Skylark: A Novel
Author: Paula McLain
Date: 2026-01-06 00:00:00+00:00
Description: The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman's quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor's dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time. 1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notor
Publisher: Atria Books

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For Teresa, for everything

All things come to an end.

No, they go on forever.

—Ruth Stone, “Train Ride”

Île de la Cité, Paris 2019

PROLOGUE

The fire peels Notre-Dame like an illuminated manuscript soaked in water, its layers separating, releasing their secrets. The roof and spire catch, lead cladding spilling down limestone walls. Eight hundred years become liquid silver.

Inside, the medieval attic nicknamed “la Forêt”—“the Forest”—groans under flame, then shatters. The spire twists and falls, puncturing the heart of the vault floor below. Yet even as the ancient beams burn on, carpenter’s symbols become visible on them, tool marks hidden since the twelfth century—adze cuts, saw patterns, perfect joints. In the domed web of the ceiling, acoustic chambers emerge like loosed birds. Hollow spaces shaped to catch and amplify chants and whispers. Iron clamps tumble, each recalling a builder’s quest to defy gravity, to reach beyond the possible.

Later, in the still-smoldering ruins, researchers will find more intimate human traces: names and fingerprints left in ancient mortar. A pilgrim’s scratched prayer in a corner stone. A mason’s hidden rendering of his daughter’s face. Measured marks showing how each stone was cut, but also hesitation, correction, the yearning, imperfect moments between the dream of beauty and its execution.

And when the embers finally cool and the last of the smoke lifts, a conservator sifting through debris uncovers one last secret: a shard of pigmented glass no larger than a coin. She holds it to the light, frowning at its unusual shade. A sheer but concentrated blue that is neither cobalt nor lapis. Not the midnight blue of Chartres, but something more distilled and diaphanous, like the place where the sea meets the sky.

Perhaps it was part of an abandoned design or lost restoration, she thinks. For now, a mystery. As she sets it in the preservation box for further study, her eye catches on something etched into one corner, faint but unmistakable. A tiny bird, wings spread wide in flight. Not a formal heraldic design, but something ordinary and intimate—a swift or swallow hand drawn for inexplicable reasons.

Closing the box, she marks its location on the cathedral’s floor plan. Tomorrow she will catalog, measure, analyze. But tonight, as she walks home along the Seine, the river’s dark current reflecting city lights where it once mirrored medieval torches, she thinks about her grandfather. The stories he used to tell her about the tunnels and catacombs beneath the streets of Paris. How revolutionaries and refugees left signs for one another, symbols of birds carved into the limestone to help guide them through the dark to hard-won freedom.

She only ever half believed him but now begins to wonder if this small shard of glass—like the cathedral itself—might carry the past and the future inside it, curled like breath. Not just a fragment, but a thread, a doorway.

What burns can still tell its story. What breaks can be remade. But what endures unchanged through fire might just carry the most powerful secret of all—that what seems like an ending is instead a beginning. Waiting there among the ashes to be found.

Saint-Marcel, Paris 1664

CHAPTER 1

The scarlet fabric burns against Alouette’s palm: crushed pomegranate, wet cherry heart, forbidden as spilled blood. In the gray hours before dawn, its color is relentless, casting off the shadows. Even the rough walls of their two-room cottage seem to draw closer, as if pulled by its radiance.

She should put it back. A dutiful daughter would return it to her father’s recipe book before he wakes, but she doesn’t move. Something in her refuses to yield—a quiet defiance that has been growing stronger with each passing season. She traces the dye-drenched weave with her fingertips, not just admiring its beauty but determined to unlock its mysteries.

Outside, the village of Saint-Marcel stirs like a beast waking, its soot-blackened houses crouched along the banks of the Bièvre. The river slides past, thick with dye runoff, factory waste, and the slick remnants of tanneries. It’s black as ink, choking the early air with its stench.

The Bièvre isn’t anything like the Seine. It’s not a river for poets or queens. It’s a worker’s river, a whore’s river. But it is also a river of power. Below its poisoned surface lies an alchemy of minerals, the last remnants of the deep past, when all of France lay beneath a warm, shallow sea.

As much as she hates the filth of the Bièvre, Alouette can also see a flicker of possibility. While the guild masters hoard their knowledge behind high walls, the river offers its secrets freely to anyone patient enough to listen. Anyone stubborn enough to resist the rules that bind women like her to numbing lives of labor and service to others. She’s collected those secrets one by one, kept them close like hidden treasures no one can take from her, knowing that no matter what others see, the river can still work surprising magic. Magic powerful enough perhaps—perhaps—to change her life.

THE SCARLET IN Alouette’s hand does not belong to her or to her father, though he is one of the most talented master dyers at the Gobelin dyeworks. By law, and by birth, members of nobility alone own the right to wear such color, the clergy to sanctify it, the Gobelins to control its making. Even her father’s mastery, hard-earned as it is, belongs to the guild, locked away in ledgers and palaces where guild wardens like Monsieur Laferrière decide who may create and who must simply serve.

France enforces its sumptuary laws with precision. Alouette’s own clothes, coarse and dull, mark her station—the colors of toil, of silence. What would it feel like to wear scarlet or gold openly, boldly, she has always wanted to know, for all the world to see? For beauty to be hers, not just made by her hands but claimed by them?

She tucks the fabric into her sleeve. Her father will create another. This one is hers.

THE FIRST BUCKET breaks the river’s surface. Its foul odor attacks her nostrils—rotting vegetation, dye runoff, and something even more rancid that she’d rather not name. Backbreaking for anyone, the work is doubly so for an eighteen-year-old girl, slight as a willow branch. Alouette’s muscles strain as she fixes the sloshing buckets to her wooden yoke, a sharp pain lancing through her lower spine. And yet no one is on hand to help lighten her burden. No one is coming to save her.

Others appear through the morning haze, their own yokes creaking. They give her a wide berth—a madwoman’s daughter. Their whispers trail like smoke: how she has her mother’s quick hands, the same way of singing to herself as she works. What they don’t say is worse. How Henriette, too, began by staring into the river’s depths, searching for something no one else could see, until the searching consumed her.

If Alouette had been born a son, she would be apprenticed to her father, René Voland, encouraged to rise as he has through the ranks of the guild to master dyer. Instead, she hauls water, scours wool. At the river’s edge, she pauses. Through the lingering miasma, the Gobelin estate sits behind a high wall that seals off the family from the wretchedness that surrounds them. Bisque-colored turrets thrust into the sky like a hard, clean slap of fortune and refinement. Two stone lions guard the gate, their empty eyes fixed on their domain.

Later, in the washing room, steam rises in choking clouds as she pours her load into the great vat atop the furnace. Each pound of wool requires ten gallons of water heated to scalding. The coarse skeins are greasy to the touch, matted with dirt and lanolin. She works them with practiced care—too much agitation and they’ll felt. Gray-brown bubbles form on the surface, building to an oily sheen.

And there, in that most unlovely of mirrors, she catches a glimpse of herself and frowns. At eighteen, she has a face that is thin and careworn, her pale gray eyes red-rimmed from the acrid fumes. Only her hair might be considered pretty, she thinks, a deep shade of russet that she wears in thick braids coiled and pinned at the base of her neck. Her mother’s hair—the one thing apart from stigma that she left Alouette before vanishing from the village twelve years ago.

What could her mother have been thinking, Alouette often wonders, to choose a name that means “skylark” while understanding full well how fettered and grueling her daughter’s life would be? Could she be any less like a bird if she lived at the bottom of the sea? With no talent for singing or any reason to try? A lark can travel anywhere. But Alouette has never been free.

“Girl.” Madame Poirier’s voice pricks like a needle. “You’re falling behind.” The overseer stands in the doorway, her silhouette stark through the haze of steam. Even her drab brown dress seems to reprimand, to remind them of their place.

Alouette’s fingers clench beneath the water’s surface. “The wool needs gentling. Unless you’d rather it felted.”

A dangerous silence follows. Then: “Your father may be a master dyer, but you’re nothing but a washerwoman. Remember that.”

The words should sting. Instead, they crystallize something in Alouette’s mind. When Madame Poirier’s footsteps finally recede, Alouette pulls the fabric from her sleeve. The color blooms in the dim steam-lit air, refusing to cower.

In a just world, its brilliance would never be caged and hoarded by the guild or by the Gobelins with their haughty stone lions and high, mocking walls. And her hands—her hands wouldn’t be made solely to scrub, to lift, to serve. But to create.

There must be others who feel this, too, she thinks, though they don’t wear their longing openly. Women who, for a fleeting moment, might dare to risk everything—not for wealth or prestige, but for freedom. For beauty.

AT DAY’S END, Alouette fills two clay bowls with millet porridge. Cold rain taps against the lead-glass windowpanes. The bench by the hearth bears the scars of their life. Edges nicked from careless knife strikes. She sets down the bowls and waits for her father. He moves about the room, his boots heavy on the planked floor, the scents of tannins and mordants clinging to his skin. Finally, he sits, pushing aside his supper to make room for his recipe bible.

Alouette loves this book—a thing he carries even to bed, tucking it beneath his pillow. The cover is calfskin, split and worn, the vellum pages stained with splotches of indigo and ultramarine, their margins laced with dried petals and notes scrawled like incantations. Legendary crimsons, impossible indigos. Tyrian purple, stolen from the gods. Verdigris, coaxed from copper and wine.

For as long as she can remember, her father has been chasing a single hue. His masterpiece—Voland’s Scarlet. A red so brilliant, so unforgettable, that it will become his legacy. This dream is what brought them here, to Saint-Marcel, the squalid faubourg of dyers and tanners, far from Marseille’s salt-fresh air and wheeling gulls. From the limitless blue of the sea.

“Look.” He draws out a scrap and sets it between them on the table. Their old game. “What do you think?”

Alouette leans in, catching the metallic tang in the weave, then lifts the fabric to the light. “Cochineal? With a tin mordant?”

His eyes brighten. “They’re using it in England.”

Venice. Bruges. Gloucestershire. Antwerp. News of innovations in other dyeing centers trickles in occasionally through the silk and spice roads, rumors carried by merchants and guild letters. He speaks of these places with quiet reverence. She listens, yearning. She would go to any of them in an instant, if she could. To learn, to watch, to see how others master what she’s only just begun to grasp.

She would carry nothing but her notebook and a satchel of dried leaves. Start over in a city where no one knows her name. Where a girl might be valued for her skill, not her silence.

Later, after her father climbs the stairs, Alouette moves through the quiet ritual of washing up. His footsteps overhead creak once, then settle. Outside, the moon is only a faint smudge. If they were still in Marseille, it would be bright as a coin tossed over the sea.

Sometimes, in the sleepless hours, she dreams of creating a color like that—the exact blue of the Mediterranean at midday, when the sun shatters on the water. A boundless blue of infinite distances.

She has no place in the Gobelin dynasty. But that doesn’t mean she won’t leave her own mark.

CHAPTER 2

At the heart of Saint-Marcel, the Bièvre splits into two sluggish arms, encircling the Île aux Singes—a riotous pocket of life. On feast days, villagers gather here: men hunched over draughtboards, women trading gossip like currency, children darting barefoot across worn stones.

At the cafés, an organ grinder sets his monkey loose among the tables. The creature draws cheers, lifting hats and skirts with practiced mischief. But Alouette never laughs. Its collar is too tight, its eyes too human, like a wise old man’s. Whatever wildness it once knew—much like her own—has been lost.

By late morning, cider has soured the air. Alouette steps lightly past drunk men slouched over tankards. She might feel disgusted by them if they had more to live for, other ways to escape the grueling weight of their days. But she doesn’t want to be like them either. There must be more to life than dulling the ache of it.

In the shadow of the old city wall, villagers coax vegetables from the soil. Alouette kneels at her own plot, careful not to stain her father’s crimson cloth. Today, in full sun, she notices how the red shifts—darker in shadow, blazing where the light hits. Not just cochineal and tin, but something more: a mystery layered into the weave.

Between neighbors’ cabbages and turnips, she’s carved out her secret world. To passersby, her herbs suggest nothing more than sleep aids and poultices. But hidden among them are her truest allies: madder and weld, yarrow and woad. She presses the serrated leaves of the woad, releasing its foul, eggy stench—a promise of transformation. In dye, it turns cloth green, then blue when it finds the air.

That’s why she loves it. A humble leaf, bruised and steeped, becomes a color worthy of kings. Its beauty demands rupture, patience, faith. Perhaps the same holds true for people. Perhaps even now the raw and often painful materials of her life might be brewing into something else entirely, given enough space and light, and some luck besides.

Her fingers brush the delicate foliage of the madder plant beside it. Its roots run deep, gathering red possibilities beneath the soil. She has studied how the roots transform with age. One year yields pink, two years orange red, but three years? Three years might bring her closer to what her father achieves. The pursuit of his red has become her inheritance, passed down alongside memories of another teacher she lost too soon.

“Your hands know the way,” her mother would tell her, guiding Alouette’s palms around the mortar and pestle. Henriette used her plant knowledge for healing, but Alouette has repurposed it—mordants for shifting hue, household wisdom turned to alchemy.

She draws her notebook from her satchel, its pages splotched and stained. Long ago, her father taught her to read and write on dye orders and parchment scraps. He was reluctant at first. It was unusual for a girl, particularly for one of her station. But she had begged, and he had relented. Henriette had only watched, silent and wary. Not because she thought the knowledge useless, but because she feared what came with it: longing, ambition, wanting more than the world would give.

Now this learning is another thing that sets Alouette apart from her peers. And still, she loves it—the secret power of words. The way formulas take shape in ink, no less vivid than color blooming in cloth.

In her catalog of recipes, some hold only failure—muddy browns, wan yellows—while others hint at something more. She compares a scrap of her dyeing to her father’s red: not as brilliant, but close.

When she hears footsteps and laughter nearby, she tucks away the fabric and notebook and pretends to weed. Two women pass with empty baskets, casting glances half pitying, half wary. Poor Alouette, the dyer’s odd daughter.

Let them whisper, she thinks. Let them steer their children away. Better to be strange than small. To keep herself for herself.

IN HER DIM kitchen, amid pots and soot and stained fingers, Alouette is building a vocabulary of shades and hues. Her father may master red, but she dreams of a full spectrum, a symphony. Something entirely her own.

She feeds the fire beneath her battered pot, salts the crushed woad, and begins the steeping. The air stinks of lanolin and woodsmoke. Her hands cramp from stirring, but she’s never felt more purposeful.

As she lowers the mordanted linen, the liquid turns it sickly green. She waits, watches. The old recipes are maddening. “Sufficient warmth.” “A hefty portion.” “Simmer for some time.” She wants precision, not riddles. She tries various mordants—wood ash, lime—tries fresh and dried leaves. But the results disappoint. Her father’s reds burn like coals. Her colors so far refuse to spark.

When rain begins to clatter at the thatch roof, she lets the fire gutter, staring at the failures logged in her book. Somewhere, past these vague instructions and purloined methods, lies the answer. She must not quit until she finds it.

CHAPTER 3

At the factory, Alouette is still scrubbing dye from her fingernails when Lucienne drops a bundle of silk into her arms.

“Mind yourself,” the older woman says, settling heavily onto a three-legged stool. “This stuff’s worth more than your soul and a year’s wages combined. Treat it like spun moonlight.”

Lucienne doesn’t patrol like Madame Poirier, all stiff collars and sharp disapproval. Her authority flows from a deeper source. Grounded in experience, she knows each woman by name and teaches without cruelty or humiliation.

Alouette blinks at the pale filaments, light as breath. “I know.” Even damp, they shimmer faintly. In a few weeks, this raw silk will become the wedding gown of Isabel Gobelin. Triple-woven brocade, dyed the color of twilight, threaded with silver to glisten as she moves.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lucienne says, noticing Alouette’s absorption. “To think, our work will shimmer on a princess.”

“A pity none of us will ever see it finished.”

Lucienne snorts. “Careful with that spite. You might cut your finger on it.”

“And you don’t feel spite?”

“I feel plenty.” She shrugs. “But I’ve learned not to waste it.”

“On what?”

“On what can’t be changed. Spite doesn’t help your hands move faster or your body ache less. And it doesn’t make silk take color any better.”

Alouette shakes her head but doesn’t respond. Lucienne’s pragmatism is both familiar and maddening. The older woman’s wisdom comes from years of resignation—a refusal to hope for anything beyond survival. Alouette wonders if she will come to feel the same, if her own defiance might one day burn out into this same quiet acceptance.

They continue to work, side by side. Every now and again, sunlight splits into rays through the grimy windows.

Soaking, the silk fibers give off a slightly sweet odor—perhaps from the white mulberry leaves the silkworms feed on. What a strange process that is to even fix her mind on. How leaves can travel through their small bodies to become this delicate gauze, still gummed with insect secretions.

The raw silk thread was ordered from Florence—nothing but the finest for a Gobelin daughter. As for the dress itself, it will be incomparable. What would it feel like to wear such loveliness against her skin? Alouette can no more imagine that reality than she can imagine the inside of a silkworm.

WHEN THE SHIFT ends, Alouette leaves the factory with aching shoulders. Music spills through the streets—tomorrow is a feast day, and the revelry has already begun. Children chase one another between stalls, their laughter tangling with the fiddler’s tune. The whole village pulses with noise and brightness.

Near the edge of the square, she catches a fragment of conversation that stills her. The old limestone quarry on the Butte-aux-Cailles is being reopened. New stonecutters have been brought in to work it.

“Fools,” an old woman mutters, shaking her head. “Can you imagine digging deeper into that cursed place, after all the trouble it caused before?”

“The quarriers take the risk,” says another. “The masters take the coin.”

Alouette swallows hard. The Butte-aux-Cailles has always been her refuge—a sacred place, still wild at the edges, with burdock and saxifrage in the air. Shepherds graze their flocks up there, on the last high patch of pasture. But not for long. Soon it will be rubble and dust and screeching winches.

It’s the same story as ever. Like the Bièvre, turned into a sluice of poison. Like the dye house, swallowing hours whole. The quarry, the stones—all of it belongs not to those who labor, but to those who take.

She presses through the crowd, the music too loud now, the lanterns too bright, as if all the merriment is simply a mask pulled over something rotten. On the far edge of the revelers, a cluster of quarriers laughs together, tankards in hand.

One stands apart from the others. He looks young—nineteen, maybe twenty—with wheat-colored hair tied back in a leather cord. His hands are weathered, his stance grounded. He doesn’t fidget, doesn’t posture. There’s an uncommon stillness about him.

Alouette turns before he sees her watching. But even as she slips back into the crowd, a curious sense lingers. It’s as if a thread has appeared from nowhere, waiting to be pulled.

CHAPTER 4

As Étienne squeezes down the rock face into darkness, the rope cuts into his palms like teeth. The bottom of the shaft is sixty feet below, where the new seam waits like an undiscovered country.

Daylight is a stranger here. Time too. His lantern swings beside him. The flame shivers, casting warped shadows against the rough-arched limestone walls.

Some men pray before they lower themselves into the pit, clutching crude saints’ medals or pressing kisses to the dirt. Étienne saves his breath. God has never ventured this far below Paris. Not once.

The new strata will be cut beneath old tunnels, abandoned nearly fifteen years ago. A dozen other cutters work beside Étienne—wedging, splitting, hoisting, and hauling—along with water boys and cart boys and Antoine Pelletier, the master mason on Étienne’s team.

“Duchamp!” Pelletier calls. “You’re with me today. Far south chamber.”

Étienne nods and slings his tools over his shoulder—hammer, wedges, pry bar, and measuring rod strapped to his back the way a soldier carries weapons. His fingers brush the handle of his têtu, the heavy quarryman’s hammer worn smooth from years of use. It was his father’s hammer, once. The only inheritance worth keeping.

The tunnel is six feet high and three feet wide, enough to allow for a man or boy pushing a cart to move the stone from the chambers and galleries back to the shaft to be winched to the surface. Étienne and Pelletier move in single file without talking. Étienne has never been one to waste breath on idle conversation. He’d rather hear his own thoughts, or the silence, which speaks with more wisdom than most, he’s learned.

It’s only when he spots a fissure running diagonally along the tunnel ceiling that Étienne lifts his lamp. “Should be reinforced,” he says.

Pelletier shrugs. “Not if we’re going to get three blocks up by midday.”

Étienne can only grit his teeth. Pelletier is a master cutter, but his authority ends there. He takes his orders from the quarriers’ guild, as well as the master builders and architects driving demand.

They reach the south chamber, a vast, cathedral-like cavern where pale limestone gleams dully beneath their lantern light. Thick turned pillars rise from floor to ceiling, the only things holding up the sky. Between them, men are already at work, their hunched silhouettes moving in unison, the rhythmic ping of metal on stone echoing like strange music.

Étienne places his lantern on a protruding rock and surveys the wall before him. The block has already been marked out—six feet long, four feet high, two feet deep. Stone destined for some nobleman’s manor. Or perhaps a church facade. The men who will live or worship in those spaces will never think of the hands that cut their foundations. They will never know the names of the quarriers whose lungs turned to dust, whose backs broke beneath the weight of Paris itself. They will merely call the stone beautiful. The highest quality. The best.

Shallow chisel marks trace the wedge line where the stone will break. A straight, deliberate cut, if done properly. Étienne places the first iron wedge into the groove, setting it gently. He’ll need twenty wedges, spaced evenly along the cut. The work requires patience and accuracy. Each wedge must be tapped in sequence, coaxing the stone to split along its natural grain. Too much force, and the block will crack where it shouldn’t. Too little, and it will never separate at all.

He moves methodically down the line, tapping each wedge with the broad face of his têtu, listening to the changing pitch of metal on metal. The sound tells him everything—which wedges need more pressure, which are biting well into the stone. He works by feel too. Intuition.

“Water,” he calls.

A boy scurries over with a wooden bucket. Étienne dips his fingers in and flicks droplets along the wedge line. The water seeps into the nearly invisible cracks, weakening the stone’s resistance.

Hours pass, fusing together in a blur. This is how time always moves underground, marked only by sweat and the deepening bite of the wedges. By midmorning, Étienne’s shoulders burn, his hands raw despite the thick calluses. Limestone dust coats his skin, turning him into a ghost. It fills his lungs too. He can feel it settling there. The slow death that plagued his father until a quicker death finished him.

Finally, a low groan reverberates through the chamber. Étienne steps back. This moment is always tense—thirty tons of stone about to tear free from the earth that has held it for millennia.

“Stand clear,” he warns.

The crack appears suddenly, racing like a dark vein along the wedge channel. The sound is like distant thunder, a deep rumble that vibrates through the soles of his boots. With a final, reluctant sigh, the block separates. It doesn’t fall—the angled cut sees to that—but the rush of air stirs the dust, blinding for a moment.

Pelletier steps forward, running a calloused hand over the fresh break. “Good cut,” he says gruffly.

Now comes the more difficult step. They position wooden rollers beneath the block and use iron levers to shift it inch by excruciating inch onto the wooden sledge.

Eight men strain, muscles taut, the sledge groaning. One slip, one failure of wood or rope, and someone dies. Étienne has seen it happen all too often—a crushed leg, a shattered spine, a man gone before he can scream.

By noon, they move the block onto the lifting platform beneath the main shaft. Above, the great treadwheel winch groans as men step inside, turning the mechanism with their body weight, chains thick as a man’s wrist lowering toward them.

As they secure the block, sunlight spills down the shaft like water, sharp and bright. After hours in the dark, the world above seems like another place entirely. When the stone rises slowly toward daylight, Étienne steps back. This piece is done. Tomorrow, there will be another. And another after that.

HOURS LATER, OUTSIDE the door of their cottage, Étienne removes his boots, scraping away the worst of the quarry dust before entering. No matter how carefully he cleans himself at the well in the village—scouring his hands, face, and neck until his skin burns—the limestone still clings to him, embedded in the creases of his knuckles, caught beneath his nails. The dust of the dead, his father used to call it. The remains of ancient creatures crushed to stone over countless centuries.

The Saint-Marcel limestone differs from the bluish-gray Caumont stone quarried by four generations of Duchamp men—the stone that built Rouen’s magnificent cathedral, its spire reaching higher than any in France. His grandfather once pointed to that tower with gnarled, swollen fingers: “Our sweat made that rise, boy. It’s our legacy. Remember that when the work seems too hard.” But that was when their name still meant something. Before the pit caved in. Before the long unmaking.

Inside their cottage, warmth and the smell of stewing vegetables gather around him like an embrace. His grandmother sits near the fire, her bent frame wrapped in a wool shawl from Normandy. At seventy-three, her face is mapped with fine lines, her once-brown hair faded to steel gray. Though cataracts cloud her eyes, her fingers work steadily at mending, threading the needle by touch after sixty years of practice.

“You’re late,” she remarks, her voice like well-worn linen. “Thomas tried to wait up for you. Poor lamb fought it as long as he could.”

“I’m sorry, Mémé. How were they today?”

“Marie’s cough has improved. I made her a licorice and comfrey syrup.” A satisfied smile creases her face. “And Thomas found a bird’s nest with three speckled green eggs. He wanted to show you.”

“Well, I’m glad he let them be.”

In the few months since they arrived in Saint-Marcel, the damp, sooty air has given Marie, who is ten, a troubling wheeze. Catarrh and nothing worse, he hopes, not needing another thing to feel anxious over. At least their two-room cottage has thick walls to keep out the worst of the rain and snow.

In Rouen, they’d lived in a proper house with glass windows. Duchamp stonecutters were once respected, well paid, until a cave-in killed six men, including Étienne’s father. Work vanished. By the time Étienne’s cousin Isabelle died of fever, leaving her children in his care, their savings were nearly gone.

Étienne moves to the hearth, lifting the lid on the pot that hangs over the coals. Steam rises, carrying the scent of turnips and a small portion of salt pork—simple fare, but better than many have in Saint-Marcel. He fills a wooden bowl and sits at the table, his body aching with the day’s labor. The new quarry is harsher than what he knew in Rouen. The work is more desperate, the safety measures fewer, the men driven harder for less pay.

“You’ll need new trousers soon,” Mémé remarks, her needlework continuing without pause.

“These will last another season,” he replies, knowing they can’t afford the cloth. Every sou goes to food, medicine for Mémé’s joints, and the small hoard he’s building beneath a loose hearthstone—security against the day his lungs begin to fail or his body is ground to dust.

From the sleeping room comes a soft cough, then the padding of bare feet.

“Étienne?” Thomas peers around the doorframe in his nightshirt, dark hair sticking up in unruly tufts. At seven, he is small for his age, with a wiry build and deep-set black eyes, like his father’s.

“You’re supposed to be asleep, petit.”

“I know, but I heard you.” He moves soundlessly over the packed-earth floor to climb beside Étienne on the bench, leaning against his arm. “Did you find any figure stones today?”

This is their ritual. In Rouen, the quarries are famous for the shells and other treasures embedded in the limestone that make the Norman quarrymen proud of their ancient heritage. Étienne’s father had shown him early on how to spot the faint spirals and fan shapes of sea life, the occasional tooth or bone fragment of creatures long past. Since Thomas was four, Étienne has brought him these gifts—a connection to their own story, the craft that has defined their family for generations.

“Not today,” Étienne says, smoothing one of Thomas’s wild cowlicks. “This quarry has different prizes than the ones at home. We just need to learn where to look. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Thomas nods, accepting this promise as certainty. His trust is a burden Étienne shoulders as heavily as any stone. Thomas was a different child, once—laughing, curious, quick to explore. The move to Saint-Marcel after his mother’s death changed him, as if some essential light had dimmed.

“Mémé says we’re going to the market on Sunday,” Thomas murmurs now, eyelids already beginning to droop. “Can you come this time?”

“I’ll try.” Another vow he might not be able to keep.

Thomas leans more heavily against him, his small body warm through the thin nightshirt. Étienne puts an arm over his shoulders, feeling a rush of fierce protectiveness. This boy is not his own child—nor is Marie—but they are his now to feed and shelter, to guide into adulthood if he can live long enough to see it. The quarry pays him seventeen sous per day for work that will eventually kill him, the same way it took his father and his grandfather before him. It’s inevitable.

“Come,” Étienne says softly, gathering the boy in his arms. “Back to bed with you.”

He carries Thomas to the sleeping room, where Marie is still curled on her pallet, her breathing steady but slightly labored. Even at ten, she’s showing signs of beauty that will bring its own troubles as she grows. She inherited her mother Isabelle’s delicate features—high cheekbones, a straight nose, eyes set wide apart beneath arched brows. Her fair hair, almost silver in the dim light, spreads across the thin pillow like spun flax.

Now, Marie murmurs but doesn’t wake as Étienne tucks the thin blanket around her. He stands watching them both for a long moment, their faces slack with trust, the rise and fall of their chests. This—this is why he descends into darkness each day. And will for as long as he is able.

Paris 1939

CHAPTER 5

The first time Kristof has even the smallest inkling of what lies below the streets of Paris, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and he’s drunk so much gin he smells like the sticky bark of a Christmas tree.

It’s the end of December, bitterly cold. Four months have passed since Hitler made his play for Poland, carving up the country with Stalin like two bullies in a schoolyard tearing a playing card in half. In the wake of the invasion, France joined half a dozen other countries in declaring war against Germany. But no bombs have been dropped, no blood has been spilled. There is just a sense of anxious waiting and the government’s insistence that the Maginot Line will hold.

The mood in Paris has been jittery, but many still believe this war can stay contained. That Paris will be spared. Kristof wants to believe that too. But already, he has seen the wards at Sainte-Anne’s changing. Veterans of the Great War who have maintained a fragile equilibrium for decades now fracture at the sound of boots on cobblestones, old battlefields unfolding in their minds like maps touched too often. Others arrive fresh from the Maginot Line, where the endless waiting—scanning the empty horizon day after day, week after week—turned their imaginations into bayonets, hand grenades.

As a first-year resident in psychiatry, Kristof has come to Paris to study the labyrinth of the human mind. The psyche with its untold depths. He arrived at his residency knowing that he would confront acute suffering. Depression, instability, mania, psychosis. A maelstrom of mental symptoms. But he wasn’t remotely prepared for this larger order of chaos that has gripped the world, spilling over the edges of his work, his life, thick as winter fog.

Tonight, he’s come to Le Sous-sol to hear Django Reinhardt. The jazz club sits in a cellar in the Latin Quarter, pleasantly murky and clandestine. The notes come in rapid-fire volleys, rhythmic and infectious, almost drowning out the voice in his head that says: Get out of France. Before the borders close. Before it’s too late.

At intermission, the man beside him taps his arm, gesturing for a cigarette. “You’re not French,” he says, shaking a Gauloises from its packet. “Swedish?”

Kristof smiles. “Is it that obvious? I’m Dutch. Kristof Larsen.”

“Alesander Extebarria.” His hair is thick and dark, gleaming with tonic. His eyes are nearly black.

“Spanish?” Kristof guesses.

“Basque, actually. Though very few know the difference.”

“And what is it?”

“That’s a long conversation.” He laughs. “We’d be here all night. Another round?” Alesander is twenty-eight—the same age as Kristof—and a student of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts.

“What will you do if your home country is taken?” he asks Kristof, exhaling toward the glow of the stage. “Will you return to Holland?”

Kristof watches the smoke curl and lift like a disintegrating gyroscope. “I don’t know. My mother and father are getting old, and I’m their only child”—only living child, he doesn’t say. “They’d prefer to have me there, but I’m committed to my patients now.” He flicks ash into the tray. “What about you?”

Alesander nods toward the spotlight, which is centered on Django’s hands. Even disfigured, they move in a blur over the strings—light, quick, effortless. “Like him, I’ll keep playing. If I can.”

Kristof knows the story. How Django was born in a caravan on the outskirts of Belgium, Romani by blood, French by fire. How he taught himself to play again with two good fingers and a thumb after the blaze that nearly took his life. The music pours out changed but undiminished, as if the flames somehow forged new tissue. Something stronger and more resilient than flesh.

OUTSIDE, AFTER THE final set, frost bites the air like glass. Alesander buttons his coat. “I want to show you something. Are you up for it?”

Kristof is scheduled to be at the hospital at dawn for morning rounds. But Alesander’s smile is persuasive. A dare thrown out like a flint spark.

“Sure.”

They walk north along the Jardin des Plantes, inky as a lagoon behind high locked gates. Farther on, the Seine glitters black and solid along its edges. Below them, two boys lace up skates, their laughter hanging in white puffs. Kristof’s throat catches. Long ago, on the Waal River back home, another pair of skaters. His sister Annelies’s scarf trailing as she spun on the ice. There are many ghosts he wants to leave behind, but not hers—never.

Near Val-de-Grâce, Alesander veers into a narrow alley, aiming for a wooden door with an iron lock. Without a word, he stoops like a seasoned cat burglar, the silence broken only by a scrape of metal against wood.

Kristof watches incredulously as Alesander slides and turns panels. Then a keyhole appears. “Are you a spy?”

Alesander grins and produces an odd-looking key from his pocket. “I made it.”

“Naturally.”

Kristof is still laughing as the door gives silently. When Alesander slips inside, he follows without question, as if hypnotized, a passenger in his own body. This is sorcery. Madness. Anything could happen next, anything at all. It makes him feel unmoored, giddy with possibility.

When Alesander clicks on his flashlight, they’re standing at the top of a spiral stairwell.

Markings have been chiseled into the stone: Profundeur 54 pieds. “Depth 54 feet.” As they descend, Kristof touches the wall, which is damp and cool. The air holds the faintest breath of chalk.

At the bottom, in a long, vaulted chamber, Kristof notices that the floor is claylike, soft underfoot. “How did you discover the door?” he asks.

“One of the older architecture students brought me down last year to show me the foundations of a Roman aqueduct. That’s where we’re headed now.”

“Wait. What is this place?”

Alesander laughs. “These galleries started as limestone and gypsum quarries, some as old as the twelfth century. Most of Paris is built from this stone. When a quarry was stripped, it was abandoned, without anyone thinking much about what that meant.” He turns, his flashlight flickering across the grooved walls. “Ever seen an ant farm?”

Kristof can’t quite picture the City of Light balancing on such precarious scaffolding, let alone the implications. “How much of the city is undermined?”

“Most of the Left Bank—and Montmartre. The eighteenth-century inspectors began consolidating the voids, but it’s still a honeycomb. There are over three hundred kilometers of tunnels, enough to walk from one end of Paris to the other without surfacing.”

“A sister city.”

“Exactement.”

They pass through a low arch into a chamber where a rough-carved pillar stands like the hub of a wheel. Alesander’s flashlight sweeps across soot-darkened engravings—faces, trees, inspection dates: 1777 I.G.; 1865 A.P. Above them, fleurs-de-lis bloom alongside an inscription: Spiritus noster est aura praeteriens umbra.

“Our spirit is but a breeze, a passing shadow,” Kristof translates, surprised that he can still remember his Latin.

“During the Reign of Terror, prisoners scrawled messages before facing the tribunal. A century later, Commune rebels were hunted through these tunnels for three days. It’s all so reassuring, isn’t it?”

Kristof smiles. “What, slaughter?”

“Perspective,” Alesander corrects with a chuckle. “Paris endures.”

Kristof studies him. He has a thousand questions, but the first might be the most mysterious. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I’m not sure.” Alesander’s expression wavers between amusement and something more elusive. “I usually prefer to explore alone. But tonight, in the club, I had the feeling I could trust you. I can’t say why.” He shrugs. “I just had a sense that you would understand this place. That you could use it.”

Kristof nods. He has never thought of himself as anything but a man of science. Still, down here, it wouldn’t take much to believe that ghosts float beside them. Not the specters of legend, but the lingering imprints of those who passed through long before—fugitives, lovers, the desperate and the damned.

When Alesander moves on into the next tunnel, he begins to whistle. The echoes ripple back like whale song. At one point, the flashlight skitters over a soot-black line along the ceiling. Ariadne’s thread, drawn in smoke. A little farther, Kristof glimpses the blackened silhouette of a bird, its wings stretched in perpetual flight.

He reaches out, fingertips grazing the rough stone. There is no way of knowing what its story is—who carved it or why—which makes the image more moving somehow. Holy, he might say, if given a moment to linger there.

But Alesander has already slipped ahead, humming the same few riffs of Django’s “Minor Swing” like a stuck gramophone.

Kristof has no choice but to hurry after him, chasing the song, and the light, through the unknown dark.

CHAPTER 6

Hôpital Sainte-Anne rises from the 14th arrondissement like a Victorian fever dream, its mansard roofs and ornate stonework lending it the air of a grand institution rather than a place of confinement. But Kristof knows better. The hospital wears its civility like a borrowed coat, the kind that fits well enough until you look too closely at the seams.

Paris has always been a city that treats madness like a garden to be pruned. Admired when orderly, uprooted when not. The infamous lectures at Salpêtrière, beginning in the 1860s, where Jean-Martin Charcot displayed hysterical women before crowds of medical students and curious spectators. “Tuesday Lessons,” they were called, turning patients into spectacle, theater. The staged “treatments” that followed—ice baths, isolation, electric stimulation—all masqueraded as science, even as they stripped dignity from those they claimed to be helping.

Here at Sainte-Anne’s, this troubling legacy is tucked behind manicured courtyards and polite diagnoses. Behind modern terminology and therapeutic promises. But the fundamental relationship remains unchanged. Healing, Kristof thinks, has always been a secondary concern. After concealment and control.

Now, in the early weeks of 1940, the plane trees cast hooked shadows across courtyards where patients still play chess or paint watercolors, as if such activities might anchor them to sanity. But like Paris itself, Sainte-Anne’s is readying for change. Ever since Hitler’s attack on Poland, when France declared war on Germany, the methodical rhythms of psychiatric care have been shifting. Long-term patients are being reassessed, some transferred to smaller facilities outside the city.

Dr. Blaise Claudel is another of these changes, having arrived from Hôpital Cochin with efficiency in his stride and a thin manual titled Emergency Psychiatric Protocols.

On one of his first days on staff, Dr. Claudel gathers Kristof and the other twenty residents in the art therapy studio, which is being converted into something more like a military hospital. A row of new beds has replaced the easels and art tables. Their metal frames reflect dully in paint-spattered windows as Dr. Claudel makes his first small speech.

“Your training has prepared you for civilian psychiatric care,” he tells the residents. “But we need to be better equipped for what’s coming. The Great War taught us that psychiatric casualties can overwhelm traditional facilities within weeks. We mustn’t be caught off guard.”

As Kristof stands listening, not quite knowing what to think, Julian Broussard catches his eye. They’ve spent enough night shifts together to read each other’s looks.

Claudel gestures to a bed where an older veteran lies staring at the ceiling—a severe case of depressive catatonia. “Monsieur Dupont was admitted in 1918. Twenty-one years, and he’s never really returned from the trenches.” Claudel holds up the manual. “We’ve developed new methodologies in the last decade, and new tools to deal with serious psychiatric conditions that might otherwise be considered hopeless. The most promising of these is controlled electrical stimulation. The voltage is precise, the risks minimal. If we can help men coming off the battlefield right away, perhaps we never have to see this sort of patient again.”

Kristof feels the skin beneath his collar prickle. The therapy Dr. Claudel is referring to is only a few years old. Its protocols are still experimental, its long-term effects unknown. In the medical journals he’s read, the controversy seems far from settled. Some physicians report miraculous awakenings while others document memory loss, broken bones, and psychological trauma.

What troubles Kristof more than the medical uncertainty is the purpose. From the sound of it, Dr. Claudel isn’t focused on healing troubled minds or easing suffering. He’s building a framework for the wounded they haven’t yet seen but surely will, as if war is a straightforward logistical challenge to be solved in advance. As if the men who will soon be carried off the battlefield can be patched up like broken rifles and returned to the front for another go.

A century has passed since Charcot held his “Tuesday Lessons” at Salpêtrière, and yet it seems little has changed. The methods are slicker, the machines more advanced. But the bodies are still the canvas, and consent is still beside the point.

LATER, KRISTOF FINDS Julian in the old solarium at the back of the south wing—what the staff call the glass corridor. The floor tiles are glazed with cracks, the windows permanently filmed with decades of rain and cigarette smoke. A rusting gurney has been pushed against the wall. Kristof leans beside it, folding his arms.

“What did you make of Dr. Claudel’s speech?” Julian asks, reading his face.

“He’s brilliant, maybe. But cold. And I can’t imagine ever being comfortable with using his machine. I became a doctor to help people, not torture them.”

“I know. I saw a demonstration last year, in Montpellier. It’s like something out of Frankenstein.”

“Why didn’t you speak up at the meeting?”

“Dr. Claudel doesn’t seem like the type to welcome debate. Anyway, you were already glaring holes in him.” Julian’s gaze trails to the broken pane above them. “What if he’s right, though? What if we’re about to be overrun, and this is the only way to stop men from falling apart?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I can’t say. It’s hard to dismiss him completely. Claudel is a rising star, and he’s been given the reins to lead this program. We’re not experts, we’re students. His students,” Julian adds, shifting restlessly from foot to foot. “I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I wish I had a cigarette.”

Kristof smiles. “I wish I had a cup of real coffee, not the swill they serve in the commissary.”

“I wish this war were over,” Julian says.

Kristof nods and exhales slowly, watching a moth flit behind the smudged pane. “Me too. Though most would tell you it hasn’t even begun.”

“I wish Patrice didn’t worry so much. I keep telling her everything will be fine, but…” Julian trails off, then shrugs. “I wish I believed it.”

“I wish I could sleep through the night,” Kristof says. “I wish this corridor didn’t feel more honest than anywhere else in the hospital.”

Julian gives a dry laugh. “I wish we could stop talking like we’ve already lost.”

Kristof meets his gaze. “But not today.”

“No,” says Julian. “Not today.”

CHAPTER 7

On washday, the apartment fills with the unpleasant smells of lye and boiled starch. Sasha’s sleeves are rolled past her elbows, steam curling up from the zinc tub in milky tendrils. The bar of soap her mother shaved into the water has gone soft at the edges. Sasha swirls it with one hand, using the other to press a shirt under the surface. The filmy cotton bobs up again, ballooning at the center until she forces it down.

Twice a month, they do all the linens this way, heating water in the galvanized tub over the gas burner, filling and refilling it until everything is done, and the apartment is a jungle of damp cotton, clotheslines crisscrossing the living room from corner hooks to high-backed chairs to a row of penny nails just above the doorframe.

“Careful with the collars,” Maman says. She’s wringing out a pair of Rald’s trousers, her gently rounded belly brushing the edge of the sink. “Not too rough or they’ll fray.”

“I know,” Sasha answers. She presses harder on the shirt anyway, just to feel the resistance.

Maman fixes her with a look, not quite disapproving. Just tired, frazzled, at her wit’s end. Sasha has been seeing it on her mother’s face more and more lately. When the radio won’t tune correctly, the coffeepot boils over, or expected news from their family in Warsaw is late in coming.

Finished with Papa’s work shirt, Sasha hangs it over the line with two pegged clothespins. The cloth clings wetly to her fingers. Around her, the maze of drying laundry makes the apartment feel even smaller than usual. Lately, she craves private corners for herself. Space. Somewhere to think that isn’t the bathroom or the stairwell or the rooftop, which Madame Gagnon usually keeps locked “for safety.”

She ducks under a line and slips into the hallway, where Rald’s shoes are in the middle of the floor again. She nudges them with her foot, sighing. Her little brother is full of odd, annoying habits. Recently, he started sleeping with his feet toward the pillow, like a flipped coin.

