with stiff, pained gestures. He was Albanian, his face a landscape of deep lines, wearing a traditional plis cap, now dusty. He cursed vividly, kicking the deflated tire, then clutched his side, his face contorting. A dark stain was spreading on his worn jacket. He’d been hurt.
Vanja didn’t think. Thinking would have told her to get back in the car, to drive away, to be anonymous. Instead, her body moved. She was beside him, her hand under his elbow.
“Let me see,” she said, in his language.
He jerked back, suspicion flashing in his dark eyes. “Who are you?”
“Someone who can help. Is it a cut?”
He hesitated, pain overcoming caution. He nodded, leaning against the car. She helped him remove the jacket. A long, shallow gash ran along his ribs, ugly and dirt-caked, but not deep enough for stitches. It looked like he’d caught it on something sharp, maybe during a hurried escape over a fence.
“You need to clean this. Infection is the real danger here.” Her voice was clinical, commanding. She retrieved her water bottle and a clean scarf from her bag. “This will hurt.”
He grimaced but held still as she poured water over the wound, wiping away the grit and dried blood with careful, efficient strokes. He studied her face, her hands, her clothes.
“You speak like one of us, but you are not,” he muttered.
“I am a journalist,” she said again, not looking up. She tore the scarf into strips to make a rudimentary bandage, wrapping it tightly around his torso. “I need no story from you. And I want no payment.”
“Why help me?”
“Because you are hurt,” she said simply, meeting his gaze. His eyes were old, knowing, and deeply weary. He saw something in hers—the absence of fear, the directness—that gave him pause.
He grunted, testing the bandage. “You have steady hands. A strange kindness for a stranger.”
“Kindness should not be strange.” She finished, gathered her things. “Get that tire fixed. And keep the wound clean.”
He was still watching her, a new, unreadable expression on his face as she turned and walked briskly back toward her own car. She felt his eyes on her back until she turned the corner. It was only later, weeks later, drinking bitter coffee in a different safehouse, hearing a name whispered with reverence, that she would piece it together. The old man’s cousin was a mechanic in Prekaz. His nephew was a young firebrand named Adem.
That single, impulsive act of aid, offered without expectation, would become a line of credit in a world where trust was extinct currency. It would be the fragile thread that would eventually lead her to a house in the hills, and to the man inside it who was busily, relentlessly, writing his own end into history.
But for now, she was just a woman in a borrowed time, standing on a dusty road, smelling the coming war on the wind, and knowing with absolute, terrifying certainty that she was already inside the story.
But for now, she was just a woman in a borrowed time, standing on a dusty road, smelling the coming war on the wind, and knowing with absolute, terrifying certainty that she was already inside the story.
The flat she returned to felt even more sterile, more temporary. She needed to move. To do the job her press card claimed she was here for. She drove the rented car toward the center, the Drenica hills receding in her rearview mirror, their quiet green concealing a coming fury she could chart day by day if she allowed herself to think about it. She didn’t. She compartmentalized. That was the only way to breathe.
The central square in Srbica was a study in forced normalcy. A few cafes spilling metal chairs onto the pavement. Men drinking thick coffee in slow, measured sips. But the police presence was thicker here, their vehicles parked at angles that suggested control, not convenience.
Vanja chose a cafe with the least appealing facade, which usually meant the cheapest coffee and the fewest official eyes. She took a table against the wall, ordered a kafa turke in Serbian, and let her posture soften into the weary slump of a reporter on a dead-end assignment. Her notebook was open, a prop of benign purpose.
Two tables over, a conversation hissed in low, urgent Albanian.
“...three more last night. From Llaushë.”
“Where?”
“They took them to the station. For questioning.”
A bitter sip of coffee. The unspoken word torture hung in the air between the men.
Vanja kept her eyes on her notebook, her pen doodling meaningless spirals. Her Albanian was perfect, but her act required ignorance. She could feel their glances, the quick, assessing flicker they gave the foreign woman. Her clothes, her bearing, her very molecules were out of place.
A shadow fell across her page. She looked up.
A Serbian policeman stood there, thumbs hooked in his belt. He was young, with a thin, unused face and eyes that tracked her from boots to hair. “Documents.”
Not a request. A statement. Vanja moved slowly, deliberately, pulling the dark blue passport and the press card from her inner pocket. She handed them over without a word.
He examined them, flipping pages with thick fingers. “Swiss.”
“Yes.”
“But you are Slavic.” His eyes pinned her. “Your name. Vranic.”
“My grandfather was Serbian,” she said, layering her German accent thickly over the Serbian words. “A long time ago. I am a journalist from Basel. Here to write about… cultural life.” The lie was bland, almost insulting.
He sneered, a little performance of power. “Cultural life. There is no culture here. Only thieves and nationalists.” He tossed the passport onto her table. It skidded, bumping against her coffee cup. “Be careful what you write. And who you talk to. This is not Switzerland.”
