"There's no such thing as ghosts, my dears. Now get in bed and big sister will tuck you in."
There's no such things as ghosts, that's what she used to tell Ivan and Natasha when they were young. On on cold and windy nights, the little Russian boy would take a gnarled old tree branch to be an ancient hand, or the howl of the wind to be the moan of a lonely spirit. This would give him such a fright that he would come running into Yekaterina's room, hop into bed with her, and hide under the covers. Of course, wherever Ivan went, Natasha followed, and so on such cold and windy nights, the Ukrainian's bed was often filled with small children. And all through those nights, she would assure the frightened little ones that ghosts and monsters didn't exist.
But after the explosion at Chernobyl, Yekaterina started seeing ghosts more and more often. The scarred and burned faces of spirits that haunted her, people that she had failed to save. The scarred and burned bodies of the living that she saw every day. She couldn't take one step without the massive ghost of the nuclear plant dropping onto her conscience like a sack of bricks.
The worst part was that it wasn't only Ukrainians whose ghosts tormented her. People of her sister's nation, of her brother's, were too trapped between worlds, flitting about at night, trying to solve some dilemma of their abandoned life. The ghosts that Yekaterina had convinced Natasha and Ivan did not exist were suddenly popping up to haunt them, and it was her fault.
But they had no one to run to now. And that was what really haunted Yekaterina, the ghost of their family, the death of which was made so much more apparent by this disaster. Because if Ivan and Natasha couldn't count on their sister to protect them, who could they count on?