“You’re weird,” she told him last night. He grinned and said, “I like it that way.” As if that explains everything. For a seven-year-old boy, it probably does.

THE BRODSKYS’ APARTMENT consists of four rooms, stacked in a row like beads on a braided leather cord. The front room is also the dining room, with windows that look out onto the rue des Gobelins, a narrow winding lane that has, Sasha thinks, the shape of a restless stream.

Madame Gagnon once told her that the whole quartier was built on a buried river—the Bièvre. “The king of dyers ruled here,” she’d said with grim satisfaction. “This very street is named for him. Gobelin. He poisoned the water black with his greed. The river was so foul they had to push it underground, but it’s still there, rotting under our feet.”

When Sasha walks the narrow lanes, she sometimes imagines she can hear it there—a thick, sluggish whisper beneath the cobblestones. Five years ago, when her family moved to Paris from Warsaw, Sasha was six and a half and Rald was not quite two. At first, they lived on the rue des Écouffes in the Marais, next to a synagogue that was so new she could still smell the varnish on the walls of the prayer room. The pipes of the organ gleamed like freshly minted bronze centimes.

Maman preferred it there, when they were in a larger community of Jews, but here in the 13th, which is far more working class, the rent is half the price and very near the LIP watch repair shop on the boulevard de Port-Royal where Papa works.

Sasha likes how quiet it is in this forgotten part of Paris, where streets curl around the ghosts of old dye factories and buildings lean together like conspirators, their dark slate roofs nearly touching overhead.

Now, with her chores finished, Sasha retreats to the hallway outside the apartment, spreading her books across the tiled landing as if she’s having a picnic. It’s cooler here, and quieter. The sun finds this spot in the afternoon, slipping down the stairwell like a secret. If she wedges her knee just right against the wall, she can balance her notebook on her thigh and pretend the world belongs only to her.

She’s working on Greek roots today—philo, sophos, logos. She mutters the words under her breath to test their shape against her tongue. Sometimes Rald comes looking for her, but today he’s busy playing inside, and Maman has moved from the washing tub to the small stove, stewing onions in a deep pot while she hums along to the radio.

Sasha writes the word philomath in the margin and smiles to herself. A lover of learning. That’s what she’ll be when she grows up. Or a memory champion. Or both. She’s halfway through sketching a mnemonic when the stairwell darkens. Madame Gagnon stands over her, looming like a tower.

“Is this a classroom now?” the concierge barks. “Books everywhere, pencils rolling underfoot—this isn’t your living room, young lady.”

Sasha doesn’t look up right away. She calmly closes her dictionary and gathers her pages into a neat stack, taking her time. “No, Madame,” she says sweetly.

The concierge clutches her broom like a bayonet. “Your parents don’t pay rent for you to make messes in public.”

“I wasn’t trying to make a mess. I’m just studying.”

“Oh? And will you be taking your entrance exams from the banister, then?”

There’s a moment—a tense held breath—and then the sound of footsteps from below. A man’s shoes, slightly scuffed at the toe, appear. It’s Dr. Larsen, looking weary, his satchel slung across one shoulder. Sasha knows who he is, of course. Everyone in the building does. The quiet tenant just above them on the third floor. The doctor who keeps odd hours and yet is quiet as a mouse as he comes and goes.

“Is there a problem?” he asks.

Madame Gagnon straightens. “Dr. Larsen,” she says with a false smile. “I was just explaining to this young lady that the landing isn’t a proper place for a study hall.”

He glances at Sasha’s neat pile of books, her sharp pencil. Then back to the concierge. “I rather like seeing children read,” he says. “It gives me hope.”

Sasha fights the urge to smirk as Madame Gagnon makes a huffing sound, then retreats down the stairs, muttering something about boundaries and respect.

When she’s gone, Sasha leans back against the wall and exhales. “Thank you,” she says, not quite looking at him.

“You’re welcome. She is rather stern, isn’t she?”

“I’ll bet she practices her scolding in the mirror,” Sasha says solemnly. “It’s her favorite hobby.”

He laughs, then gestures toward her books. “What are you studying?”

“Greek. Did you know that certain orators in Greek society could memorize almost anything? Epic poems thousands of lines long.”

“That’s impressive.”

“It’s just association. Turning words into pictures. I’ve been working on training my own memory for years.”

“For years? How old are you?”

“Twelve.” Then, because she knows what he’s thinking, she adds, “And no, it’s not precocious. It’s practical. Minds are muscles. You need to use them.”

He chuckles. “You sound like a natural philosopher.”

“I’m working on it.”

Just then, the apartment door creaks open behind her. “What are you doing out here, sha’le?” Maman asks, stepping into the hall.

“Hello,” the doctor says, “I’m Kristof Larsen, from upstairs. How do you do?”

“I’m Rachel Brodsky.” One of Maman’s slender forearms rests lightly on the rising curve of her belly as she smiles. “I see you’ve already met Sasha. And this”—she gestures behind her as Sasha’s younger brother peers warily—“is Rald, my son.”

Rald buries his hands in the pockets of his short pants, blinking up at the doctor with a guarded sort of curiosity. Rald always watches new people as if they might steal his shoes.

“We were just about to sit down to dinner,” Maman says. “Would you like to join us?”

Dr. Larsen seems to hesitate, shaking his head. “That’s very kind, but I wouldn’t want to impose—”

“Please. There’s plenty. Unless you have somewhere else to be?”

“I don’t,” Dr. Larsen says, looking slightly sheepish. “And thank you.”

THE MOMENT SHE steps inside, Sasha can’t help but see their apartment through the doctor’s eyes. The drying laundry, which Maman merely pushes aside, as if it’s not embarrassing. Books everywhere, stacked like fortresses on the piano, the radiator, the window ledge. At least the good tablecloth is on, the one with a burn mark near the edge that they cover with the saltcellar.

Maman is still wearing her apron, and her hair has dampened around her face, so that small curls spring up. Sasha watches her smooth it back into order with one hand while stirring the pot with the other.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she says to Dr. Larsen. “Sasha, set another place, please.”

Sasha grabs a fifth plate from the sideboard and lays it down with care between her parents’ place settings. The kitchen smells of mushrooms and onions, with the tart bite of sauerkraut beneath. Hunter’s stew. Maman often makes it when there’s not much meat on hand.

Rald has squeezed himself into a corner of the sofa with one of his comic books—not helping, as usual.

“Rald,” Sasha says impatiently, “fill the water pitcher. We have company, if you haven’t noticed. And try not to burp at the table.”

He makes a face at her just as the door opens. It’s Papa, home from the watch factory. “Well,” he says, pulling off his cap, “I see we’ve been joined by our mysterious upstairs neighbor.”

The doctor rises slightly. “Kristof Larsen. Hello.”

“Felix Brodsky.” Papa gives him a warm, firm handshake. “We’ve wondered about you. You’re just above us, and yet you make less noise than a cat.”

Kristof laughs, coloring. “I could try harder, if you’d like. Bang a few pans now and then.” He glances around at the lively chaos in the apartment. “But I’m not sure I could compete.”

“We won’t hold it against you.” Papa’s eyes twinkle as he jokes in his usual way. “Please, sit.”

They all settle in. Maman ladles stew into bowls. Papa murmurs a “Baruch atah Adonai” before lifting his spoon.

“Amen,” Maman says quietly.

Sasha notices how Dr. Larsen glances between her parents, nodding politely but saying nothing. Perhaps he doesn’t pray. Certainly, he’s not Jewish. Tall and fair, with skin so pale it’s almost translucent in the lamplight, he looks as unlike the rest of them as a snowdrift at a bonfire.

“This is delicious,” he says after a few bites.

“It’s what we had,” Maman replies. But there’s pride in her voice. Sasha knows she secretly loves to be praised for her cooking.

“How long have you been in Paris?” Dr. Larsen asks Papa.

“Five years. We came from Warsaw.” Papa’s eyes catch Maman’s, and a silent conversation flickers back and forth between them. This is how they are.

“We left when things began to get bad,” Maman adds. “It wasn’t hard to read the writing on the wall.”

Kristof glances back and forth, perhaps unsure if it’s appropriate to ask more. Maman seems to sense his hesitation and shrugs lightly. “My father had a bakery. It was burned. He didn’t survive it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kristof says quietly.

Felix only nods.

“We were lucky,” Maman says. “Paris has been good to us. Felix found work. We found community. And”—she smiles ironically—“we found this place, this very drafty but serviceable apartment.”

Felix chuckles. “Serviceable? It’s a palace compared to the attic rooms we started in.”

“Don’t remind me,” she says.

The conversation drifts from Parisian weather to books to Maman’s upcoming due date near the end of the summer. Rald tugs on Kristof’s sleeve once to ask what kind of doctor he is, and Kristof answers gently, with words Sasha approves of—simple, but not condescending.

“Not the kind who delivers babies,” he says. “I study the mind.”

Sasha leans forward, interested. “Do you mean madness? Or memory?”

“Both,” Kristof says, giving her an amused look. “Among other things.”

“I think memory is fascinating, don’t you?” she says. “I can memorize a hundred objects if I arrange them in a room in my mind.”

Papa raises his eyebrows. “Is that why I found a carrot in my shoe?”

“You exaggerate.” Sasha snorts. “It was under the table.”

Everyone laughs, even Kristof. Sasha watches him a little longer. There are faint purplish shadows beneath his blue eyes. He looks as if he never sleeps, or as if he thinks too much. Even so, he’s handsome, and there’s a kindness in his face too. She can tell he is happy to be here and have their company, like someone coming in from the cold.

After dinner, Maman clears dishes while Papa offers Kristof coffee. Sasha watches from her usual spot on the piano bench, one leg swinging. Rald is reading on the sofa, pretending he’s not tired, though his head bobs every few moments.

When Kristof rises to leave, Papa walks him to the door, and Sasha trails after them.

“Do you know the game?” Papa asks, nodding to the Go board on the table.

“Not well,” Kristof admits. “My grandfather taught me when I was a boy, but I’ve never played enough to advance my skills to any great degree.” He smiles. “I tend to clutch at the edges of the board, trying to stay alive as long as possible.”

“Ah, then I can teach you. I promise I’ll take it easy on you at first.”

Sasha laughs. “Don’t take the bait, Dr. Larsen. He’s a shark.”

“Don’t frighten away the little fish, Sasha,” Felix teases, winking. “Even sharks need to eat.”

As the doctor says good night, Sasha wonders what kind of apartment he goes back to, and if he likes living alone. She wouldn’t want it for herself. The quiet would be unnerving, she thinks. But for an hour or two—long enough to read in peace, to brush her hair at night without Rald banging on the door to the bathroom—that would be like heaven.

“Come again,” Papa calls after him, and then closes the door. He touches his beard lightly and looks down at Sasha. “What a nice man. Don’t you think so?”

“I like him,” she says. “He seems a little lonely, though.”

Her father blinks, appraising her. “Yes, I saw that as well. Not much slips by you, does it?”

Sasha smiles, feeling herself expand. He sees her. “That’s the idea.”

CHAPTER 8

Spring comes to Paris so gradually it seems to approach on tiptoe. The war, however, remains eerily distant. Dispatches from the front read more like stories from some other time, some other world. The only real fighting is happening in Finland, where Soviet and Finnish forces wage their own private conflict, as if on the snowy face of the moon.

In every newspaper story and radio bulletin, the French government insists that if the Nazis ever challenge France’s borders, the Maginot Line will hold. The fortress is a marvel of technology. Two hundred eighty miles of bunkers and gun batteries, surrounded by minefields—France’s great shield against the inevitable. Reinforced galleries run five or six stories underground, stocked with enough supplies to outlast a siege. Hospitals, kitchens, barracks, even a system of trapdoors to catch the enemy if they breach the line. Steel and concrete, wood and fireproof barriers. Surely nothing like it has ever existed. But Kristof has already begun to suspect the fortress might also be a monument to wishful thinking.

He sees similar signs everywhere—which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Denial has always been the mind’s first line of defense against the unbearable. Even those who understand the situation clearly need to believe the lie, as if sheer will can make one version of reality outlast the other. There’s even a Dutch word for it—struisvogelpolitiek. “Ostrich thinking.” Burying one’s head in the sand, pretending everything is fine.

He’s hardly immune to this strategy himself. However distant the war seems now, the floodgates are open. History is rushing toward them. But for the moment, Paris hovers—caught between past and future, winter and spring, war and peace. And Kristof, like so many others, finds himself drawn to that suspension. Even basking in it. The souterrain becomes part of the seduction: a passage out of time, stamped with his name.

THAT FIRST WINTER, before everything changes, Kristof and Alesander meet often, usually after midnight, when skulking into obscure tunnel entrances goes mostly undetected.

Kristof is learning to move through the dark with increasing confidence. The tunnels are a language he’s learning with his body. The way the walls narrow and widen, how the ground shifts from packed stone to powdery soil to clay so moist it clings to his boots, caking off later like chalk. The vaulted caverns and sinkholes have a thousand different identities. Some tunnels are neatly mortared, their walls as clean and square as if punched out by a tool, some barely wide enough for a child to crawl through. Some have collapsed like molehills, half filled with rubble, while others lead to chambers vast as ballrooms, held up by thick, ancient columns that might well last for another six hundred years.

Once, they stumble on an elegant spiral staircase that leads to a manhole cover. Kristof tilts his head, listening to the life moving just above them. Heel strikes clacking against pavement, bicycle tires skimming over stone, the distant wail of a baby. And yet here below, they could be ghosts, moving silent and unseen.

Alesander seems to have almost no inhibitions, no checks and balances, no brakes. He also seems to need very little sleep—unlike Kristof, who requires several days to fully recover after one of their adventures.

On a frigid night in February, the two men meet and make their way to Montparnasse, to a tangle of dark streets south of the cemetery. The cobblestones gleam, slick with mist. The sky hangs low, pulsing with a halo from café lights several blocks away. But here, they pass no one except a lanky, ginger-furred tomcat standing sentinel near an alleyway.

For a moment, Kristof wonders if Alesander means to go in that direction, into a cataract of trash bins and brackish-smelling sewer grates. Instead, he ducks through a ragged hole in a chain-link fence. On the other side, before an arched steel door set into the stone boundary wall of the cemetery, Alesander rifles through his ring of outlandish-looking keys.

Kristof assumes the door will lead below, but instead, it takes them through the wall, into a shadowed expanse of tombstones and crypts. “Why didn’t we just jump the wall or slide through one of the openings in the gate?” he asks.

“What fun would that be? Besides, I have a key.”

Kristof can only look at his friend, shaking his head. “Where to now?”

“Now, the good part.”

In Alesander’s presence, he often finds himself feeling this way—as if he’s apprenticed to a magician or illusionist. Anything might happen at any moment. A shower of coins from an empty bucket. Smoke transformed into a cage of doves.

For the past six years, Kristof has been so focused on his studies and career that he had lost all sense of play. These days, he needs just that—more than ever. The uncertainty in the world keeps growing. But in the tunnels, this small, occasional dance with precariousness acts like a pressure release. It’s all foolish, and he knows it. He’s behaving like a schoolboy, and yet when he was at school, long ago, he was far too diligent and far too good. He has catching up to do.

They reach a squat, round tower flanked by skeletal cypress trees. Alesander sets to work on another lock. “The Tour de la Charité,” he explains. “It was a windmill once, back when this was farmland for a monastery. The monks built it in the seventeenth century. After the Revolution, the church was seized, the monks expelled, but this—this was left behind. They say Robespierre’s men used it to store confiscated church gold before it was melted down. Then it was forgotten.”

“Until now?” Kristof guesses.

Alesander’s grin is barely visible in the dim light. “Something like that.”

Beyond the tower’s threshold, the scent of earth and damp stone thickens. A spiral staircase leads them downward, the air cooling with each step. Kristof hesitates at the base, where the passageway yawns into blackness.

“This way,” Alesander says, leading him through a low archway. On the other side, his flashlight skims over a row of stacked remains. Skulls and femurs arranged in precise, orderly patterns. Everything, all of it, patinaed like aged bronze.

“Finally, my private tour of the catacombs,” Kristof says.

“You thought I’d forgotten?”

The spectacle is mind-boggling. Not just how artfully the bones have been positioned but the sheer magnitude of them. “How many cemeteries were dug up and dumped here?” Kristof asks.

“Twenty.”

Twenty.

“The Cemetery of the Innocents was the worst,” Alesander continues. “Bodies in charnel pits layered so deep they overflowed into cellars, into basements, the stench unbearable. In 1786, Louis XVI ordered them cleared. It took two years. They did it at night, so the people wouldn’t panic.”

“And now they’re just… here. Anonymous and disassembled.”

“Better than being paved over, wouldn’t you say?” Alesander’s voice is oddly reverent. “Here, they are remembered. Or at least, they remain.”

Kristof exhales, feeling the enormity of it—the millions who have lived and died above these streets, now resting in the dark. He thinks of Annelies too. Her grave is so far away. Before he left Nijmegen, he visited her, placing a bundle of violets knotted with a scrap of white ribbon at her tombstone. But that was years ago, when he still believed grief could be assuaged with ritual. That loss was finite.

Now, standing here among millions of nameless bones, he realizes that the dead are never truly gone. They wait underground, in the corners of memory. In words unspoken and choices unmade. His sister was a life, and now she is an absence. Palpable. Perpetual.

“I suppose we all end up in the same place eventually,” he says. “Maybe the accoutrements don’t matter. Funerals. Grave markers. Mourners.”

“What matters is what we do now.” As if for emphasis, Alesander’s light lingers on the hollow gaze of a skull. “While we’re here and still can.”

Saint-Marcel, Paris 1664

CHAPTER 9

Alouette’s earliest memories are of the sea. Periwinkle sky, azure water, salt-fresh air. The smell of cut lavender bushels drying in the sun. Bright fishing boats bobbing in the old port beneath crying gulls. She was just three years old when her family arrived from Marseille, but sometimes when she closes her eyes to sleep, she can still hear the gauzy fragments of a lullaby sung by her Provençal grandmother.

When they moved from the south, her mother, Henriette, had brought along her knowledge of plants. In Henriette’s hands, sage fought off fever, willow bark eased pain, marigold defended against infection. “Nature gives freely,” she would say, “if you know how to ask.” Even now, Alouette can picture her deft movements. Crushing leaves to release their essence, steeping roots until they surrendered their strength.

After Alouette’s birth, Henriette had carried three other babes through three separate dark winters, only to deliver each of them, pale and breathless, into the hands of the midwife. Stillborn.

The last time, when Alouette was six, the village women helped her mother wrap the small bundle—her brother—in a length of waxed cerecloth and walked with her to the Cimetière Saint-Médard, where, like the others, he was laid not in a crypt or cloister marked with flagstone, but in a common grave, sprinkled with a dusting of earth and lime, along with a prayer for his soul. That night, her parents had quarreled so loudly that they woke Alouette on the other side of the thin wall.

“That damned river has poisoned my womb,” her mother had wailed jaggedly, through tears. “What kind of healer am I if I cannot keep my own children alive?”

In the months that followed, Henriette became a changed person. She would start a task—grinding roots into paste, tying bundled herbs with twine—and then simply stop, staring into nothing. She spoke to the lost children as if they sat beside her. Sometimes she laughed, bright and terrible, making the hair on Alouette’s neck rise.

The villagers whispered. “Touched in the head,” they said. “Poor René, saddled with a madwoman instead of a wife.”

Shame burned in Alouette. A complicated thing. At times, she wanted to shake Henriette, to make her see the daughter she still had. She despised her mother for being weak, and yet she also hated the villagers for their cruelty, wishing she could defend Henriette against them with sharp stones.

And then one morning, she was simply gone. Alouette rose to a cold kitchen. Her father was there, looking at the untended hearth with a dazed expression, hands on his hips. Henriette had not said goodbye. She’d taken almost nothing with her.

Standing beside her father, Alouette wanted to seem strong, to be strong, so that this bog of sadness and confusion would sink away behind her. A dark shape tossed into the darker river. Would she ever see her mother again? Would Henriette try to return to Marseille? And yet how could she, with almost no money? She might starve or stumble into a den of thieves, cutthroats. Anything.

Instead of wailing or screaming, Alouette made a small box in her mind—large enough to hold the questions that might never be answered—then she closed the box, sealed it well, and buried it.

NOW, TWELVE YEARS later, Alouette pours herself into her experiments, finding in color what she’s lost in other ways. With each passing season, her hands have grown more confident, her eye more refined.

Drawing water at the river one morning, she looks up to see a tanner downstream. The image is as foul and stomach-turning as ever—a hunched figure ankle-deep in murky pools, flies thick as a constellation around him. With a practiced and almost graceful movement, the tanner dips a torn hide into a yellowish solution. Moments later, when he withdraws it, what had been a soft, decaying piece of flesh now appears taut, its surface pale amber.

Watching, Alouette nearly drops her water pail. Maybe it isn’t gentleness her blues need—it’s violence. A chemical assault that will batter more than lure the color from the woad leaves.

When she’s back in her kitchen workshop, the idea continues to transfix her. European dyers have spent generations chasing the famed blues of the Americas—indigo so potent it’s been called “blue gold,” so disruptive that half of Europe has banned it to protect local guilds. Woad can scarcely compete, no matter how carefully coaxed. But Alouette is finished with patience. Finished with limitations.

She reaches for the small tin box she borrowed from the tanner’s yard—though “borrowed” may be too polite. A painted skull warns of what’s inside, but she ignores it. Arsenic.

She measures it with care, a whisper of powder at a time, and scatters it into the steaming pot where the woad has already steeped. The fumes bite at her throat.

Finally, she dips cloth into the bath, then lifts. The air touches it, and the color changes—blossoming into something dazzling. Vivid. Alive.

The room blurs for a moment, the heat pressing in. She presses a hand to her forehead, unsure whether the dizziness is from the fumes or the sheer force of the moment. It’s unsettling, the way her heartbeat stutters. But the color gleams, unmistakable and new. By morning, she will know if it holds. If the impossible has become hers.

CHAPTER 10

For hours, Alouette has lain awake, watching shadows retreat from the walls. Now dawn creeps through the shutters and across the floor like spilled milk. She loves mornings for this reason. How the light changes everything it touches.

When she can wait no longer, she slips downstairs to her workbench, half terrified, half euphoric. The test piece hangs where she left it. In the dim room, the blue gleams—deeper than indigo, luminous without edge. She lifts it to her face, breathing in its mineral tang. The usual woad stench is gone, as if something alchemical has purified it.

Her hands made this. Her mind. No guild master or overseer. No man.

She hears footsteps overhead—the creak of floorboards, then the stairs. René enters, rubbing his hands together against the cold. His gaze finds the cloth. “What’s this?”

“An experiment. I found a way to deepen the color.”

“How?”

For the briefest moment she hesitates, her fingers brushing against the edge of the workbench where the small box of arsenic sits tucked in the shadows. “I tried something new. A mordant from the tanneries.”

His eyes narrow. “Arsenic?”

“Just a small amount. It didn’t ruin the fibers. And look, the color is as rich as the finest indigo.”

For a moment he simply stares at the test piece. Then he says, “It’s extraordinary. The clarity, the saturation.” He turns it toward the light. “It glows.”

“The chemical is dangerous, I know. But if handled properly—”

Her father shakes his head, blinking. “The masters would never approve of someone outside the guild making such a discovery—let alone a girl.”

“Why do they need to know? I’m not part of their system. They would never let me be. It’s mine.”

That breaks the spell. “They’ll never let it bear your name. You’re no one in their eyes. You think they won’t punish you?”

“I think they will,” she says. “Which is why we should leave.”

“Leave? That’s impossible. Stop this foolishness.”

“It’s not foolishness,” she flares. “Don’t you see? This is our chance to be more than just another family of dyers in Saint-Marcel, forever bowing to the guild masters, forever begging for their approval. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? To make your name unforgettable?”

René turns to the fabric, his hand hovering over the weave. She can see the war within him—caution against ambition, fear against hope. His gaze lingers for one moment longer, then his attention snaps back to her, a door closing with a click, a shudder. “I have my own work to get to. We’ll discuss this later.”

But she already knows: They won’t.

CHAPTER 11

When Étienne was first lowered into a quarry shaft, he had yet to turn eleven. Not to cut stone—that would come later—but to carry water buckets and tools, to light the lamps and scurry where the older men could not fit. His hands had blistered on the rope, his breath going shallow in the dust-choked dark.

What he remembers most is the silence. The way the tunnels swallowed sound, leaving only the scrape of boots and the dull clang of metal. Now, a decade later, that same silence surrounds him—deeply familiar, close as skin.

The workday has ended. Most of the others have gone. Their voices—low, hoarse from damp and exhaustion—fade into the distance, absorbed by the winding tunnels that lead back to the main shaft. Only Étienne remains, waiting for this rare solitude.

He lifts his lantern and studies the chamber he’s claimed as his secret place. The walls rise smooth and pale around him, limestone surfaces polished by generations of quarrymen. In Rouen, his father had shown him caves where ancient people had drawn animals using charcoal and ochre. “Men have always needed to leave their mark,” he explained. “To say I was here before the darkness takes them.”

After placing his tools carefully on the ground, he removes the glass chimney from his lantern. The flame flutters, stretching higher without its constraint. When he lifts it close to the pristine wall, the flame paints the stone with a layer of fine black soot.

He moves his lantern deliberately, watching the darkness bloom beneath it. First, he traces a large É, the lines familiar in his hand now. Then a T, strong and definite. The letter shapes grow as he works, black against the pale stone. I-E-N-N-E. His name, written in smoke.

Long ago, Mémé had begun to teach him his letters during long winter evenings, tracing shapes in the hearth ashes, later guiding his hand on scraps of paper when they could be found. “Knowledge is the one thing they can’t take from you,” she’d say, never needing to clarify who “they” were.

Now, he practices alone, carving meaning out of silence. Beneath his name, he begins a new word: T-H-O-M-A-S. Then another: M-A-R-I-E. The soot marks are fragile, temporary—the next quarryman through this passage might easily destroy them with a careless brush of a sleeve. But for the moment, they exist. Proof that he exists, too, and the people he loves.

He steps back, studying his work. In the flickering light, the smoke writing seems to breathe with a life of its own. Finally, he replaces the glass chimney on the lantern and reaches for his tools.

That’s when he hears it. Not the familiar drip of water or the groan of shifting timbers, but something sharp as flint. Then muffled voices. He stills, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears. Rarely does anyone work this deep so late in the day. Not unless there’s reason to.

Étienne moves toward the sound, careful to keep his footfalls silent. The tunnel ahead narrows, its walls closing in, rough-hewn and uneven. A new vein they’ve only just begun to explore.

Closer in, he stills again, listening. A grunt of effort. The dull clink of metal against rock. He presses his back to the stone, quiets his breathing, suddenly aware that he shouldn’t be here. The best thing to do is reverse his steps soundlessly. To turn back, say nothing, keep his head down. But he doesn’t. Instead, he shifts nearer, inch by inch, until he can peer around a wide turned pillar to the chamber beyond.

It’s dimly lit, but he can make out three figures hunched around a crate, their hands working to shift its weight against the wall, hiding it beneath a spill of quarried stone.

At first, Étienne thinks: theft. That someone in the quarry is bold enough to pilfer shipments meant for the guild masters. But then he sees the mark of a crest—a rich stamp burned into the wood: Gobelin. The name is gilded with wealth and privilege—and, most of all, power. He can’t imagine that anyone, no matter how greedy or intrepid, would dare steal from the family right under their noses, in the village they built.

No, it’s much more likely that these men are working for the Gobelins, helping them smuggle goods past the octroi tax barriers that surround Paris. The taxes are supposed to weigh every man the same, but the wealthy always find ways not to pay. Which makes this even more foul. The idea that the Gobelin family, with their resources and connections, is trying to further evade their dues makes Étienne livid enough to scream.

“Not here, you idiot,” one of the men grumbles. “Farther down. This tunnel’s too exposed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” another says. “The next shipment won’t sit long.”

Étienne listens intently, his fists curled at his sides. If the Gobelin family is using the quarry’s resources, its manpower, it’s possible the higher-ups in the guild are involved, but it’s just as likely that the smugglers are working for the family directly. Taking all the risk, yes, but also profiting. Whatever they’re being paid, it must be more than what he makes for a hard day’s labor. There’s no doubt about that.

As his pulse hammers, his mind spins on the implications. The quarry broke his father, like so many others, earning him little more than a shallow grave before forty. That same path waits for Étienne—tightening breath, a stooped back, a pitiless death. And then what will happen to Thomas and Marie?

It’s a bitter irony to think that moments ago he wrote his name in smoke—a vanishing mark. Ash and illusion. But these men are carving out profit. Something real. Something that lasts.

He’s never stolen anything, never broken the law. His conscience is clean, but his pockets are empty. Maybe survival has always demanded more than endurance, and it’s only now dawning on him. The compromises. The harsher accountings and reckonings. What it costs to actually live.

CHAPTER 12

In Alouette’s kitchen workshop, she begins to feel like an alchemist. Not the robed sorcerers of old who promised miracles, but a humbler, hungrier kind.

Jars of copper and alum glint in the firelight, powders hissing faintly when stirred. The blue dye has unlocked something inside her: a feverish thirst for knowledge braided with hope. The simple joys of woad and weld no longer satisfy. She wants more. Wants this creation to sprout wings for her, sow a path beyond this city, a life shaped by her own hands.

And yet some nights, the pigments keep their grip on her long after she’s left her workshop. Her fingertips tingle. When she stands too fast, the room tilts. A bitter, metallic taste haunts her tongue, no matter what she drinks to chase it away.

It’s the heat, she tries to tell herself. The effort, and the thrill of creation. But deep down, she knows these symptoms are effects of the arsenic. That she’s playing with fire. But what other way is there? To stay is to disappear. To follow the rules is to be kept small forever.

Perhaps the dream always poisons the dreamer a little.

ONE EVENING, SHE walks to the quarry at the base of the butte to gather woad. The plants grow in her own garden, but here the rocky soil and wildness give the leaves more potency, or so it has always seemed to her.

Alouette hasn’t been here in more than a month. Not since the quarry reopened. But even before she reaches the ridge, she knows that she’s made a mistake. The chestnut trees that ringed the open meadow have been felled, their stumps jutting like broken teeth. And the slope, once green with wild grasses, has been gutted—raw limestone exposed in jagged wounds, pale rubble bleeding down the incline.

The river was poisoned long before she was born, bled of its clarity until it can only run black. And now the butte, too, has been taken—torn from the land, loaded onto wagons, sold for a price. There is no silence like the one that follows a ruin.

She swallows against the bitterness rising in her throat. She should go. There is nothing left for her here. But then she sees him—the new quarrier. The one she noticed in town. His tunic and boots are powdered with dust, his long hair falling past the thin cotton scarf knotted at his neck.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.” His voice is rough-edged, deep. “The area isn’t safe, though. Not tonight.”

Alouette bristles at the warning. As if she has no right to be here. As if she is not standing on ground that she once called hers. “I was just…” She stops herself. She owes him no explanation. Instead, she lifts her chin. “I was curious about how the quarry works.”

It’s not quite a lie. She is curious. And she hates what she’s seen.

He gestures behind him, toward the pit. “As I said, you shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid.”

He makes an exasperated sound and takes a few steps nearer. He’s twenty, perhaps, with tawny eyes and a strong jaw. There is something about him—a stillness that she first noticed in town. It tells her he means to give little away about himself.

“Well, you should be,” he says.

Her fingers tighten at her sides. “You don’t even know me.”

“No. Nor do you know me. I’m Étienne Duchamp.”

She studies him, wondering what he is thinking. To him, she has no history, no trailing gossip of her odd ways and aloofness. She might be any willowy girl wearing a patched skirt and heavy boots, her braid already loosening in the evening breeze. “Alouette Voland.”

His gaze lingers. “Like the bird.”

She waits for the teasing, the mockery. She’s heard it all before—A skylark, is it? Do you sing?—but Étienne only nods slightly, as if her name confirms something he already suspected.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“Rouen, in the north.”

“Is it nice there? I’ve never been anywhere.”

“Nice enough until it wasn’t. My father died there. He was a quarrier too.”

She can tell he doesn’t want her sympathy. His words land flat, factual—and yet she hesitates. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry. Still, you go on working in the quarry.”

“Do you see another way? I can hardly let my family starve.”

“There’s always a choice.”

His laugh is short, mirthless. “Not for men like me.”

“I hate what’s become of this place,” she says, gesturing toward the severed hillside, the crushed remains of the butte, wishing she could remake the world in so many ways. “Soon, there’ll be no beauty anywhere.”

He folds his arms, regarding her with a faint tilt of his head. “I dig where I’m told.” There’s no edge in this. Just a truth so blunt it feels almost tender.

Alouette looks away. “I used to come here as a girl. When it was wild and quiet.”

“It’s not all gone,” he says as a breeze lifts the dust between them. “You can still hear that quiet, if you listen for it.”

For a moment, neither speaks. Then she says, “Do you ever think about leaving?”

He smiles. “I just arrived. But yes. Almost every day.”

Alouette feels embarrassed now, and more than a little confused. She doesn’t know what to make of this—of him. “I should go,” she murmurs abruptly.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

“Perhaps,” she echoes. Turning, she steps carefully down the slope. But just before the bend, she glances back.

He is still there. Still watching.

CHAPTER 13

As Alouette nears home, the moon breaks through the clouds, casting its waxen light over the Gobelin factory. The tin rooftop gleams with an eerie sheen, like verdigris on old copper.

For years, villagers have whispered of a ghost here: Jehan Gobelin’s restless spirit, draped in shadows, guarding his secrets with a voice like bone scraping bone. Alouette has never believed in the phantom, though she understands the legend’s appeal.

Tonight, the factory seems to thrum. She’s almost at the entrance when movement catches her eye. It’s Thierry Lavigne, her father’s journeyman.

“Oh, hello. You’re working quite late, Thierry.”

“Your father is. I only stayed to keep an eye on him.” He shifts from one foot to the other, seeming nervous, on edge. “It’s not my place, but he’s pushing himself too hard. He won’t listen.”

“He’s fine.”

“Of course. You’d know better.” With that, Thierry nods and strides away, leaving her with a feeling of uneasiness.

Inside, she follows the ripe stench of chemicals to her father. Steam rises like wraiths as he stands on the scaffold, stirring a wide cauldron.

When she approaches, his eyes dart up. “Alouette. What are you doing here?”

“I was just passing by on my way back to the cottage. I saw Thierry outside. He seemed… concerned.”

René tenses. “I told him it was a test. A new mordant. Nothing to report.”

She steps closer, eyeing the liquid, which is dark as blood. Something drops out of her chest. “You’re experimenting with the arsenic. Why have you kept this from me?”

“I had to know if it was real.” His voice tightens, ropelike. “If your method could be repeated. If it has a future.”

The heat from the vat curls against her face. Her hands itch. Skin tingling in that way she’s tried to ignore for days. “Even so, you could have told me.”

He turns away. “It worked. Look.”

But she doesn’t want to look. She knows already that the color will have the richness of kermes. Of coppery fire. “You told me not to use it.”

“I said we had to be careful.”

“No,” she says. “You said to leave it alone. That it was too dangerous.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“By taking it for yourself?”

His jaw sets. “This isn’t about you or me. It’s about the dye.” He gestures toward the vat. “The future. You’ll be part of it—don’t you see? All of this is for us. But it must be perfect first.”

“Us?” she repeats, her throat dry as paper. “And when it’s perfect, what then?”

“We’ll go. Just as you said. We’ll leave this place behind and take what we’ve made with us. In secret, of course. If anyone suspects, that would be disastrous.” He reaches for the stirring rod, and that’s when she sees it. A tremor. Barely there, but unmistakable.

Her breath catches. He tightens his grip, willing the motion to smooth, but she has already seen.

An unwelcome memory rises. In the workshop two years ago, an older dyer lost his life to caustic chemicals. Florent. That was his name. He was seasoned and should have been more careful. Should have known better.

She hadn’t witnessed the accident, only its aftermath—his body twisted on the floor, his breath coming in tight, wet gasps, the foam at the corner of his mouth tinged green. Whispers of recrimination raced through the factory, that he had mismeasured his mordant, inhaled too much of something he shouldn’t have. The guards wrapped his body in linen and carried him out before the next shift arrived.

“If you don’t respect the nature of these poisons, you may as well invite a fire into your lungs,” someone had told her. Lucienne, maybe, or one of the older women in the washroom.

Alouette had heeded the warning then. Had promised herself she would never turn her back on the very real dangers at play. But now—

“It won’t be much longer. Please have faith, my lark.”

Faith, she thinks, as the factory seems to pulse around her like a second heart. Then why does it feel like fate instead? Like a feeling creeping over her skin, whispering that something awful has been set in motion? That she might not be able to stop it?

Paris 1940

CHAPTER 14

If the souterrain pulls on Kristof’s imagination, the Brodsky family pulls on something deeper. His craving for belonging. More evenings than not, he finds himself at their door, reveling in the clatter of dishes, Rald asking to carry bowls, Rachel saying, “Careful with those.” It’s all a beautiful kind of chaos. Something he hadn’t realized he missed.

Paris feels more like a stage set by the day, waiting for the curtain to fall. Being with the Brodskys tethers him to the ordinary, the real. On warmer spring nights, Felix sets up his Go board in the courtyard to school Kristof in the finer points of the game. Generally, this leads to a thorough trouncing—not that he minds. He marvels at Felix’s patience, how even in the direst positions, he studies the board until he finds a way forward.

The game has such elementary elegance. A circle and a line. Black and white stones. A simple grid holding endless complexity—rules learned in minutes, mastered over a lifetime. When the family fled Warsaw, Felix wrapped the slotted cherrywood board in layers of felt and carried it in his rucksack the whole way.

Kristof can’t quite explain why this act touches him so. Perhaps because it wasn’t a necessity Felix chose to carry—but something that insisted on joy, on continuity. A quiet declaration that even in flight, some part of him believed they would still need to play.

Sasha and Rald had been too young to understand why they left Poland so quickly. Paris was meant to be a haven. For a time, it had been. But now? Now Kristof isn’t sure any such place exists in Europe.

Felix is only thirty-three, just five years older than Kristof, though sometimes that astonishes him. Not because Felix seems old, but because he seems anchored in ways Kristof has never felt. Complete.

Rachel is expecting their third child. Sasha, now thirteen, is her mother’s second pair of hands. Eight-year-old Rald is newly obsessed with marbles and bottle caps, storing them in a cigar box with nearly the same care Felix shows the Go board.

One April evening, Rald and the other boys are at the far end of the courtyard, flicking bottle caps at a potted ficus on Madame Gagnon’s small terrace.

“It’s their version of the Maginot Line,” Felix says.

Kristof laughs. “They’re defending it with bottle caps?”

“Ils ne passeront pas,” Felix teases, half over his shoulder. “As if the Germans can’t simply go around—or fly over?”

“Don’t even say it. I need something to believe in, however flimsy.”

“You can’t dally forever. Your move.”

Kristof groans. The game has tipped into a capturing race, and Felix has already set a trap. “What do you think I should do?” he asks Sasha.

She’s brought her schoolwork outside, but more than half the time, she watches them. Her dark eyes track every move. “To win, you mean?”

“Of course.”

She smiles. “Pray?”

Kristof laughs. “I already tried that.” He places a black stone, feigning confidence.

“A glutton for punishment,” Felix says to Sasha.

She leans closer. “Maybe he sees something we don’t.”

“I wish,” Kristof says.

Sasha is supposed to be working on a history assignment, but Kristof spots Ovid beneath her textbook. She’s set herself a challenge: to memorize the Metamorphoses in Latin before her sixteenth birthday, using a memory palace like the ancients did. She described it to him once—rooms in her mind, each holding a different tale. A sunlit chamber for Daphne and Apollo. A stairwell for Phaëthon’s fall. Every passage pinned to a place, so that walking through the palace brings the stories back, step by step.

Her romanticism makes Kristof smile. Then sigh. He remembers his sister, years ago, speaking the same way about Hölderlin—reciting verse in their father’s study, her eyes bright with wonder. That was before depression took hold. Before he found the book still open on her desk, margins filled with notes she would never finish. She had underlined, Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch. “Where there is danger, salvation also grows.” Hopeful words. But she hadn’t kept hold of them.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part: You can see disaster coming and still be powerless to stop it.

He places another black stone. The board answers with a soft click. Above them, Madame Martin’s window is open, and Édith Piaf’s voice drifts through the courtyard like golden thread. Rachel comes down with glasses of tea, stirred with cherry preserves and a thimbleful of slivovitz, just the way Felix likes it.

She eases into a chair, pushing off her shoes. Her feet are often swollen now, and Kristof notices the dark half-moons under her eyes. Earlier that day, they received a letter from Felix’s cousin in Poland. He and his family had been moved to a sector reserved for Jews. Felix hides his worry for the children’s sake, but Rachel looks frayed.

“A ghetto,” she says. “Like Kiev in ’19. Like Warsaw after. This world, I’m telling you.”

“They’ll be all right,” Kristof replies gently. “They have each other.”

“My grandfather used to say persecution has a rhythm,” Rachel murmurs. “It drifts away for a while… but it always rolls back in.”

Sasha has been listening all along. Now she lifts her book and reads aloud: “Fluctus assurgere videntur formare caelum. ‘The waves rose up and seemed to form the sky.’ It’s from Book Eleven. Ceyx’s ship is destroyed in a storm.”

“Oh, Gołąbeczku,” Felix says, clicking his tongue. “Maybe you should read something happier?”

“It is beautiful, though. The gods are so moved by Ceyx and Alcyon’s love that they turn them into kingfishers. They soar together forever.”

“Hopeful, at least,” Felix concedes.

“Sounds tiring to me,” Rachel teases. “Eternity is an awfully long time.”

“They’re halcyon birds,” says Sasha. “They’re immortal.”

Rachel laughs. “All right, then. You win. It’s cheerful.”

Listening, Kristof wonders if they aren’t all pretending, just a little. Turning toward routine—soup bowls, board games, fading sunlight—as if by keeping their feet on familiar stones, they might avoid slipping into the abyss gathering just beyond. How long can that go on?

He looks at the board. Rald launches another bottle cap. Rachel smooths her skirt. Sasha turns a page, murmuring Latin under her breath. Kristof studies the stones in front of him. But all he can see now is the shape of his loss, already laid out and waiting.

CHAPTER 15

On a Friday in early May, Kristof cracks two eggs into a skillet. The morning is still, the window propped open to let in a wisp of cool air. The whites are just beginning to set when a voice erupts from the wireless—sharp, dry, sparking with urgency.

He freezes, spatula in hand. The Germans have launched a coordinated offensive. A lightning assault on the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Troops are already crossing the Meuse. As he listens, the pan smokes. His eggs burn. It’s only when the sting reaches his eyes that he moves again—too late to save anything.

He walks to Sainte-Anne’s still hungry, the raw ache in his stomach ticking alongside the rising dread in his chest. His home country has fallen and his world has altered permanently. His parents have no telephone. There is no way to reach them except in a letter. And letters take time. So, he waits.

For days afterward, the air itself seems to hold its breath. The Germans hurl blow after blow in quick succession. Rotterdam is bombed and burned. Queen Wilhelmina flees to London. Belgium folds. Headlines blur into rumors. Paris grows quiet in a new, unfamiliar way. People whispering as the shop lines lengthen. The butcher no longer joking about the phony war.