“I am only observing,” she said, retrieving the passport, meeting his gaze with a flat, professional neutrality that seemed to irritate him more.
He leaned in, his voice dropping. The smell of stale tobacco and sweat was sudden and intimate. “Observation is a passive act. Sometimes, people who just watch are the most dangerous of all. They see things. They remember things.”
He held her eyes for a beat too long, then straightened, turned, and walked away, his boots loud on the concrete.
Vanja’s heart was a hammer against her ribs. She took a slow breath, the air cold in her lungs. The interaction was a boundary test. A warning shot. She finished her coffee, the grounds bitter on her tongue, and paid with a careful deutsche mark.
As she stood, a boy, maybe twelve, darted past her table. His shoulder clipped the edge, rattling the cup. A folded square of notebook paper fluttered from his hand onto her chair. He didn’t stop, didn’t look back, vanishing into an alley between two buildings.
Vanja sat back down slowly. She palmed the paper, unfolding it in her lap under the table.
Two words, in a tight, rushed Albanian script.
SHQIPONJË. PREKAZ.
The eagle. Prekaz.
A summons. Or a test.
The old man from the road. It had to be. The speed of it, the sheer audacity, sent a jolt through her system. Trust didn’t exist here. But curiosity did. And a desperate, gambler’s need for any tool, any connection.
She burned the paper in the cafe’s ashtray, watching the edges curl and blacken into nothing. The action felt ridiculously dramatic, but necessary. The policeman was watching from across the square.
She walked back to her car, the autumn sun weak and yielding to a bank of cloud from the north. The decision was already made. Prekaz was the heart of the coming storm. To go there was to walk directly into the path of history. But not to go was to be a ghost, a bystander. She had not been sent here, fallen here, whatever this was, to be a bystander.
She started the car. The engine coughed. The map on the passenger seat was a useless, glossy thing from the rental agency, missing all the important roads. She would have to ask. And asking would draw attention.
A woman at a roadside stall selling walnuts and wilted greens pointed a gnarled finger when Vanja, speaking careful Albanian, mentioned a cousin near Prekaz. “The road past the school, then left where the oak tree is split by lightning. But you should not go at this hour. The light is bad. The police, they stop cars.”
“Thank you,” Vanja said, buying a bag of walnuts she didn’t want.
She took the road anyway. The light was fading, bleeding the world into shades of grey and blue. The split oak was a stark silhouette against the sky. She turned onto a smaller track, gravel and mud crunching beneath the tires. Forests closed in. The tension was no longer an abstract hum; it was a physical pressure, a feeling of being watched from the treeline.
Ahead, a makeshift barricade—a fallen log, not official, but placed with intent. She slowed to a stop.
From the shadows, two young men emerged. They wore jeans and dark jackets, not uniforms. Their faces were tight, anxious. One carried a hunting rifle, held low but ready. The other approached her window. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
“This road is closed,” he said in Albanian. His eyes darted past her, scanning the road behind.
“I was told I could find Shqiponjë,” Vanja said, the word feeling foreign and dangerous on her tongue.
The young man’s expression changed. Fear, then a flicker of resolve. He looked at her car, her face, her clothes. “Get out. Slowly.”
She complied, the cold evening air biting through her jacket. The other young man came forward, rifle now more prominent. He gestured for her to turn around. She placed her hands on the cold roof of the car. His pat-down was quick, professional. He found her passport and press card, handed them to his friend.
“Swiss?” the first young man muttered, examining the documents under the failing light. He looked at her with utter confusion. “What is this? A joke?”
“No joke,” Vanja said, her voice steady. “The old man with the cut tire. He said to come.”
A long pause. The woods were utterly silent. Then, a sharp whistle echoed, a birdcall that wasn’t a bird. The young man with the rifle lowered it a fraction. He nodded toward the trees. “Walk. Leave the car. We will bring it.”
“My equipment—”
“Walk.”
She walked into the darkening woods, the two young men flanking her. The path was barely visible, a thin trace in the pine needles. After ten minutes, the trees thinned. A farmhouse stood in a clearing, lights off, but a soft glow came from a low barn behind it.
They led her to the barn door. The one with her passport opened it a crack and spoke to someone inside. Then he stepped back, and motioned her in.
The smell hit her first—damp earth, animal sweat, and the sharp, coppery scent of gun oil. Kerosene lamps hissed, casting long, swaying shadows. The space was crowded, not with animals, but with men. Some sitting on crates, others cleaning weapons, disassembling Kalashnikovs with a ritualistic care. All eyes turned to her. Suspicious. Hostile. Curious.
In the center, an older man stood up from a stool. He had a graying beard and the calm, weary eyes of a teacher. He held her passport, open to her photo.
“I am Shqiponjë,” he said, his voice gravelly and quiet. “The old man you helped is my uncle. He says you have a healer’s hands ” He stepped closer. The room held its breath. “So. Tell me, Swiss woman with a Serbian name who speaks our language like a sister… who are you really, and why are you in my barn?”