On the twelfth, the Germans punch through at Sedan. Kristof reads the headline in front of a newsstand, but it’s the silence afterward that unsettles him most. No speeches from the French government. No new reassurances or directives. Just people moving faster through the streets, as if a fuse has been lit.

He hears someone mutter, “So the Maginot Line broke after all.”

In truth, the Germans didn’t smash through the fortress. They went around it, through the Ardennes—a forest so dense that everyone had deemed such an attack unthinkable.

If anything, this feels worse than failure. It’s stupidity. Gross miscalculation. He starts carrying his identity papers more consistently. Passing the Gare de Lyon, he watches a boy drop a suitcase and his mother yank him forward into the station, too intent on fleeing to care if the case is left there on the sidewalk. Elsewhere in the city, whole families sleep beneath newsstand awnings. The stations grow swollen with conscripts and refugees—too many faces turned south.

EACH DAY, KRISTOF returns home and checks his mailbox. And then, finally—a Dutch postmark.

His father was sleeping when the roar of planes stirred him. At first, he thought it must be a dream. But no. Paratroopers were falling out of the sky in Rotterdam. The Hague, too, he wrote. Some have been caught wearing disguises, dressed like farmers, or even in women’s clothes. Can such an army best ours? They’ll never succeed in taking us. Not when our water defenses are unequaled. It can’t happen. It won’t happen.

A second letter, dated May 12, arrives with the first. By then, German bombers dotted the horizon. In Nijmegen, the streets Kristof grew up on were ringing with artillery fire. Canals detonated. Dutch planes on fire, spiraling to the earth. Somehow, his father wrote, with a disbelief that mirrors his own, we are at war.

Kristof knows his father’s desk well. Sunlight would have caught the brass rim of the inkwell as he sat writing. It’s where he taught Annelies and Kristof to form their letters. Now his script runs jagged, desperate. Words fighting to escape the page.

His residency and earlier studies have taught Kristof much about human resilience. About the mind’s capacity to heal. But he’s also learned how quickly systems can fail, how easily the walls we build to protect ourselves can crumble. He thinks of the Maginot Line’s impressive fortifications, of Holland’s famous water defenses. Of his father’s house, which hopefully still stands, unchanged, while the world topples around it.

Watching his homeland fall from a distance feels almost surreal for Kristof. As if it’s a tree crashing down in a faraway forest. A soundless impact he can register only in his bones. The time delay increases his sense of helplessness. His body moves through one world while his mind is anchored in another, half a continent away.

Now, in the middle of his shift, the light in the on-call room flickers overhead, making Kristof jump. Seconds later, Julian Broussard appears in the doorway carrying two chipped mugs of coffee.

The two men have been working together for more than a year—shared shifts, shared cigarettes, the quiet shorthand of long nights in overcrowded wards. If Kristof trusts anyone at Sainte-Anne’s, it’s Julian.

“Thanks,” he says, accepting the coffee gratefully. The warmth of the cup in his hands is grounding. At least as much as it can be, given the current circumstances.

“Anything else from home?” Julian finally asks.

Kristof shakes his head.

Julian blows on the hot liquid, then sips from his cup, looking nearly as haggard as Kristof feels. Typically, Julian’s rakish brand of handsomeness lends him the air of someone who’s just left a baccarat table in Monaco with a barrel full of chips, even when he is diagnosing battle fatigue or schizophrenia. Julian’s young wife, Patrice, is equally beautiful. A few weeks ago, she visited the hospital with a plate of homemade pastries wrapped in striped linen. The sight of her—petite, smiling, with dark hair rolled beneath a fashionable hat—was like a tonic. As if a soft pink camellia bloomed out of one of the X-ray machines.

Julian beamed like a schoolboy that day—so obviously proud of her and delighted with the shape of his life. Now he looks world-worn and depleted. Two weeks can change everything. How well Kristof has come to know that particular lesson.

“Have you met Henri Allard?” he asks Julian.

“From the Fifty-Fifth? The one who won’t stop clawing at his skin?”

“That’s him. Earlier tonight, he broke into the supply closet. He got hold of a bottle of bleach from a custodial cart and was trying to bathe in it.”

“Christ.”

“You said it. Three orderlies had to hold him down while I gave him enough Luminal to drop a horse. And Claudel wants to run electricity through men like that? Men who can’t trust their own minds?”

Julian shakes his head. “You’re right. I just don’t know if I can justify trying to push back. Patrice trusts me to take care of her. And we’re trying to have a baby.”

“That’s wonderful. It really is. You should be thinking of your family first. It’s just…” Kristof gazes into his coffee cup while his thoughts spin. “I’m struggling with all the uncertainty, I suppose.”

“Me too,” Julian says quietly.

They stand there, staring at each other for a moment longer. Then Kristof sighs. He straightens his shoulders, cracks his neck to one side. “I guess we should get back to it.”

CHAPTER 16

Henri Allard had arrived at Sainte-Anne’s two weeks earlier—one of thousands of men broken at the Battle of Sedan. Most not by bullets or shrapnel, but by something far more insidious.

Kristof has always tried to meet new patients with empathy, to picture their experiences. At their intake interview, as Henri talked, he imagined the scenes in detail. Henri in the Ardennes with his brigade—boots soaked in morning mist, rifles slick in their hands, still believing what they’d been told. That the forest was impassable to tanks. That the Maginot Line would hold. That Belgium’s neutrality would buy time.

Then the forest exploded. As the earth shook, Stuka bombers screamed overhead. Their sirens designed to crack nerves well before their dropped ammunition loads cracked bodies. The wailing sound—part banshee, part machine—drove into every crevice of a man’s brain.

“The communication lines went dead first,” Henri said. “Cut to ribbons. Then came the rumors. German tanks at Bulson, they said. Panzers everywhere. We couldn’t tell what was real.”

The panic spread like wildfire through the ranks. Soldiers abandoning positions that had never been breached. Equipment left behind. Entire units dissolving into chaos.

“I ran,” he said, voice hollow. “Everyone did.” He’d been found days later, catatonic in a ditch, physically unharmed but mentally shattered.

Now, on early rounds, Kristof finds Henri awake, staring at the ceiling, restraints lightly tied to the bed railings at his sides.

“Do you know what day it is?” Kristof asks quietly.

“Wednesday.” Pause. “I’m not sure.”

They usually speak in brief exchanges. Henri startles easily. He doesn’t want to talk about the war. But when Kristof mentions his Lyon accent, he nods.

“My mother had a restaurant,” he says. “I used to make sauces. Béchamel. Hollandaise. Things that can split, if you’re not careful.”

Something in that sentence sticks with Kristof.

“You’re not crazy,” he said once, when Henri flinched at his own reflection in the dark window. “You’ve just seen too much. And your mind is trying to survive it.”

Over the coming days, Kristof returns to Henri’s room again and again, working to build trust. Some visits last only minutes. A check of the restraints. A question about sleep. Other times, he lingers—talking softly or saying nothing at all.

Henri doesn’t warm quickly. But he begins to accept small comforts: a cup of tea, a folded towel under his knees, a lamp Kristof leaves burning low. When Kristof offers to read aloud from the newspaper—just the headlines—Henri doesn’t say no.

Progress is uneven. There are still nights when Henri thrashes in his sleep or stares down an empty corner of the ward like it’s full of ghosts. But he also begins to ask quiet questions of Kristof.

“Where are you from?” “Do you believe in God?” “Do you think I’ll ever be normal again?”

HYPNOSIS HAS RARELY been Kristof’s first option with a patient. It’s not a trick or a shortcut. But for someone like Henri—locked in traumatic memory—it can become a door. Not to revelation, necessarily, but to stillness. To relief. The felt memory of safety.

Kristof remembers one patient in Amsterdam, a dockworker who hadn’t spoken for months after watching his crew die. Under hypnosis, guided by nothing more than the image of seaweed drifting in a tide pool, the man’s breathing had changed. His eyes softened. For ten minutes, he had rested in the world again. That was enough to begin.

With Henri, Kristof waits for the right day. Not until the orderlies report three nights of sleep in a row. Not until Henri volunteers a memory—one filled not with concertina wire or mortar explosions, but food. Helping his mother make ratatouille as a child, how she would always slice the zucchini thin enough to see through.

That same afternoon, Kristof asks Henri if he would be open to trying the therapy. He doesn’t ask plaintively or even hopefully—just as a next step. And Henri nods.

THE THERAPY ROOM’S green wallpaper is meant to be calming, though Kristof always finds it vaguely unsettling. He lowers the shade, softening the light. Henri lies stiffly on the chaise. Kristof settles into the chair across from him.

“Thank you for trusting me,” he says.

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Henri’s mouth turns up ever so slightly. Then he says, “I’m ready, I guess.”

“I want you to close your eyes and take a deep breath.”

Henri looks a bit uncertain but follows the cue.

“Now, try to think back to a time before the war, a moment in your life when you felt completely at peace. It could be a place, a person. Anything that brings you a sense of calm and happiness.”

Henri is quiet for a few moments, brow furrowed—then: “My grandparents have land near Bordeaux. They keep goats. I used to spend summers there.”

“That sounds like a wonderful place. Was it hilly?”

“Rolling. A little rocky.”

“Good. Now I want you to imagine yourself there. Can you see it?”

“Yes.”

“What’s there, right in front of you?”

“A path. My grandfather’s dog chasing a rabbit. The grass is tall. Chicory, little white flowers…”

“You hear the goats’ bells. You feel the sun. The grass moves like water in the wind.”

“Yes,” Henri says, as his hands begin to unclench. His breathing grows more steady.

Kristof continues, spinning the threads of the dream weaver. Together, they follow the path up the hillside. Grasshoppers click like flint. Clouds drift like schooners across a faultless blue sky. The world wraps gently around them, receding.

Kristof’s own memories are part of the spell. He knows that and gives in to it, using every soft pang from his lost boyhood to lift the magic carpet higher. Soon, he doesn’t need to think about the words. The action of speaking and his intentions do all the work for him, drawing out the right cues and markers like bends in a familiar road. Ones he can find by feel alone.

Soon they both stand in the same place, having gone there together. The light at the crest of the hill is gold on gold. Looking out, the sun on their faces, they both see the countryside, where generations of shepherds have tended their flocks. Where they will go on tending them, unharmed and undeterred, into the distant future.

Kristof watches Henri’s forehead go smooth, his hands loose in his lap, and feels moved. The war has slipped out of Henri’s body for now, swept away like chaff. Even minutes of peace like this can make a difference. The body remembers. And where memory goes, healing might follow.

When Kristof brings him gently back, Henri blinks, adjusting, like a man climbing out of a diving bell after a voyage below.

“How do you feel?” Kristof asks.

“A little sleepy,” Henri says. “Calmer.”

“That’s a good sign. You know… I feel calmer myself.” He says this without moving from the chair, without shifting his notebook. For now, the world outside can wait.

CHAPTER 17

Spring has never been Kristof’s favorite season. He can still remember every etched detail of that March in 1935, when the thaw came too quickly. The Waal River ran fast with melted snow, its banks sodden and treacherous, even though the air smelled of cherry blossoms.

He was in medical school then, focused on textbooks and cadavers. The cling of formaldehyde followed him everywhere, no matter how vigorously he washed his hands, and yet he loved learning the map of human bodies. He took comfort in this—in names, in order, in control. Here was the brachial plexus. Here was the sciatic nerve.

But Annelies lived outside such lines. Light hit her too brightly. Sounds cut too sharply. The world poured into her, more than her slight frame could hold. Most afternoons, he would find her in the living room, sprawled on the carpet, surrounded by books. Never a chair—too ordinary. Books were her portal, her escape.

Some days, she wouldn’t even notice him standing there, her concentration like a room she entered alone, closing the door behind her. Other times, she leaped up like an uncoiled spring, words rushing from her in breathless, urgent bursts.

“Listen, Kristof. Hölderlin writes of rivers as if they’re the veins of gods. Die Donau, der Rhein—they’re not just water but time itself flowing.” She looked up to see if he was following her. “The poet’s voice still reaches us, long after his mind collapsed.”

That was Annelies. Finding voices others missed. Building bridges that outstripped time. In summer, she read Hölderlin and Goethe in the garden while their mother’s roses blazed. But there were other days when she slept late, not wanting to leave her room. Nights he heard her pacing, reciting poetry in German, obsessed with translating the complex rhythms.

The warning signs were there, but subtle. And he had been young, and so certain of the solidity of the world. Intent on his own ambitions.

He had entered medical school at the age of twenty—far younger than most of his peers. A prodigy, they’d called him—always first in his class, especially in sciences. At first, he’d set his sights on becoming a surgeon, drawn by the precision it required, the clean lines between success and failure. There was glory in surgery, in being the youngest to master complex procedures.

This was what consumed Kristof in the spring of 1935—seeing his name in medical journals, his techniques taught to others. Meanwhile, the person he loved most retreated further and further into a black cloak of sadness.

THAT MORNING, SHE’D left for school as usual, her dark hair caught up in a neat braid, her wool coat buttoned against the lingering chill. Nothing seemed different.

The policeman who came to their door kept apologizing, as if courtesy could soften the blow. They had found her schoolbooks stacked neatly on the bridge railing. Her German literature notes carefully written out, translations of Rilke’s poetry in her precise hand. A letter lay beside them, folded twice and addressed simply:

Liebe Familie,

I’ve tried to be strong, to bear what cannot be borne, but I’m so tired. For a long time, I have wanted to believe that life could be like Rilke’s rose petals, “noiseless, living, opening without end.” And yet so much feels cold and walled off and too difficult instead, or perhaps I simply don’t have enough faith. Remember me when you read Rilke’s words:

“Every angel is terrifying.” Now I understand why.

Alles Liebe,

Annelies

Kristof had watched his mother’s face drain of color. Her hand flew to her throat, to the small gold cross Annelies had given her the previous Christmas. His father went still as stone.

The days that followed moved like a dream. Their house filled with timid whispers, with covered dishes no one ate, with relatives who didn’t know whether or not to mention her name. His mother took to her bed, emerging only to sit in Annelies’s room, touching her books, her sweaters, the dried flowers she’d pressed between dictionary pages. His father shut himself into his study for hours, emerging with red-rimmed eyes. At night, Kristof heard him pacing, pacing, much the way Annelies had once done.

“She was doing so well,” his mother would say, over and over. “She seemed better.” Just days before, Annelies had laughed telling a story at breakfast, his mother reminded him. And what about the new dress she’d wanted to wear to graduation? Why would someone who had been planning so carefully for the future suddenly choose to abandon it?

But Kristof thought back to other telling moments. The chapped, ragged edges of Annelies’s nail beds, where she wouldn’t stop picking at the skin. The way she’d given away some of her favorite German poetry books the week before. How she’d hugged him longer than usual that last morning.

“Hölderlin wrote even as his mind fragmented,” his sister had told him once, perched on the windowsill with a volume of poetry in her lap. “He kept writing, kept finding beauty, even as he lost himself. Isn’t that remarkable?”

Her entire face had lit up then. But now he wondered if she had been talking about inevitability instead of beauty. If the meaning of Hölderlin’s story for her wasn’t resilience, but disappearance.

Annelies was his sister, but she was also his first patient. Kristof just didn’t know it then.

Now, years later, on the overcrowded neurasthenic ward at Sainte-Anne’s, men sit or lie in broken postures, fighting silent battles. Their pain hums beneath the surface, just as Annelies’s did once. Waiting for someone to hear it.

This is why he stays a little longer than necessary near the bedsides of men like Henri Allard. Stays until their breathing steadies, until the tension eases in their faces and hands. These small moments feel like steps toward trust. Like beams and trusses slowly set into place for an invisible but crucial bridge.

If once he stood outside his sister’s door feeling utterly powerless, these days he leans in, listening to the quiet between his patients’ words. As if by helping them, he might finally understand her.

Here he can knock at another soul’s door. And this time, he can wait for an answer.

CHAPTER 18

It’s the last week of school. If the sun had its way, nothing would be wrong. It falls in golden sheets across the pavement, catches in the curls at the nape of Léa Engel’s neck as she erases the board for the last time. The classroom smells like chalk dust and pencil shavings and the faint sourness of children trying not to sweat in wool jumpers.

The bell rings, and everyone bursts out as if summer still means apricot tartlets, marbles in the street, and dusk that lasts forever. As if the world is the same as ever. But Sasha can feel the difference in the air. In the way Madame Blin didn’t meet their eyes when she handed back their last assignments. In the way Joseph Metz’s desk has stayed empty since Passover.

On the walk home, Sasha passes three families she doesn’t recognize—mothers with bundled children, one with only a single suitcase, another with none. They linger near the bakery, trying to look as if they fit in here, but their shoes are all wrong. A boy about Rald’s age crouches on the curb, drawing something invisible with his finger.

She wonders if this was how her family looked to others when they first arrived. Foreign and conspicuous. At seven, she barely knew the word for bread. Maman had tried to coach her before they entered shops: S’il vous plaît, merci beaucoup, non, je regarde seulement. And yet she stammered, reddening, wanting to run away.

They had rented a furnished apartment then, with a nice synagogue nearby. A radio that picked up Warsaw on clear nights. They were not homeless, not exactly. But they had left behind something permanent and taken the opposite with them. Their lives folded into suitcases, carried like contraband.

Now she passes the new wave of refugees and tries not to stare. Part of her wants to reach out. To say: It gets easier. To say: There are alleyways with fig trees in bloom, and small kindnesses you won’t expect. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even slow down.

Instead, she lets her shadow stretch long ahead of her on the cobblestones and thinks about how strange it is to plan for a summer that might not come.

At the corner of the square, she slips into the Jardin des Gobelins. The gate creaks faintly behind her. It’s peaceful here, a stretch of surprising greenery tucked between old buildings with blistered shutters and mostly empty cafés. Today, there is an old man reading a newspaper on one of the benches and a girl younger than Rald dragging a stick through the dust as if she’s plowing a field. Near the edge of the fence, a woman in a headscarf kneels beside a narrow garden bed, cutting back a tangle of calendula. For a moment, the woman pauses to watch a pair of sparrows flitting down to drink from a puddle. One hops onto the stone border beside her, curious. She smiles at it and doesn’t go back to her work until the little bird flies away.

Sasha sits on a low wall beside the fountain. The water is cloudy, ringed with algae, but it still burbles as if nothing has changed. Maman says this park was an island once. The river used to run open here, before they buried it. Before the factories closed. Now the Bièvre flows underneath, hidden but still moving. She thinks about that sometimes—how a river can vanish from the surface and still exist. Still carry its story through the dark.

Is that what war is? Something hidden but rising, quiet only until it’s not? Everyone says it’s happening elsewhere. In the east. Over the airwaves. But these families—tired, slow-moving, silent—are not elsewhere. They are here now, passing like wraiths through Sasha’s ordinary streets. They wear everything they own and still carry almost nothing.

Taking out her notebook, she rests her hand on the cover but doesn’t open it yet. The wind lifts the corner of a colored flyer caught beneath a nearby yew shrub—headlines in bold type, names of cities she isn’t sure how to pronounce. She wants to write something about how this all feels. About how much she worries that nothing will ever be the same. About being thirteen and not having lived enough yet to know what a single death means, let alone hundreds of thousands of deaths. Millions.

Her mind feels muddled. The empty lines of her notebook seem to mock her. What can she say? What does she actually know? Maybe only this:

Whether we can hear or taste or touch it, the war is here. Like blazing sunshine. Like these sparrows.

Like an empty suitcase and the wrong shoes. It’s already begun.

Saint-Marcel, Paris 1664

CHAPTER 19

The last light of day slants in dulling rays as Étienne rounds the bend, hoping to get to the spring and then home before full dark. Many of the quarriers use the lower well, but the upper source runs clearer, purer, if one believes in such things.

He’s walking, swinging the two empty jugs, when he notices movement among the scattered vegetable plots at the center of the Île aux Singes. Most villagers have already returned home for their evening meal, but one figure remains, bent over the soil in the fading light. Alouette Voland.

Her plot sits apart from the others, tucked into a narrow corner of the communal garden. While her neighbors grow practical crops—cabbage, turnips, herbs for the pot—in her beds, plants with unfamiliar leaves stretch toward the setting sun, their shapes curious to him.

He slows his pace, unsure if he should pass by or retreat. There’s an intensity to her work that feels private, not meant for others’ eyes. But he finds himself unable to look away from the picture she makes—solitary against the dimming sky, invested with a purpose that seems to illuminate her from within.

She kneels in the dirt, a stone mortar balanced on a flat rock beside her. Her hair has come partly loose from its practical braid, copper strands catching the last golden light. The curve of her neck holds an unconscious grace that makes his steps falter.

She doesn’t see him at first. Her attention is fixed on a cluster of yellow blossoms. She picks one, rubs it between her fingers, and frowns as if it’s spoken the wrong answer to a silent question. Next, she plucks a root with scraggly leaves and a woody stem, places it into her basket, then brushes the earth back over the hole with a kind of reverence. That’s when she looks up and startles at his presence, as if he’s caught her dreaming instead of gardening.

For a moment, neither speaks. A slight flush has risen to color her cheekbones, whether from exertion or the cooling evening air, he can’t tell. Then she sits back on her heels, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek with the back of her wrist. “You’re a long way from the quarry,” she remarks.

“So I am.”

She doesn’t smile exactly, but there’s the edge of one—faint and private—that softens the angles of her face. Her eyes catch the fading light, pale gray turning almost pewter as a cloud passes overhead.

Étienne takes a few steps closer, nodding toward a string of colored flags that stretches between two stakes at the edge of her plot. One is ochre, another a bruised purple. A third glows like fire, shot through with gold. All test pieces, clearly, each marked with a small notation tied to the corner. “Did you make these?” he asks, feeling sure he knows the answer.

“My father is the dyer in our family,” she says, a current of something defiant beneath the simple reply.

“And what of these plants? Are they for dyestuffs?”

She glances at the root in her hand—madder, he realizes. Its distinctive red interior revealed where her knife has scraped away the woody outer skin. “Some of them. But other things grant colors too. Minerals. Clay. Bark and lichen. Metals, sometimes.”

As she speaks, she reaches for her basket, shifting it slightly to cover something partially tucked beneath the roots and herbs she’s gathered—a folded cloth that peeks out just enough for him to glimpse a shade of blue so deep it makes the evening sky look pale and insubstantial by comparison.

She notices his gaze and casually rearranges the basket’s contents again, concealing the cloth entirely. The gesture seems practiced, almost unconscious—the movement of someone accustomed to hiding valuable things in plain sight.

“How does it work?” he asks, genuinely curious now.

She shrugs. “Some plants bleed willingly. Others need coaxing. Some only yield their colors if you steep them in ash water. Others prefer vinegar or urine. A slow boil, or a quick flame.” She glances down at her hands and then up again, as if deciding whether or not to say more. Whether or not to trust him. “There’s a method to it. Recipes hundreds of years old. But you also have to feel when a color is right. To believe it’s possible.”

Étienne doesn’t know what to say to that, and yet he recognizes this language. It’s how he feels about stone, about the way each block is cold and plain and fixed, set there by time itself, but also a mysterious keeper of secrets, whispering stories and clues to those with ears to hear.

He steps closer, careful to remain on the path rather than trespass into her plot. His eyes drift to her basket again, where the blue cloth lies hidden, and then back to her gaze. Those striking gray eyes the color of shifting clouds.

“And do you have other experiments?” he teases gently, hoping she’ll bite. “Beyond what you show here?”

A wariness flickers across her face, quickly masked. “Perhaps,” she says lightly.

“I’d like to see them. I’ll bet they’re extraordinary.”

She looks at him fully now, glints of twilight catching her cheekbones, her braid slipping looser. “Why would you think that?” she challenges, even as her eyes flare with obvious pride.

Because you are extraordinary, he thinks to himself. To her, he smiles and says, “Just a fair wager.”

To his surprise—and possibly hers—Alouette smiles back.

CHAPTER 20

The feast of St. John, on the night of the summer solstice, is meant to be a night of purification, of setting a match to bad luck and misfortune. As a child, Alouette had loved these rituals—gathering goatsbeard, yarrow, and green birch with her mother to wind around the cross that would burn in the village square, on a pyre of stacked clean wood, to ward off evil spirits.

Now, the villagers laugh as lovers leap the newly lit flames together, seeking blessing. The whole of Saint-Marcel seems to glow. Children run with torches, smoke curling into the heavy summer air. The scent of scorched herbs lingers, warding off misfortune.

Laying some last bits of fresh wood at the base of the pyre, the pretty daughter of a starch maker begins to sing. It’s an old tune, but the melody is somehow keener for it, and more plaintive:

I loved him so much, my handsome love,
my lover of St. John’s Eve. He doesn’t love me anymore.

It’s in the past; we won’t talk of it again.

The tune hovers, mothlike, moving Alouette unexpectedly. The girl seems to be telling her own story, telling the truth about love as she knows it. And yet for Alouette, such feelings seem no more possible than touching the sun.

Forcing back a sigh, she turns away from the music and toward the field, where the harvest has already begun. The sun swings low toward the horizon, draping orange light over the heads of children running through the rows of knawel plants, making silhouettes of men and women.

The scrubby plants harbor cochineal insects, tiny bearers of vivid red dye. St. John’s Blood, they’re called, coming to ripeness at the solstice. Each is no larger than one of her freckles, but crushed between fingernails, they yield drops bright as garnets.

Tonight, the field is alive with voices and movement. Men and women stoop over the rows while children dart between them, clutching small bundles of roots. Someone hands Alouette a spade, and she kneels to dig, grateful for work that might ground her restless thoughts. The sandy soil crumbles easily as she works the blade into the ground. A few tugs, and the roots come free, scattering pale clay onto her skirt.

She’s done this many times over the years, but now, as Alouette lifts the plant and peers at the dozens of rosy-flecked cochineals, they seem newly meaningful. The females are most prized, containing the essence needed for carmine dye. A chemical defense transformed into something precious. These creatures live buried where nothing should thrive, die too soon for reasons beyond their understanding. Yet they carry such brightness within them that even a drop of their blood, properly fixed, can last centuries.

“Alouette?” A voice breaks her reverie.

She looks up. A woman stands a few feet away, her face half shadowed by the wide brim of her straw hat. Her bodice is finely made, the linen dyed a rich brown that sets her apart from the villagers. At her throat glints a silver cross.

“Hello,” Alouette says questioningly, unable to place the woman.

“You are Alouette, then?” The woman sounds slightly amazed. “I wasn’t quite sure. But your hair is the same. It’s such a lovely color, still.”

Still? A tendril of shadow passes over Alouette’s heart. She studies the woman’s face more carefully—the familiar curve of her mouth, the set of her eyes—and suddenly she lets the roots slip from her fingers. “Who—” she begins, but then stops, her voice catching. Doesn’t she know?

“You don’t recognize me? I suppose I’ve changed with age.”

Alouette stands, continuing to stare at the woman’s features while feelings race through her, sharp and bewildering—anger, disbelief, a treacherous flicker of longing. The flesh along her jaw has softened, and her gray eyes are lined and less lively. But yes, the resemblance is there—the woman whose face she’s spent years searching for in crowds, whose voice she’s strained to hear in moments of stillness. Apart from the winking threads of silver, her hair is the same shade of auburn as Alouette’s.

“Henriette,” she utters. Mother is too high a fire to jump. A pyre spitting cinders. Twelve years have passed without a word. “How are you here?”

Henriette takes a half step forward, then stops, seeming to sense the invisible barrier between them. “I came for the festival, same as you.” She laughs nervously. “I’ve been living in Gentilly for the last year.”

“Gentilly?” The word is flint-sharp, a slap. “You’ve been a half day’s walk away for a year?” Alouette’s chest tightens with a sudden fury. “A year, and you made no attempt to find me? To speak to me?” Her voice breaks on the last syllable, betraying the child still buried within her.

Henriette flinches. “I wanted to,” she says softly. “So many times I walked to the edge of Saint-Marcel and then turned back. I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you would hate me. Or that you and René would seem happier without me. That I’d discover I was unnecessary.” Henriette’s eyes shine with unshed tears. “Or worst of all—that I’d find you suffering, and know it was my fault.”

“So you chose to know nothing instead.”

The accusation hangs between them. Henriette’s shoulders slump. “I was so unhappy back then, Alouette. I felt trapped. You remember how it was.” She hesitates, one hand twisting in the other. “I believed I might harm you more by staying.”

“Harm was done either way.” Alouette means the words to land hurtfully. But they scarcely touch the truth. The knot of grief that still twists in her for what might have been. The yearning and need she’d had to clamp off long ago, like a seeping wound.

“I’m sorry I caused you pain,” Henriette says. “I couldn’t do any different then. As for now, I came in hope that we might make amends. I’d like to try if you’re willing.”

The apology stuns Alouette—so much so that she can’t quite make herself trust it. Everything Henriette says just seems like another pitfall. Another opportunity for betrayal. “It’s too late.” She shakes her head. “It’s been too late for years.”

Henriette looks at her for a long moment, then says, “I came for another reason too. There are rumors that your father has finally found his color.”

His color? Possessiveness flares, pushing other feelings to the side like still-smoldering ash. The discovery was her doing. Her father’s new experiments wouldn’t be possible otherwise. But of course the rumors would name him. “Where did you hear that?”

“It doesn’t matter how. It’s true, isn’t it?”

Alouette’s jaw tightens. “I don’t have time for riddles.”

She knows she should walk away. She doesn’t trust this woman—not her dangled implications, not her regret. But she stays fixed to the spot, as if some old longing holds her in place.

“The guild won’t protect him,” Henriette says. “Experiments unsanctioned by their authority—especially with uncustomary materials—that’s treason.”

“He knows that. Everyone does.” Which is why we need to leave, to run, she doesn’t say.

“I understand his obsession,” Henriette goes on, her expression softening a little. “It’s the work of his life. Nearly thirty years. But he’s let devotion blind him to danger. He’s not safe here. I’m not sure you are either.” She dares to take a step closer. “I know I forfeited the right to ask anything of you. But please. Be careful. The guild has eyes everywhere.”

Alouette holds her gaze, working to remain steely. “You did forfeit that right. Honestly, I don’t know what you want from me.”

“Nothing,” Henriette says simply. “I just want you safe. That’s all I came to say.”

Alouette doesn’t answer, just brushes the clay from her skirt. “Goodbye. I hope we won’t meet again.”

“Alouette—” Henriette tries. “Please. Hate me if you want, but remember that if things become dangerous, you can come to me. I’m at the apothecary in Gentilly. The one with the blue door. Anytime. Day or night.”

Before Henriette can say another word, Alouette turns, walking fast toward the village green. Laughter and music clatter at her nerves, as if she’s lost a layer of skin. This night is meant to ward off bad luck, to seal good fortune, and yet she feels exposed, less protected than ever before.

In her bewilderment, she’s missed the last of the sun, she realizes. The waited-for moment marking summer’s arrival has passed her by. The sky above purples with thickening dusk, while her thoughts whirl like rabbling blackbirds. She walks without feeling her boots, without smelling the hateful river on the air. It’s only when she reaches the bridge onto the Île aux Singes that she looks down to see that her palms are livid. Smeared with St. John’s Blood.

Henriette’s return has shaken something loose inside her. A dam of questions and emotions long held back. Why would her mother return now, after twelve years of silence? What does Henriette know about René’s work that she doesn’t?

When she reaches the Bièvre, it’s a dark silver thread. Brighter filaments reflect the festival lights. Finally, her breath begins to fall into rhythm again. But as soon as she rounds the next bend, she realizes that she is not alone.

She stops short. “Étienne.”

“Alouette.” He looks equally surprised. “I was on my way to the festival. Actually, I was hoping you might be there. But it seems I’ve frightened you.”

She can’t answer at first. She only watches him, pulse still unsteady. Somehow, he looks different tonight—the angles of his face tempered. Yet his eyes remain the same, observant and careful. “You didn’t frighten me.”

Étienne narrows his gaze, studying her, the way he might regard a stone before deciding where to place his chisel, she thinks. “What is it?”

She realizes, with a strange rush of clarity, that even though they are nearly strangers, she wants to tell him everything. About her mother’s return, her father’s trembling hands, the arsenic’s promise and peril. About how alone she suddenly feels. Caught between the splinters of family broken apart long ago and a dream that might destroy them all.

Still, she hesitates, her hands clenching at her sides. “Have you ever had the feeling that something is happening, and you can’t stop it? That the more you try, the more it slips through your fingers—like water or…” She falters, searching. “Like dust?”

“Yes,” he says simply. “I have.”

His eyes have taken on a gleam, like the surface of the river, distorted with streaks of gold. When Étienne steps nearer, she doesn’t back away.

He says, “People like us, we’re told our place from the moment we’re born. Stay small. Keep your head down. Be grateful for the scraps.”

Alouette feels as if he’s reading a secret message written on her skin, something she’s tried to hide even from herself. The desperate hunger for more. For something of her own—not just a color, not just a formula, but a life that isn’t predestined by the guild’s rules or her father’s shadow or the narrow expectations of what a dyer’s daughter might become.

“What if scraps aren’t enough?” she asks. “And never will be?”

“I think about that all the time. For myself. For my family. I have people depending on me. My cousin’s children—they’re like a niece and nephew to me—and my grandmother. They’re the reason I work so hard. But I won’t be able to do it forever.”

Étienne is even closer now, though she can’t recall him moving. Perhaps she moved toward him. The space between them seems charged with possibility, with danger. With the same potential she feels when a new color begins to bloom from the mordant bath.

“My mother left us when I was a child,” she says suddenly. His openness and sincerity have emboldened her, like a kind of spell. “I haven’t seen her in twelve years. But tonight, she was in the village. I saw her in the knawel fields.”

“What did she want?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know exactly. She came to warn me about the guild, she said. About my father’s work. About being careful.”

A telling silence pulses. For a moment, Étienne seems to be assessing her, or this—weighing a decision that might cost him. Then his hand lifts. His calloused fingers brush a strand of hair from her cheek. “And will you?”

Alouette can feel her heart beating in her throat as the question hangs between them. The sensible answer, the careful answer, is yes. But something in her rebels against it. Against everything she’s been told, everything that’s been demanded of her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m tired of feeling small. Tired of being afraid. Tired of watching other people decide what colors I’m allowed to make, what dreams I’m permitted to have.”

“So am I,” he murmurs.

They are only inches apart now. She can feel his body heat, smell the limestone dust and something green and herbal beneath it, like crushed mint. Before she knows what’s happening, he’s kissing her, breathing her in. Alouette’s pulse thunders in her ears. Her hands, without her willing them, rise to his chest.

And then—distant voices. Laughter, too close. The spell shatters like thin ice. They pull apart, both flushed.

Étienne looks at her. His expression has turned guarded once more, though his eyes still hold a small spark of something unresolved. “Be careful or don’t, Alouette,” he says. “But don’t forget to live.”

And then he is gone, moving toward the festival lights, leaving her confused and breathless by the river’s edge.

CHAPTER 21

The cottage is silent when Alouette steps inside, save for the rhythmic drip of dye from the various kettles—a sound like a failing heart. Mordant fumes cling to the air, metallic and sour, coating her tongue. She lays her shawl on the table, smoothing the homespun wool with fingers that won’t quite steady.

There is a lingering warmth on her face, where Étienne had touched her cheek. But even more insistent is the thrum of Henriette’s warning. She’s nursed a similar anxiety for weeks, and yet hearing the portent from Henriette’s lips is like finding her own fears written in blood on the wall. A harbinger of disaster made suddenly, unavoidably real.

Near the hearth, her father hunches over a pot of steaming liquid. He’s so fixed on his task that he doesn’t take notice of her.

“I thought you would be at the factory,” she says, hovering near the edge of a chair.

“It’s safer here.” He lifts a scrap of wool from the kettle, watching how the dye bleeds through the fibers, utterly rapt.

“Is it safer?” She wrestles with the words, trying to order her thoughts enough to sway him. To make him see. “Couldn’t the guild come through the door at any time, if they were suspicious enough? Nothing belongs to us. You’ve said it yourself a thousand times.”

“Why would they? Don’t be foolish.” But he’s talking too quickly, and his voice has pitched up, like a man trying to be understood through a growing storm.

“I saw Henriette at the festival tonight. She warned me that the guild is suspicious of your new experiments.”

René stills. “What? How can that be?”

“I wondered the same myself, but it’s true.”

“She’s living in the village again? Why now? Has she been watching us?”

“I don’t think so. For the last year, she’s been in Gentilly. She told me she overheard someone mentioning your name there. In connection with the guild. She came to warn us.”

“That woman,” he mutters, exhaling sharply, raking a hand through his hair. “Always chasing shadows. Always stirring up trouble.”

“She didn’t seem mad. She seemed afraid.”

René laughs bitterly. “Henriette is afraid of nothing but her own ghosts. If she’s speaking to the guild, it’s not to help me—it’s to tear me down. She can’t stand to see me succeed, even now.”

“Succeed?” The word tastes like rust on Alouette’s tongue. She gestures wildly, past the dye-streaked workbench, the crumpled pages littering the table, to the twisted world beyond them. “You call this life success?”

When her father only shakes his head dismissively, she begins to pace. Her hands itch to do something. To grab one of the precious pigments and hurl it against the wall just to see the color splinter.

“Why would Henriette try to hurt us after all this time?” she finally presses him. “Why would she even bother?”

Her father slams his fists against the table. The jars rattle, a curl of red dust spiraling into the air. “Because she’s unwell!” he roars.

Alouette stares at his outburst, driven beyond exasperation. “This is my discovery. This blue—my blue—it’s the first thing that’s truly my own.”

“You think they’ll care who discovered it?” His gaze pins her like a specimen under glass. “To them, you’re just a girl playing with dyes.”

She recoils as if he’s slapped her. “I won’t let them take this from me,” she says, hating the tremor in her voice.

For a moment, he says nothing. Then his shoulders drop slightly. “You’re young, Alouette, and impatient. Impatience makes you heedless of danger. And there is danger. You don’t know what the guild is capable of.”

“I do, though. That’s why we need to leave now, while we still can. Let’s take our discovery and go elsewhere. Please.”

“The formula isn’t perfect yet. If we leave now, I won’t have what I need to bargain with later. All of this must be calculated, not rash.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to be caught before then. Waiting is rash, don’t you see?”

But he won’t meet her eyes. And that silence, vast and final, is her answer.

THAT NIGHT, SLEEP evades her. From her straw mattress, Alouette stares at the ceiling, each crack a branching path, a question. Her father snores in the next room, dreaming of colors he may never finish. She fears he will keep perfecting and protecting until there’s nothing left to save.

She doesn’t ever want to cling this way—blinded by endless toil and obsessions, by the ways of the past. She doesn’t want her life to follow her mother’s course either. Henriette had managed to escape Saint-Marcel, but at what cost, after waiting so long? Until she teetered on the edge of reason.

Through the window, Alouette hears the murmur of the Bièvre, its familiar sour scent curling upward to find her. She used to think the river despised her. That they were bound to each other like mortal enemies.

But tonight, the sound feels less like a curse than a challenge. Are you brave enough? the river seems to whisper. Brave enough to rise, to leave, to grasp for more?

And is she?

CHAPTER 22

In the days that follow, her father hardly speaks to her. He works through meals, through nightfall, continuing to chase something ineffable. Continuing to ignore Alouette’s anxieties and warnings.

No matter what she says, he won’t be hurried, won’t be moved. She begins to wonder if he’s already made peace with the risk at hand. The dangers of being exposed or caught. Or worse, if he’s in a state of denial. One that might go on indefinitely. Until it’s too late to run.

No matter how maddening her father’s behavior is, there is no part of her that wants to abandon him. She loves him dearly. But what if he won’t see reason? Her safety could be in danger, too, as Henriette said. Certainly her freedom. Her dreams of creating her own dyes and formulas.

Silently, Alouette wrestles with what she must do while she goes about her days in the lavoir, staring into roiling basins of lye-foamed lanolin and thinking. What would it take for her to leave alone? Does she have that kind of courage—or any practical estimation as to how it might be done? People leave the village all the time. She’s not her father; the guild wouldn’t bat an eye if she vanished. But she has so little money. And no experience at all of the larger world.

When Étienne drifts into her mind, Alouette tells herself that he’s the most sensible person to turn to. He’s traveled and lived in many places. He must have connections or ideas about how she would begin to plot her course. This is all true. But whether or not she wants to admit it, she hasn’t stopped thinking of their encounter by the river on St. John’s Eve. The steadiness in his tawny eyes. The way he listened without looking away.

THE RUE DES Chiffonniers lies in the hollow between the butte and the river, where the poorest in Saint-Marcel make their homes. Ragpickers, deserters, men with debts, or worse. It’s a place where people go when they have nowhere else to be and nothing left to lose.

Alouette walks quickly, her shawl pulled tight, boots silent on the uneven stones. She’s heard whispers about where the quarrymen drink—not at the respectable taverns near the factory, but in the dim corners of Le Lapin Noir, where the wine is cheap and no one troubles themselves with another’s business.

The tavern’s sign is so faded she nearly passes it by. Only the rabbit’s red eye marks it clearly. She hesitates at the door, smoothing her skirts with damp palms. The thin knife tucked in her boot offers little comfort.

Inside, the air is thick with pipe smoke and the sour reek of spilled wine. Conversations drop to murmurs as she enters, then resume with deliberate nonchalance. She spots Étienne at a corner table, his head bent low over a tankard. When he sees her, he looks surprised, and then wary.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“You’ve said that before.” She reaches for a chair and sits without waiting for permission. “About the quarry, as I recall.”

“This isn’t the quarry.”

“No.” She glances around the shadowy room. “It’s worse.”

Étienne watches her across the rim of his drink, the candlelight catching on the sharp planes of his face. His hands—the same hands that had held her close by the river, that know where stone wants to break—curl around the clay vessel. “Then why come?”

“I came because I thought…” She stops herself. “Because I’ve made a decision. I want to leave the village. I was hoping my father would come with me, but he refuses, even though he’s likely in danger.”

Étienne doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.

“I’m not asking for rescue. I’m not a child running from home. I just—” She stops again, feeling flustered, exposed.

“What is it, Alouette?”

She exhales, trying to think with more clarity, to say what she means, what she wants. “I know how people disappear from places like this. My mother did that. But what does it take to survive?”

“Where would you go?”

“Maybe south, toward the sea. I was born in Marseille. I still have family there. Perhaps they would help or at least shelter me for a while.”

He doesn’t respond at first. His gaze lingers, and she knows he’s studying her, trying to read her face, perhaps.

“You once told me that everything you do is for your family,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I don’t know that I have a reason, not like that. For a long time, I thought I was part of my father’s legacy. But it’s not enough anymore. I want to live, Étienne. I want to pursue something real. Something that belongs to me, before it’s too late.”

A silence falls between them. The tavern is almost empty now. The air smells of ash and sour wine.

“Should we walk for a while?” he asks finally. “I’d like to see you home, to make sure you’re safe.”

She hesitates. But the pull toward him is stronger than whatever doubt lingers. And besides, she doesn’t want to walk the rue des Chiffonniers this late alone.

Outside, the wind has picked up. Alouette feels the coarse fabric of her dress press to the contours of her body as she follows Étienne down a narrow passage between buildings, the scent of river mud and night blossoms thick in the air. He walks slightly ahead, close enough to lead, far enough that she could turn back if she chose.

At first, Alouette holds her tongue while her thoughts unspool in a jumbled blur. There’s so much she wants to tell him, so much she’s afraid to admit.

“Will you really go?” he asks after a time.

“I hope I will. I hope I’m brave enough to do it.” She glances at him. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

“No. I’d like to one day.”

She wants to ask more—but feels wary of his answers. “Do you think I could make it?” she finally ventures.

Étienne stops walking and turns toward her. “Yes.” His eyes search hers. “But it’ll cost you more than you realize. And once you go, you won’t be the same.”

She swallows, gathering courage. “I’m willing to pay.”

Where they’ve stopped, a crooked lintel only half blocks a breeze riffling past. It stirs the loose tip of her braid. For a moment she forgets the streets, the danger, the way the world narrows and punishes. All she feels is the strange, terrible possibility that she’s no longer alone.

“If I needed help,” she asks, “would you give it?”

There’s no hesitation in his answer. “Yes.”

As she meets his eyes, the hush between them shifts—laden now, and expectant. She knows she should leave before it becomes too much, before the temptation of this moment overtakes her completely. Staying here with him isn’t at all the safe choice. But something has already given way inside her. Not to recklessness, but to a kind of claiming. An answer to the river’s dare.

When his kiss comes, she lets herself fall into it as into deep, still water. He tastes of red wine and something earthier, like stone after rain. His calloused fingers cup her face with surprising gentleness.

Moments later, he pulls away. “I should see you home now,” he says, though his eyes tell a different story.

Her heart is still racing. The night air feels suddenly thin, insufficient. “Not yet,” she breathes.

Étienne searches her face, looking for any sign of uncertainty. “I know of a place where we can go. Above the tavern. It’s not much, but—”

“Show me,” she says simply.

THE ROOM IS small and dark, but clean. Inside, a single candle burns low, casting warm shadows across whitewashed walls. The floor creaks as they cross it, the mattress is thin and uneven beneath the blanket. None of these things matter. What matters is that she’s choosing this, choosing her path, even if only for tonight.

She reaches for him, tracing a small scar above his eye, as his breath hitches. “What happened here?”

He doesn’t answer, only leans in, his lips finding the curve of her jaw, his fingertips skimming her inner wrist, where her pulse gallops. The warmth of his touch is almost unbearable. She has never been held like this. Never been seen like this—not as a daughter, or as a vessel for labor, or as a clever girl with dangerous ideas. But as a woman. As herself.

He begins to undress her slowly, lingering over each tie and fastening. The lines and curves of her. Her own hands move more boldly than she would ever have expected, brushing over the ridges along his shoulder, the hollow at his collarbone, the arch of his rib cage. As if, in learning his shape, his body, she is also discovering her own.

When Étienne hovers over her, she is on edge at first, every nerve taut with hesitation. The unfamiliar weight of him, the press of his skin against hers—her own artlessness and inexperience. She squeezes her eyes shut, focusing on the pressure of his hands, his warm, searching mouth. He moves slowly, as if waiting for her to stop him. She doesn’t.

There is a moment of sharpness, a gasp of surprise, and then the pain ebbs, dissolving into an urge to press closer, to have nothing at all between them. It’s as if something tidal is moving through her, with her, as constant and inescapable as the pull of the moon.

She never planned for any of this to happen. Has never imagined more than fleetingly that it even could. And yet she finds herself grasping onto each sensation, onto Étienne, willing herself to feel only this. This heat, this pressure, this recognition of safety, however fleeting or illusory.

For as long as she can remember, Alouette has carefully and determinedly guarded what is hers. Her thoughts, her work, her very self. And now, to share it, to want without apology, feels like the most radical act of all.

LATER, WHEN THEIR breathing slows and the quiet wraps around them like a second blanket, she rests with her head tucked beneath his chin, her arm draped across his chest. It feels as if they’re suspended in time—between the old world and the new, between what must be and what still might.

“Tell me about the sea,” he murmurs, his voice a warm rumble against her ear. “What was it like, growing up in Marseille?”

She thinks back to the fragments of memory she still holds—the scent of salt and lavender, the taste of honey-sweet figs, the endless horizon where blue meets blue. “I remember the light most of all,” she says. “Pure and clear, making everything more alive somehow. And space—so much space it made you dizzy. Not like here, where everything presses close.”

“I’d give anything to see it,” he admits. “The farthest south I’ve been is Lyon.”

“Someday, perhaps.” The words slip out before she can catch them—a dangerous hint at a future that’s improbable at best.

As they grow quiet again, she presses her cheek against his chest, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. The scent of him clings to her skin, grounding her even as her thoughts drift to the uncertainties that lie just ahead.

She will leave soon, she knows this. And she won’t ask him to follow. But she doesn’t want to regret this night either. It proves that she can claim something for herself—not a promise, not forever, just a moment of tenderness that no one can take from her.

Paris 1940

CHAPTER 23

Alesander waits at their usual lamppost, hands in pockets. When he sees Kristof’s face, his grin fades. “You look haunted.”

“Something like that.” Kristof isn’t quite up to saying more, and Alesander doesn’t push. That’s one of the things Kristof likes best about him. The way he just opens doors and lets you walk through.

The iron grate clangs shut behind them. Usually, Alesander would already be talking about his latest discovery—a forgotten wine cellar, a mysterious inscription, some architectural detail that delighted him. His sketchbook is always close at hand, filled with hasty drawings of whatever catches his eye. A particularly elegant arch, an old engineer’s notation, the signature of a Prussian soldier who also left the name of his hometown, Potsdam, in 1870. Each expedition is a treasure hunt.

Tonight, though, Alesander pulls out a ruler, a brass compass, and fresh graph paper. Then he begins to measure a doorway, marking distances with a series of crisp notations.

“Adding to your map?” Kristof asks.

“Getting serious about it. I should have done it long ago. I’ve been treating this place like my clubhouse. But now… now it seems obvious that the maps could be useful one day. Soon.”

Kristof studies Alesander’s profile in the flickering light, the unfamiliar tightness in the set of his jaw. “You’ve been listening to the news reports.”

His friend blinks, nodding. “Copenhagen fell in four hours. Oslo in six. I’ve heard Rotterdam burned for days. Why would Paris be spared?”

Kristof has often had the same thought himself. Each time, it makes him feel a little more trapped, a little more breathless. These past months, the tunnels have been an antidote to such worries. An antidote for the increasing difficulty of the world. The war. His patients. Dr. Claudel.

A clubhouse, Alesander said. But for Kristof, the underground functions as a parallel reality. One he’s begun to need just as much as a magician needs a trapdoor. Or Aladdin his lamp.

Is all of that over? It seems so.

Alesander is moving more slowly through the tunnels than Kristof has ever seen. Every ten or twenty yards, he stops to take more measurements, sketching lines on the graph paper. These aren’t anything like his usual artistic renderings, the ones he uses to illustrate stories over wine in his cramped apartment, where architectural drawings cover nearly every surface. Instead, he’s making precise technical notations—of ceiling heights, load-bearing walls, distance between support columns. His brass compass catches the light like a trapped star.

At a junction of three passages, Alesander stops and looks up. Fifty or sixty feet away, at the top of this telescope made of earth, a manhole cover winks at them like the eye of a giant.

This is normally when Alesander would pull out a flask or a hunk of bread. When they’d lean against the clammy stone, losing track of time as he told some incredible story.

Instead, he turns to study the intersection with an engineer’s focus. “My grandfather helped map the Madrid subway,” he says. “Before the civil war. He used to say that every city has two faces—the one aboveground that everyone sees, and the one below that only a very few remember.”

“And which one survives?”

“Both. Neither. Sometimes, when everything is burning, the forgotten paths become the ones that matter.”

Kristof shivers suddenly. “You’re thinking these could be hiding places.”

“They’re already hunting people in occupied territories. Jews, intellectuals, anyone who speaks against them. The reports from Germany—did you see what they did to the synagogues in ’38? All those people fleeing to Belgium and Switzerland, to England…”

“And now Paris is next,” Kristof fills in, thinking of all the foreign doctors and residents at Sainte-Anne’s—himself included. How carefully they pronounce their French, as if accent itself might become evidence against them.

“They go after the same groups everywhere. Jews first. Then political dissidents, union leaders, artists, homosexuals. Communists. Anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of order. My cousin Vicente fought Franco in Spain. He said Madrid taught him that when they start taking names, you need three things: information about what’s coming, places to hide, and ways to get out.”

“Did he make it? Your cousin?”

“Barely. Hid in the Pyrenees for weeks. He told me that the difference between living and dying came down to knowing which trails through the forest could be trusted.”

As he listens, Kristof knows that Alesander is right to be thinking ahead, thinking of action. And yet part of him isn’t quite ready for the fun and recklessness to end. This new seriousness is like being woken too early from a good dream. One that might never materialize again.

Still, reality is here. The cold slap of it, jarringly present. He’s awake now—so he might as well accept it. Kneeling beside Alesander, damp grit gouges into his knees as he looks at grid lines in the open notebook. “Show me what you’re doing.”

“See these notations?” Alesander points with the tip of his drafting pencil. “I’m marking the height and width of passages, down to the centimeter. These blue lines show the places where I’ve seen substantial water in rainy seasons. And these crosshatch marks are where I’m trying to identify walls thin enough to break through if needed. Escape routes within escape routes.”

For an hour, they talk about how to use carvings and inscriptions to aid with direction. How best to leave their own clues so others can decipher and follow them if necessary. Above and around them, the tunnels play tricks with sound. Rats become footsteps. Falling pebbles echo like gunshots. The walls seem to speak their own language—warning or protecting, Kristof can’t yet tell. Maybe they’ll teach them how to disappear.

“Here.” Alesander’s flashlight beam catches on a line of markings. Words carved deep: Liberté ou la mort. Freedom or death. “From the Revolution.” He touches the grooves. “Could have been written yesterday.”

“Or today.” Kristof rests his hand on the cool stone, wondering about the many others who have stood here, looking at or tracing these same letters as they drew strength.

Later, as they climb back to the street, dawn breaks over Paris in pearls and roses. The city wakes, unknowing. Somewhere past the horizon, armies gather like storm clouds.

Kristof thinks of his father’s letters. Dutch planes falling from the sky. The fear in his patients’ eyes. But beneath their feet lies another Paris—one of ancient secrets and defiant words. Of measured escape routes and careful plans. A Paris of resistance, waiting in the dark for its moment.

CHAPTER 24

When Kristof shuffles sleepily into the hospital, his mind still fogged from too little rest, a shrill metallic sound splits through the corridor. A gurney rattles past, its wheels skidding slightly on the linoleum. On it, a patient is strapped down tight. Georges Plomin.

Kristof recognizes him immediately—the former soldier who arrived three weeks ago, silent and rocking, his blue eyes dull and withdrawn.

He has spoken only once to Kristof, in a whisper hoarse with disuse: “Do you think a soul can die before the body does?”

And now, here he is, rearing against the restraints, his face contorted in animal panic. “No—please, no!” The words scrape from his throat. “Help me!”

Kristof turns sharply to the orderly. “Where are they taking him?”

The man barely glances at him. “Electroshock. Dr. Claudel wrote the order this morning.”

“He’s catatonic half the time. Have you ever seen him violent?”

“Not my decision,” he mutters, adjusting his grip as the patient thrashes against the straps.

Kristof hurries after them, heart pounding. Inside the treatment room, Dr. Claudel stands at the head of the table, sleeves rolled up, preparing the electrodes. “Observing today, Dr. Larsen?” His voice is almost jovial.

On the gurney, Georges Plomin’s chest heaves as another orderly forces a rubber block between his teeth. He is crying now, soundlessly, tears streaming toward his temples.

The sight of it sends something visceral through Kristof, a cold snap of memory. A different lecture hall, long ago. The smell of chalk dust and tobacco. A professor at Utrecht, sitting eye level with a similarly ill woman. He had used no restraints. No force. He had talked to her, and listened, bearing witness.

But now, this. A man being strapped down. Rendered voiceless. Kristof’s pulse thunders in his ears. He’s been trained in the various ways to curb and minimize seizures, which are signs of neurological distress. The idea of intentionally provoking one seems almost medieval.

Several orderlies step forward to assist, securing the patient’s head and limbs as Dr. Claudel applies a thick layer of conductive gel to Georges Plomin’s temples. Then he nods to an assistant, and the apparatus begins to hum.

The instant the electrodes make contact, the patient’s body stiffens, limbs jerking and twitching as the current surges through his brain. His torso bucks, leaping free of the gurney as the orderlies struggle to restrain him.

Kristof forces himself to watch. Forces himself to remember every terrible moment of it.

After twenty long seconds, Dr. Claudel finally signals for the current to be turned off. Georges Plomin’s body relaxes like a balloon being deflated. He doesn’t open his eyes when the orderlies disentangle him from the electrodes and various straps. His face remains pale.

“As you can see,” Claudel says with complete composure, as if he’s taken the man’s temperature instead of purposefully electrocuted him, “the patient tolerated the procedure well. Over the next few days, we expect to see a significant improvement in his symptoms.”

Kristof stares at him, then leaves without a word. All that day, the image of Georges Plomin’s convulsing body sears itself into Kristof’s mind. He has chosen this career path because of Annelies. But this—this is not medicine.

As his shift ends, he stands at the window of the residents’ kitchen, holding a cup of tea. The steam makes a cloud of condensation on the glass. In it, Kristof traces his old professor’s words with his fingertip. Be present. Bear witness.

He can’t change what has just happened. But he can decide what kind of doctor he will be. And he knows now—he can no longer afford to be neutral.

CHAPTER 25

On the night of June 3, the air-raid siren cuts through sleep like a knife. Kristof lies there, heart pounding, as footsteps fill the stairwell. The numerous passive defense drills have prepared him for this, and yet everything feels overwhelming now. Because it’s real.

He pulls on his clothes, his shoes. On the landing, Sasha stands in her nightgown. Her face is pale. “Maman’s not well.”

Rachel comes into the hall, one hand pressed to her swollen belly. Sweat beads her forehead. Felix holds her elbow, but his eyes meet Kristof’s with raw fear.

“I thought she wasn’t due for another month at least,” Kristof says.

Rachel flinches as another contraction hits. “Tell that to this baby.”

They make their way down to the cellar. Madame Martin has already lit candles. The sirens scream on as Kristof helps Rachel settle onto a blanket Felix has spread on the floor.

“How far apart are your contractions?” Kristof asks.

Felix answers for her. “Ten minutes, maybe less.”

Rald buries his face in Sasha’s shoulder as she whispers to him in Yiddish, her voice calm despite the tears streaking her cheeks. Even in fear, she holds him steady, as if she’s the older sibling by a dozen years, not five. For a moment, she catches Kristof’s eye and mouths, “She’ll be okay?” Somehow, her vulnerability strikes him harder than the sirens.

“Maybe this is false labor,” Kristof says hopefully. “Stress can do that.”

Rachel shakes her head. “Rald was born early, too, and he came quickly.”

“Then we should get to a hospital.”

Kristof barely finishes the sentence when the first explosion hits—reverberating heavy and low, like a barrage of distant thunder. In one corner of the cellar, wine racks rattle metallically. Plaster shakes from the ceiling. Rachel doubles over again with a cry.

The closest hospital is Salpêtrière, a few kilometers away, but there’s no way of knowing if the roads are safe. On the other hand, is staying here any less dangerous? He had delivered babies during medical school, but never in a cellar. Never during an air raid.

Monsieur Laurent, a neighbor who lives on the first floor of the building, offers to help. “Should I bring more blankets, Doctor?”

“That would be good,” Kristof tells him. “And candles. Alcohol if you can find it. Or hydrogen peroxide—and fresh towels. I’ll need to wash my hands.”

After the supplies are gathered, Kristof checks the baby’s position, and his heart sinks. The baby is breech. He feels the small hard curve of its buttocks and dearly wishes he had paid closer attention in medical school. If the cord is around its neck, what is he supposed to do again? But there’s no use worrying about such things now. One emergency is enough.

“Felix,” he says. “I need your help.”

Rachel knows from his voice. “Something’s wrong.”

“I need to try to turn the baby.”

Another explosion rumbles in the distance, half swallowing Kristof’s words. He places his hands on Rachel’s belly.

“This will hurt,” he says.

She nods, clinging onto Felix tightly.

Each time Kristof thinks he has turned the baby, it slips back. His fingers dig deep, guiding this small life toward the light while chaos thunders from above. “Almost there,” he tells Rachel, a lie.

All the while, Felix never releases Rachel’s hand. His whispered reassurances—half Yiddish, half Polish—are too soft for Kristof to hear, but they seem to anchor her through the pain.

Finally, Kristof sits back, the tendons in his arms cramping. The baby is still in the wrong position, and yet Rachel’s contractions are coming faster now, as unstoppable as everything else. They are out of choices.

“Rachel,” he says. “Listen to me. When I tell you, push. Push like your life depends on it.” Because it does.

Madame Martin kneels beside them with fresh candles. Only Madame Gagnon seems unmoved. In the far corner, she is entirely focused on her own safety, praying the rosary again and again, the beads in her hands clicking like tiny bones.

“Now,” Kristof says.

Rachel pushes. The cellar fills with her raw, animal cry. The sound is ancient. It has nothing to do with bombs or wars or tomorrow’s terrors. She’s just a mother fighting to bring life into the world.

Finally, the baby comes in a rush. First the feet, blue and impossibly small. Then the body, slick and twisting. The head is the hardest part. For a terrible moment everything stops.

“One more,” Kristof says. “One more push.”

The last siren wails as the baby slips free. A girl. She doesn’t cry at first. Kristof rubs her chest with his fingertips, remembering old lessons. Please, he whispers to himself. Please.

Finally, she opens her mouth and wails, strong and furious. Moments later, the all-clear siren begins its long, lonely note.

“A fighter,” Felix says, laughing through tears. “Like her mother.”

Rachel reaches for her daughter. Sasha and Rald creep closer to meet their new sister. In the shuddering halo of candlelight, Kristof watches the family form a circle—Felix’s face almost beatific as he traces each perfect finger, each tiny toe.

THEY GET RACHEL to Salpêtrière just after dawn. Felix half carries her while Kristof keeps the baby warm against his chest. Sasha and Rald walk close behind. The streets are empty. Smoke and debris cling to the sky. The darkest cloud hovers above the Bois de Boulogne.

Soon they will hear news of the attack, framing the extent of the damage. To the west of them, in the 16th arrondissement, a thousand German bombs have fallen. Several hundred people are injured. Dozens are dead.

Still, Kristof feels oddly peaceful as he waits with the children in the hospital garden. His attention centers completely on this wooden bench, where Sasha dozes with her head on his shoulder. Rald sorts pebbles on the clay path while behind him, a row of pollarded plane trees raise determined fists to the sky.

He thinks of how different it felt to help Rachel than his patients at Sainte-Anne’s. And not just because she’s his dear friend. In the hospital, he tries to unravel the complexities of the mind—deciphering its fragile currents, its unseen wounds. Every step forward is met with an equal pull back, a dance of uncertainty. But in the makeshift air-raid shelter, there was no mystery. A breech birth is a stark fact. Brutal and uncompromising. The baby’s body fought him. Rachel’s body fought him too. And yet it seemed like the same fight. The same refusal to surrender.

An hour later, Felix comes to find Kristof and the children in the park. “Both safe,” he says. “Resting.” Then he grasps Kristof’s arm. “Come up to the apartment. Just for a moment.”

Once there, Felix reaches into a high kitchen cupboard for a bottle of slivovitz. A good one, saved for occasions that need marking. They drink from tiny glasses.

“We’re calling her Klara Miriam,” Felix says in a toast. “After Rachel’s grandmother. She helped hide Jews during the pogroms.” He pours another measure. “A good name for these times.”

Kristof thinks of that cellar. Of Rachel’s fierce struggle to bring life into darkness. Of Klara Miriam’s first breath mixing with the all-clear siren. “A perfect name,” he says.

They touch glasses. The brandy burns like a blessing.

Saint-Marcel, Paris 1664

CHAPTER 26

When Alouette wakes in Étienne’s arms, his breath is slow and warm against her neck. Real. For a moment, she is tempted to let herself sink back into it. Almost. If she stayed, she could fold into this life. His life. A version of herself that could be happy here, that would choose this closeness instead of the fire in her blood.

It’s a compelling dream. But if there’s one thing Alouette understands about dreams, it’s that even the loveliest, the most powerful of them can dissolve in moments. Like the last few stars in the morning sky. Like the smell and taste of him as she pulls away gently, carefully, not wanting to wake him.

Outside, the rooftops catch the first flush of dawn. Étienne’s kiss still lingers on her lips, but the purpose in her steps takes over. She’s determined to try once more to persuade her father. If she moves quickly—if she can find the right words, the right tone, reminding him of everything they stand to lose—then maybe, just maybe, they can still leave together with her discovery of color, while it still belongs only to them.

She quickens her pace, rehearsing the conversation in her mind, reshaping her arguments. She will not beg, but she will make him see. Make him understand.

But as she nears the cottage, the door is slightly ajar. And her heart stutters.

Inside, Henriette is asleep at the table, her head cradled in her arms like a child. The candle beside her has burned to nothing but pooled wax.

For one disorienting second, the tenderness of the scene collides with the chaos around it. Cupboards yawn open, pigment jars lie toppled on their sides, papers and ledgers are scattered about, as if someone has rifled through them in haste. Her workshop. Her experiments. A wreckage of searching hands.

Something of last night’s courage still lingers in Alouette’s blood. Rather than collapse under this new horror, she feels her spine straighten, her resolve building strength. She pushes Henriette’s shoulder roughly. “Wake up.”

Henriette blinks, rubbing her temples as if waking from a heavy dream. “Alouette.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The constable’s guards came to arrest your father. They say he’s been withholding his formula. That he’s kept secrets from the guild for his own gain.”

Everything slants and tumbles inside her. She had feared this moment—had even imagined it more than once, like a bad omen she couldn’t shake. And yet, now that it’s here, she feels utterly unprepared. “Where is he?”

Henriette exhales, shaking her head. “They must be holding him somewhere.”

The vagueness in Henriette’s voice seems practiced somehow, careful. “Who told you?”

“I heard from Cécile Lavigne.”

“Thierry’s wife? Why would she come to you, or even know how to find you?”

“Cécile was a friend for a time, long ago. I saw her at the festival and she offered to let me a room. I’ve been staying with them.”

Alouette’s mistrust sharpens to an edge. She thinks of the night she saw Thierry leaving the factory, his false concern for her father. He’d been watching, reporting. But to whom? And why would he tell Henriette unless…

“You knew this was coming. How?”

“I didn’t—no more than I told you at the harvest. I tried to warn you then. But this—I had no idea.”

Anger rises, filling Alouette to the brim. Her hands quiver as she thinks of her creation, the scrap of flawless blue in her pocket. Thank God she had it with her, safe and sound. But what about her father’s work? A lifetime of toil and sacrifice. Would they threaten or even torture him until he exposed their secrets—laid everything bare?

“You went to the guild,” she says, nearly spitting. “Or straight to the Gobelins. You gave him away.”

“Why would I do any such thing?”

“That’s what I can’t puzzle out. Payment? Spite?” The fury feels too large for her skin. She tastes blood where she’s bitten her lip.

“I came to warn you,” Henriette protests. “You’re my daughter.”

For years, Alouette has carried her mother’s absence like a scar. She’s borne it all, the consequences of her mother’s choices, every whispered word in Saint-Marcel, every cold glance from neighbors who felt sure that madness ran in her veins. Henriette’s shadow has darkened every step she’s taken. Why would it be any different now?

“Get out,” she hisses.

“You’re making a mistake—”

Alouette’s knife is in her hand before she even thinks of reaching for it. Yesterday, she would have hesitated. But now—after knowing what it means to truly claim something for herself—she will not waver. Not with her father’s life at stake. Not with everything she’s worked for hanging in the balance. “The only mistake would be in trusting you.”

Henriette’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t recoil. Instead, she looks at Alouette the way one looks at a tombstone. As if there’s nothing further to be done but weep. Slowly, she rises from her seat, gathering her shawl around her.

The moment the door swings shut behind her mother, Alouette exhales, shuddering—but finds no relief. She stands there, heart pounding, still clutching the knife. The cottage is in shambles. It makes her feel ill to know it’s been hunted through by greedy, unfeeling hands.

And then there is her father behind bars and in danger. She has no power to protect him or the work they’ve done. The guild will stop at nothing to take what they believe is theirs. All she can do is wait and pray that her father won’t be harmed. That however mercenary they are, they can still show enough charity to release him.

Please, she thinks, let him be unmaimed. Please let him be alive.

CHAPTER 27

In the days that Alouette waits for news of her father, no one will let her see him or explain what he’s being charged with. Hour after hour passes, and she grows sick with worry, unable to sleep or keep anything in her stomach.

The cottage feels both too full and too empty—empty of his presence, his muttering as he works, the rhythmic scrape of his mortar; full of his scattered papers, half-finished experiments, the faint scent of his madder root preparations still lingering in the air. She leaves his workbench untouched, a shrine to his absence.

On the third day, Lucienne appears at dusk, rapping at the door. Alouette hasn’t gone to work at the lavoir since her father vanished and assumes Lucienne has come to summon or dismiss her. Instead, she builds a fire and sets the kettle boiling for barley tea. While Alouette sits motionless at the table, Lucienne moves like a shadow around her, opening windows to let in the rain-scented wind.

Such a simple thing—a friend who comes in a moment of need without being asked. Who knows to invite in fresh air when grief threatens to suffocate. Alouette has always held herself apart, guarding her work, her dreams. But here is Lucienne, steady as the tide, bringing bread from her own larder and quiet strength when it’s needed most.

“There’s something you should know,” Lucienne says when they are sitting side by side at the small, worn table. The steam from her cup rises between them, a fragile, transparent barrier. “About why the guild acted so quickly. They found letters in your father’s workshop.”

“What?” The word falls from Alouette’s lips, hollow with disbelief.

“It appears he’s been corresponding with Venetian dyers. Trading guild formulas.”

Alouette’s pulse lurches. Her father’s obsession, his desperate need for validation—it all shifts into terrible focus. Could he really have taken her discovery and bartered it away? Her blue, born of her hands and mind, sent across mountains to strangers?

“That’s impossible,” she says. But even as she speaks, uncertainty threads through her voice. “My father has always been loyal to the guild. Devoted, even when they’ve given him little in return.”

Lucienne’s expression softens with pity. “Devotion can turn bitter when it isn’t returned. You know how long he’s worked on that red—twenty years? Thirty? With little recognition.”

“But trading secrets?” Alouette shakes her head. “He doesn’t even speak Venetian. How would he—”

“There are always translators for the right price. And Venice…” Lucienne trails off, her fingers tracing the rim of her cup. “Venice has always been ahead of us in certain techniques. Their glass, their pigments. Some say they have methods that make our dyes look like a child’s attempt.”

The suggestion hangs in the air between them. That her father, consumed by ambition, might have sought knowledge beyond guild boundaries. Beyond the law. It was the very thing Henriette had warned about, yet Alouette had dismissed it as madness or spite.

“They say Laferrière intercepted a letter,” Lucienne goes on, her tone careful. “That’s how they knew. Did you ever see him writing one? Or notice anything unusual in his workroom?”

Alouette thinks of the late nights, the locked drawer in his workbench, the way he sometimes hurriedly covered papers when she entered unexpectedly. Details that seemed innocuous at the time now align in damning patterns.

“No. Nothing definite. But—” She hesitates, torn between loyalty and truth. “He’s been more secretive lately. More… desperate. Since we discovered—” She stops herself, drawing in a deep breath. “What will they do to him?”

“If they can prove treason against the guild?” Lucienne looks away, her profile sharp in the firelight. “The best outcome would be stripping him of his medallion, his position. Public humiliation. Banishment.”

“And the worst?”

“The Châtelet. Or Bicêtre.” The names of the prisons toll like funeral bells. “Men have disappeared for less.”

Alouette’s hands clench in her lap, the bones of her knuckles pressing white against her skin. “There must be something I can do. Someone I can appeal to—”

“You?” Lucienne’s laugh holds no mirth. “My dear, you’re a woman. Worse, you’re a dyer’s daughter with no connections, no wealth to offer as surety. To them, you’re as invisible as the air they breathe.”

Lucienne’s words strike a familiar chord of rage in Alouette’s chest—the same frustration she’s felt all her life. Being unseen, unheard, despite her skill and knowledge. The way the men at the factory watched her father with respect, but averted their eyes from her, as if her presence might somehow contaminate their craft.

“But if I could explain—if I could make them understand he isn’t working against them…”

“What would you say? That he was only seeking knowledge? That he meant no harm?” Lucienne sighs. “Intent doesn’t matter to the guild. Only loyalty. Only control.”

The fire snaps in the hearth, sending shadows skittering across the floor like frightened creatures. Outside, rain beats a steady rhythm against the roof, each drop like a tiny hammer pummeling stone.

“I don’t believe it,” Alouette says finally. “Not all of it, at least. My father has many faults, but he wouldn’t betray—” She stops, a new thought striking her. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he thought he had no choice.” The pieces of the puzzle shift, rearranging into a pattern she should have seen sooner. “The arsenic. Our experiments. What if he was trying to trade what we discovered for something else? Protection, maybe. Or a position elsewhere.”

Lucienne studies her face. “What arsenic? What experiments?”

Too late, Alouette realizes her mistake. She shakes her head, drawing back. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter now.”

But Lucienne isn’t fooled. “Alouette, listen to me carefully. If you know something—if you were involved in whatever your father was doing—you must be very, very careful.”

“I wasn’t involved,” Alouette says, but the lie tastes bitter on her tongue. “I only meant to say—”

A knock interrupts, saving her from further explanation. Three sharp raps against the door, then silence. Lucienne rises to answer, but Alouette stops her with a hand on her arm. “I’ll go.”

When she pulls open the door, the night air rushes in, damp against her face.

It’s Étienne.

Rain drips from his hair, quarry dust streaking his clothes. Just days ago, she’d fallen asleep in his arms, his heartbeat steady beneath her cheek. Now his presence fills the small space, heavy with things unsaid. As Lucienne tactfully retreats to the hearth, his eyes meet hers briefly. A moment of silent acknowledgment passes between them. What they shared is still real, still theirs, even in this crisis.

He glances around, noting the untouched food, the hollow shadows beneath Alouette’s eyes. “I heard what happened,” he says. “Is there any word about your father?”

“Nothing certain.” Alouette’s voice sounds distant to her own ears, as if she’s speaking from the bottom of a well. “The guild has him. That’s all I know.”

“I’ve been asking questions,” he says. “There are men in the quarry with connections to the city guard. They say your father is being held at the guildhall for now, not the Châtelet. That’s something, at least. But they’re saying it’s treason, Alouette. Against the guild and the crown both. Something about formulas being sent to Venice.”

He meets her gaze as if trying to plumb the depths of her hurt. “Did you know what he was doing?”

“No. Yes. I—” Her thoughts scatter like pigment in water, impossible to gather. “I knew he was desperate to perfect his red. I knew he would do almost anything. But this? To take our work and sell it without telling me?”

The words escape before she can contain them. Our work. She’s never claimed it so plainly before, never asserted her ownership of the discoveries they’d made. That she’d made, and he’d taken as his own.

Étienne moves closer, seeming to sense her spiraling thoughts. The smells of rain and limestone cling to him, familiar now in ways she hadn’t expected. “Whatever happened, whatever he did—it isn’t your burden to carry,” he says.

“Isn’t it? He’s my father. His blood runs in my veins.” She gestures around the room, at the jars of mordants, the stained worktable, the dye-spattered walls. “This is all we have. All we are.”

“No.” The certainty in his tone makes her look up. “It’s not all you are.”

He hesitates, then reaches into his pocket and withdraws something wrapped in a small scrap of cloth. When he unfolds it, a carved figure rests in his palm—a lark with wings unfurled, fashioned from pale limestone with such delicate precision that it seems almost alive.

Alouette stares at it, transfixed. The surface has been polished to a soft sheen, each feather delineated with careful attention. The bird’s head is lifted, its breast thrust forward as if into a strong wind. “Even stone can learn to fly?” she murmurs.

His eyes never leave her face. “I started it the night we met. After you left the quarry.”

“It’s beautiful,” she says softly.

“Down in the tunnels, you see carvings of birds everywhere. Some say the early quarriers were seamen first. That the birds are like the dove in the story of Noah, promising land and safety after a long journey. But my father always thought of them as larks, there to remind us that there’s sky above, however far away, even when the darkness feels thick enough to swallow us whole. That there’s a way out, even when we can’t see it.” His thumb traces the bird’s outstretched wing. “When I learned your name was Alouette… it felt like a sign.”

Something breaks loose inside her—a tectonic movement in a place she thought had hardened beyond feeling. This man has seen her, truly seen her, in ways no one else ever has. Not just the defiant dyer’s daughter, the washerwoman with stained hands, but her very soul.

“We could leave now.” His suggestion is a whisper beneath the drumming of the rain. “Tonight. Find somewhere new, where no one knows us or cares about stations.”

For a moment, she lets the image flare to life in her mind—Étienne’s calloused hands catching hers in the morning sun, the Bièvre far behind them. No guilds. No fathers. Only a different life, an unwritten one. Perhaps she can still be that girl—the one who lets herself be saved.

And yet…

Her father sits in a cell, alone and undoubtedly afraid. His life’s work, his passion, his obsession—reduced to a charge of treason. However much Alouette resents him for his secrets, for potentially betraying her work, she cannot abandon him. Not now. Not without knowing the truth. Not without first trying to reclaim what is rightfully hers.

And beyond all of this, there is her own discovery—the color that belongs to her alone. If she leaves now, what will become of it? Another guild secret, locked away and forgotten? Another formula buried in the private ledger of some master?

When she gave herself to Étienne, much of that night had felt so freeing, like claiming herself. But to abandon her work would be like surrendering the truest thing she owns.

“I need to find a way into the factory,” she says, the words tasting of ash and inevitability.

“To help your father?”

“Yes. And to protect what I’ve worked so hard for.”

Étienne studies her, his eyes dark with emotions she cannot—dares not—name. “Alouette—at least let me help you.”

She touches his face, tracing the scar on his forehead, memorizing its shape. In his gaze, she sees their shared hours, the sweetness of the wine, the way their whispered sighs had woven together like dreams. For a breath longer than she should, she lets herself feel it. Then other thoughts seep in. His family needs him as much as her father needs her. They are both tethered to older loyalties and duties.

“No.” She shakes her head and pulls away.

Étienne grips her wrist, just for a moment. Not hard, not to stop her, but as if he’s trying to hold on to something slipping through his fingers. “You don’t have to do this.”

The words scrape at the still-soft part of her, more dangerous than any blade. Because she wants—oh, how she wants—to believe him. To believe that there is a part of herself that could set aside responsibility and guilt and history. That could choose happiness, however fleeting, over the weight of justice.

It would take almost nothing to grasp his outstretched hand. To let him lead her past the city gates, past the endless hunger of Saint-Marcel. She would not look back. They would find a small house somewhere, away from the reek of the Bièvre and the grip of the guild. Étienne would sculpt stone instead of toil to unearth it, and she would find color everywhere.

She sways toward that life—toward him—before the weight of reality yanks her back. The girl who could leave does not exist. Alouette was never given a chance to become her. When she fell asleep in Étienne’s arms that night, she had glimpsed what contentment might feel like. But the path before her is more difficult and necessary. She knows she must choose not to be safe, but to be brave.

“Please—” He tries again. The word seems to hold everything he cannot say. Please be careful. Please come back. Please don’t forget what we found.

She shakes her head once more, a voiceless plea not to make her choice any harder. Then she places the lark back in his hands. “Keep this safe for me.”

Étienne exhales slowly, nodding. His eyes darken as he looks at Alouette a moment longer, then he pockets the lark, his shoulders squared against whatever ache he feels. His expression settles into something resolute, a mirror of her own determination.

Some promises don’t need words. And some paths, once chosen, allow no turning back.

When he’s gone, Lucienne speaks into the silence. “Mind the ground you’re treading on.” She squeezes Alouette’s hand as if she’s trying to pass on reason and resilience through touch alone. “They don’t just punish men like your father. Years ago, there was another dyer—skilled and ambitious. She had her own ideas, like you. She thought she could bargain with them.”

Alouette swallows, her mouth dry. “And?”

Lucienne meets her gaze. “No one speaks her name anymore.”

CHAPTER 28

Alouette paces the cottage as midnight ticks past, the weight of urgency pressing against her ribs. Lucienne’s words echo in her mind—about foreign letters and acts of treason. But something doesn’t align. Her father barely spoke French with elegance, let alone Venetian. Even if he had managed to find a translator, why would he risk everything he’d been working toward, particularly after he had warned her constantly against taking risks, being reckless, not following tradition?

No, these charges smack of fabrication. There must be evidence—proof that would expose the guild’s lies and machinations. Her father kept meticulous notes of every interaction with guild officials and always had. If there’s anything that could reveal the truth, it would be in his private ledger, hidden beneath the loose floorboard under his workbench. The guild might never think to discover it there, but soon he’ll be sentenced, and any chance to exonerate him will be lost.

She pulls her darkest cloak around her shoulders and slips into the street, the night pressing close. Each step toward the factory feels like moving toward the edge of something vast and inescapable.

The door is locked when she reaches it. Without hesitation, she smashes a window with a brick, the shattering sound ringing through the empty streets. Glass slices into her palm, sharp as betrayal, but she doesn’t stop. Blood trails her through the mill room, pooling in her lifeline, smearing across cabinets as she searches. The air here is thick with memory as well as acrid mordants. These vats and cisterns were her father’s true home, where obsession and devotion turned to precarious ambition.

Like father, like daughter. But her obsession casts a different hue. She doesn’t want guild approval, or wealth, or a legacy carved in ledgers. She wants justice—for herself, for her father, for the work they’ve poured their lives into.

The darkness inside the mill is absolute, save for the slivers of moonlight filtering through broken panes. She has four hours, perhaps, before the earliest workers arrive. The shadows are her allies, turning her into one more ghost for villagers to whisper about.

She moves quickly, heart hammering, her wounded hand forgotten.

On the way to her father’s workshop, she passes the drying room, where bolts of twilight-silk brocade cover the laying table. The fabric is luminous, shifting from a deep, rich blue to the purple of an iris bloom. Twilight, the commission had specified. Someone—her father, perhaps—had managed to bottle the very shade of evening sky.

She lifts the silk, her blood seeping into the fabric like spilled wine. The beauty of the mark transfixes her, a terrible irony. How easily she stains what she loves. Then—voices. A flicker of lantern light. The scrape of boots in the corridor.

She springs toward the door, wild and unthinking, her heart pounding. The hallway yawns dark and endless before her, but she can hear them behind her now—pursuing, closing in.

A sharp command: “Halt!” Too close.

She veers toward the primary dyeing room, her feet slipping against the slick stone floor. All around her, the bitter smells of copper and alum, the residual heat from doused cauldrons. She scrambles onto the scaffold, a desperate bid for escape, but they’re too fast. Shadows shift below her—two, maybe three men, their heavy steps vibrating through the boards beneath her hands.

She runs blindly across the narrow planking, lungs burning. Then—her boot catches. A misstep, a betrayal of wood against wood. The world tilts. She falls.

Cold chemical fluid rushes up to meet her, forcing its way into her mouth, burning her throat. Her father’s scarlet dye. The vat left untouched since his arrest. The color blooms around her, thick as blood, clinging to her skin, her clothes, sinking into her very being.

The men shout, their voices distorted through the liquid. Hands reach for her, but she kicks them away, sinking deeper. If they take her, it is over. If she surfaces, they will strip everything from her—her discovery, her name, her freedom.

Vermilion ribbons pull her under, wrapping around her like silken chains. She could let go. Slip beneath, disappear into crimson oblivion.

But survival flares hot and instinctual in her chest. This is a deeper fire, something beyond fury, beyond defiance. Her limbs thrash against the weight of the liquid, against the grip of fate itself. With one final surge, she breaks the surface, gasping, skin painted in her father’s color. A creature of red and rage. And then—hands seize her, wrenching her from the vat.

The world blurs in the sickly glow of lantern light. A rough voice murmurs something she barely registers before the blunt crack of a rifle’s stock slams into her ribs, sending her to darkness.

The last sound she hears is the river in her blood, whispering the same truth it always has: Run. Escape. Endure.

Paris 1940

CHAPTER 29

After that first bombing of Paris, on the night Klara was born, a long-overdue panic erupts in the city. The streets clog and churn with chaos as everyone flees at once—or tries—cars crawling in endless lines in every direction. Almost immediately, petrol becomes scarce. The overrun metro shuts down. Kristof feels relieved that he lives close enough to walk to work, though it’s an eerie feeling to pass shop after shop with shuttered doors and windows. Whole neighborhoods fall silent, almost sepulchral.

The city feels gutted. Feral dogs roam alleyways in packs, scavenging for scraps. After dark, cats shred garbage bags, leaving trails of wet newspaper and fish bones. Kristof, too, feels like a straggler. Like a ghost in his own life, haunting the margins of a city already half abandoned.

Even as he goes through the motions—examining patients, writing charts, following protocols—his hands sometimes shake so badly it takes effort not to drop his pen. There are no medical textbooks for this, no clinical guidelines on how to function while the world dissolves around him. It no longer seems to matter to Kristof that he isn’t a French citizen. He isn’t an outsider merely bearing witness to the collapse. He’s part of it, woven into the fabric of a city about to be unmade.

Like the monuments and government buildings, the walls of Sainte-Anne’s need to be fortified at the base with sandbags. Many nonessential staff flee. Those who stay receive crash-course training in how to handle mass casualties.

An otherworldly feeling clings to everything as Kristof rushes to follow orders: securing essential equipment, moving critical patients away from high-risk areas, releasing nonurgent cases to make room for wounded soldiers and civilians. And then—a terrible waiting.

One afternoon, as the dull thud of great guns ripples along the hospital corridors, Kristof finds himself working alongside Julian in the supply room, stockpiling bandages and medicine.

“None of this feels real,” he remarks, almost to himself. “It’s like we’re stuck in some horrible nightmare.”

“I know,” Julian agrees quietly. His usual humor is nowhere to be found. “Patrice is begging me to go south to Lyon. Her mother is alone there, terrified. I told her that I can’t abandon my patients.” He tries to laugh, a sound as thin as melting ice. “Don’t I sound noble? The truth is part of me wants to go. To run. Would you have made me out to be such a coward?”

Kristof sits back on his heels, sighing. “We all want to go, Julian. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or mad.”

“And yet we don’t.” Julian gestures vaguely toward the hall. “Their lives matter more than ours, that’s the oath we’ve taken. More than our family’s lives. But I sometimes wonder if it matters. If I’m really helping.”

“I ask myself the same thing. Especially on the bad days, when Henri Allard has another episode—or any one of them, really. I want to believe they can get better, but I’m not sure. Particularly not now. Our patients need rest. They need life to be soft and kind again. Not this.”

“I had a dream last night that I was on a train, watching Paris disappear behind me. I felt… God, I felt relieved.” Julian shakes his head, scowling. “What kind of doctor am I?”

“A human one. Sometimes, when I’m walking home, I imagine just… not turning back. Just keeping on walking.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere. Nowhere. Honestly, I have no idea. I couldn’t get home, if it even still exists. I haven’t heard from my parents since just after the Netherlands fell. No mail can get through.”

“I know you worry.”

“That doesn’t quite say it, but yes. I worry.”

“Well, selfishly, I’m glad you’re here,” Julian says finally. “I don’t think I could do this alone.”

“Neither could I, my friend. Neither could I.”

ON JUNE 10, a scorching afternoon, Kristof sees smoke rising above the rooftops along rue de Vaugirard as he walks home. A sharp, acrid smell hits the back of his throat. Then recognition sets in. The government is burning paper—thousands of classified documents reduced to ash before they can fall into German hands. Not if they come. When.

The smell of ash clings to his clothes, as if the city itself is exhaling despair. Paris once seemed unshakable to him—a city of light immune to the world’s darkness. Now, that light feels impossibly fragile, a single wavering flame in an empty church.

By the time he reaches his apartment and turns on the radio, the death knell has already begun. General Weygand’s voice crackles through the speaker, cold and clinical as a terminal diagnosis: Paris will be left undefended. To preserve its monuments, its grand boulevards, its beauty—the government will simply step aside.

Prime Minister Reynaud had vowed resistance. We shall fight in front of Paris, behind Paris. Now he’s gone, fled to Tours with his cabinet. The whiplash is dizzying. No last stand. Not a single shot fired. Hitler can simply walk in and claim his prize.

The final straw comes a few days later, on June 14, just before dawn, when the First German Army attacks the Maginot Line between Saarbrücken and Saint-Avold, one hundred miles from Luxembourg. The beginning of the line’s collapse.

Kristof hears the news in a radio broadcast in the hospital staff lounge but struggles to fully take it in. It can’t be true, can it? The impenetrable fortifications along the German border were supposed to keep France safe. That’s what the reports have been saying all this time, even before Hitler attacked Poland. What the government has promised, emphatically and repeatedly. But this, too, has been a lie.

The truth is, the Maginot Line began to fail the moment it was flanked at Sedan a month ago—when the Germans slipped past it entirely. This is just the last, symbolic blow. The end of a fortress that never saw the right war coming.

From the very beginning, gross miscalculations and overt falsifications have worked, stone by stone, to build a stronghold grounded in delusion. The Ardennes forest—a crucial component of the Allies’ defense—was supposed to be impassable to a mechanized army. It simply couldn’t be done, the people of France were told, over and over. The Meuse River was touted as a natural barrier. A strong deterrent against invasion.

And yet somehow, the Germans managed to obliterate these two “impossible” obstacles within days of each other. France has been left glaringly exposed, like a citadel with a catastrophically fatal flaw.

The swift German advance has torn through the country’s defenses like a relentless flood, shattering Allied confidence in their strategy and washing away any last semblance of safety. Seen in this light, blitzkrieg isn’t just a military tactic—it’s a psychological weapon, inducing a state of paralyzing shock and disbelief. A mass state of acute stress response—fight, flight, or freeze playing out on a national scale. And within Kristof as well.

He walks away from his colleagues, still huddled around the radio, in a kind of daze. The medical chart in his hand trembles so violently that he needs to stop and shift his grip, willing himself to calm down. He thinks back to the patriotic newsreels that proclaimed the Maginot Line would hold fast. The vast underground bunkers, the heavy artillery, the elite troops stationed along the border—all there to guarantee French security.

A fortress built on quicksand.

In the psychiatric wards, patients flinch at passing shadows and sirens. They know—intimately, instinctively—that the world is breaking. Perhaps they have always known.

A few hours later, as Kristof washes his hands in an exam room, a nurse bursts in with news. The Germans are already at the porte Saint-Denis. Motorcycles have begun to roll in. Tanks too. Paris stands open, like a door left ajar.

The nurse’s words reach him through water. A roaring noise fills his head—a sound like artillery, or a train rushing toward its end.

“Dr. Larsen?” She steps closer. “Are you all right?”

He nods automatically, his awareness narrowing to the carbolic soap foaming over his hands, the sting of it in his eyes. That antiseptic smell will stay with him forever. The puncturing scent of collapse.

THAT NIGHT, PARIS stands untouched. Its bridges arch over the Seine. Its streets bear the weight of centuries of stone. Yet beneath the surface, a quiet fracture spreads—a world ending, never to return.

In dim corners and supply closets, whispers have already begun to rise. Not everyone will step aside. Some will fight. But that’s another story, distant and unreal—a tale he can’t yet imagine.

CHAPTER 30

Kristof hasn’t heard from Alesander in days—weeks, he realizes with a start, feeling concerned that Alesander’s apartment building on rue Monge isn’t far from the hospital. Kristof’s been there half a dozen times—once to help carry stacks of books up the narrow stairs after they’d lingered too long at Shakespeare and Company.

When he arrives this time, just wanting to know his friend is all right, the concierge sits blinking at him from her chair in the booth, like a specimen in formaldehyde. She fans herself with yesterday’s newspaper, her face taking on a careful blankness.

“Monsieur Extebarria? He paid through the month. No forwarding address, I’m afraid.”

Kristof shakes his head, bewildered. “Wait. When?”

“A few days ago, just after the Germans came.” She pauses meaningfully. “He’s always been peculiar, that one. Coming and going at all hours. I’m not surprised.”

Something in her tone gives him pause. The word peculiar seems to pulse, edged with judgment or suspicion. “What do you mean, exactly?”

The concierge leans forward slightly. “Visitors sometimes. Not French, I don’t think. Speaking low. And once I saw him with papers—many papers. He hid them when he saw me.” She shrugs. “Not my business, of course.”

Kristof forces himself to think more carefully about his friend’s behavior. How Alesander was forever appearing and vanishing according to his own whims. How he knew every hidden door in Paris. That leather satchel he always carried, which Kristof had never seen inside of. And those stories he told, about his cousin in Spain, the one who fought Franco. Did the details of those tales ever shift in their recounting? Had Alesander been involved in something more than their underground explorations?

Though the concierge looks at him strangely, Kristof asks to see the abandoned apartment. Four flights up, he finds the door unlocked, the room stripped bare. In the kitchen, empty shelves gape. Alesander often used his kitchen table for drafting, but that is empty too. Only a tin cup sits on the windowsill, an old copy of Le Petit Parisien beneath it.

The room seems to tick faintly with silence. The curtains have already lost the odor of tobacco and ink, as if Alesander himself was only a kind of collective illusion. And what of their maps, likely rolled into Alesander’s satchel now, carried away to where? Back to Spain? Kristof has always been so proud of their so-called historical research, never once questioning its true purpose.

Something catches his eye in the corner—a scrap of paper wedged between floorboards, as if it has fallen and been missed in the hasty departure. He kneels and works it free. It’s a small rectangular card, blank except for a series of numbers written in what might be code. He stares at it, turning it over in his hands, realizing how very little he might have known his friend.

He glances around one last time, then slips the mysterious card next to the string in his pocket, uncertain whether it’s a clue or merely a reminder of how much has been hidden from him. In the stairwell, his footsteps ring against stone, each one a question without an answer.

ON THE EVENING Marshal Pétain delivers his surrender speech, the Brodskys gather in Kristof’s apartment. Rachel sits with newborn Klara against her chest, still weak from the difficult birth and the newly sleepless nights. The older children are uncharacteristically quiet, no doubt sensing the tension in the adults.

Pétain was a hero in the last war, a celebrated and honored figure. But he is eighty-four now. An old man. His voice quavers as he comes on the air.

“C’est le coeur serré que je vous dis aujourd’hui qu’il faut cesser le combat,” he begins, his soon-to-be-infamous words punctuated by static. “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting.”

Kristof hears Rachel draw in a breath and hold it. Felix’s jaw clenches. Little Klara clings to her mother’s blouse with a pink fist.

“So, it’s over, then,” Felix says. “France has fallen.”

Kristof’s response comes sharper than he intends. “No. France is more than its government. As long as people fight—”

Rachel’s sad smile stops him. “You have a good heart, Kristof. But I fear dark times ahead, especially for Jews.” She adjusts Klara’s blanket. “My family lost everything in Odessa before escaping to Warsaw.”

“History has little imagination,” Felix murmurs.

Later, after Rachel puts the children to bed, Felix stays while Kristof opens a bottle of brandy.

“You’re family to us now,” Felix says. “If you ever need anything, even years from now, even if we’re countries apart, you can count on me.”

Kristof had grown up among reserved people who didn’t express themselves so openly. Only Annelies had dared to show emotion, and she had been as out of place in their cold, restrained household as wildflowers breaking through frozen tundra.

That time seems distant now, lost behind him. Here, the very notion of family as something unbreakable feels naive. But also necessary. He wants to believe Felix—to accept this bond as a shield against the growing darkness—even though a voice in his mind whispers that promises like these might not survive for long.

“Thank you,” he says, wrestling with his own feelings.

Felix takes a slow sip of brandy. “I owe you my daughter’s life. Who knows, perhaps Rachel’s too. Not even my own brother has done as much for us.”

“I’m glad I was there.”

“Yes.” Felix tilts his glass, watching the amber liquor catch the light. “I’m glad we’re here together. It makes me rest easier. If something were to happen to me, I know my wife and children would be safe.”

“Nothing will happen to you. The Germans aren’t interested in a Polish watchmaker.”

Felix gives a dry laugh. “A Jewish watchmaker.”

Kristof has no answer for that.

In the silence, Felix studies him for a moment. Then he says, “The world has seen fit to make us brothers, come or not what may or may not come.”

Kristof smiles at the double negative. It’s charming and somehow strangely reassuring. “What’s that from?”

“Something my father used to say when he was a little drunk. He made a song of it. Sometimes he’d grab my mother or my sister and dance, humming it—Come or not what may or may not come.”

“What do you think he meant?”

Felix shrugs, blinking. “Maybe that fate blows like the wind. Life happens to us. How we choose to act, whom we choose to love—that’s all we can control.” His eyes glisten, but he doesn’t turn away. He isn’t ashamed of tears.

“Was he a good father?” Kristof asks.

“Good enough.”

“Well, you are. I expect you already know that.”

Felix smiles. “Good enough.” He swirls the brandy in his glass. “I hope my children remember me that way.”

CHAPTER 31

Even before the armistice has officially been formalized, Wehrmacht boots echo across the pont Neuf. Motorcycles roar past the Tuileries, and bloodred flags rise like an infection across the skyline. German cars prowl arrondissement by arrondissement, broadcasting commands over loudspeakers: All private arms must be surrendered. Any hostile acts will be punished by death.

The country has been split in half. The north, including Paris, is under direct German occupation. The south has become the so-called free zone, governed from Vichy by Marshal Pétain’s new government—a puppet regime draped in tricolor but kneeling to Berlin.

Kristof hears German commands daily—Achtung. Sperrgebiet. Verboten. Nur für Deutsche. This is the same language Annelies once loved so dearly, whose cadences used to move her to tears. Now it feels desecrated. A prayer rewritten as a curse.

The stark Gothic letters shout ownership from every wall, so different from the old markings in the tunnels below. The ones that first drew Kristof to the city’s hidden spaces. Underground, signs exist to guide, to remember. These new ones are determined to exclude, to erase.

Kristof has come to think of Paris as two cities—above and below, mirrors of each other. But no longer. Now, the underworld feels like the saner, truer version. The one to be trusted.

ONCE HITLER HAs conquered France, sweeping it into his velvet bag with his other treasures, he visits Paris only once, on June 23, waving from the foot of monuments for photographs. Then he disappears to focus his energies on destroying Britain and the Balkans.

His presence isn’t necessary to begin the steady unraveling of Paris under occupation. He hangs a welcome sign on the open door, inviting his chosen people to enjoy the city as if it is now their own private buffet. The myth and legend of it—monuments and bistros, museums and fine hotels—all theirs for the taking.

Soon, busloads of German tourists arrive, poring over their What to Do in Paris guidebooks while Nazi officers and bureaucrats engulf the city like locusts, devouring anything of value.

They go for the art first. Convoys of military trucks pull up to the Louvre, crating up centuries of culture like so much cargo. Masterpieces that belong to the entire world are now destined for Hitler’s planned Führermuseum or the private collections of his cronies. The Mona Lisa, thankfully, has already been spirited away to safety. But so many others fall to a different fate.

And the homes… oh, the homes. The finest residences in Paris are commandeered for German officers and officials. Families are turned out onto the streets with barely enough time to gather their belongings. On any given day, Kristof sees pianos and fine china, furniture and tapestries, being loaded onto trucks, bound for Germany.

As for the Vichy authorities? They stand by and watch. Sometimes they even help identify valuable targets. Eager to prove themselves useful to their new masters. Pétain’s face, meanwhile, is plastered all over Paris—the doddering old “hero” preaching a false gospel of national revolution. The slogans shouting out from these posters urge Parisians to work with and for Germany. To do their part for the “New Europe.” How bitter those words taste.

One night, Kristof sits in his dark apartment, listening to the distant hum of life outside. Somewhere, laughter rises faintly, carried on the wind. It sounds wrong—sharp, hollow, cutting through the silence that now defines Paris.

The curfew is in place, and yet he can’t stay here. He steps into the streets, telling himself that he’ll flash his hospital badge if it comes to that. But there’s no need. The city is quieter than he has ever known it, yet alive in its own uneasy way. A man cycles past, his chain creaking. A cat darts across the pavement, its shadow stretching long under a distant streetlamp. These are the rhythms of a city trying to sleep or dream while holding its breath.

The streets narrow as he approaches the Latin Quarter, cobblestone alleyways smelling of tobacco smoke and coffee, spilled wine and forgotten cigarettes. And then he hears it—the unmistakable strain of Django’s guitar, sharp and syncopated, almost painful under the current circumstances.

Kristof pauses, letting the sound guide him. Ahead, Le Boeuf sur le Toit glows faintly, music spilling out of the open windows. Django’s fingers move like practiced lightning, same as ever, but something in his playing feels detached or mechanical somehow, stripped of its soul. Kristof has to wonder if performing for the Germans feels like being a puppet, his stage surrounded by a fretwork of strings that are more like trip wires.

How and why is Django still in Paris? Hitler has long targeted the Romani—Gypsies—deeming them a lower order of people. Perhaps he tried to vanish but was stopped at the border? As for his safety, it seems obvious that enough of the officers or higher-ups in the new administration see the genius in Django’s music. His brilliance has bought him racial amnesty. But what about those with no obvious gifts or luck? Those with no stage to stand on?

Now, laughter spills out into the street, drowning out the melody twisting in the air. A blond woman in a vivid red dress sashays past the open window, laughing as a handsomely dressed officer catches her, dips her low.

Kristof isn’t sure if what he feels is anger, envy, or something darker. Hitler has offered Paris like a feast. Take it all, he’s declared. The music, the wine, the museums. The beauty. Dance in their clubs, sleep in their beds, drink from their cellars. Enjoy your prize.

The ease of this laughter, this music, seems to clash against everything stolen, everything broken. The dissonance of it all. Kristof stands frozen on the sidewalk, a frayed wire in his chest seeming to vibrate more precariously with every note.

Finally, he turns away, walking fast. A breeze picks up behind him. It pushes his shirt fabric against his shoulder blades, as if he’s being given a light but emphatic shove. From above, wooden shutters bang and rattle like distant gunfire.

All the way home, Felix’s words replay in Kristof’s mind: The world has seen fit to make us brothers. But does being brothers mean they can guarantee each other’s safety?

CITY OF PARIS

NOTICE TO THE POPULATION

8 July 1940

By order of the German Military Command:

All wireless sets must be surrendered to the nearest police station before July 15.

Those keeping radio sets in their possession after this date will be severely punished.

ORDINANCE

27 September 1940

Concerning Jews in Occupied Territory:

1. A Jew is anyone who belongs or has belonged to the Jewish religion, or who has more than two Jewish grandparents.

2. Jews must register at their local police station before 20 October 1940.

3. Jewish-owned businesses must display a yellow sign in French and German: “ENTREPRISE JUIVE.”

CHAPTER 32

The dance of occupier and occupied is a strange one—even for Kristof, who doesn’t really belong to Paris. Some citizens are wealthy enough to seal themselves up inside handsome estates, sending servants to buy whatever they need to maintain their standard of living, as if nothing is different whatsoever. But the majority feel ill at ease and compromised. Infiltrated.

Most of the food resources funnel toward the Germans, while the people of Paris register for ration cards that allow the minimal caloric intake needed to survive—and no more. Queues for bread begin before dawn. Whole sections of the city are soon closed off to pedestrians, while the Wehrmacht, the Kriegsmarine, the Foreign Office, and the Gestapo move into Paris’s most exclusive hotels. Yellow signs appear in the windows of Jewish-owned businesses, alerting anyone who might rather do their shopping elsewhere.

The discrimination makes no sense to Kristof. The idea that anyone is more “pure” or “chosen” than someone else—what does that even mean? Hitler’s hierarchies are absurd enough, but what stuns him more is how easily the French have adopted them. Jews have lived here since Roman times. They helped build the country, fight for it, love it. They were granted citizenship during the Revolution, alongside Protestants—supposedly an end to the old exclusions.

When the Depression hit, and the economy collapsed, more came—refugees, workers, families hoping for shelter in the so-called City of Light. By 1939, the Jewish population in Paris had more than doubled. Most settled in the Marais, where Jewish families have lived for centuries. But others found homes in Montmartre, Belleville—even here, in Kristof’s own arrondissement. They are his neighbors. His patients. His friends. And yet the Germans label them parasites. As if they don’t belong. As if anyone does, more than another.

The targeting doesn’t stop there either. Poles and other Slavs, Black and mixed-race French citizens. Communists. Socialists. Freemasons. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Homosexuals. Pacifists. Prostitutes. The disabled. Even the homeless—anyone who lives outside their narrow idea of usefulness. Anyone who doesn’t conform is called asocial. But it’s not about society. It’s about power.

When six bombs explode in synagogues all over Paris, Kristof comes to understand all too well that “foreigner” does not mean the same when applied to all non-Parisians. In the vile pecking order of “common enemies” in occupied Paris, Jews are at the top. With each round of restraints issued, beginning in the first weeks of the occupation, Jewish citizens are pushed further and further into the margins of society.

They are banned from cafés, theaters, libraries, and public parks. Their businesses are confiscated—then their bicycles. Radios. On the metro, Jews are allowed to sit only in the last carriage, and in shops, they’re restricted to the hours between three and four in the afternoon, when most shelves are already emptied by food shortages and earlier, luckier shoppers.

Luck is a revolting way to think of it, and yet many Parisians lean into their advantage, seeming grateful for a scapegoat. Some believe the stereotype that there are too many immigrants, particularly Jews, in France, stealing jobs and homes from more deserving natives, diluting the collective identity. Kristof even hears Madame Gagnon, the concierge in his building, whisper as much to a neighbor. What are they going to do, she wants to know, about “the Jewish problem”?

Kristof already knows that Madame Gagnon is a gossip, but her callousness sickens him. How can such cruelty be the residue of war? War means battle. The battering of the Maginot Line. Tanks and fighter jets. Blitzkrieg. This, there isn’t a word for, unless it is hate.

WINTER ONLY MAKES things worse. A north wind bears down, rattling the windowpanes like chattering teeth. The Seine freezes—its surface clouding to shades of black and green, like bottle glass. Kristof’s fingers go numb during his rounds, struggling with patient charts. Even morphine vials shatter in the cold.

At Monsieur Petit’s bakery, the ration line stretches around the block—two hours for sawdust bread, for ersatz coffee that smells of burned roots. A matchbook-size portion of cheese, if that. Milk only for children.

Kristof gives most of his coal to the Brodskys. Their apartment holds the last warmth he knows, with all the mattresses pushed together and blankets layered high. His own room stays frozen. He sleeps in his overcoat, dreaming of summer.

One evening, he sits at their kitchen table with Felix, a candle flickering between them as Felix works with copper wire, mending the base of a broken lamp.

“Like life,” he murmurs, twisting the filament with steady fingers. “It bends if you’re careful, breaks if you force it.”

Outside on the street, German voices cut through the night air. Rachel continues her mending, with Klara in a bassinette nearby. Felix stirs his tea. Only Kristof goes to the window. Below, three German soldiers encircle a man while he rifles through his pockets for the necessary identification in frantic, futile desperation.

When Kristof comes back to the table, Sasha’s eyes meet his. “This must be frightening for someone so young,” he says.

“For everyone,” she replies, sounding far too wise for her years. “At school, we don’t talk about it. We do our sums, take our exams, sometimes play table tennis. In larger lycées with more Jewish children, I’ve heard that they’re being put in separate classrooms, with separate recesses and lunch hours.” Her brow furrows. “What do they think the others can catch from us?”

Kristof has no answer.

“They took the maps out of our classroom,” Rald adds from the sofa.

Sasha nods. “We’re not supposed to learn geography anymore. As if knowing where places are might make us dangerous. And the books—so many books have disappeared from the shelves. Riva says her brother saw them in a pile behind the headmaster’s office, ready to be burned. But we don’t talk about that either.”

Felix glances at Kristof, then returns to his repair work. The gesture is small, but it holds weight. Sasha has spoken these thoughts before.

Kristof swallows. “Do you wish your teachers would be more direct?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha admits, frowning. “Maybe they’re afraid. Yesterday, Riva and I went to buy stationery for her mother after school. There was only one other person in the shop—a woman who looked at us so hatefully I went blank. I don’t even know if she knew we were Jewish. Maybe she guessed. Maybe it was just the way we looked. I wanted to lift my chin and meet her eyes, but I didn’t.”

With this, Felix puts down his tools and reaches for her, wrapping an arm around Sasha’s shoulders. “Nie martw się, kochanie,” he murmurs in Polish. “Wszystko będzie dobrze.”

Sasha leans against him. “Dziękuję, Tato,” she whispers against his chest.

Kristof feels his throat tighten. If she were his daughter, he would want to shield her too. But how can anything be all right? How is Sasha supposed to defend herself against a world that no longer makes sense to any of them?

Before he leaves that night for his cold apartment, he turns to her. “Don’t think you weren’t brave in that shop,” he tells her. “Many adults don’t know how to carry themselves now.” Even I don’t, he thinks but doesn’t say.

NO ONE USES the word resistance. No one except Charles de Gaulle. Kristof didn’t hear his speech directly—the one this relatively unknown French general delivered from London over the BBC channel just after Paris fell. The Germans already controlled the airwaves then. But word spread like wildfire.

“Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished,” de Gaulle had said. The words were like a lifeline thrown to a drowning nation. A call to arms, not just for soldiers, but for every French citizen to resist in whatever way they could.

Copies of de Gaulle’s speech were secretly printed and passed hand to hand, like precious contraband. Kristof wasn’t offered one. The exclusion stung, reminding him that despite his years in Paris, he was still seen as an outsider.

He begins to wonder if his perspective has any value at all. Until one night at the hospital. It’s very late, with only a few weary staff members peppering the halls of Sainte-Anne’s, when in the quiet staff room, one of the senior nurses furtively shows Kristof how to tune in to the BBC broadcasts.

“Listen only after curfew,” she tells him in a low voice, her eyes flicking toward the door. “Not here, obviously. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it.”

He studies her, trim and serious-looking. Ursula is her name. She’s Austrian, he has heard, though her French is perfect, like everything else she does. On the wards, she’s competent to a fault, and yet in the two years they’ve been working side by side, she has never been anything but strictly professional with him. “Why are you, then?” he finally asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe to see if I can trust you.”

“You can. These are strange days.”

“Stranger all the time,” she says.

As she blinks at him, he notices the color of her wide eyes—the saturated blue of a cloudless day. Her jaw and chin are square and almost sculpted, giving her the dignified look of a Bourbon queen. Why is he just now seeing how pretty she is? Has he really become so invested in his work, so anxious about the war, that he has stopped being a flesh-and-blood man?

The next day, Kristof looks for Ursula, thinking he might ask her to share a meal, or at least a cup of tea. But their paths don’t cross. After several days of scanning the halls, he grows brave enough to ask the nursing supervisor. Ursula, he is told, has been transferred to another hospital elsewhere in the city.

The news disappoints him more than he expects. Worse, he can’t shake the feeling that something has happened to her. It’s not uncommon for people to be arrested for listening to forbidden broadcasts. A few days earlier, Kristof had seen a man roughly questioned by the Vichy police simply for wearing a pin with the colors of the French flag. In this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, silence has become its own form of survival.

And yet—doesn’t silence have its own cost? More and more, each unopposed injustice, each unspoken truth, begins to feel like a small defeat. The real skill, he’s starting to realize, lies in knowing when to speak, when to act, and, most of all, whom to trust.

Across the street from the hospital, there’s a small café where Kristof often stops for coffee. Just the other day, the old man who runs the place, Jean-François, had given Kristof a sly glance after he ordered his usual café au lait. Then he leaned closer and dared to tell him a joke.

“Did you hear the one about the Nazi who stops a Frenchman on the street in Paris and asks, ‘Excuse me, where is the rue de Rivoli?’ ”

Kristof glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see Vichy police lingering nearby. “Go on.”

Jean-François shrugged dramatically, mimicking the Frenchman’s response.

“ ‘Désolé,’ the man says, looking bewildered. So the officer tries again—this time in perfect French. The man’s face lights up. ‘Ah, a fellow Frenchman! It’s right around the corner!’ ”

Kristof smiled, tipping Jean-François more than usual when he left the café. It was good to laugh, even briefly. More than this, it felt as if they’d shared something quietly defiant—a wink between strangers, a moment of audacity.

CHAPTER 33

The Bernsteins leave on a Sunday morning, without a single box. No goodbye. No quiet knock on her family’s door. Just the soft, final click of the key in their own latch before the sun is fully up.

By supper, Sasha hears other neighbors whispering in the stairwell. Madame Martin says she remembers Sophia Bernstein talking about Lyon. Or maybe it was Nice. Monsieur Laurent thinks their daughter must have sent for them. A diplomat’s wife, wasn’t she? In Switzerland, or maybe Sweden? The stories swirl and change shape, like smoke Sasha tries to catch in her hands.

What she knows is this: Madame Bernstein used to wave at Sasha from their third-floor window when she came home from school. She grew sweet alyssum and pansies in her flower boxes. On Rald’s and Sasha’s birthdays, she gave them small gifts, bright new colored pencils tied with ribbon, twists of lemon candy. On the Bernsteins’ doorframe, their bronze mezuzah was engraved with a tiny, perfect tree of life. Now, the threshold looks strangely naked and wrong.

One day, Maman stops to ask the concierge if she has news of the family. “They left so quickly. I hope nothing is amiss.”

Madame Gagnon gives a one-shouldered shrug, pretending to be engrossed in her newspaper. “Dust settles fast,” is all she says.

THREE WEEKS LATER, the new tenant arrives. Sasha hears him before she sees him—boots on the landing, a short laugh, the clatter of a key in the lock. He’s young. Not much older than Dr. Larsen, she thinks, though his hair is buzzed so short it makes his ears stick out. His uniform is blue and stiff and smells like starch. Gendarme. He nods at her as if he owns the building.

The officer’s name is Robert Mercier. He lets Madame Bernstein’s flowers die, using the flower boxes as an ashtray. He plays his radio too loud. The voices from Radio Paris echo into her family’s kitchen in the evenings.

“Finally, a proper French tenant,” Madame Gagnon says, with a smile that makes Sasha uncomfortable. “Someone who understands order.”

When the Germans marched into Paris, they dismissed the French police from their posts and took away their weapons. But by July, the weapons were returned. The gendarmes had become allies to the Nazis. Collaborators.

One night, Sasha climbs the stairs to see Monsieur Mercier standing near her own door. Just hovering there, listening. When she moves past him, he doesn’t even seem embarrassed to be caught snooping.

She doesn’t say anything. Not to her parents, not to Rald, who has started sleeping with his head tucked under his arm again, as if he’s trying to fold himself up or become invisible. Just once, she tries to talk to Maman about it, but she is busy folding diapers, her eyes already shadowed with sleep. “Not now, sha’le,” she says. “We’ll talk later.”

There isn’t a later.

Another time, she overhears Monsieur Mercier and Madame Gagnon in the courtyard as they share a cigarette.

“The new system is quite organized,” he says with pride. “Registration cards, census forms, special stamps for Jewish-owned businesses. It’s all very efficient. Almost scientific, really. Everyone in their proper place.”

Madame Gagnon clucks her approval while Sasha freezes, feeling something hard and cold settle in her chest.

And still the cigarette butts pile up in the flower box. Dust settles over the blank space that used to hold the beautiful little tree of life.

Saint-Marcel, Paris 1664

CHAPTER 34

Light filters through the iron bars, casting a grid of shadows across Alouette’s skin. Her hands still bear traces of red dye, looking like rust or dried blood. They didn’t even let her wash.

She touches her pocket out of habit—then realizes it’s gone. The scrap of vivid blue cloth she’s carried for months, folded tightly into the seam. The guards must have taken it, or she lost it in the struggle. A bitter image centers itself in her mind: the blue fabric falling from her pocket as she tumbled into her father’s dye vat. Its color her own invention—her last hope for a better life—finished with.

The jail cell smells of damp iron and sweat, and the acrid tang of urine. A distant drip of water echoes through the narrow corridor. A rat scratches and scuttles along one of the timbers above her.

She remembers walking past Saint-Marcel’s prison locale as a child, clutching her father’s hand and quickening her pace when the wind carried its stench. The ominous entrance, reinforced with iron, always seemed to leer at her, as if daring her to step out of line. She would never have imagined then that one day she’d find herself inside. Yet here she is, part of the living shadow she once feared.

At the creak of a door, Alouette looks up, expecting another guard. Instead, Henriette appears, her frame silhouetted against the torchlight. The guard behind her jingles the keys but doesn’t enter.

For a moment, Alouette is too astonished to speak.

“I’ve been so afraid this would happen,” Henriette says as she steps closer, her face half hidden in the weak light.

“Afraid? I would think you’d be pleased.”

Henriette rests her palm against the bars, as if for balance. “You have every right to be angry for things in the past. But don’t let it blind you to the present. I tried to warn you because I care for you. I mean to make amends.”

“It’s too late for that now.” Alouette looks away. In the corner of the cell, there’s a crack in the wall shaped like a river and painted black with mold. Black as her own terrible river.

“Have you heard anything of your father’s trial?”

“No. What news do you bring?” she asks, though she is half afraid to know. Her mother’s expression makes her heart quicken.

“For most of a day, the guild masters questioned him. They say he stood silent before Claude Gobelin himself, wouldn’t speak a word of where he’d hidden his work.” Henriette’s voice carries a mix of pride and anguish. “Even when they threatened to strip him of his medallion, to take everything he’d built, he wouldn’t reveal the recipe.”

“What about the letters they found? Wasn’t the recipe there?”

“You’d think so. Isn’t that more reason to believe the guild planted the letters to incriminate him?”

Alouette’s breath catches. How could Henriette, who left them both, have more faith in her father than she’d been able to muster? While Alouette had broken into the factory seeking evidence to exonerate him, doubt had been her companion. She had allowed herself to believe, if only briefly, that her father might have betrayed her trust.

Memories of their last encounter flood back—her accusations, his wounded eyes, the bitter words exchanged like blows. And now she might never have the chance to take them back.

“Where is he?” she asks numbly.

“Here in the jail, I believe. For now.” Henriette’s hands twist against her skirt. “They’ve sentenced him to Bicêtre.”

Alouette sways, bracing herself. The village jail is nothing compared to Bicêtre, where men waste away in crowded cells and fever spreads like wildfire through the common wards.

“How long?”

“Until he reveals his formula. Or until…” Henriette hesitates, then leans closer to the bars, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “Oh, Alouette. I don’t know if the gossip is true, but I heard that René collapsed after his tribunal.”

“Collapsed?” She shudders.

“They say he is alive, but only just.”

The room around Alouette begins to swim as a memory flashes: Her father bent over his workbench, coughing into his sleeve. The metallic taste that lingered in the air. She should have expected this. Should have known. He was breathing arsenic, touching it, inhaling it. Far more exposed than she had been, day after day, week after week.

She looks down at her fingertips, seeing them stained with guilt now, as well as poison. “How did you bear those years?” she finally asks. “Watching him destroy himself for his work?”

“I was jealous more than pained. That his passion fed him. I wished for anything half as fulfilling.”

Alouette nods. How many times has she felt exactly the same? Too many to reckon with. “Yes.”

“I never despised him, but I did come to despise this place. I still do.” Henriette frowns, clearly struggling with emotion. “When I left, I found refuge in the Marais, with the Sisters of Saint Catherine. I had never been a pious woman—you know that. But that last winter, I didn’t want to live anymore. I went to one of the bridges along the Seine, meaning to let myself drown.”

Alouette stares at her mother. “How terrible.”

“Yes. One of the sisters discovered me there, pulled me away from the edge, from death. I thought they might demand prayers or confession. They just…” She pauses, swallowing. “Instead, they gave me clean air to breathe. Simple work that didn’t make my hands bleed. And slowly, I began to trust their God, whether I believed in him yet or not. I needed something larger than myself to lean against, when my own courage failed.” She lowers her eyes, then lifts them again. “There is grace in knowing when to accept help, even from unexpected quarters. The sisters taught me that too.”

Alouette doesn’t answer, but something softens in her chest. Her mother found sanctuary with the sisters, and a strength so different from her father’s fierce defiance. But what will sustain Alouette, after whatever sentence awaits her?

Henriette reaches through the bars to briefly touch Alouette’s cheek. “The world is larger than Saint-Marcel, larger than the guild’s laws. And you… you’re very brave. Far braver than I ever was.”

Tears well up, threatening to overspill Alouette’s control. Long ago, she’d buried her love for her mother. Buried her own need. Now it stirs to life again, the subtlest fog of breath against a mirror—but life. “Perhaps not brave enough for what’s coming,” she says.

“But you are.” Henriette’s eyes—once so distant and cold—are fiery now, blazing with determination. “Whatever your sentence, you must fight for yourself. Promise me this. History isn’t yet written, Alouette. The dye is not set.”

CHAPTER 35

When it’s time for her sentencing, Alouette is led through the narrow streets, hands bound before her. The familiar scents of the dyeworks district—alum and madder, lanolin and woodsmoke—seem to mock her now. Villagers gather in clusters, their murmurs rising like a tide. Faces she’s known since childhood.

A young girl clutches her mother’s skirts, wide eyes fixed on Alouette’s dye-ruined clothes, her wild hair. Alouette wants to explain that these stains are victory, not sin. Proof that she had touched something real, something true. Instead, she lifts her chin higher, heart pounding like a drum within her rib cage.

As she approaches the guildhall, her steps falter when she spots Thierry’s wife standing at the edge of the crowd. Their eyes meet for a brief moment before Cécile’s gaze darts to the ground. Alouette still doesn’t know why Thierry would betray her father, but there are easily half a dozen reasons. She’s heard rumors here and there—about Thierry liking to gamble at draughts, about building debts and a sick child who nearly died during last year’s fever.

The guild rewards obedience. And it punishes failure. Perhaps Thierry thought he was protecting his family. He might have told himself that the guild would only slap René’s hand—warn or demote him. Not destroy him. But now the damage is done—and she and her father are both paying the price.

Inside, a dozen guild masters sit in tiered rows like carrion birds, their black robes melting into shadow. The hall reeks of beeswax and authority. The marble floor whispers under her boots—the same floor she once crossed as a child, clutching her father’s hand. Now it feels warped, hostile. Alouette’s wrists burn where the rough cord binds them, but she keeps her back straight. She will not cower. Not for them.

Claude Gobelin presides at the long table, flanked by guild masters whose faces shift between boredom and thinly veiled satisfaction. Laferrière is first to speak, his voice calm, almost conciliatory.

“Alouette Voland, you stand accused of theft, of violating guild law, and of recklessly endangering the integrity of the dyeworks. Do you deny these charges?”

“The formula was mine,” she replies, swallowing against the dryness in her throat.

A murmur runs through the chamber like wind rippling through cloth. Some exchange glances of disbelief, while others snicker behind their hands. From the back of the room, a woman’s shrill cry: “Has she lost her senses?”

One of the older guild masters leans forward, his face crimson with indignation. “This is preposterous! A girl has created a formula that has eluded our most experienced masters? Next, she’ll claim to have invented the loom itself!”

Alouette stands straighter, the mockery hardening her resolve even as it stings. The chamber’s derision only confirms what she has always known—they will never see her as anything but a woman overstepping her bounds, a daughter betraying her father’s trust with hysterical delusions.

Claude Gobelin sighs, folding his hands over the ledgers before him. When he returns his attention to Alouette, his expression reveals nothing but weary impatience, as though dealing with a petulant child.

“Your attempts to shift blame from your father with these… fanciful claims only compound your offense, Mademoiselle Voland. We have confirmation that your father, René, corresponded with dyers in Venice, offering trade secrets in exchange for their own. These are acts of treason.”

“He did no such thing!” she shouts. “Those letters are a lie planted to incriminate him.”

“Silence! You are hardly in any position to deliver testimony. His charges stand. As for you, your actions were delinquent and beyond rebellious.”

For a brief moment, she’s tempted to laugh. “Then punish me as a rebel. But don’t pretend this is justice.”

The masters exchange incredulous glances. Claude Gobelin glowers instead, his expression like a thundercloud on the edge of bursting.

He reaches for something beneath his chair, sets it on the table before him as one might a sacrifice. It’s the shredded remains of the twilight-silk brocade, mottled with streaks of Alouette’s blood. Its former perfection is unrecognizable.

With icy care, he turns to the guild’s surgeon-apothecary. “Maître Bernard, can you confirm if this destruction seems a sign of rebellion? Or might it instead resemble hysteria?”

“The symptoms are clear,” Maître Bernard intones from his seat beside the masters. For twenty years, he has treated the dyers’ burns and breathing troubles. Now he regards Alouette with the same clinical distance he might show a diseased organ. “The racing thoughts, the insolent tongue, the violent impulses—all signs of a woman’s humors in fatal disorder.”

“She unlawfully entered our workshops,” another adds. “Ruined valuable property with unnatural strength—”

Alouette can barely fathom these claims. Hysteria? Unnatural strength? “I broke into the workshop because I had no other way to find proof that my father did nothing wrong. That these accusations are lies.”

“Silence!” Claude Gobelin bellows. “Your father chose his fate when he stubbornly concealed his formula rather than share it with the guild that has bolstered and protected him. And you—” His eyes narrow. “You’ve proven that some frailties of reason are a dark legacy.”

Maître Bernard nods gravely. “I have seen it before in our trade. When women attempt to grasp at matters beyond their understanding, it often leads to such delirium. The mind, like heated glass, becomes brittle and breaks. Sometimes permanently.”

Alouette feels herself tumbling into disbelief, an eddy that swirls, pinning her limbs to her body. They see insolence in strong-mindedness, irrationality in passion and conviction. Like the cochineal insects at solstice, crushed for their precious red, she carries something within her that terrifies them—the power to transform, to create, to defy their careful order. And yet for all of this, she is paralyzed in this moment.

The commissaire examinateur rises. Until now, he has held his tongue, surveying the proceedings like a lord from a raised dais. The golden chain of office winks against his black robe as he announces the accusations against her with obvious disgust. Fureur utérine—hysteria. Accès de fureur—frenzied fits. Aliénation de l´esprit—temporary disconnection from her wits, her own mind. “Such manifestations suggest either willful moral laziness or true madness,” he goes on. “Either is a grave sin.”

Alouette’s hands clench at her sides. Her pulse flutters weakly as his words unmoor her.

“For punishment and correction,” the commissaire continues, “you will spend three years at the Salpêtrière asylum, after which you will be interrogated to see if your corruption has been sufficiently corrected and vanquished. Or if not”—he pauses, exchanging a meaningful glance with Maître Bernard—“you will remain for an indefinite period. Sometimes, of course, there is no cure. We have seen how such disorders of the female mind can persist, resistant to even the most modern treatments.”

Salpêtrière.

Each ringing syllable knocks the breath from her lungs. That walled tomb alongside the Seine, where screams echo through corridors deep as wells and chains rattle in perpetual darkness. Where the mad are packed fifty to a room, their bodies pressed together in filth and fever. They say the most violent ones are chained in the underground cells, where rats gnaw at their feet and darkness chinks away at their reason until they become truly insane.

“Three years,” she whispers, tasting ash on her tongue. Three years while her father rots in prison, his own sentence indefinite until he yields his secrets. Three years while the world moves on without her.

The thought of Étienne pierces her heart—his rough but gentle hands. How he had dared to dream of another kind of life with her, far from the factories and guilds that bind them both. A small cottage, perhaps. Children with his serious eyes and her stubborn chin. Would he wait for her? Could she fairly ask him to? Three years might as well be eternity.

Her limbs feel liquid as she stumbles, nearly falling to her knees.

Faces in the crowd blur indistinctly. Then, through a roaring in her ears, she hears Claude Gobelin’s final words, each one striking like a hammer blow: “Perhaps this will persuade Master Voland to reconsider his silence.”

They’re using her. Using her fate to break her father’s will. A pawn in their game of power and profit. If only they would listen to her—if only she could make them see that she is the one who discovered the radical new mordant. Her hands mixed the compounds. Her imagination contrived a solution no one else had seen.

And yet they would no more believe a woman could do such a thing than that water could flow uphill or that gold could be coaxed from lead. A woman creating what generations of master dyers could not? Unthinkable. Hysteria. Delusion.

Even if her father spoke now, if he told them that his daughter was the inventor—would they listen? Or would they dismiss him as a desperate man trying to save his child? It’s the perfect trap: Her genius becomes either theft or insanity, her truth either a lie or mental frenzy. How will she ever prove she’s cured enough to leave Salpêtrière under such paradoxical conditions? She’ll die there.

Alouette stares at the stone floor beneath her, feeling as if she might collapse into shards. Henriette had called her brave—but where is that bravery now? She searches the recesses of herself and finds only fear, vast as the night sky, black as the waters of the Bièvre.

As she’s dragged from the room, her gaze sweeps the chamber. She does not know who she’s looking for. Étienne, perhaps. Her mother. But the doorway is empty.

No one is coming for her. She has nothing left to hope for or fight for—only the memory of her blue. The formula lives inside her now, set in the marrow, unextractable, whether it—or she—ever sees the light again.

Her last thought before the doors bang closed behind her: I should have run when I had the chance.

CHAPTER 36

At the edge of the square, Étienne stands frozen, the ground beneath his feet suddenly as unsteady as a fresh excavation. Lucienne had summoned him with a frantic message, but he had arrived too late to do anything but witness.

Alouette’s trial was swift and merciless. He had exhausted every connection, called in every favor owed to him in the quarry. He’d offered his medallion as surety, a year’s wages in advance, even his service in the guild’s debt. All for nothing.

The guards march her through the village streets, her hands bound before her with rough rope that bites into her wrists. Even from this distance, he can see the determined set of her jaw, the way she holds her spine straight despite everything. She wears clothes that are dye stained, dark as blood.

Faces turn to watch her pass, some hostile, some curious, some bearing the vague sympathy of those who know injustice is unfolding before them, and yet lack the courage to oppose it. Women pull their children closer while men mutter prayers or curses beneath their breath. All these people she’s lived among—not one steps forward. Not one raises a voice in protest.

Neither do you, says an accusing voice in his mind. You stand here like the rest, watching in silence. His hands clench at his sides until his knuckles ache. Every instinct inside him screams for him to move—to cross the square, to break the line of guards, to snatch her away. His muscles quiver with the effort of restraint. He’s mapped the hidden passages beneath Saint-Marcel for months now. With a little help, they could disappear tonight, be halfway to the coast by morning. Perhaps even to Marseille, the sea-glittering place she’d described to him that night when they lay together, her voice soft with memory.

But the risk. God, the risk.

Not just to himself—that he’d gladly bear—but to Thomas and Marie, to Mémé, whose medicines cost more each month. If he’s taken, who would care for them? Who would ensure they don’t starve or end up in the poorhouse? And Alouette herself—attempting to free a condemned prisoner would mean a harsher sentence for her, and the gallows for him. The sheer impossibility of it rests heavily on his shoulders. Like the first time he’d descended into the quarry at ten, rope burning his palms, darkness swallowing him whole.

The guards reach the cart, shoving her forward. She stumbles slightly on the uneven cobblestones, and Étienne nearly cracks in two at the sight. They handle her roughly as they secure her to the cart’s iron rings, flinching away from her dye-stained hands as if madness might spread through touch. Idiots. They understand nothing, certainly not the brilliance those hands have created—a blue that caught the light like the sky itself. He’d only glimpsed it for a moment that day in the garden before she hid the cloth away again, but he knew he would never forget it.

Now, morning mist clings to the ground, wreathing the wheels of the cart like phantoms at the edges of a nightmare. These streets that once formed Alouette’s world seem to shrink away, becoming foreign territory with each passing moment. Three years in Salpêtrière—a sentence that might as well be a lifetime for one so young. If she survives. If she returns, what will remain of the girl with fire in her soul? The thought is unbearable.

Through the crowd, Alouette’s gaze finds his. A current passes between them, potent enough to make his heart stutter. Her eyes—clear gray, unflinching—hold no accusation, only a strange, fierce tenderness that threatens to bring him to his knees.

He takes one step forward, unable to stop himself.

Lucienne appears as if conjured by his movement, her hand catching his arm in a surprisingly strong grip. “Don’t,” she whispers urgently. “Think of your family. One wrong move condemns you all.”

She’s right. He knows she’s right. And yet.

The carved lark feels heavy in his pocket, its stone wings pressing against his thigh. So small a thing—yet when Alouette held it, her face had transformed, as if recognizing something of herself in its arrested flight. Perhaps that was why she’d returned it to him so quickly. Because hope had been too terrifying, too dangerous in a world determined to cage her or clip her wings.

What if he had managed to persuade her to flee with him? What if they had gone that very night, slipping away into the darkness beyond Saint-Marcel’s reach? The regret will haunt him, he knows, for all the nights to come.

As the cart begins to move, Alouette’s eyes never leave his. That gaze holds everything they’ve never said aloud—everything they might have been in another life, another world. They had only a handful of hours together, precious moments stolen from fate. He’d barely let himself imagine more, though hope had taken root anyway. Dreams of mornings and shared bread, of children with her fierce spirit and his steady hands. Visions of simple happiness that must now wither like quarry flowers in frost.

Still, if there were a way to reach her, he would swear that this can’t and won’t be the end. That he will wait for her. That the gift of knowing her, however briefly, has marked him more permanently than any stoneworker’s tool. But the distance between them grows with each turn of the wheels, and no words can cross it.

She holds his gaze until the last possible moment, offering something he recognizes as permission, as farewell, as blessing, before the cart jolts forward, stealing her away.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 37

The notices appear like weeds after rain. First on official buildings, then in shop windows, then plastered to the walls of their own rue des Gobelins. Kristof passes them each morning on his way to the hospital, feeling the world around him shrink, its borders redrawn in neat typescript and government seals.

If the early announcements seem almost mundane, dictating various regulations about blackout requirements, curfew hours, ration coupons, soon nearly all the ordinances concern the Jews—particularly foreign Jews. Jewish businesses and companies are commandeered and “Aryanized,” or simply liquidated. Further restrictions and humiliations pile up—each new ordinance arriving every few weeks, it seems.

But one changes everything.

CITY OF PARIS

NOTICE TO THE POPULATION

29 May 1942

ALL PERSONS OF JEWISH RACE

Must wear a yellow star beginning 7 June 1942.

The star must be visible at all times on the left side of the chest.

It is forbidden to appear in public without this badge.

Violators will be subject to severe penalties.

The bulletin goes up everywhere, pasted to the sides of buildings like wallpaper, glaring out from windows and doorways, impossible to ignore. They have a week to comply.

IT’S ONE THING for Kristof to read the ordinances and another to watch Rachel stitching the abominable patches onto the family’s clothes. Juif.

In Vienna, they stamp passports with a crude red J. In Warsaw, they use white armbands. Here, yellow stars. The bureaucracy of hatred spreads like infection.

Rachel sits at the table, sewing another onto Sasha’s coat. In the next room, Sasha plays with Klara. Their laughter rings out while Rachel’s needle moves. Her shoulders are rigid, coiled tight beneath her blouse. When a stitch goes crooked, she frowns, rips it out, and begins again.

“It has to be perfect,” she tells Kristof without looking up. “They said clearly visible. No loose edges, or…” The words trail off, but the threat is clear. Any improperly displayed badges mean immediate fines or arrests. Offenders can be dragged away on the spot.

“We had to pay for these,” she adds, muttering. “Can you imagine? I had to wait for three hours, with Klara in my arms.”

Kristof is thinking of what he could possibly say when Felix walks in with a small sack of provisions. He’s been to the market, but so little is left.

Later, as the two men sit listening to the children play, Felix says, “They have no idea what any of this means.”

“They shouldn’t have to,” Kristof replies.

CHAPTER 38

Brief though it may be, sleep for Sasha is a kind of transformation. A curtained-off world where she can be free of her body and its vulnerabilities. Free of the hair that now grows beneath her arms and between her legs. Free, most of all, of the lumpy pyramids that have claimed her chest, reshaping her in ways she cannot undo.

At school, she walks with her books in front of her, crossed tightly in her arms, though she knows this is childish. There are boys in her class who stare at her breasts. A few are shy and surreptitious. When she catches them, they flush and look away. But others are brazen bullies who seem to enjoy making her and the other girls uncomfortable. They sneer at her if she dares to confront them with her eyes. Her face goes molten, and she wants to hide. To disappear.

All of this is new for her—this embarrassment and lack of confidence. This sudden shrinking from the light. She has always been a happy person. Happy in an easy, natural way. Quick to laugh at the jokes of her friends. To laugh at life. Serious people have always annoyed her. She has never been able to understand what there is to worry about in terms of the future for someone her age. Until now, of course.

Besides her friend Riva, who has escaped the city—at least for the time being—with her parents, to their country house in Rolleboise, there is only one other Jewish student in her class, an annoying clown of a boy named Maurice Brocheton. When the day came that they were all required to wear the Judenstern on their clothes, Maurice refused at first. He was just trying to get attention, Sasha thought. Trying to get others to notice him. Sasha had already decided that she would try to be as jolly about it as possible. It was a stupid ordinance, after all. She would go on being the same person. Her classmates already knew she was Jewish. What could a badge the size of a splayed leaf do to change that?

But she had been wrong. It still makes her feel ill to think of that day. June 8, a boring Monday, or so she had thought walking to school with her brother, Rald, who had lately become more irritating than ever. In March, he had turned ten, far too old for the tears that had sprung up earlier that morning when Maman buttoned up his jacket and kissed him, telling him to be brave. Sasha had felt impatient with him, even spiteful. He wasn’t a baby, after all, and so why was he behaving like one?

All the way to school, Rald kept reaching for her hand, as if he still needed her help to cross the street. His palms wet from wiping his face. Each time, she had pulled away. Later, she would come back to this over and over. How irritated and uncaring she had been with her brother. Rald was only scared and terribly worried, as he had every right to be, and she had behaved like a cow. And yet there was no way—no matter how often she wished for it—to take any of this back.

ODILE AND SABRINE were in the schoolyard when Sasha arrived. Along with Riva, the four friends had been a tightly knit group since they were eleven. A square, Sasha had often thought, with four equal sides. And yet that day, when she came up to them, pulling a face to try to make a joke about the star, their faces had remained blank.

Sasha had always been able to make them laugh. It was her usual way of treating life—even troubles. Poorly done exams or flubbed speeches. Embarrassing encounters with boys or teachers. She was the same, and yet they were not. Odile and Sabrine had stared. Not at Sasha, but at the left shoulder of her cardigan, where the stupid badge sat. Juif in stark black letters at the center. She had the strangest feeling then. Like a seesaw hitting the pavement hard when someone jumped off the other seat as a prank. That lurching crash to earth.

It was almost as if the two friends had rehearsed what they would do in advance, arranging the steps like choreography. Without saying a word and in unison, they blinked at her with only the slightest disdainful drooping of their mouths—as if she was a different kind of animal from them. Not a girl at all, but a hybrid creature with spotted fur on her face or a tail poking through her navy wool uniform skirt. Then they had walked away.

After that, the morning classes felt unbearable. In Latin, Monsieur Belmont called on Sasha three times, though she hadn’t raised her hand. His eyes never landed on her fully, as if looking directly at the star might burn him. When she translated a passage from Caesar’s Gallic Wars correctly, he said nothing, only nodded curtly before moving on to the next student. Before, he had always praised her Latin, sometimes even reading her translations aloud to the class.

At least he acknowledged her, while Madame Fournier in mathematics behaved as if Sasha had become a speck on the wall. When she distributed graded assignments, she skipped Sasha’s desk entirely, leaving her paper face down at the edge of her blotter. Sasha had to retrieve it herself after class, feeling her cheeks color as she approached the teacher’s desk.

Only Professor Reinhardt seemed unchanged. The old German teacher had been at the lycée forever, his accent still thick even after decades in Paris. Some said he had left Germany after the Great War, disgusted by what his country had become. Now he taught Goethe and Schiller with the same passion as always, his blue eyes rheumy behind thick spectacles.

“Fräulein Brodsky,” he called when she entered his classroom. “I believe this is yours.” He held out a small notebook full of Latin translations that she must have dropped on another day. Their fingers brushed as she took it, and he didn’t flinch or look away. Instead, he winked, as if they shared a secret.

Worst of all was lunch. The dining hall had always been a sanctuary—their table by the window, which the four friends had claimed as their territory, trading sandwiches and whispering about which teachers were in bad moods. Now Sasha stood at the entrance, tray in hand, scanning the room for a friendly face.

Maurice sat alone at the periphery, hunched over his tray, one foot bouncing beneath the bench. When he saw her hesitate, he shot up straighter and waved, elbow flying too high in a gesture that was part welcome, part performance. His limbs always seemed too long for his frame, like a boy caught halfway between childhood and something more uncertain. Several students turned to stare. Sasha wanted to disappear through the floor.

Even so, she reluctantly made her way over to him. “Can I sit here?” she asked, though it was obvious that she had no other choice.

“Our own private table,” he said, gesturing grandly to the empty seats. “The best view in the house.”

“Stop it,” she hissed. “You’re making it worse.”

He shrugged. “They’re already looking. Might as well give them a show.” His voice cracked slightly as he spoke, but he didn’t seem to notice—or didn’t care.

Sasha picked at her food while Maurice chattered about inconsequential things—a film he’d seen, a book he was reading. He was talking too loud, his laugh too brittle. She realized with a pang that his performance wasn’t for their watching classmates. It was for her, a clumsy attempt to cheer her up.

After her last class, Sasha lingered in the library. She couldn’t bear the thought of walking home yet, facing her mother’s anxious questions about how the day had gone. The librarian, Mademoiselle Demars, didn’t look up as Sasha entered, but she didn’t tell her to leave either.

The library was almost empty. Most students now rushed home after school. Sasha made her way to the classics section, her fingers trailing along familiar spines. She pulled out her copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, its pages worn from countless readings.

She opened to Book Three—the story of Echo and Narcissus. Echo, punished by Juno, could only repeat the last words spoken to her. Narcissus, beautiful and proud, rejected all who loved him. Both transformed by pain: Echo fading to voice alone, Narcissus becoming the flower that bears his name.

She’d always loved this story for its poetry, its beautiful language. Now she saw something else in it—the curse of being reduced, carved smaller, shred by shred, until only one aspect remained. Echo could only repeat, never initiate. Like Sasha now, defined by a single word, a single star.

In the margin, she’d written months ago: Metamorphosis means transformation instead of death. The characters change form, but they endure. She traced the words with her fingertip, needing to be reminded that she was still Sasha Brodsky. Still the girl who loved Greek and Latin, who could recite Ovid from memory, who helped her father fix watches when his fingers were stiff from the cold. This star, this badge—it couldn’t blot her out, only change her. Perhaps into something stronger or clearer or louder.

She copied a line from the text into her notebook: Ipse sibi plaudis. “She applauded herself.” Even when no one else would.

A short while later, Maurice approached, his satchel slung carelessly over one shoulder. “Walking home?” he asked, his usual bravado subdued.

Sasha closed her book and nodded. Outside, Paris continued as always—the same streets, the same buildings. But everything had shifted, just slightly. Like looking at the world through warped glass.

“It’ll get better,” Maurice said as they neared her street.

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he admitted. “But I know we’re not alone.” He pointed to an elderly man wearing his own yellow star, walking with his head held high. “See? He’s not hiding.”

“Maybe he should,” Sasha said quietly.

“Maybe we all should.” Maurice kicked a loose rock, watching it skitter across the cobblestones. “But then they’d win for sure, wouldn’t they?”

Sasha didn’t answer. There were no good answers anymore, only choices about how to carry what felt unbearable.

CHAPTER 39

Hôpital Sainte-Anne is far from the main locus of the occupation, which naturally centers on the most desirable neighborhoods, the 8th, the 16th, the 17th. But very quickly, the Germans set up outposts in nearly every quartier, “requisitioning” advantageous buildings and apartments, turning out the former residents.

The municipal school across the street from one of the hospital’s main entrances on rue Broussais is one such requisition. Soon, it becomes an everyday occurrence for Kristof to run into bureaucrats and soldiers, auxiliary workers and secretaries, even German Red Cross nurses in pressed skirts and jackets, with smart hats that seem glaring and wrong, however banal they might be. The Sainte-Anne’s nurses wear white smocks and aprons, with starched veillike caps pinned to trail down their backs. It soothes Kristof to see them, so prim and dovelike. Until, without a word, the German nurses begin to appear alongside them, absorbing and miming their routines.

Even as Kristof’s mind reels, wondering what this new infiltration means, a caravan of German officers arrives one day for an unscheduled meeting with hospital administrators. Whatever information had changed hands behind closed doors, the following day, two of Kristof’s professors vanish, both of them Jewish. Then Paul Tillion, one of the residents in Kristof and Julian’s year, is arrested and taken away in a sleek black Opel Kapitän. Gossip swirls all day about why.

Kristof feels restless and edgy, trying to process it all. Long after the last shift change, he wanders into the salon in the Magnan Pavilion—one of the few places at Sainte-Anne’s that still bears traces of its old ideals. Here, a gallery displays some of the hospital’s extensive collection of artwork created by former patients of this and other psychiatric hospitals, dating back to the nineteenth century. Paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculptures made in art therapy workshops or as part of patients’ personal expression.

He has never come to the gallery without feeling moved by the images, some raw and almost childlike with bursts of wild color, some incredibly nuanced and intricate. But tonight, he has barely crossed the threshold when he realizes he isn’t alone. Dr. Claudel stands in profile, his attention fixed on a painting in front of him, the faint glow of a cigarette marking his place like a signal flare. Kristof hesitates for a moment. He thinks about reversing his steps and slipping away, but he doesn’t.

The older doctor turns and nods, as if he’s been expecting Kristof. “Ah, Dr. Larsen. Coming to say goodbye?”

“Excuse me?”

“To the artwork. It’s being taken down and sent into storage. I assumed you knew.” He turns back toward the nearest frame, a charcoal rendering of a house made almost entirely of windows. “The requisition came this morning. They’ll be safer locked away, and a military hospital has no place for such things.”

For several seconds, neither speaks. Kristof gazes at the shapes and colors along the wall, feeling defeated, as if the very air has conspired to erase them. Then Claudel clears his throat gruffly. “You disapprove of me.”

It takes Kristof a moment to find his voice. “No,” he lies. “I disagree with your methods.”

“Methods,” Claudel repeats, a humorless smile grazing the corners of his mouth. “The antiseptic word for cowardice and compromise.” He gestures toward the row of paintings. “You know, it was Dr. Édouard Toulouse, decades ago, who believed this sort of thing could save them. That art might reach what medicine could not. Perhaps he was right. Or perhaps it only delayed the inevitable.”

“I don’t see how cruelty improves anyone’s chances.”

“Cruelty?” Claudel shakes his head, ash scattering at his feet. “You think you’re different because you treat your patients with kindness? Because you object—politely, academically—to what you see around you?” His gaze rakes over Kristof, sharp as glass. “My only brother fought at Verdun,” he adds abruptly. “He served ten months in the trenches and then twenty years in a sanatorium, unable to feed himself, unable to recognize our mother’s face. She was never the same. She didn’t know how to grieve him. He was still alive, after all, when all of France’s young princes were dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kristof says, wondering how else he might respond to this sad and awful story. What a thing to live through.

Claudel merely blinks, slow and slightly weary. “It must be comforting, thinking you have the moral high ground. But I know exactly what happens when we fail to act. When we let men rot inside their own broken minds because we’re too squeamish to try something new.”

Kristof opens his mouth, but Claudel presses forward, his voice dropping to a rasp.

“You see cruelty. I see a chance. A chance to bring men back before it’s too late. Before they drown in themselves.”

“I’m not so naive as you think,” Kristof says. He’s so tense he can feel his pulse jumping along the taut muscles of his neck. “My sister took her own life after years of depressive illness.”

“I know.” Claudel’s face gives nothing away. “And yet you still think this hospital could survive on virtue. It survives because men like me make the decisions you are too young, too clean, to contemplate.”

With that, he crushes the cigarette against the iron rim of the radiator and turns on his heel. Kristof remains where he is, clenching and unclenching his hands as he stares at the row of patient paintings, their fragile, furious colors. He understands now that Claudel once loved someone. Once believed in saving minds, not just managing them.

But seeing that—even feeling the truth of it—doesn’t add up to forgiveness.

How long has this pavilion been standing? At least a hundred years. So much older than either of them, layered with lives, betrayals, small salvations. He presses a fingertip to the cracked plaster, half imagining that he can feel the shallow pulse of the building, its life and legacy slipping away.

Is there a way through this war without becoming part of its machinery? He isn’t sure anymore. And that terrifies him more than Claudel ever could. He lingers for a moment longer, gazing at one last painting—a sun with a dense black core—and then turns away before the ache in his chest can fully take hold.

OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Kristof is astonished at how quickly the hospital becomes something else. Wards empty. Whole wings are sealed off. Patients he has known for months—some who have found brief moments of lucidity, who have painted galaxies and dreamscapes and strange miraculous visions—are discharged in droves.

Officially, they are “released.” In reality, abandoned to a city that has no place for them. Like a snake shedding its skin, Sainte-Anne’s sloughs them away, faster and colder than Kristof could ever have imagined.

Feeling angry and overwhelmed, Kristof searches out Julian and finds him in one of the older and rarely used examination rooms, where he sits hunched over a chipped enamel table, a stack of patient files spread before him. He’s cracked open the windows to let out the reek of stale disinfectant, but the June air tastes no cleaner.

“They sent another twenty patients home today,” Julian remarks gloomily.

Kristof sighs. “If you can call it home.”

“The supervising doctors say it’s safer. More humane. Better than staying in a military hospital run by the enemy.”

Kristof says nothing. They both know the truth. It isn’t humanity driving the discharges. It’s hoarding. The hoarding of resources by the Nazis. They take whatever they want, and if that also means the slow collapse of the hospital’s ability to care for the people it’s supposed to protect, so much the better. Supplies are vanishing. Rations cut by half. Even the staff has grown hollow-eyed from hunger. No one discusses it openly, but anxiety hangs in the corridors like a sour smell. Most of their patients are in dire trouble, thrown back into a city that can barely feed itself, let alone its mad and unwanted.

Kristof hates thinking about how they’ll manage on their own—wandering the boulevards like sleepwalkers, frail bodies wrapped in insufficient coats. Some will starve. Some will disappear without record. A quiet, slow dying no one will claim responsibility for.

“It’s not murder exactly,” Julian says after a moment. “Not yet.”

Kristof swallows hard. “Feels close enough.”

Julian looks up at him then, the old rakish glint in his eyes dulled and turned inward, like a curtain drawn shut.

“Once I thought surviving was enough,” he says quietly.

Kristof shakes his head. “It used to be. That feels like a million years ago.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it never was.”

Their eyes meet, something grim and implicit passing between them, and Kristof feels a fissure in the wall he’s built deepen, a hairline crack darkening toward collapse. Then, Julian shoulders the files and leaves, his steps steady but taut, as if he, too, is carrying some invisible new weight.

Not murder. Not yet.

THE NIGHT SHIFT at Sainte-Anne’s begins at eleven. Before the occupation, the walk to the hospital was almost pleasant. Cafés still hummed, couples lingered over wine, the city settled into its evening rhythms. Now, curfew has redrawn everything. By nine, the streets empty. Blackout curtains are drawn. Anyone still moving after hours must have a reason—and papers to prove it.

Kristof’s route takes him past shuttered storefronts, their windows blanked by wooden boards or plastered with notices. Café Mabillon, where students once argued philosophy until dawn, now serves as a German officers’ club. The bookshop where Felix buys his Go manuals has reopened under “Aryan management,” its former owner vanished like so many others. Even the streetlamps seem dimmer, as if the city itself is trying to hide.

He keeps to the shadows out of habit, his identification and medical badge ready in his pocket. The streets have acquired new cadences, new rules. Know when to look down, when to hurry past. Notice everything while appearing to be distracted or oblivious. To the luxury car parked outside a former Jewish dressmaker’s shop. The fresh paint on a door that was scarred with slurs last week.

As he turns onto rue de la Santé, he passes three German soldiers escorting a woman in an evening dress, her laughter carrying unnaturally. The sound follows him like an insistent ghost. Once, these streets would have been alive with talk, with music from basement jazz clubs, with the particular poetry of Paris at night. Now there is only the echo of his own footsteps and the occasional military vehicle cutting through the dark.

Near the hospital, a cat darts across his path, sleek and purposeful. It pauses to study him with luminous eyes before vanishing into a drainpipe. These night creatures are the true citizens of Paris now—the cats, the rats, those who move through darkness out of necessity rather than choice. They have learned to navigate this new geography of absence, this changed city that goes to ground when the sun sets.

The hospital’s lights appear ahead, pale squares floating in the blackness. Soon he will be inside, moving through familiar corridors, listening to familiar demons. But until then, he is just another shadow slipping through neighborhoods he barely recognizes, carrying his papers as if they’re protective charms.

LIKE THE CURFEWS, rationing reshapes daily life with ruthless precision. Coupons dictate everything—bread, meat, sugar, soap. Even shoes. The best of what remains is diverted to the Germans while most of Paris’s citizens reckon with the dregs. Flour stretched with acorns, turnips, sawdust. Children learn to sip chicory in place of coffee, to eat bread so dense it seems more stone than sustenance. Every household develops its own alchemy, coaxing meals from remnants. Pigeons, squirrels, and even crows appear in market stalls, euphemistically labeled. Parisians adjust their appetites to survive, their stomachs tightening as the war stretches on.

Rachel plants a kitchen garden. She starts with four window boxes and slowly spreads to every available patch of courtyard soil. She uses old crates, tin cans, even a cracked chamber pot—anything that will hold dirt. Carrots and radishes sprout between the cobblestones, their leaves reaching toward what little sun filters down between the buildings.

“The trick,” Rachel tells Kristof one evening as she snips herbs into a pot of soup, “is to think like your grandmother.” She stirs the broth—mostly water flavored with potato peelings and a lone carrot. “Mine could make a feast from breadcrumbs. I used to think she was just being stingy.” She smiles, but her eyes stay serious. “Now I understand she was teaching me how to survive impossible times.”

Kristof watches as she portions the soup so that each bowl receives the same amount. Her ladle moves like a conductor’s baton—three beats, pause, scrape. She’s turned rationing into a kind of dance—a determined, creative symphony.

“Rald,” she calls, “fetch the bread.”

He brings over yesterday’s loaf, dense and gray. Rachel cuts it into identical slices, thin as paper.

“Tonight, we’re having a progressive dinner,” she says as if she’s announcing a party at the Ritz. “Each bite must be smaller than the last. The winner gets to choose tomorrow’s story.”

Sasha comes to the table with Klara in her arms. “Maman, I’m almost fifteen. I know what you’re doing.”

“Of course, you do, maideleh. But your brother’s only ten and he’s better at this game than you are.” Rachel’s voice is light, but Kristof catches the slight tremor in her hands as she serves Felix last, her own bowl conspicuously absent. “Besides, your father needs his strength for all those tiny watch parts.”

Felix looks up at her. “Rachel—”

“I ate while cooking,” she says firmly. The lie sits between them, as thin as her missing slice of bread.

Later that week, Kristof brings them eggs—a rare treasure from a farmer patient. Rachel’s eyes widen at the sight, but she quickly composes herself.

“These will make a fine meal for the children,” she says, already calculating how to make six eggs stretch across four days.

“They’re for you too,” Kristof insists.

She shakes her head. “A mother is like a tree in winter. As long as the sap still runs, the leaves will come back in spring.” She pats his arm. “We cope. We adapt. And we remember the recipes our grandmothers taught us, even if we must imagine most of the ingredients.”

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 40

As the cart lurches forward, the iron gates of the asylum yawn open. Alouette peers through the slats, her fingers tightening against the rough wood. A vast gray courtyard stretches before her, hemmed in by towering walls. Women in muted shifts move slowly, heads bowed. Beyond them, two guards drag a struggling woman across the open space, her bare feet smearing crimson across the pale stone.

The image is searing, a brand pressed to the raw edges of Alouette’s mind even before a figure in immaculate black advances toward the guards intoning a prayer for the manacled woman, Latin phrases rising like smoke. Then the guards haul the prisoner away toward a low stone building set apart from the others. Even from here, Alouette can see chains bolted to the walls outside the cells, as if they’re to hold captive animals.

When Alouette finally stands, taking in the sheer immensity of the compound, her legs seem unwilling to hold her. The walls stretch in every direction, sealing off the outer world. Within their grasp, orchards and pastures sprawl in eerie, deceptive calm, their beauty unsettled by the looming silhouettes of mills, barns, and gardens worked by unseen hands.

Dozens of stone buildings with barred windows squat at right angles to one another, their doors as thick as prison gates—like barracks for the condemned. And above it all, the chapel looms, its skeletal spire clawing at the sky, casting a long, piercing shadow over the courtyard.

This is a place that exists apart: vast and yet suffocating. A city within a city, as extensive and isolated as Saint-Marcel. But where Saint-Marcel hums with industry, this place breathes with something darker. The citizens are prisoners and orphans, the mad and the maimed. Les aliénées. “The alienated ones.”

The screaming woman’s voice has faded, but its echo lingers in the air, heavy as the July summer heat. Then, a female officière seizes Alouette’s arm without warning, fingers digging into muscle. She’s young, but her face is weather-hardened, carved by whatever forces shape the caretakers who control this place. As she marches Alouette through the maze of corridors, their footsteps strike a rhythm against the stone—click, scrape, echo—each sound bouncing back distorted, as if the walls themselves are listening, learning the cadence of their new prisoner.

They walk along corridors that twist like the Bièvre’s poisoned channels, each turn revealing another identical passage. Women drift past like ghosts, their movements both leaden and insubstantial somehow. Alouette watches one pass a stationed guard, seeming to fold herself smaller as she does so, drawing in her own edges like fabric shrinking in too-hot water.

The guard has a bow resting on his shoulder, an arrow nocked and at the ready. And yet his eyes are even more threatening. They track the shape of the woman as she goes, the weight of his gaze like a physical touch.

“You may call me Sister Marthe,” the officière says, as she opens a heavy wooden door and leads Alouette into a small nave. The room is cold and stark, with a single barred window casting wafers of mottled light onto the floor.

Standing in the nave, Alouette reeks. Her sodden clothes have dried onto her shape and need to be pried off by the sister, while Alouette’s cheeks flame. She has never been naked in front of a stranger and fights the urge to cover herself with her hands. The first bucketful of water is cold enough to make her gasp. The black soap, flecked with some kind of herb, stings her skin like nettles. And yet to feel clean now, after all she’s been through, she would suffer almost anything.

Once Alouette has finished washing, and dried herself with a rough cloth, Sister Marthe lifts a pair of shears. Alouette’s hands fly to her hair instinctively. The sister pauses only long enough to say, “It will grow back. If you earn the privilege.”

The blades snick closed, again and again. Auburn strands fall around Alouette’s feet, catching the weak light from the window. Afterward, her head feels impossibly light, exposed. She touches her newly shorn scalp, grieving the familiar weight of her braid, the silky ends she once twisted absently between her fingers. There is nothing but the ghost of it, a ragged line of stubble at the nape of her neck.

The absence hollows her out in a way she doesn’t quite have words for. She has never considered herself vain, but this is not vanity—this is mortification. A forced unmaking. Long ago, her mother used to tug gently at her braid before sending her off to bed. “Your hair will grow thick and strong, my lark,” she would say, pressing a kiss to her temple. As the memory rises, Alouette tries to snuff it out before it can fully take shape.

Putting away her shears, Sister Marthe presents the uniform that Alouette will wear day in and day out, a mud-colored chemise of shapeless flax that falls to her shins, stiff and itchy. Wooden clogs and a sack-like bonnet.

“Better things can be purchased,” Marthe says, as if to offer comfort. “Have you any income?”

Alouette shakes her head, hating to admit that she has none. As if on top of everything else, she should have found a way to avoid poverty as a birthright.

“You will work, then, in exchange for your lodging. What are your skills?”

To be imprisoned and required to pay for that “privilege” seems beyond ludicrous.

“I work with plant stuffs for dyeing cloth.” The lie comes easily, as if of its own accord. Saying she was a laundress will get her nothing.

“We have no need of that presently,” Marthe replies. “But there is a medicinal garden. Perhaps you can learn your way into being useful there?”

“Yes,” Alouette agrees quickly, scarcely able to process the easiness of sideslipping years of hateful drudgery. Although who can say if the garden will offer respite or only a different variety of grinding labor. Only time will tell.

AS SHE FOLLOWS Sister Marthe deeper into the asylum’s maze, Alouette’s clogs scrape and echo against the stone. She counts her steps, trying to map the warren of passages in her mind, but each turn looks the same as the last.

“Help me,” a voice cries out from one of the cells as they pass. Alouette’s stomach clenches with pity, mixed with fear for herself. Who are these madwomen? What have they done or not done? Are they dangerous, or simply victims of circumstance like she is? Meanwhile, Sister Marthe walks on without reaction or remark, making Alouette wonder if the suffering woman truly believes the officière has the power or empathy to comfort her, or if she is wailing simply because she still has a voice to do so.

The cell they finally stop at is barely wider than Alouette’s outstretched arms. Three walls hold wooden planks at waist height, each bearing a thin straw mattress gone gray with age. Wherever the stone is bare, beads of moisture catch the dim light from the corridor. Moss grows in patches near the floor, vivid green against the granite’s dull surface. The air smells of mildew and human waste, with an underlying tang that reminds her of her father’s workshop—saltpeter, she realizes. The whole building reeks of it.

Women occupy four of the six sleeping planks, their faces turning toward her with identical wariness and curiosity.

One rises. She is tall, broad-shouldered, with sand-colored hair pulled back severely from her face. Her movements are self-assured, impassive. “I’m Sylvine,” she says, with a glance that weighs and dismisses Alouette simultaneously. “You’ll get used to things here—or you won’t.”

Before Alouette can respond, a bell tolls somewhere above them, its sound distorted by the stone walls. The other women stir immediately, mechanical as puppets, reaching for bound prayer books stacked in a corner, whether or not they are able to read them.

“You’ll learn the schedule soon enough,” Sister Marthe says from the doorway. She pauses, something close to sympathy hovering over her features. “The first night is always the hardest. Try to sleep if you can—tomorrow will likely be longer than you can imagine.”

When Marthe has gone, Sylvine gestures to an empty plank. “That one’s yours,” she says, already turning away. “Fresh straw. You can thank the previous girl who didn’t last the week.”

Alouette realizes she’s shaking, her fingers digging into her palms. Her stomach cramps as she remembers the prisoner in the courtyard—her bloodied footprints, the raw terror in her eyes as they dragged her away. “There was a woman outside—” she begins.

“Thérèse,” another cuts in, her sharp features animated by a kind of bitter eagerness. From her bonnet, dark hair escapes in unruly tendrils. “She thought she could scale the wall by the laundry. They always catch the ones who run.”

“Quiet, Maude,” says Sylvine. “Don’t embarrass us all by behaving like an animal.”

When Maude retreats to her corner with a scowl, Alouette sinks onto the hard bench, wood creaking beneath her weight. Sylvine hadn’t raised her voice, but the force behind her words left no room for argument. It was a warning, Alouette realizes, meant as much for her as for Maude. Here, mistakes aren’t pitied. They’re punished—or costly in some other way. Better avoided to be sure.

The other women are watching her still, measuring her presence as they’ve likely measured every newcomer before her. Besides Sylvine and Maude, there are two others who seem to be twin sisters. They sit close together, fingers interlaced, mirror images of weariness and trepidation. The last occupant stays fixed in shadow, only her bright red hair visible in the gloom.

“What’s your name?” Sylvine asks.

“Alouette Voland.”

“Do you know where they’ve put you, Alouette? This is the Saint-Lazare ward, where they keep the troublesome ones—women who think too much, who question too much. Who dare to grasp at knowledge that isn’t meant for them.”

Surprised, Alouette can only stare at the wall beside her, where the saltpeter blooms in crystalline patterns.

“You’ll learn to survive here,” Sylvine says coolly. “Or you’ll be swallowed. No one will mourn either way. In the meantime, you should learn quickly who’s in charge. And always remember that the walls hear all, and the sisters have eyes everywhere.”

From somewhere in the distance comes the sound of chains dragging against stone, followed by a muffled cry. Alouette turns away, pressing her hands to her face. In the skin of her palms, she can still smell the Bièvre, the dye baths, the faint scent of madder. Soon, even that will be gone.

She has not spoken her father’s name aloud since before her sentencing. What might he be enduring now in his own version of hell? She imagines him in Bicêtre’s shadows—his hands, those clever artist’s hands that taught her to read color like a language, now empty, trembling, like her own.

CHAPTER 41

Predawn light seeps through the high window, weak and blotchy as curdled cream. Bells ring, cutting through the damp chill. Alouette opens her eyes, disoriented until memory floods back.

Salpêtrière.

She rises, limbs aching from the stiff plank bed. The others begin to stir around her. Maude rocks on her mattress, her expression blank. The redheaded woman seems not to have moved at all.

“Prayers,” Sylvine urges, already on her feet. “Get up, or you could get the strap.”

The door opens and Sister Marthe steps in, her black uniform as pristine as if she’s been awake for hours. Or perhaps she simply never sleeps, like some dark flower pressed between pages of doctrine instead of bedsheets.

Alouette kneels with the others as they light tapers. Candlelight trembles along moisture-beaded walls. Strange shadows writhe in the corners.

“Lauds for laudes,” Sister Marthe instructs. “Praise. Resurrection. Each dawn asks us to contemplate God’s glory and the promise of eternal life.”

Alouette’s bladder aches. Her stomach growls. Glory feels far away from this icy floor. She bows like the rest, but her lips stay sealed. God has always been a stranger. Her father’s house had no place for prayers—not between vats and cloth and unpaid debt. Religion has always seemed to belong to those with silk cushions and full bellies.

WHEN SISTER MARTHE finally signals them to rise, pale morning light has begun to stripe the floor through the window’s iron bars. They straighten their bedding, tidy themselves as much as such a thing is possible. Then it’s time for mass.

Alouette has heard of Salpêtrière’s size, but seeing it, breathing it, is something else entirely. Inside the chapel, a thousand women fill the pews—wasting, weeping, silent, or mad. Each of them—like herself—less a person than a soul to be scrubbed clean.

The pews in the front of the chapel are filled with children watched over by wet nurses and women known as “aunts” rather than the officières. Even on this first morning, Alouette can see that some of the children have been given preferential treatment. They wear finer clothes, some even in stockings, with a clean, neat look and flawless posture. While others look like the orphans they are, scruffy and raw, with wide, startled eyes that make her want to look away.

Finally, the superioress enters. In her black silk dress and matching bonnet lined with lace froth, she looks well fed. Rolls of flesh strain against the waistline of her skirts, and yet her face is thin and hawk sharp. Beside her walk two angelic-looking girls, polished as brass candlesticks. Their hair falls past their shoulders in golden waves, untouched by the shears. Alouette sees the message too clearly, how even here, beauty is rewarded. Fawned over. She remembers her own curls, heaped on the floor of the nave. What accounts for one girl being a treasure and another a threat? It makes no sense to her, and yet what does that matter?

The rector begins the introit. Strings of Latin rise like incense, but she tastes only ash on her tongue. Is there a soul, and can it rise? Do only the privileged few get to fly free, like the voices of the superioress’s favorite jewels flinging song into the rafters of the chapel—alleluia, alleluia, amen—while others remain trapped below forever?

AFTER PRAYERS, ALOUETTE is carried along by the slow procession through corridors while dawn spreads like a bruise. Her wooden clogs thwack against the floor along with hundreds of others, the sound like hard, pelting rain.

The dining hall opens before them, vast and low-ceilinged. Gray-clad women move through the space like threads through a loom, each following a preordained pattern.

The room is arranged in a hierarchy. Consumptives huddle at one table, hollow-cheeked and trembling. The epileptics at another, the blind at yet another, guided by touch. Meanwhile, at the very front, on an elevated platform, the clerics and senior officières dine like nobility, with white bread and meat, as their proper cutlery clinks against china plates.

Alouette swallows a mouthful of broth, forcing herself to ignore the sour undercurrent. Across the table sits the red-haired girl from their cell—Simone, with pale blue eyes and almost translucent skin. Alouette smiles at her, but the girl’s expression doesn’t change.

“She can’t speak,” Sylvine says from beside her. “They held her down at the Bastille and cut out her tongue when she wouldn’t pray to their God.” She shrugs as if the details scarcely matter anymore. “La Force is just as bad. The rats there don’t wait for the bodies to cool. Best keep your head down if you don’t want to find out for yourself.”

Alouette tries to imagine life without a voice. The brutality of it. “I’m sorry,” she mouths. But Simone does not blink.

Moments later, there’s a rustling of disorder. A middle-aged woman at a nearby table stiffens as a seizure overtakes her—back arching, limbs convulsing. As soon as two officières pull her from the bench and away, the composure of the room knits itself back together seamlessly, as if nothing ever happened.

Alouette forces herself to swallow her next spoonful, though her throat has gone tight.

She is beginning to understand it now—the fierce, ruthless logic of this place. Sympathy is a luxury no one can afford. To endure, you have to look away.

Later, the courtyard air is thick with the last heat of the day, the sky low with storm clouds. It’s high summer. And yet what can seasons mean here?

A crow perches on the iron spikes of the outer wall, its black eyes flicking toward the orchard. It caws once before flapping to a higher post. Alouette follows its movement, the dark wings catching skeins of weak light.

There are omens about crows—one is a sign of misfortune, according to the old tales. But to her mother, crows and ravens were protectors, sent as a warning to be cautious of your surroundings and to keep your wits about you.

She is still watching it when one of the guards comes up behind her, urging her along with a too-familiar touch to the curve of her back. She flinches away just as the crow snaps open its oiled black wings. In one motion, it’s gone over the rooftops, before it can so much as whisper to her what its meaning is or where it plans to fly.

CHAPTER 42

On her third morning in the asylum, Alouette is summoned from her cell and told that she has been assigned a duty in the physic garden. At Salpêtrière, everyone works, except those who have money from their family or elsewhere to pay for their keep, and those are rare as unicorns. The youngest make sheets for the beds of the infirm. The mad roll boiled wool onto spindles. The strongest labor outdoors in every weather.

Alouette will be one of these—and though she knows it won’t be easy, the thought of being among living things again fills her with a desperate hope. Such expectations are dangerous here, and yet the feeling persists.

The garden lies in the northeastern corner of the compound, where the high boundary wall runs parallel to the Seine just beyond. Here, the beds are lush with summer. The air smells of rain-wakened herbs and tender shoots, unlike most of Salpêtrière.

Sister Geneviève approaches with a basket and pruning shears. “You have some experience, I’m told.”

“Yes. My father was a dyer. I helped tend and gather plants and herbs. Woad, madder, weld.”

The sister nods, her lips tight and pale. “All of nature conforms to God’s order. So should those who cultivate it.”

Alouette kneels as instructed, thinking to herself that if she must be on her knees, serving, at least this church—with thriving greenery instead of punishing wooden pews—is one she understands.

“Begin with the chamomile,” Sister Geneviève says, placing a basket on the grass beside her. “Take only the flowers that have fully opened. Leave those still forming for tomorrow’s harvest. We rely on the herb for many things here. Nausea. Fever. Nervousness. For sleep. For shame.”

Shame. Of course. And yet all dark thoughts quickly dissipate once the sister moves off to inspect the others. The chamomile blooms are perfect: crisp white petals, golden centers like the sun in miniature. Alouette handles each with care approaching reverence. Here, for a moment, she can forget where she is. What she’s lost.

From her place among the flowers, she hears bargemen calling on the river. The creak of vessels. Snatches of song. Ordinary life beyond the wall. Meanwhile, the garden is its own world. Beds marked with wooden placards identifying remedies and poisons alike: lavender, thyme, feverfew, foxglove, henbane, nightshade.

The sisters see only nostrums here—febrifuges and purgatives, tinctures for agues and plasters for wounds. Plants categorized by what they can extract from bodies. Blood, bile, phlegm. Perhaps no one else here knows what Alouette does. That within the same leaves and stems and roots lie dormant colors—vibrant, lucent, valuable. Pigments that have traveled trade routes, started wars, built fortunes.

This chamomile in her basket yields a pale yellow dye, subtle as dawn light, the tansy a yellow green, the lady’s bedstraw a true red very close to madder. All around bloom secrets, hiding in plain sight. She understands how to unlock them. Even now, even in this place where women are stripped of everything—dignity, liberty, individuality—she still possesses this: the secret language of color.

Alouette works her hands deeper into the soil, feeling the cool earth beneath her nails, and thinks of her father, alone in his cell, hoping that he can at least still imagine the shades and hues he always loved, conjure them in his dreams. She thinks of her mother, too, of Henriette’s last words to her as she waited in her jail cell. Whatever your sentence, you must fight for yourself… History isn’t yet written… The dye is not set.

Has she forgiven her mother? she wonders. Perhaps not completely. But here in the garden, with roots between her fingers and old recipes reemerging from memory, she begins to see what she couldn’t before: that her mother’s legacy—however difficult or imperfect—is still a powerful inheritance.

Her reverie breaks as Sister Geneviève returns, her sharp eyes scanning Alouette’s work. “You’ll have to be more efficient,” she announces. “The infirmary has requested a double portion. Our physician finds it effective for calming difficult patients.”

Alouette nods, her gaze dropping to the flowers in her basket. By the time the day’s tasks are done, her fingers are raw from stripping leaves and bundling stems.

As the women file out of the garden, heading back to their dormitories before vespers, Alouette lingers a moment longer. The evening light slants through the branches of an ancient pear tree, casting dappled shadows across the feathered heads of herbs.

She presses her palm to the soil, anchoring herself in its warmth. That’s when she sees it: a linen scrap tucked beneath a stone at the edge of the chamomile bed. She glances around, then pockets it quickly.

Later, in her cell, she unfolds the small pouch. Inside: five seeds, dark as ink against the cloth. She can’t name them, but something in their shape is familiar to her. She rewraps them carefully and hides them against the wall behind her pallet. She doesn’t know what they’ll grow into—only that they’re hers. A secret. A beginning.

That night, sleep comes fitfully. She dreams of her father, of Bicêtre, of mouths without tongues. Of river stench and locked doors. Of Jehan Gobelin’s ghost watching with a cold, satisfied smile. But also of Étienne. The feel of his arms around her offering shelter, protection. His hands tugging at her braid until her hair spills around them.

Hours before dawn, when the bell for matins drives her to her knees for prayer, her fingertips can still remember the shape of the seeds.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 43

Sasha traces her finger along the cool marble floor of her memory palace’s central atrium. In her imagination, the tiles gleam with breathtaking perfection, each one engraved with the opening lines of Ovid that she studied and memorized over the last weeks and months. In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora. “My mind leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.”

She’s chosen the location of her memory palace carefully. Not the Louvre or Notre-Dame, both of which she considered at first, but then rejected—but the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, with its iron arches and endless rows of books. Every alcove, every shelf in her imagined library holds a different section of Metamorphoses. Book One lives in the grand reading room, its tales of creation and the Four Ages stored in the wooden card catalogs. Deucalion and Pyrrha’s stones, which can turn into humans, rest in the first drawer, while Apollo chasing Daphne occupies the center of the room, where sunlight pours through the high windows.

Sasha shifts on her bed, the springs creaking beneath her weight. Somewhere in the apartment, Rald is arguing with Maman about having to watch his little sister, who is a toddler now, getting into everything. Sasha presses her palms against her ears. How is she supposed to concentrate?

“Sasha!” Maman’s voice cuts through her thoughts. “You need to leave in twenty minutes if you want to make it to the library before noon!”

She sighs, reluctantly closing her Latin text. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has reduced its hours for Jews to between twelve and two, and she needs every minute of those precious hours if she’s going to finish Book Seven by the end of the week. In April, she turned fifteen, and she still has more than half of Metamorphoses to memorize.

“Coming,” she calls back, but doesn’t move immediately. Instead, she thinks about the new notice that’s been posted on buildings throughout the neighborhood, the one Papa had read aloud at breakfast with a tight voice: “Jews must ride in the last car of the metro train or the rear platform of buses.” Another restriction, another humiliation.

The apartment smells of cabbage soup again. Sasha’s stomach growls despite her distaste for the watery broth. Meat has become a distant memory, and even potatoes are increasingly scarce. Still, Maman manages to create something from almost nothing each night.

In the kitchen, her mother stirs a pot with one hand while bouncing two-year-old Klara against her hip with the other. Dark circles shadow Maman’s eyes, and yet she offers a warm smile when Sasha enters.

“There you are. Do you have your library card? And your identification papers?”

Sasha nods, patting her satchel. “Everything’s here.”

“Good. And remember, you must be home by four. The curfew—”

“I know, Maman.” She doesn’t mean to sound sharp, but frustration leaks into her voice anyway.

Maman’s expression softens. “I wish I could come with you, but Klara has been fussy all morning, and I promised Madame Laurent I’d mend her husband’s shirts.”

“It’s fine,” Sasha says, more gently this time. “I’m perfectly capable of taking the bus by myself.”

“Of course you are.” Maman kisses her forehead. “My little scholar. Just be careful.”

Sasha rolls her eyes but secretly appreciates her mother’s concern. On her way out, she grabs the ration card for bread—perhaps she can stop at Monsieur Petit’s bakery on the way home, if the line isn’t too long.

Outside, the summer air carries the scent of chestnut blossoms, incongruously sweet against the backdrop of German patrol cars and stern-faced officers checking papers according to whim. Sasha walks quickly, her satchel bouncing against her hip. She knows exactly how many minutes it takes to reach the bus, how many stops until the Panthéon, how many steps from there to the library’s grand entrance. This is how her life is measured now.

At the arrêt, several people already wait. Sasha recognizes a few from the neighborhood whom she only knows in passing. The woman who sells flowers from a stall on rue de Croulebarbe and the elderly professor who sometimes speaks to Papa when they pass on the street. She nods politely to both and takes her place in line.

When the bus arrives, she lets the others board first, then climbs the steps. The driver barely glances at her as she hands him the fare, but as she moves toward an empty seat near the middle, his voice stops her.

“Jews to the back,” he says without meeting her eyes.

Heat rushes to Sasha’s cheeks. It’s the terrible star, of course, blazing from her blouse like a mark of shame. Will she never again be invisible? Just an ordinary girl on an ordinary day instead of something suspicious? Something contagious?

“Go on,” the driver says.

Sasha swallows hard, lifts her chin, and turns toward the rear of the bus. As she squeezes past other passengers, their stares feel like physical pressure against her skin. The back platform is already crowded—a family with small children, an older man with a cane, and a boy about her age with thick, dark hair who is also wearing the star.

“Excuse me,” she murmurs, hating how small her voice sounds.

The boy shifts slightly, making room for her. “You can hold on to this rail,” he says quietly. Sasha thanks him while surreptitiously catching a longer glimpse of his face. On second thought, he looks older than she is, maybe sixteen, tall and broad-chested with warm brown eyes and thick lashes. C’est un vrai Romeo, her friend Riva might have whispered if she were here, but she isn’t. She and her family have been far away for weeks, at their country house in Rolleboise.

Their going had made Sasha incredibly jealous at first. If only her parents had a country house, she kept thinking, a safe place to wait out all this awfulness. But now, the envy has faded, and she only misses her friend. Life was lighter and more fun with Riva around. Spotting this cute boy on the bus, for instance, would be a different thing completely if they were together. Something to talk about and dissect for hours or even days afterward.

“I’m Gérard Nordmann,” the boy says. “I go to Lycée Charlemagne.”

“Sasha Brodsky,” she replies, not quite meeting his gaze. “Lycée Rodin.”

He nods, and they fall silent. Sasha stares out the back window, watching Paris slide by in reverse. A woman with a market basket crosses the street. A German officer checks a man’s papers outside a café. At the Panthéon, the bus slows, rumbling toward the stop. Sasha adjusts her satchel, preparing to exit.

“Are you headed to the library?” Gérard asks suddenly. “I go there most Saturdays. It’s so cool and quiet.”

“Oh.” The coincidence surprises her. “Yes.”

“Maybe I’ll see you inside,” he says, then glances away, as if embarrassed by his own forwardness.

Sasha steps off the bus without replying but finds herself oddly flustered, her pulse still jostled by the encounter. All the way to the library, she knows he is walking a little behind her. She feels him there but tries not to think of it or to hope he catches up and tries to walk with her.

When she reaches the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, solemn and imposing, Sasha climbs the steps quickly, drinking in the sight of the massive reading room through the windows. For two hours, she can almost pretend the world outside has no claim on her.

Inside, she presents her card. The librarian checks her watch pointedly.

“Jewish hours begin at noon,” she says, her voice carrying through the hushed space. “You’re three minutes early.”

Sasha bites back her anger, stepping aside to wait as other patrons glance at her curiously. Gérard stands along the side wall, reading a book. He seems to have forgotten about her. She turns away, refusing to let it bother her. She has work to do, after all. Her memory palace won’t build itself.

When finally allowed through, Sasha chooses her favorite table in the back corner, where a shaft of light gilds the worn surface. She unpacks her materials—Latin text, notebook, three pencils, the small medallion her father gave her when she first announced her Metamorphoses project. The coin shows Apollo reaching for Daphne, her fingers already curling into laurel leaves.

Now she holds it lightly, feeling the warm metal against her palm, and lets herself fall into her memory palace. The real library fades as she moves through her imagined one—each room, each shelf, built into the architecture of her mind.

She doesn’t notice Gérard’s approach until a shadow crosses her page. He hasn’t forgotten about her after all. He stands there, a little awkwardly, his thick hair fallen across his forehead and over one eye. Even so, his gaze holds a warm steadiness. Toffee-brown velvet—that’s what his eyes are like.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Am I disturbing you?”

“Yes.” She flushes. “I mean no, I was just far away,” she admits.

He gestures to the chair opposite. “May I? Most of the other tables are full.”

She could point out that they aren’t. Instead, she nods. “If you want to.”

Gérard sits and opens his book. When Sasha returns to her own, her focus doesn’t settle. She’s too aware of him across from her—the way he mouths words as he reads, his quiet concentration.

When he eventually speaks, he keeps his voice low, so as not to draw a withering look from the librarian. “What are you reading?”

“Ovid. Metamorphoses.”

He smiles, and the expression transforms his serious face. “Medea and Jason?”

Sasha blinks. “How did you know?”

He points gently at her page. “I recognized the line. ‘I see the better path and approve it, but follow the worse.’ ” His Latin is a little rough, but he says it earnestly, without pretension.

“You’ve read Ovid?” she asks, skeptical but secretly pleased.

“In translation,” he admits, flushing again. “Not like you.”

Her defenses soften. “I’m memorizing it,” she says. “All fifteen books.”

“All of them? That’s… incredible.”

He listens as she describes her memory palace: the imagined reading rooms, the shelves of stories, the way Apollo’s light fills the central hall. He asks questions—good ones—that show he’s following, not just humoring her.

“Where’s Daedalus?” he asks at last.

“In the archives,” she says. “The blueprints for escape tucked between history’s records.”

He smiles again, and Sasha feels the strangest tug inside her chest, something old and almost forgotten stirring.

The library clock strikes two. Sasha scrambles to gather her things.

“They’ll start checking papers,” she mutters.

Gérard closes his book with a sigh. “I hate it. Being controlled and excluded like this.”

“It won’t always be this way,” she says, though she isn’t sure she believes it.

They leave together, through patches of afternoon sunlight crashing over the marble steps. Gérard lingers conspicuously.

“Maybe… next Saturday?” he suggests.

“Maybe,” Sasha answers. Then, impulsively: “I’ll be starting on Book Eight soon. Daedalus and Icarus.”

“I’ll brush up,” he promises, his smile flashing again.

They part ways, since he has errands. Sasha boards her bus alone. But as Paris reels past outside, she touches the medallion in her pocket—and in her mind, she sketches a new alcove in her palace: two chairs, a worn table, a shaft of indelible light.

CHAPTER 44

Kristof has worked the night shift and comes home feeling barely awake. Trudging up the final flight of stairs in his apartment building, he sees the Brodskys’ door standing open. Inside, Rachel stands at the kitchen table with account books spread before her. The set of her shoulders reminds him of someone bracing against a storm.

“Where’s Felix?” The question catches in his throat.

Then Sasha appears, her face pale as paper. Behind her, Rald stands frozen with a book in his hand. His eyes, wide and dark, follow his mother’s every movement.

“They came early this morning,” Sasha says. “Two officers in gray uniforms. They wanted Papa’s papers.” Her voice carries a practiced steadiness, as if she’s determined not to cry.

“Five men from our street alone this morning,” Rachel elaborates. “All Jewish. All with businesses or trades.” Her pencil hovers over columns of figures in her account book. “We have enough savings for two months, maybe three if we’re careful. I can take in additional work. Sasha can help more around the house.”

The calm in her voice is somehow worse than tears.

Kristof has heard about all kinds of trouble resulting from the new registration requirements for Jews, the endless documents needed to prove residency, citizenship, profession. One missing stamp, one incorrect date…

“Did they say where—”

“Nothing. But it must be a work camp of some kind, in the east. If they let him write, we’ll know more soon. Depending on when he’ll be released, we might need to move to a smaller apartment. The rent is too high here without Felix’s income.”

Rald taps his book against his knee with soft thumps. “But Papa will come back,” he says. “Before we’re forced to move?”

“We’ll leave word of our new address,” Rachel promises. “He’ll be able to find us, don’t worry.”

Kristof glances over her lists—weekly budgets, expenses that can be cut. The careful math of survival.

Sasha moves closer to him. “Could you ask at the hospital if anyone knows more about the work camps? Are they far away? What about Madame Kaufmann’s husband? He’s at Drancy. We could walk there if we needed to.”

Before he can answer, Rachel says, “Sasha, go check on Klara. She’ll be waking from her nap.” When Sasha hesitates, Rachel adds, more firmly, “Now, please.”

Sasha’s shoulders drop, but she goes. In the silence that follows, Rachel bends nearer to Kristof, her voice low. “No one knows anything because no one is meant to know. But the men will work, and they’ll come home when it’s over. That’s what we tell the children. That’s what we must believe. Anything else is too unbearable. They wouldn’t…” She stops when her voice begins to shake, pressing her lips together. “I have to focus on what I can control. One day at a time.”

“Rachel,” Kristof says carefully, “should we try to find a way for you and the children to leave Paris?”

“And how would we do that?” Her eyes are enormous as she blinks at him. “The roads are dangerous. We have almost no money. Besides, we’ve been through worse. Warsaw was worse.”

“What can I do to help?”

Rachel finally meets his eyes. “Just be here… for the children. Felix would want that.”

“Of course. Anything.”

Later, in his apartment, Kristof stands at the window. In the quiet, he hears a German patrol passing, their boots marking time on the cobblestones. Then Klara begins to cry in the room below him, Rachel’s voice soothing her with a lullaby. The same Yiddish tune he heard her humming softly the night he delivered Klara. He doesn’t know any Yiddish, but he likes to think the tune is about better days. Christ, don’t they all need that?

His hands flex uselessly at his sides. Where is Felix now? The stories vary so widely it’s impossible to know what’s true. Some say the men are merely detained at places like Drancy, working the fields by day and returning to barracks at night. Others whisper of trains heading east, of camps located deeper in occupied territory.

You’re family to us now, Felix had told him after Klara’s birth. If you ever need anything, even years from now, even if we’re countries apart, you can count on me.

But it’s Felix who desperately needs someone, and Kristof can do nothing. How many times has he sat at the Brodskys’ table, sharing what little food they could gather? How many evenings has he watched Felix patiently pretending to lose at chess to Rald, or listening to Sasha’s endless stories about Philomela and Tereus, Jupiter and Io? Felix, who always has a joke ready when the blackout makes the nights too long. Who faces every new restriction and fresh humiliation with quiet dignity. Kristof knows more about who Felix really is than he does his own father—and loves him more too.

And yet what can love do? Can it send out a searchlight through the dark streets of Paris and beyond? Can it find his friend and bring him home?

Below him, little by little, Klara’s sobs grow faint. The Brodskys’ apartment falls quiet as they all go to sleep. He presses his palm against the wall in front of him and closes his eyes, wishing he could hold the family all in place. And Felix, too, far beyond his reach.

CHAPTER 45

Sasha arrives at the library later than usual the following Saturday, having spent the morning standing in line at the prefecture with Maman, clutching a folder of documents that might—or might not—help them learn where Papa has been taken. It’s been almost a week since the police came for him, and still no word beyond the vague assurance that he’s been sent to a “work camp.” The official behind the glass had barely looked at their papers before stamping a form and telling them to check back in a month.

A month. As if they can simply suspend their worry, their fear, for so many days.

In the reading room, Sasha settles at her usual place but can’t bring herself to open her Latin text immediately. Instead, she stares at the table, seeing not its polished wooden surface, but Papa’s empty chair at dinner, his tools laid out neatly on his workbench, the watches he’d been repairing now abandoned in various states of completion.

“Is this seat taken?”

Sasha looks up to find Gérard standing beside her, a violin case in his hand. His expression shifts from hopeful to concerned as he takes in her face.

“No,” she says, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “It’s free.”

Gérard sets his violin case beside him, his hand resting lightly on the worn leather as if it’s a touchstone. “Has something happened?”

The directness of the question catches Sasha off guard. She’s grown accustomed to veiled references, to the careful euphemisms that adults use. Away. Called up for service. Temporarily relocated.

“My father has been arrested,” she says, the words strange and sharp on her tongue. “He’s been sent off to do work detail, they said. We don’t know where.”

Gérard’s eyes darken with understanding. “I’m sorry,” he says simply. No platitudes, no false reassurances. Just acknowledgment of the rupture in her world.

“My uncle was taken last month,” he adds after a moment. “From his apartment in the Marais. My aunt received a postcard from Pithiviers just the other day.”

“Where is that? Is it a temporary camp like Drancy?”

“I think so. But south of here, near Loiret.”

“Is he… is he all right?”

Gérard shrugs, a gesture too heavy for his years. “He wrote that the conditions are difficult but bearable. That they’re keeping everyone busy with construction work.” His mouth twists slightly. “My uncle is an accountant. He’s never built anything in his life.”

The absurdity of it all hangs between them—the nonsensical reassignment of skills, the pretense that these arrests are simply about labor allocation. Sasha thinks of her father’s precise hands, his patience and care at his work. What use would a labor camp have for such delicate talents?

“My father repairs watches,” she says. “The most complicated ones. The ones other clockmakers give up on.”

“Then they should value him.” His hand tightens on the edge of the table, as if his will alone, his conviction, could make the world fair. “Whatever this is about, they can’t just waste abilities like that.”

Sasha lets herself be comforted by Gérard’s certainty, at least for a moment. She hasn’t considered this perspective—that Papa’s expertise might protect him somehow, might make him necessary.

“Do you think they’ll release them soon?” she asks, hating how childish the question sounds.

Gérard hesitates, clearly weighing honesty against kindness. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “My father says we must prepare to wait out the war. That if the labor is bearable…” He trails off, not finishing the thought. “He’s essential personnel at the conservatory. Teaching German officers’ children.” His expression clouds. “For now.”

Sasha nods, understanding the temporary nature of safety, real or imagined. She opens her Latin text, needing the consolation of its familiar pages. “I haven’t been able to concentrate,” she admits. “I keep starting Book Eight and losing my place.”

“Daedalus and Icarus,” Gérard says, remembering their previous conversation. “The labyrinth.”

“Yes. It all feels different now. All those stories about imprisonment, about escape.” She traces a string of words with her fingertip. “Papa used to help me practice. He doesn’t speak Latin, but he would listen to me recite and tell me when I stumbled.”

“I could listen,” Gérard offers. “If it would help.”

The thoughtfulness of his offer makes her throat tighten. “Thank you. Maybe next time. Today I’m not sure I would remember anything correctly.”

Gérard doesn’t push. Instead, he opens his own book—she notices it’s a biography of Mozart. She doesn’t know any boys who are serious and intelligent and sensitive all at once, who read about composers indoors on a warm summer day.

“How long have you been playing the violin?” she asks.

“Since I was six. But for a long time, I didn’t take it seriously.”

“What changed?” Sasha finds herself feeling genuinely curious, grateful for something to think about besides her father’s absence.

He considers this. “I suppose I realized that instead of acting like music was being forced on me, I could choose it for myself. After a while, it started to seem like the one thing I could control. When everything else feels…” He gestures vaguely. “Uncertain. The music is always there, waiting.”

Sasha nods, understanding him completely. It’s how she feels about her memory project. For several minutes, they sit in companionable silence, Sasha trying to focus on Daedalus crafting wings of wax and feathers, Gérard making occasional notes in the margins of his book.

She notices the way he taps his pencil softly against the page, a slow, unconscious rhythm—like the ticking of a metronome. There’s a steadiness to it, a quiet pattern. She watches him for a moment, then asks, “What are you playing now, in your lessons?”

“Bach’s Chaconne. It’s… difficult. The most challenging piece I’ve attempted.”

“Will you play a little for me sometime?” The request surprises them both. “Not here, obviously,” she adds quickly.

“I’d like that. Perhaps…” He hesitates. “There’s a small park near my aunt’s building. Sometimes I practice there when the weather is good.”

“I usually go straight home from the library,” Sasha says, thinking of Maman’s increasing anxiousness since Papa was arrested. “But maybe one day soon if I can arrange it.”

Sasha looks at the clock. Somehow, it’s already a quarter to two. Gérard follows her gaze and shrugs, as if he, too, has no idea where the time has gone.

“I had a thought,” he says after a moment. “If your father can fix the most complicated watches, don’t you think that he’ll find ways to be useful? Ways to showcase his intelligence, even in a work camp?”

Sasha pauses, turning the question over. She thinks of Papa’s resourcefulness, his quiet strength, his ability to see connections that others miss. “You’re right,” she says slowly. “He wouldn’t just give up. He’d make himself valuable so that he can survive.”

“Exactly,” Gérard adds with unexpected conviction. “My uncle wrote that they’re forming work groups based on skills. That the guards want things to run efficiently. Your father is exactly the kind of person they’d recognize as an asset.”

Sasha hears something desperate in Gérard’s certainty, as if he’s trying to convince himself as much as her. But she wants to believe his theory anyway. Needs to believe it.

“Papa always says that competence speaks for itself,” she offers. “That skill transcends language, politics, everything.”

“See? He’ll be all right.”

They pack their things as the library attendant begins his rounds. Outside, the June sunshine hits them like a physical force after the cool interior of the library. They pause on the steps, uncertain.

“I was thinking of walking for a bit,” Gérard suggests. “I could go part of the way with you, if that would be all right?”

Sasha hesitates, then accepts. The city seems more threatening since Papa’s arrest, as if his absence has removed some invisible shield of protection. But it’s a beautiful day, and a walk does sound nice.

They take the less crowded streets. Gérard reaches for her satchel, adjusting his violin to tuck it over one shoulder. The normality of the gesture—a boy carrying a girl’s books—feels like a small act of defiance against everything happening around them.

Still, even as the afternoon presses warm and golden against her skin, Sasha finds herself falling into a pocket of sadness—the way she does now, when she leaves the world of her beloved myths, or an hour at the library with someone as sweet and sensitive as Gérard, only to remember how terrifying and uncertain the real world is.

As they turn onto a wider boulevard, Gérard automatically slows his pace, allowing a group of German officers to pass without having to acknowledge them. Sasha notes the instinct—a subtle calculation of when to be visible, when to disappear. They have all learned it.

Soon, she looks up at the familiar rooftops of the 13th arrondissement—but in her mind, she is far away. She is in Warsaw again, standing on the balcony of their old apartment, watching the sea-green rooftops of the Pod Blacha gleam in the sun.

She is running through Stare Miasto under strings of Hanukkah lights. She is standing by the bronze mermaid at the river, the legend of Syrenka curling through her mind like a song.

The life behind her feels so close, sometimes. Almost touchable. While everything ahead remains a blank space she can scarcely bring herself to contemplate.

“Have you ever tried to build a memory palace for the future?” Gérard asks, interrupting her daydream.

She glances at him, surprised—and for a second, she isn’t sure how to answer. “No. I don’t think you can memorize something that hasn’t happened yet.”

“I suppose not,” he agrees, smiling a little. “But you could still imagine it. We have to believe that something wonderful can still happen after all this, don’t we? Otherwise…” He trails off.

“I know,” Sasha says, when he doesn’t finish the thought.

They reach the rue des Gobelins and Sasha stops, pointing down the curving lane. “That’s my apartment building. The one with the wrought-iron balconies. We live on the second floor.”

“It seems like a nice place. Quiet.”

“Not with my brother and little sister.” She smiles. “But it’s all right. It’s home.”

“Will you be at the library next week?”

“If I can. Maman needs more help with the younger ones now that Papa’s gone, and there are so many errands, forms to fill out…”

“I’ll look for you,” he says simply. “Saturday at noon.”

“I’ll do my best,” Sasha says as Gérard hands back her books. “Thank you for listening about Papa, and for…” She falters, not sure how to articulate what his company has meant today.

“It helps me too. Talking to someone who knows what it’s like.”

Sasha nods, feeling something tentative but real settle between them—like a thread stretched taut but steadfast, unbroken. She takes a few steps backward, wondering how to say goodbye, what the protocol is for a friendship forged under such circumstances.

Finally, she smiles and walks away, resisting the urge to turn around. Her satchel thumps against her hip as she follows the bowed shape of the sidewalk—the river of her street, which was once a true river, tainted with dyes.

She has just reached the gate of her building when she hears it. At first, she thinks it must be her mind playing tricks—the strain of everything, the too-bright sun after the library’s hush. But then she stops, heart thudding into her throat.

Braided through the ordinary noise of the day, a melody has begun to weave its way toward her. Notes delicate and stubborn, solemn and slow, like a caravan carrying something precious across a crumbling bridge.

Bach’s Chaconne.

Stunned, she turns, and there he is, half hidden at the corner. Gérard, his violin tucked under his chin, case open on the sidewalk at his feet, bow tracing the air with quiet insistence. The notes are neither sharp nor pleading—they’re resolute, steady, like breath refusing to falter. A promise refusing to break.

He is still a student, she can hear. His playing isn’t perfect, except in all the ways it is. He plays from the heart, not caring who else hears. This is for her and for himself. For the stubborn thread of hope held between them.

When the last trembling note fades, Gérard lowers his bow. For a moment, he only looks at her across the curving river of her street. Then he returns his instrument to its case, lifts his hand in a small wave, and slips off, disappearing around the corner.

Sasha watches him go, the music still vibrating in her bones. She feels dazed and disbelieving at first. That anyone would do such an astonishing thing. But by the time she reaches the second-floor landing, she is crying. Silent, unstoppable tears that she knows she won’t be able to explain to her mother, or perhaps to anyone.

CHAPTER 46

The acrid smell of German cigarettes has become as familiar in the halls of Sainte-Anne’s as the scent of antiseptic. Kristof pauses at the top of the stairs, his hand resting on the banister where the polished wood gives way to bare grain—no one has time for such frivolous tasks anymore. He gazes down the long corridor, sunlight filtering through windows half covered with strips of black paper: a futile defense against Allied bombers.

When he first arrived, nearly three years ago, this part of the hospital housed its most challenging psychiatric cases. Now, steel-toed boots echo against the tiles, and Wehrmacht officers stride past with an air of easy ownership. The wing stands as a stark reminder of how quickly the world can change, how easily the known can become alien. A sanctuary transformed into a fortress or prison.

Kristof adjusts his white coat, the fabric thin and overwashed, and makes his way toward the wards. Nurses hurry past, their faces drawn with exhaustion, arms laden with supplies carefully rationed to last the week. A trio of German soldiers loiter by the nursing station, their laughter too loud, too careless in a place of healing and hushed voices.

At the end of the hall, a new sign hangs on the door of Dr. Claudel’s office. The black Gothic script reads, Militärischer Verbindungsoffizier. “Military Liaison Officer.” Kristof feels the now-familiar tightening in his chest as he passes.

“Efficiency,” Claudel recently announced to the residents, explaining that his new role will only help the hospital through this complex transition. “Our German colleagues bring modern methods. Let’s learn to appreciate them.”

Julian had caught Kristof’s gaze across the room. Neither of them needed to say a word.

A short while later, Kristof checks on Georges Plomin, the catatonic patient who was subjected to multiple rounds of electroshock therapy several years ago. The man who, regardless of Dr. Claudel’s violent “interventions,” hasn’t improved, even slightly. In fact, he’s never spoken again—and yet Kristof hasn’t stopped trying to work with him. Hasn’t stopped hoping that he might one day find his voice.

But Plomin’s bed is stripped bare. The mattress has been disinfected, and yet it still holds the shape of his body, as if he has only just risen for a morning stroll. His few belongings—a worn photograph, the small, crude wooden horse he had carved during occupational therapy—are gone.

“Transferred,” one of the new nurses says, scanning her clipboard.

“Where?”

“The notes only say, ‘Eastern Facility.’ ” She pauses, looking mildly apologetic, and Kristof realizes she isn’t sure what that means either.

When she leaves, he stands looking at the stark bedframe, thinking of Georges Plomin’s face during a brief moment of connection years ago—the way he reached for Kristof’s pencil, his eyes focusing for the first time in ages, recognizing something in the world beyond his private hell. That single encounter had felt so promising. So auspicious. Now he has simply disappeared.

Finally, Kristof leaves the room, forcing himself to focus on his rounds. One task at a time. Stay present. Then he notices a commotion near the conservatory. A group of Vichy officials stands in the center of the hall like a highly polished bulwark, both barring progress and oblivious to the fact.

Until recently, the occupying regime has kept to their own designated spaces—separate wings, even a separate courtyard and garden within the compound. Their presence here, in the heart of the ward, feels almost predatory.

Clenching his jaw, Kristof is about to turn away when a familiar silhouette among the group makes him freeze. He blinks twice, certain that his exhausted mind is playing tricks on him. But as the man turns, his profile catches the harsh light. Roman nose and square, elegant chin. Oiled black hair above the crisp navy collar of his Vichy tunic.

Alesander Extebarria.

Adrenaline spikes, hot and nauseating. It’s been two years since Alesander vanished from his apartment, leaving behind only maps and questions. What on earth is he doing here—in a sea of Vichy dress uniforms, on Kristof’s ward?

For a fraction of a second, Alesander’s eyes glance over at him and stop. Just long enough for Kristof to glean a flicker of recognition. Or is it a warning? Then the moment passes. Alesander looks back to his colleagues, as if Kristof is nothing more than a shadow on the wall. And Kristof is forced to walk on, somehow, though the air in his lungs has turned to stone.

At the end of the hall, he hurries into the stairwell, pressing his forehead to the cool plaster as the floor beneath him lurches upward. How many nights had the two of them spent underground, mapping the tunnels beneath Paris? Alesander leading the way, his voice steady in the dark as he pointed out passages and landmarks.

Kristof never questioned how Alesander knew so much. Was he a spy for the Germans even then? Cataloging the city’s secrets, taking stock of its weaknesses for some future betrayal?

Through the door, he can still hear the group’s loud chatter—proprietary and sickeningly out of place. He can only assume they’re here to instigate more acts of efficiency. If Alesander is stooping so low as to collude with the Nazis, he isn’t the man Kristof thought he was. And if he has some other role—a double agent, perhaps—why has he never come to Kristof to explain? Why materialize at the hospital, with so much more risk? Kristof could have shouted his name, after all.

It’s all so mystifying. Obscure as the tunnels they haunted a lifetime ago. Only one thought remains clear as Kristof steadies his knees beneath him and makes his way down the stairwell to another ward: In occupied Paris, trust has become as fragile as glass, and just as easily shattered.

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 47

On her straw mattress, Alouette holds herself taut, her eyes wide in the predawn dark. She’s been told that her treatments begin today.

Though this is her first week in the asylum, she’s already heard too many whispers about how sin is purged here, in all its guises. Insolence, melancholia, hysteria, and moral weakness. There are ice baths so cold the skin burns, bodies submerged until consciousness slips away. The spinning chair—la chaise tournante—where they strap a woman in and whirl her until her mind unravels, nausea and terror indistinguishable. And the beatings, of course, delivered not as cruelty, they claim, but as correction, to shake loose the darkness lodged inside. Some say leeches are used, their slow, cold mouths pulling sickness from the blood. Others speak of blistering irons pressed to the skin, meant to release bad humors.

Alouette doesn’t know what waits. Only that it will happen soon. Now.

She hears footsteps, and Sister Marthe appears in the doorway and leads her to the infirmary, a narrow stone building with a high sloped roof and almost no windows.

Inside, the air smells of vinegar with an undertone of blood. Rows of cots line half of the long, unwelcoming room, some separated by a wooden partition. Against the opposite wall, a weathered table is cluttered with folded linens, stoneware jars, and instruments whose purposes she cannot name.

The treatment area is set into an alcove, where the physician, Monsieur Moreau, waits, his figure etched sharply against the pale blocked stone. He wears the black robe of learning, its stiff white collar like a blade at his throat. His face is pale, pinched with severity, the skin drawn tight over angular cheekbones. A thin, neatly trimmed mustache rides his upper lip, dark as ebony, and his hair is pulled back, tied neatly with a ribbon.

His hands are what Alouette notices most—thin, almost delicate, with long fingers stained faintly yellow at the nails, as though even his slightest touch leeches color from the world. One hand holds a leather-bound ledger, the other a quill poised above it, ink blotting slightly where he hesitates. He glances up, his eyes reflective but empty, like chips of glass.

“Bring her forward,” he says to Sister Marthe. He uses no intonation and doesn’t look at Alouette, almost as if he’s discussing not her but the weather or a crack in the plaster.

Within the cage of her ribs, a frantic drumming begins. Her feet feel rooted to the stone floor. Does this man really believe he is saving her, Alouette wonders as Sister Marthe’s grip tightens on her arm—or does he simply not care?

A younger man appears from somewhere. An apprentice with a fine coat and clean, eager hands. “You will learn that women of this type suffer from an excess of heat in the blood,” the physician says.

Alouette stiffens. Women of this type.

The apprentice glances toward her, his expression blank, diffident. A student absorbing his lesson. He says nothing.

The physician tilts his head toward Alouette, gesturing to her as though she were an inanimate object. “Observe this one,” he continues. “She does not appear ill—does she?”

The apprentice hesitates. “No, sir.”

“And yet,” Monsieur Moreau says, stepping forward, finally looking at her, “she is unbalanced. Do you see it?”

Alouette feels her face grow red and hot. Her heart continues to thunder.

The apprentice shifts, unsure. “How do you determine—”

The physician doesn’t sigh exactly, but there’s a tinge of impatience in his manner, as though he has been asked this same questions again and again by the unseasoned. He lifts Alouette’s wrist, turning it in the gleam of the lantern with no more care than he would give a specimen from one of his many jars. His fingers are cool and dry against her skin.

She feels her nerves betraying her, blood thrumming against his touch.

“The pulse is quickened,” he murmurs. “Too much bile, too much heat. These women suffer from excitations of the mind and body. The humors become disordered. What follows?”

“Irrational behavior.” The apprentice’s response sounds rote. “Agitation. In some cases, violence.”

“Left untreated, the mind festers. And so—” Monsieur Moreau releases her hand. “We restore balance.”

Alouette wants to speak up for herself. To tell them both that her mind is more than sound. But her mouth feels dry, full of paper and ash.

The apprentice leads Alouette to a wooden chair and pulls leather straps firmly across her wrists and ankles. Sister Marthe assists, laying a cloth over her forehead, her touch impersonal.

“Women like this one often benefit from bleeding,” the physician says to the apprentice as he selects a slender lancet from a tray. He pushes Alouette’s sleeve past her elbow. “It relieves congestion in the blood, lessens fevers of the mind. Some require further interventions—ice immersion, purging. But we begin here.”

The blade presses into the crook of her arm. She feels a hard bright pinch. Then warmth, sliding down her skin in a thin line.

They call it a cure. Bleeding is meant to draw out poisons, to ease the weight of an inflamed lung, to cool the body when it burns with fever. But what sickness lives in defiance? What delirium stirs in free thought? Here, the blood isn’t drained to heal, but to empty the body of strength. To make her pliant. Colorless.

The red stream courses steadily into the bowl. Alouette’s head lolls back against the chair. She feels the room tilt and sway, shifting between the infirmary and somewhere else. Her father’s workshop, where cochineal boils in wide copper vats, deepening to the richest, most unimaginable red. For dyeing, the carmine-colored insects are crushed before being sacrificed. Their lifeblood is rare and precious, not at all like hers.

She tries to count the drops as they fall, to measure what they’re taking from her, but her mind feels clouded, indistinct. The apprentice’s face swims over hers as he peers closer at the bleeding bowl, studying. He, too, has questions about quantity.

“We observe the response,” says Monsieur Moreau. “If the patient continues to show signs of disorder, we proceed with a second bowl, or perhaps even a third.”

A third? Alouette would scream if she could. She feels untethered, as though something inside her is slowly drifting away from an essential anchor point.

Finally, the physician squeezes her arm with a tourniquet, setting aside the lancet and bowl. For a moment, Alouette is filled with relief, allowing herself to believe it’s over. The room spins gently at its edges, her arm throbs, but they’ve taken enough—surely.

“Next, we must address the corruption in the humors,” Monsieur Moreau says to his apprentice. He reaches for something on the table. “The bloodletting opens the pathways. Now we can purge the darkness that feeds her delusions.”

When Alouette sees the pewter funnel in his hands, understanding crashes through her. The chair rocks back. The funnel presses against her lips, cold and unyielding. She clenches her teeth.

“Open,” the physician murmurs almost indulgently, as if cajoling a wayward child.

Sister Marthe steps forward and, with a practiced touch, pinches Alouette’s nose closed. That’s when her body betrays her. She gasps as the sour liquid floods her mouth, acrid as vinegar or limewater. She can either swallow or drown.

She swallows. The nausea and retching are immediate, rising hot and tight from her stomach.

Afterward, the apprentice hovers. “Are both purges always necessary?”

The physician nods thoughtfully, passing the apprentice the funnel and emetic basin. “When they first come to us, yes. Some respond quickly, while others resist our methods. Distinguishing between the two requires practice and vigilance.”

He glances down at Alouette, then away, already cataloging her among his countless other cases. The last thing she hears him say before dizziness overtakes her, carrying her off to blackness, is this: “The devil does not yield easily.”

WHEN ALOUETTE WAKES, the world is thin and filmy, like drops of dye in puddled rainwater. The ceiling hovers, seeming to float—a low arch of mottled stone, with damp spidering along the seams. She blinks and her thoughts scatter.

There’s a sound nearby. She turns her head, the motion dizzying, her pulse fluttering weakly. Someone is moving between the cots—a young woman, balancing a basin against her hip. Marguerite is her name, another inmate, assigned to the infirmary as a servant and helper. Her dark hair is knotted low at her neck, loose strands softening a face etched by time and quiet wars. Her cheekbones still bear the imprint of beauty, but her mouth suggests only patience, hard-won.

Swallowing against the parched feeling in her mouth, Alouette tries to sit up and her head whirls, lurches.

“You’re awake,” Marguerite says. Her gaze is cool and steady gray: river stones washed smooth by the current. She reaches for a pitcher and cup and then hands a tincture to Alouette, floating with herbs.

Aqua mirabilis. Alouette recognizes it, tasting cinnamon, ginger, angelica, rosemary. It soothes the worst of the burning in her throat.

“Slowly now,” Marguerite urges. “You’ll make yourself sick again if you gulp.”

For a moment, Alouette can only stare at the woman, feeling disoriented. There isn’t any sharpness or coldness to Marguerite. No rough edges. She seems to have been shaped by holding up others, not pushing them down. “Thank you,” she finally says.

“You’re the one who knows about dyeing cloth.”

“Yes. Though it seems a lifetime ago already.”

“My father was a glassworker. He died doing it, but he made the most beautiful things.” Marguerite seems about to say more when brisk footsteps echo from down the corridor. She straightens quickly, adjusting her expression as easily as smoothing the unruliness out of linen cloth. By the time Sister Marthe appears in the doorway, her features appear to have never worn anything but this neutral polished mask.

“Ah,” says Sister Marthe, stepping into the alcove. “You’re stronger than I expected. Good.”

Marguerite retreats, seeming to dissolve as the lay sister guides Alouette to her feet. Above Marthe’s grip, the bandage seeps, making Alouette feel like retching all over again. The room tips dangerously.

“Mind yourself,” the sister murmurs, her voice a murky echo of concern. “The first treatment is always the most dramatic.”

Alouette glances once over her shoulder as she’s led away. Marguerite stands at the edge of the room. They exchange a brief look, and yet it holds recognition, like a deeply banked ember. You can do this, the look seems to say. Endure.

On the way back to her cell, the corridors blur past—gray stone, iron gates, the shuffle of her own feet beneath her. Alouette focuses on the sister’s steady grasp, the only thing tethering her to consciousness.

“We’re nearly there,” Sister Marthe says as they enter the dormitory. Her voice is gentle, even maternal. “I know you don’t understand our ways yet, but we really do mean to help you if we can. It’s all for your benefit.”

Alouette wants to laugh, or perhaps cry, but she has no strength for either. Help her? They’ve bled her like a slaughtered pig, purged her as if she were made of something wholly rotten. And yet there’s no cruelty in Sister Marthe’s eyes or tone. Only calm certainty, the same expression she wore while holding down Alouette’s shoulders during the treatment.

That’s the true horror, Alouette realizes as Sister Marthe helps her onto her thin pallet. They believe in this. They truly think they’re saving her soul.

“Rest now,” Sister Marthe says, making the sign of the cross over her. “Tomorrow will be better.”

Then the burlap curtain falls closed. A dimness presses in. Alouette touches the bandage at her elbow, feeling the slow seep of blood. Tomorrow will be better? Meaning what? That tomorrow she will be weaker and more malleable? Closer to the hollow thing they want her to become?

CHAPTER 48

Étienne stands across from the towering walls of Salpêtrière, a small cloth bundle tucked into his pocket. The August wind carries the warmth of late summer, but here, in the shadow of the asylum, seasons feel irrelevant. The massive gates might as well be the entrance to a fortress or a tomb—impenetrable by force, oblivious to suffering.

He’s waited for this opportunity for weeks now, since the day the cart carried Alouette away. Made discreet inquiries, risked questions that drew suspicious looks. Finally, he found Mathilde Cadieux, the midwife, who walks between worlds.

She approaches now—a small woman with iron-gray hair and a face carved by decades of watching birth and death revolving on the same indifferent wheel. “You understand this is the only time,” she says without preamble. Her voice is surprisingly deep and matter-of-fact. “After today, I cannot risk it again.”

Étienne nods. It had taken nearly all his savings just to convince her to try this once.

“The sisters trust me because they need me,” she continues, adjusting her shawl. “But that trust is precarious.”

His fingers tighten on the packet he’s brought. A letter wrapped around a tiny stone lark half the size of his thumb. Its wings pressed close to its body. Not the unfurled flight of the one he gave Alouette before, but one that waits patiently. That endures.

The letter had taken him hours to compose. Each word written and rewritten with painstaking care.

He’d begun practicing just after Alouette was taken away. Burning the midnight oil to transform his rough candle-writing into something more. Something that might bridge the distance between them.

The words can’t say everything, of course. They can’t say that he regrets not holding more tightly to her while he still had a chance. That he thinks of her a thousand times a day, missing her and worrying for her safety. They can’t say that he’s been reading aloud to Mémé in the evenings, borrowing books from the village priest. That he’s trying to build himself, day by day and letter by letter, into someone who might be worthy of her when she returns. And so, he writes only this: I won’t forget you. I wait. —É

“Your note must be small,” the midwife says, eyeing his bundle. “Small enough to fit inside this.” She opens her palm to reveal what looks like an ordinary stone, but when she twists it, it opens to reveal a walnut-size hollow.

“Her name is Alouette Voland,” Étienne says a little breathlessly. “She has—”

“The name is enough. I won’t reach her myself. There are others inside who will do nearly anything for a few coins.”

At the tolling of a bell, the woman straightens. The gate begins to creak open.

“Now you must go,” she says.

“Wait,” he pleads. “I need to be sure that you’ve seen her. I can pay more, if you’ll deliver the message into her hands yourself. If you can tell me that she is safe and unharmed.”

She considers him with a small, ironic smile. “Love,” she remarks, as if it’s a malady well worth avoiding. “How much more?”

“Half again what I’ve already paid,” he blurts before he can regret it.

She nods. “Wait here, then. It may be an hour or two. I can’t predict.”

THE HOUR STRETCHES into nearly three as Étienne waits. He’s brought along a battered copy of Aesop’s Fables lent by the village priest. His fingertip traces each line as he reads with excruciating slowness, mouthing the words as he deciphers them. The wind rustles the pages, and half a dozen times he loses his place. Still, he persists.

A quarryman has no need for letters—or so he’s been told. But now he understands that words are another kind of tool, another way to shape the world. Alouette will return to find a man who can read her formulas, who can write his own name without hesitation, who can stand proudly beside her rather than in her shadow.

By the time the midwife reappears, the sun has passed its peak. Her shawl hangs askew off one shoulder, and her face looks blanched, weary instead of composed.

Étienne rises at once, tucking away the book.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “One of the laboring women died—a breech. In the commotion, I couldn’t try to reach your sweetheart, not without attracting notice.”

He exhales slowly as his spirit sinks. He should have known he was on a fool’s errand.

“I did find a girl who promised to deliver your message,” she continues.

“Do you trust her?”

“I trust that she wants the coin. But she didn’t hesitate.”

“What now?” He begins to feel desperate. “Could Alouette ever get a letter back to me?”

The woman shifts her weight, resettling her shawl on her thin shoulders. “Salpêtrière isn’t the Châtelet. It’s less a prison than a warehouse for those best kept out of sight. There’s a ward for the hopeless cases—the ones who won’t recover or who ask too many questions. Once you’re transferred there, you don’t come back.”

“That won’t happen to Alouette,” he insists, feigning confidence. “She’s too clever, too resourceful.”

“Perhaps not. But I’ll tell you this as well: This was the third death in a month. Some say it’s contagion or plain misfortune. Others say the infirmary is letting certain patients slip away… intentionally.”

“What do you mean? Why?”

“Because too many mouths are hard to feed. Because some women are inconvenient. Because cruelty doesn’t always need a reason…” Casting a look at his troubled face, she says, “I’m sorry to cause you pain. But better that than letting your young heart waste itself on a story that ends the way it was always meant to.”

Étienne closes his eyes, hoping to God that the midwife is wrong. If not, if something even more terrible lies in wait for Alouette, he doesn’t know how he’ll manage. “Thank you,” he finally says. Then: “I know the money wasn’t enough. Why did you help me?”

She is silent for a long moment. “Because thirty years ago, no one helped me reach my daughter before she died. One act of mercy can’t balance the scales, but perhaps it tips them slightly.” She blinks at him with a weariness that makes him think of battlefields survived without victory. “I hope the bird finds her.”

And then she is gone.

BY THE TIME he arrives home, the last bit of daylight melts in ragged streaks over the dark rooftops. He walks through the door heavily, dropping his knapsack onto a chair.

Mémé looks up, setting aside her mending. “You went to the asylum.”

“I did.” He sinks onto a stool near her, fixing his eyes on the weathered floor. “No one deserves to be in such a place. The whole thing should be burned to the ground.”

She sighs, shaking her head. “That may be so. But only God can strike the match. Alouette wouldn’t want you to destroy yourself this way. The living must go on living, my dear.”

“I know what the living must do,” he says, frustration brimming inside him. “I do it every day.” Afraid he might cry, he kneels quickly to build up the small fire, keeping his back to her.

“Is that so? Then why have even the children noticed how you walk around as if in a trance? Just last week, Thomas asked me why you never laugh anymore.”

Still on his knees, he shakes his head. “What is there to laugh about? Call me a fool, but I love her.”

Mémé makes a clucking sound and then sighs again. “When your grandfather died in the Rouen quarry, I wanted to lie down beside him in that pit. But I had your father and uncle to raise. And the world doesn’t stop turning because we’re in pain. There’s a difference between surviving and punishing yourself.”

Étienne straightens, finally meeting her gaze. “I should have helped her leave right away. She came to me, asking for advice, but selfishly, I wanted to keep her here a while longer. I thought that if I did, she might find reason enough to stay.”

“Ah, so that’s it,” Mémé offers gently. “Lucienne has said that Alouette is a strong woman who knows her own mind. Would you agree?”

“Yes,” he allows, unsure of her meaning.

“Then you must at least consider that she chose to stay. Chose to break into the factory.” Her eyes narrow as they find his, as if she needs to be sure that he’s truly listening and absorbing her words. “Alouette took up her life in her own hands.”

A whirring silence falls. Étienne feels the space inside his head grow crowded with confusion. Doubt.

Then Mémé clears her throat. “What does your heart tell you?”

He breathes in, deep and raw, letting her question sink to the bottom of him. “That she’s still there,” he says. “Still herself.”

She nods. “Then that is what you must hold on to. And in the meantime, you must live. The children miss you, even when you’re right beside them.”

“You’re right.” He swallows hard. “I’ll try.”

Later that night, after the house has gone still, Étienne sits at the small table in his room. By candlelight, he takes out the new carving he’s begun, shaped from a piece of limestone he pilfered from the quarry. His knife works slowly, finding the stone’s hidden contours, revealing the bird caught within. Each delicate curve, each suggestion of feather and form, feels like a conversation with Alouette. Each pass of the blade is a vow.

When the last delicate wing feather is etched, he places it on the windowsill beside the others. Candlelight catches them, casting tremulous shadows across his small room. He’s made three so far—each one a little different. One with its beak cracked open slightly, singing. One with its head tilted, listening to the song of another. One looking skyward.

He touches each gently, these small guardians, keepers of his vigil, then reaches for his slate tablet. A gift from the priest, who took pity on Étienne’s halting questions about books and letters. He has a soapstone pencil, too, small and cool in his hand. Rubbing out mistakes with a rag, he practices his letters, copies passages, and records small events. Thomas lost another tooth, he writes, concentrating. Marie hasn’t coughed at all this week, which makes me hopeful. Mémé told stories of Rouen tonight.

Always, before he blows out his candle, he writes one more word, repeating it like a prayer: Alouette. Alouette. Alouette.

CHAPTER 49

Alouette has never been more aware of time. Matins wakes them in darkness. Lauds drags them from restless sleep to greet the thin gray of dawn. Prime forces them into chapel, stone-backed and brittle-spined in pews that know no comfort. Then terce signals the start of labor, sext commands them to pause, however briefly, and none drives them back to their toil. Vespers closes the day, and compline demands submission to another night.

The hours are cages, reminding the women that they belong to the machinery here, not themselves. But there are other reminders too. The lecherous glances of the guards, the hands that wander when backs are turned. The screams that echo down corridors long after their source has been silenced. The rats bold enough to scurry across sleeping bodies. The rat bites foaming with infection.

Despite the rigid structure, some boundaries within the asylum are curiously fluid. A single corridor might separate the crippled from the poor, the palsied from the morally debauched. Other divides are vast and absolute. In Les Loges, women are chained to walls “for their safety,” the sisters insist. The air inside is thick, unmoving, as if hope itself cannot survive there. These women do no work, see no sky, their world reduced to stone and straw, their own hands the only thing left to freely explore.

“Why do the mad have the same restrictions as even the murderers?” Alouette dares to ask Sister Marthe one day.

“To keep them from danger. And to protect the rest of us,” Marthe replies with practiced certainty. “The superioress knows best.”

Alouette holds back her retort, recognizing the futility. Marthe is a cog in the same unforgiving machine—obedient, unquestioning. In this way, even the sisters are imprisoned, their lives bound by invisible chains of duty and doctrine.

LATE ONE EVENING, Alouette leaves her cell to use the latrine at the end of the ward, down a hallway slick with algae and rot. There’s no door—just a crooked plank propped in the archway that offers the illusion of privacy. Inside, a wooden bench with crude holes stretches along the wall, positioned above a deep pit. Alouette finds a spot and squats quickly, knees pressed together, trying not to breathe too deeply.

It is not the act that shames her. It is the way they’ve stripped even the smallest dignity from it. No privacy. No cloth to clean herself. No distance between her and the others, who keep their eyes averted in tacit agreement. This, like so much else at Salpêtrière, is deliberate—another way to remind them they are less than human in the eyes of those who control their lives.

When she emerges, cheeks burning, she wipes her hands on the inside of her shift. Moments later, a shadow detaches from the wall in the corridor. It’s Jean-Baptiste, one of the guards who patrols the wards at night.

“Well now,” he says, his voice carrying that gratingly possessive tone the guards often use. “Still awake?”

Alouette doesn’t respond. She keeps her face blank, even as her pulse jumps.

“A girl as pretty as you.” He shrugs. “I imagine someone might want to send you something. And maybe they did.” His eyes drift down her body, lingering.

“What do you mean?” She hates the feeling of being toyed with. Batted around like a piece of string. “Send me something? Who would do that?”

“A beau, maybe. You’d know more than I would who it was.”

She fights to keep her expression neutral. Can he be talking about Étienne?

“I didn’t see what it was,” he goes on, tilting his head like a hungry crow. “But I held it long enough to know it’s small. Important, maybe.”

She meets his eyes. “What do you want?”

He smiles. “A kiss. Just one. I’d say that’s a fair trade.” His boots scrape the stone as he takes a slow step closer. “Though most girls here understand that my protection is worth much more.”

Alouette’s stomach clenches. She wants to spit. Scream. But this place is teaching her how far silence can go, how survival sometimes means enduring the unendurable. How many others have made similar bargains, trading pieces of themselves for scraps of safety?

“You could be lying,” she says. “And anyway, if I kiss you now, what will you ask for tomorrow? Or the day after? I’ve seen how your ‘generosity’ works.”

His smile drops, eyes narrowing. He’s not used to being denied, especially by women who have nothing left to lose but whatever dignity they’ve managed to preserve. He studies her face, calculation replacing desire. Then he spits on the ground by her feet and turns away. “Your loss,” he growls. “Enjoy your time in the infirmary. I hear Moreau has taken a special interest in your ‘treatment.’ ”

A shudder ripples along her spine. She would like to watch Jean-Baptiste choke on his threats. Or better, to endure one of Monsieur Moreau’s bloodlettings himself. Then he wouldn’t be so mocking and dismissive. But what can she really do except hurry back to her quarters and hope he forgets about the slight?

Could he have been telling the truth? Could Étienne have been trying to reach her? And if so, how might she glean the message without giving in to Jean-Baptiste or someone like him? They’re all like him, she’s beginning to realize. Or nearly all. Like wolves sanctioned to guard the flock.

Back in her cell, Alouette sits on her sleeping plank, hands clasped tightly in her lap to stop their trembling. Across the narrow space, Sylvine watches her with keen eyes that miss nothing.

She settles beside Alouette, close but not touching, respecting boundaries in a place where such limits are routinely violated. “Something’s wrong.” Her voice is low, sharper than kindness, but steadier than indifference. “What did he want?”

Alouette stares at her. “How did you know?”

Sylvine’s mouth curves into a bitter smile. “The look on your face. When you see it enough, you stop hoping that you won’t.”

“He claimed to have a message for me from the outside. But he wanted… payment first.”

Sylvine nods, unsurprised. “And you refused.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Sylvine’s approval is a tangible thing, stretching into the gap between them. “Some women think giving in makes them safer. It never does.”

“But now I’ll never know if he was telling the truth. If someone really did try to reach me.” The words catch in Alouette’s throat. “If it was—” She stops, reluctant to speak Étienne’s name aloud.

“Jean-Baptiste might really have something,” Sylvine says after a moment. “Not all the guards are imaginative enough to invent such a tale.”

“But even if he does, I can’t—” Alouette shakes her head, frustration burning behind her eyes. “I won’t.”

“No,” Sylvine agrees. “You won’t. And you shouldn’t have to.” She pauses, considering. “There are other ways. Other guards who don’t demand the same… currency. Thibault, the one who’s posted at the east gate on Tuesdays.” Sylvine’s voice drops even lower. “He can be bribed with actual coin. His mother is ill and needs medicines he can’t afford.”

“I have almost nothing,” Alouette says. “I’m told I’ll receive a third of my wages when I’ve worked off the balance of my care. But who knows how long that will take?”

Sylvine hesitates before reaching beneath her thin mattress, pulling out a small cloth pouch. “I have enough.”

Alouette stares at her, uncomprehending. “Why would you—?” The coins inside feel impossibly heavy for their size. She has received few kindnesses since arriving at Salpêtrière, and none so unexpectedly generous as this. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she whispers, her chest tightening.

“Don’t thank me. We have to help each other, sometimes. No one else will.” Then she stands, moving back to her own sleeping plank before the night sister makes her rounds.

Later, as Alouette lies awake listening to the restless breathing of her cellmates, she grips the pouch of coins against her chest like a talisman. In a few days, she will find Thibault. In a few days, if the gods are kind, she might hold something of Étienne in her hands—tangible proof that the world beyond these walls still exists, still remembers her name.

And for the first time since the gates of Salpêtrière closed behind her, she allows herself to feel a dangerous emotion: hope.

CHAPTER 50

When Tuesday arrives, Alouette’s nerves feel stretched thin. The minutes crawl. Finally, when the midday bell tolls, she slips away from the group of women headed to the refectory and heads toward the east gate, quickening her steps.

She finds the guard leaning against the archway, chewing on a stub of licorice root. His uniform is rumpled. He doesn’t look dangerous, but neither does he look kind.

“Thibault?” she asks quietly.

He glances up, slow to recognize her.

“I heard…” Her voice falters. She forces herself to begin again. “I was told that a message came last week. That someone from outside—someone I know—tried to reach me.”

He squints. “Says who?”

She hesitates. “It doesn’t matter. I just need to know—was it true?”

He spits to the side, shakes his head. “If something like that had come through, I’d know. And I don’t.”

“But Jean-Baptiste said—”

“Jean-Baptiste says a lot of things. You shouldn’t listen to half of them.”

Her fingers tighten around the pouch in her apron. She considers offering it anyway. Just in case. “Are you sure? He made it sound real. He told me it was small. And meant for me.”

Thibault shrugs. “Then he lied. Maybe to get something out of you, maybe just to watch you squirm. That’s his kind of fun.”

Alouette’s limbs go rigid. “You wouldn’t protect him if he were lying?”

His gaze sharpens, suddenly cold. “I’m not protecting anyone. And I’m not risking my post chasing rumors. If a message came, it didn’t come through me. That’s all I can tell you.”

With that, he turns to greet another guard, who is just approaching. But as he walks past her, she sees the faintest flicker of satisfaction pass over Thibault’s features.

Alouette stays frozen in place, her heart hammering.

She doesn’t call after him. Doesn’t accuse him of manipulating her. What would be the point?

She has no proof. No power. Just the whisper of something she might have seen and the sinking certainty that the guards protect their own. That if she crossed or accused one, she might find herself punished by them all.

Maybe this was all a ruse to begin with. Maybe Jean-Baptiste was taunting her, and Thibault told the truth. Or maybe there was something.

Is it too much to dream that Étienne did try to reach her? Too much to hope that someone beyond these walls sees her as more than a body to be used, a mouth to be fed?

She doesn’t know. And not knowing is almost worse than certainty.

ALOUETTE BARELY SLEEPS that night. Her thoughts churn with imagined words and phantom gestures—a message that may have existed, a voice that may have called her name. In the stillness, she can almost hear it. But when morning comes, there is nothing but labor. Stone. Routine.

She throws herself into it more completely than before. If she cannot reach outward, she must find something to hold here.

Little by little, she has begun to memorize the asylum’s moods and seasons. Its labyrinthine corridors and invisible lines drawn between those who matter and those who do not. The staff, nearly a thousand souls, mirrors the number of convicts: archers, guards, cooks, porters, laundresses, gardeners, apothecaries, carpenters, and masons. Each role carries an unspoken weight of authority or servitude, though none holds sway like the superioress, Mademoiselle Léontine de Mouchy.

Not highborn, yet she presides with an authority that demands deference. She oversees everything—the bursar’s accounts, the kitchens, the infirmary—her reach extending into every shadowed corner of Salpêtrière. They say she resides in private lodgings adorned with fine furnishings, her garden so beautiful that it seems to bloom by royal decree. She attends concerts and salons in the city, returning as if the grime and suffering here could never touch her silken hems.

Among Salpêtrière’s occupants, the children—some two hundred of them—begin working at age six, their tiny hands threading woolen stockings destined for sale. Their numbers grow steadily, multiplied by the foundling wheel embedded in the asylum’s wall. Each turn delivers another infant anonymously into the system—no name, no history, just a mouth to feed and, someday, a pair of useful hands.

The bell rings high and sharp, announcing another rotation of the wheel. Another body. Another future already claimed. By fourteen, the lucky ones become chambermaids or serving girls. The rest remain at their posts: carding, spinning, weaving. Their lives organized by task and obedience—one spoke turning into the next.

There are a few, however, who seem to escape. The chosen ones—prettiest, and most pliable—who are groomed by the superioress herself. Little “jewels” polished for favored roles, their beauty traded as currency. They are spared the harshest punishments, untouched by the physician’s treatments, as if privilege could inoculate against suffering.

It’s an illusion, of course. Everyone pays in the end.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, Alouette moves between beds of rosemary with a basket and a curved knife. The sky has been threatening rain since dawn, a dull gray pressing against the high stone walls beyond holly hedges. Her hands are stiff with chill. And yet she finds herself humming. If she must endure three years of living hell at Salpêtrière, at least there is this. Bees burying themselves in the furred heads of lavender. Dew refracting gold among the marigolds.

When footsteps crunch along the path, she turns to see Sister Geneviève and a slightly built girl of eleven or twelve beside her. The girl is pale—even sallow—and seems uncertain, clutching the ends of a gray shawl around her slender shoulders.

“This is Christiane,” Sister Geneviève says with an impatient clip, seeming irritated at being pulled away from more important duties. “They sent her from the laundry, where she was only in the way. Before that she was in the weaving rooms. I’m not sure she’ll be useful here either, but do what you can.”

When the sister moves off, Christiane says, “I might not be strong, but I can learn. I’ll do whatever you ask of me.” She clasps her hands in front of her, attempting not to fidget.

“All right,” Alouette says, feeling sympathy for the girl. Her achingly thin wrists. Hollow cheeks. Pale brown eyes too large for her face. The familiar marks of an asylum-raised child—body stunted from years of labor, beginning when she was barely old enough to hold a spindle. If she’d been born on a farm, they might have called her a runt and let her die without much fuss. Something too fragile to bother caring for.

“Kneel here beside me,” Alouette tells the girl. “Do you know anything about plants?”

Christiane shakes her head. “I’ve been here most of my life but have never worked in the gardens. I was good at weaving,” she adds with shy pride. “Very good and quick, too, but the air there was bad for my lungs.”

“Consumption?”

“No, thank goodness. They’re just weak. Winter is the worst time, but just now I feel fine.” She offers a small, lopsided smile. “I could dance a jig if you like.”

“Perhaps later.” Alouette can’t help but smile back at her. “What do you know about medicine?”

“Only what the sisters say. That God’s bounty can cure any affliction, if the soul is willing.”

“And when the soul is unwilling?”

Christiane turns her face toward the gray sky for a moment before answering. “When the soul is unwilling, you suffer.”

Alouette considers the girl. Her huge eyes. Shoulder blades so thin they could snap in a strong wind. And yet there’s something about her that suggests resilience rather than weakness. “Yes,” she finally says. “We can agree on that.”

She settles Christiane near a robust clump and shows her how to move the knife lightly, using just the curved tip. “We harvest rosemary in the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun becomes too strong. The younger, tender stems have the most flavor and potency.”

“What is it for?”

“Many things. In a tisane, it’s soothing to the stomach. It can also help with joint pain, provide relief for eczema of the scalp. I’ve heard tell it lifts the spirits, too, though you would never see it here.”

Again, the lopsided smile comes. A dimple appears in the center of Christiane’s cheek, making her look even younger. More innocent, however improbable that seems under the circumstances.

A short while later, Sylvine appears carrying her own harvesting basket. Hers is full of goldenrod. “You have a shadow,” she says to Alouette.

“This is Christiane.”

“Yes.” Sylvine turns to the girl. “You’re from the orphans’ ward.”

As Christiane nods, Alouette’s stomach twists. It is one thing to be thrown into Salpêtrière as a convict or beggar. Another to have never known anything else. “Were you left on the foundling wheel?” she asks.

“Not at birth. I was two years old, the sisters tell me.”

Christiane’s stoicism moves her unexpectedly. Alouette looks away, pretending to busy herself with a woody stem. It’s either that or cry and have Sylvine think she’s taken leave of her senses.

Clearing her throat, she stands. With the toe of her boot, she pushes the basket of rosemary sprigs toward Christiane and drops a ball of twine on top. “Tie these into bunches the size of your hand. Twice that, rather,” she says, glancing again at the girl’s small frame. Then she strides off toward an invented task.

At the age of two, Christiane would have been old enough to struggle and cling, Alouette thinks, her heart twisting. Old enough to shriek “Maman!” as the iron grate clanged shut. As the barrel turned and turned, faceless and final.

That’s the cruelty of the wheel—it doesn’t ask who you are. It takes and spins. Delivers the child and spins again, absolving the mother as it feeds the machine. And the bell rings on, indifferent to the echo it leaves behind.

Later, having regained her composure, Alouette returns to find that Christiane has done her work well. The bundles are uniform, her knots quick and tight.

“The sisters used to have me sort linens,” the girl says when Alouette praises her. “I liked the feeling of the cloth between my hands. This is a little like that.”

Of the women made to work at Salpêtrière, few find satisfaction in it, let alone comfort. Alouette watches her for a moment before reaching for a frilly lobe of mugwort. She flashes the silvery underside of the leaf and then presses it into the girl’s hands, thinking of Henriette. Of herself as a child, a lifetime ago. “What does it smell like to you?”

“Lemon.” Christiane’s dark eyelashes flicker as she dips her face close. “Sage.”

“It drives away moths and fleas,” Alouette says. “Steep it in tea, and you’ll dream through the night.”

Christiane turns the leaf over several times, seeming to memorize it with her fingertips. “Show me something else.”

Alouette points to a bed of foxglove, their flowers like rows of stacked bells, deeply purple with freckled throats. “Never touch these with bare hands.”

“They’re so beautiful.”

“They are,” Alouette agrees. “And they can stop the heart.”

Christiane’s hand hovers near the blossoms, tracing the air above their slender stems. “Lovely, but dangerous,” she murmurs. “Like the stories the sisters used to tell us about the outside.”

The remark startles Alouette. She studies the girl’s profile—still soft with youth, but something in her gaze feels older, tempered. Christiane may have never lived beyond these walls, but she’s learned to read danger in things dressed as kindness. The asylum itself has taught her that.

“There are other plants I can show you,” Alouette says gently. “Safer ones. Chamomile for sleep, mint for—”

“No.” Christiane keeps her eyes on the foxglove. “Show me everything. Even the deadly ones.” Her eyes are calm and wide, the irises light brown, the color of nutmeg scraped fresh from the seed. The look in them is almost conspiratorial. “After all, I’m to be your apprentice, aren’t I?”

A raindrop lands on Alouette’s arm. Then another. The storm that’s been circling all day is finally breaking. She tilts her face to the pewter sky, thinking of Henriette and the knowledge passed from hand to hand, woman to woman, through generations. Remedies and poisons, the line between them drawn only by intent.

She pulls her shawl tighter. “Yes,” she says. “I suppose you are.”

CHAPTER 51

Half dozing at morning mass, Alouette kneels, wishing it were midnight instead—that she had hours of blank, amnesiac sleep ahead of her instead of this: the press of a thousand bodies packed tight as souls in purgatory, the weight of salvation grinding like salt in a wound.

September feels like a threshold more than a season. Outside, the plane trees hold most of their leaves, though the edges have begun to yellow and curl like parchment over flame. The mornings arrive cloaked in mist now, and the garden harvests have shifted—more roots, fewer blossoms. The heat of St. John’s Eve is a far-off memory, replaced by colder dawns and a heaviness in her bones.

The rector sweeps in, resplendent in his black cassock and blinding white sash. His biretta resembles a miniature Gothic cathedral, its spires jabbing heavenward like accusatory fingers. Today, he also wields a silver crucifix festooned with sprigs of basil—nature tamed and blessed, disciplined and purified like the women themselves, though some wild essence always threatens to break free.

Today is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, commemorating its recovery from the Persians—another sacred treasure requiring violent liberation. The herb’s medicinal sweetness suffuses the air, marking the story of Helena, Constantine’s mother, who followed the scent to unearth the True Cross, as if God’s holiest relic required the nose of a truffle pig to be found.

In his sermon, the rector reminds the women of Salpêtrière that the crucifixion symbolizes mercy, glory, love. That the trials of confinement are invitations to carry their own crosses with praise and gratitude. Their sufferings will lift them, polish them until they gleam with divine grace. Their hunger is sanctified bread, their isolation holy wine. Each lash and deprivation will bring them closer to their sacrificed Lord.

Alouette barely hears him. Her thoughts slide and tumble, too slippery to hold. In the weeks since her arrival at Salpêtrière, she has learned more than she ever wanted to know about martyrs—each story more harrowing and unthinkable than the last. St. Agnes dragged naked through the streets to a brothel, her hair growing miraculously long to shield her. St. Bartholomew flayed alive and then beheaded. St. Catherine of Alexandria, sentenced to death on a spiked wheel that shattered under her, only to be decapitated anyway. St. Ignatius of Antioch, thrown to the lions, proclaiming, I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of God.

As if pain is the ultimate sacrament.

The congregation rises to join in the introit. Cibavit eos. “He fed them. He fed them with the fat of wheat, alleluia; and filled them with honey out of the rock, alleluia, alleluia.”

The words and notes rest like stones on Alouette’s tongue as the basil is passed through the congregation. Each woman must kiss the herb, breathe in its sanctifying perfume, another small submission. When the sprig reaches her trembling hands, its sharp green scent strikes like a slap. A bead of sweat slips down her spine. Nausea rolls through her.

She fights it, bowing her head, squeezing her eyes shut, but the dizziness worsens. Suddenly it’s unbearable. She grips the pew for balance, willing herself to breathe more calmly. Then her stomach lurches.

Stumbling to her feet, she pushes blindly past the kneeling women, ignoring the gasps, the startled rustle of cloth. She nearly reaches the door. Nearly. Instead, she doubles over and vomits into a corner near the bénitier of holy water.

A sharp intake of breath ripples through the chapel. The chanting of prayers stutters and halts. A single moment pulled too thin. Then Sylvine is beside her, catching her elbow with a firm, grounding grip.

“It was the broth,” she says evenly, loud enough for Marthe and half the chapel to hear. “The meat was bad. I told you it tasted off.”

Alouette clings to the words like fraying rope. Her legs tremble. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve, bile stinging the back of her throat.

Marthe folds her hands, neither kind nor cruel.

“The meek shall bear all things,” she says. “Including their own messes.”

The chapel exhales. The chanting resumes.

“Go on, then,” Marthe adds. “Clean it up.”

LATER, CROSSING THE courtyard, Sylvine touches Alouette’s sleeve, and she flinches. Her body is still on edge, her stomach tight.

“Is it possible the broth isn’t the trouble?”

Alouette stops, afraid to meet Sylvine’s eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“No?” Sylvine’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Faintness. Dizziness. Sick in the mornings. Weakness you can’t ignore. You’re sure you don’t catch my meaning?”

“Impossible.” Alouette forces a hollow laugh. But is it?

She has missed her bleeding at least once. Perhaps twice. Maybe three times. She blamed the meals, the stress, the hard labor. Everyone’s cycle falters here. Everyone feels weak. Only—this might be different.

Sylvine walks on while Alouette hesitates under the archway, its stone cool against her shoulder. The thought lodges behind her ribs like a curled fist. The morning wobbles off-center. She does not want to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And yet Sylvine had guessed. Had seen. The fact leaves her feeling naked in a way no punishment ever has.

CHAPTER 52

That night, Alouette and Sylvine sit close on the narrow cot—the kind of closeness that once would have drawn wary glances, now born of something more complex and difficult to name. The dormitory is quiet, though there is never true silence at Salpêtrière. A woman sobs softly in another cell, half muffled by her quilt. Another mutters prayers under her breath—a ceaseless rhythm that lulls some of the others to sleep.

“Do you have a husband waiting?” Alouette asks. They’ve shared absurdly close quarters for more than two months, and she’s never asked this. Never asked any of them.

Sylvine doesn’t flinch. “A husband, yes, though he doesn’t wait. Not since I made the mistake of confessing adultery to my parish priest, asking to be forgiven. Instead, I found myself at the Châtelet.”

Alouette glances over, marveling at her frankness. Her lack of shame. Somehow, Sylvine has managed to retain a dignity no one can steal or diminish.

“And then?”

“When I told the prévôt that I was pregnant with my husband’s child, and that torturing me would deprive him of his rightful heir, he said no wanton woman could be trusted to know when a child was conceived, let alone who the father was.”

“Where was your lover in all this? Surely, he tried to vouch for you.”

“He could not. He had died.” Sylvine’s voice doesn’t break, but her hands tremble before she folds them tightly in her lap, as if she’s trying to press the story back into silence, where it belongs. “At my trial, I tried to explain that he’d been gone five months. Unless a dead man could father a child, he couldn’t be the one. For that, I was deemed insolent as well as debauched.”

Alouette shivers. She’s heard stories of the Châtelet—the interrogations, the torments. Her own inquest and sentencing seem almost gentle by comparison, though it hadn’t felt that way at the time.

“There shouldn’t be such unfairness.”

“No.” Sylvine’s mouth hardens. “ ‘Women are beset by passions the way animals in the wild are beset by hunger,’ the prévôt told me. Since I had no control over sins of the flesh, I should be confined to protect other men from possible infliction. But here, within these walls, they care nothing for our virtue. The guards, the workers—they take what they want. The sisters look away, pretending to ignore the bruises.” Her laugh cuts like a scythe. “Some of the officières even arrange it, currying favor with the men who have power here. And if we resist…” She shrugs. “There are always ways to make life harder for troublesome women.”

Alouette feels her throat constrict. She thinks of the way certain guards stare in the courtyard. The women who avoid every eye. “That’s why I’ve seen you gather extra pennyroyal,” she says softly.

“Yes. Why we share it among ourselves. What else can we do?”

Alouette nods, though her heart pounds. Her hand brushes unconsciously against the place where her body has begun to change. “What became of your child?”

Sylvine’s gaze clouds over, retreating inward. “My pains began here. Too early. I was sent to the Hôtel-Dieu—but I didn’t arrive in time to save her.” Her voice remains level, but her hands have gone still in her lap. “They said she was too small. That she never drew breath.”

A long pause stretches between them. Then Sylvine adds, quietly, “But I never saw her. They wouldn’t let me. Just once, I begged. Just to hold her. But they said no. She was already gone. I came back alone.”

Alone. The word rakes through Alouette, as if she’s swallowed iron filings. She thinks of her mother’s lost babes—the grief that nearly killed her. “What will happen when you’re released? Your husband won’t claim you?”

Sylvine snorts softly. “No. I defiled his honor. He’d had plenty of lovers himself, naturally, but there are no penalties for adulterous men. He couldn’t stain my honor because I had none to begin with, you see.”

“Oh, Sylvine.” Alouette reaches for her hand and squeezes it gently.

“It’s all right.” The look in her eyes shifts through grief, despair, rage—then, impossibly, settles into a calm surety. “It’s no matter now. I live only to avenge the life of my child. The daughter who was taken from me.”

“You think they lied to you, then? That she wasn’t stillborn?”

“I think they’re capable of anything. That they have their own ways of dealing with inconvenient births. Anyway, if there’s justice left in this world, even buried and rotten as it is, someone will suffer for what they stole.”

The silence that follows seems to echo, dense with feelings too complex to utter. The thoughts Alouette has tried to outrun begin circling again. The dizziness. The scent of basil curdling in her stomach. The last time she bled.

She doesn’t want to name these things. Naming them would make them real.

Outside, a bell tolls the hour. The bronze sound reverberates off stone. Alouette counts the number of strikes, each one falling like judgment from an unforgiving god. Her secret wraps tighter around her ribs. A living thing she can neither claim nor deny, as she stares into the darkness beyond their small circle of candlelight.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 53

When Kristof returns from his hospital shift, a sheet of folded paper waits on his kitchen table. The hair on the back of his neck stiffens. He’s certain he locked the door when he left.

The handwriting on the note is familiar: Tomorrow, sunset. Parc Montsouris, where the Petite Ceinture cuts through. Remember that first night at Le Sous-sol, when we talked about the meaning of resilience? I’ve learned a thing or two since then. Please let me try to explain.

Kristof’s thoughts muddle as he reads it again, wondering what he should do. It’s been two years since Kristof stood in that stripped-bare apartment on rue Monge, staring at the abandoned tin cup on the windowsill, feeling like a fool for having trusted Alesander completely.

And now, after his shocking appearance at Sainte-Anne’s in a crisp Vichy uniform, among those officials picking through patient files like vultures—after Alesander looked at him with that inscrutable glance that might have been recognition or warning—now this. A break-in. An invitation.

It could be a trap. The Gestapo are clever—they know how to use old friendships, old loyalties. Has Alesander been their collaborator all along? Those strange hours of coming and going that his concierge mentioned, his mysterious knowledge of every hidden passage and forgotten door in Paris. All that exploration below could have been reconnaissance for the Germans.

But none of that really tracks with the Alesander he knows—or used to. Besides, the way his note referenced Le Sous-sol and resilience seems genuine. A conversation from another lifetime, when they drank too much gin and first explored the souterrain. Before reality fractured.

THE NEXT EVENING finds Kristof at the park’s edge, driven by a need for answers that outweighs his caution. He scans the twilit trees and dandelion-pocked grass for signs of surveillance, half expecting to see German uniforms materialize from behind a bench or fountain.

The old railway track cuts through the park like a scar, its rails patinaed with rust and long since silent. With the sinking sun, the landscape looks more abandoned and forbidding than he’s entirely comfortable with. There’s suddenly no one around. Only nightingales calling out from shadowed branches.

He’s tempted to leave—this is madness—when a familiar whistle catches his ear: a handful of notes from “Minor Swing.” Moments later, Alesander emerges from behind a stand of chestnuts, wearing simple dark clothes instead of the Vichy uniform.

“You came.” He offers a relieved half smile. “Though you were right to hesitate.”

“I’m still hesitating. What the hell is going on?”

“Not here.” Alesander glances around the dusk-filled clearing. “Follow me. Please. Five minutes, then if you want to walk away, I won’t stop you.”

The maintenance door that leads to the tunnels is half hidden by ivy, its lock well oiled despite the rust. As they descend the stairs, each step drops them deeper under Paris. The air cools, taking on the familiar damp scent of stone and earth. Part of Kristof remains tense, tracking their path, cataloging exits. But another part of him—unexpected, almost traitorous—welcomes the return to the souterrain. He hasn’t realized how much he missed it.

Unlike many of the old galleries they once explored, this one is wired for electricity. Naked bulbs dangle overhead at intervals, humming faintly. The place feels lived-in. Watched. By whom? Kristof can’t help but wonder. And yet Alesander moves with the easy confidence of someone on home ground.

They follow the passage deeper until it opens into a small chamber reinforced with wooden beams. A kerosene lamp swings slightly from a hook, casting a soft halo over the makeshift table—a wooden door balances across two barrels. Crates stand in for chairs.

Alesander gestures for him to sit, then reaches into his coat and produces a flask. “Gin,” he says, offering it first to Kristof. “Not quite as good as what we used to drink at Le Sous-sol, but it serves its purpose.”

Kristof takes the flask but doesn’t drink. “You owe me an explanation.”

Alesander meets his eyes. “I know. But there’s something you should understand first. We’ve kept tabs on you these past few weeks. Quietly. I had to be sure you hadn’t changed.”

“You were watching me?”

“Confirming. Trust, these days, isn’t something you hand over. It’s something you vet.”

Kristof stares at him for a moment, thinking of how to respond. He doesn’t like the idea of having been followed without knowing it, invisible eyes trailing his every move. Then again, what Alesander is saying about trust makes sense. It relaxes him slightly. “Go on.”

“I know what you must have been thinking when you saw me in that uniform, but I’ve been playing a part, and that’s my costume. I’m not actually working with the Germans; quite the opposite.”

As Alesander begins to tell his story, there are long pauses and detours, all bolstered by sips of gin. His initiation into the resistance began not with grand ideological commitments, but with a single afternoon in June 1940. He had been mapping an extension of the southern tunnels—alone, since Kristof was tied up with hospital duties—when the Germans entered Paris. Emerging near Montparnasse, he had walked into a city already transformed.

“I remember standing there,” Alesander says, his voice distant, “still covered in tunnel dust, as if I’d climbed out of one world and into another. A woman next to me was weeping silently. Not making a sound. Just tears streaming down her face. I asked if she needed help, and she looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Do any of us look like we can be helped?’ she said.”

He returned to his apartment to find a commotion in the courtyard. His neighbor, Professor Bergmann—an elderly mathematician who fled Berlin in 1937—and his wife were being loaded into a black car. The professor’s wife thrust a package wrapped in oilcloth into Alesander’s hands.

“Keep it until we return,” she whispered.

The small bundle sat in his wardrobe for weeks, a silent rebuke. Inside: family photographs, letters, a few modest heirlooms—a silver pocket watch, a pair of candlesticks, a wedding ring. The artifacts of a life deemed unworthy of continuation.

“You don’t wake up one morning and decide to become a resistance fighter,” Alesander explains soberly. “You just find yourself unable to look away. Unable to pretend.”

His early acts of defiance were small, almost accidental. Carrying messages for neighbors. Delivering food to those afraid to venture out. It was in a café on rue Mouffetard, a place he’d frequented before the occupation, that he encountered Jean-Michel Lefort, a quiet Belgian he recognized from his university days.

“You still know your way around the catacombs?” Lefort asked after they exchanged cursory greetings.

“Better than most.”

“That could be useful.” Lefort wrote an address on a scrap of paper. “Sunday. Four o’clock.”

The address led to a bookshop near Saint-Sulpice. The proprietor, a gray-haired woman with wire-rimmed spectacles and ink-stained fingers, merely nodded when he entered and directed him to a back room where Lefort waited with two others. They didn’t offer their real names.

His first challenging mission came a week later: guiding a family—a former judge, his pianist wife, and their two small children—through the tunnels to a safe house beyond the city limits.

“The little girl had a cloth rabbit,” Alesander recalls, his voice softening. “I remember thinking: This is what it comes to. A child and her favorite toy in the dark, running from monsters who wear uniforms and sign papers.”

When they emerged seven hours later in the back garden of a sympathizer’s home, the mother embraced him. “You have saved us,” she whispered against his cheek. Her gratitude burned like acid.

Through the autumn of 1940 and into the winter, Alesander’s involvement deepened. The network specialized in forged papers, creating new identities for those marked for deportation. His background in drafting proved unexpectedly valuable—he understood paper compositions, inks, even some of the mechanical aspects of printing.

“When I first studied architecture,” Alesander says, “I thought knowing how a city was built would help me understand something essential about its nature.” He pauses. “Unfortunately, I was right.”

Kristof glances at him. It’s always been like this with Alesander—sharp angles hidden inside offhand remarks. A far more convoluted blueprint beneath the surface.

By day, he passed as a civil engineer—credible, forgettable, just technical enough to slip past suspicion—a resistance courier by night. There was a woman, Adrienne Levasseur, a printer’s daughter with nimble fingers and fierce eyes. She created the most perfect forgeries, signatures so flawless they could fool even the officials who supposedly wrote them.

“We were careful,” Alesander says. “We never met at the same place twice. Used dead drops. All the tradecraft you read about in spy novels. It works, until it doesn’t.”

In the spring of 1941, everything collapsed. A raid on one of their safe houses nearly caught him. Three members of his cell were arrested. Two were executed within the week. Adrienne disappeared into the machinery of Nazi detention.

“I stepped out to check the street, minutes after they arrived,” Alesander says, his voice suddenly flat. “The timing was pure chance. I had to watch from across the road as they loaded everyone into trucks. I saw Adrienne look up, just once. Straight at me, though she couldn’t have seen me in the shadows. She didn’t call out. Didn’t betray me by so much as a flicker that she knew I was there.”

Kristof notices how tightly Alesander has begun to grip the flask. “What happened to her?”

“Pithiviers, then east. That’s all I know.” Alesander’s face is stone. “I looked for her name on every list I could access. Nothing.”

That night, his handlers moved him south, to Lyon. He was given a new identity as a civil servant working in municipal water management. For six months, he developed escape routes through the Alps, guiding refugees toward Switzerland.

“There’s nothing like the mountains in winter,” he says, “A silence so complete you can hear blood pulsing in your ears. We would move only at night, using the stars to navigate. No light at all. Just the constellations and the crunch of snow beneath our boots.”

It was on one of these crossings, in November 1941, that his group encountered a German patrol. They scattered in the darkness, bullets ricocheting off rocks. Alesander escaped with a Jewish academic and his teenage son, taking them east, away from their planned route, higher into treacherous terrain.

“We slept in caves, eating pine nuts and whatever else we could forage. The boy was remarkably brave. He never complained, even when his feet were bloody with blisters. The father kept reciting poetry under his breath. Goethe, I think. In German, ironically enough.”

When they finally reached a safe village on the Swiss side, the academic clasped his hand. “I have never truly understood freedom,” he said, “until it was ripped away.”

Looking into his face, Alesander couldn’t possibly tell him the truth. That Switzerland wasn’t always kind to Jews, and might still turn them back.

By early 1942, the resistance leadership had a more ambitious plan: infiltration of the Vichy administration. Someone who could access information about planned roundups, deportation schedules, transit points.

For two months, Alesander lived in a farmhouse near Marseille with a former actor named Alain Bardin, who trained him in the nuances of his new identity: Captain Philippe Darroz, the son of a decorated Great War hero who died at Verdun. The younger Darroz had studied at the prestigious École Polytechnique, was politically aligned with Marshal Pétain’s vision for a new France, and had family connections to several high-ranking Vichy officials.

“We would sit for hours, Bardin and I, constructing this fictional life,” Alesander says. “The right school ties, the right family connections. Which lycée I attended. Which professors mentored me. The names of my father’s military comrades—all verifiable. We created memories for this man who never existed.”

“How did you keep it all straight?” Kristof asks.

“That’s the trick of it,” Alesander replies. “You don’t just memorize details. You inhabit them. I learned to speak with the precise accent of someone educated at Polytechnique. Practiced the correct way to give the Vichy salute. Learned to react instinctively when someone addressed me as ‘Darroz.’ I would catch myself thinking about a fictional father as if I had known him. Grieving a man who never drew breath.”

In March, the newly minted Captain Darroz arrived in Paris, with papers assigning him to administrative oversight of public health facilities. His actual mission: to monitor increasing German interest in psychiatric institutions.

“The pattern was clear from Germany,” Alesander says. “First, they came for the political dissidents. Then the Jews. Then the mentally ill, the disabled—anyone deemed a ‘burden.’ They were developing more systematic methods here. Psychiatric hospitals like your own were perfect targets. Vulnerable patients. Detailed medical records. Institutional structures that could be co-opted.”

He hadn’t sought out Kristof immediately, he explains, because he couldn’t risk exposing his cover. Not until he was certain the position was secure. For three months, he played his role perfectly—the correct political opinions voiced at the correct moments, the right balance of collaboration and professional distance.

“You learn to navigate these worlds,” he says. “Which officers have weaknesses for brandy. Which ones have Jewish grandmothers they’re desperate to hide. Which ones genuinely believe the ideology. Those are the most dangerous—but also the most predictable.”

As Alesander finishes his account, Kristof recognizes that he hasn’t heard anything like the whole story. There were obvious gaps and omitted details—moments when Alesander’s eyes darkened and his voice trailed off. Shadows he was choosing to keep to himself, either because they were too painful to articulate or because some actions, once spoken aloud, can never be taken back.

What remains clear, though, is the transformation. Alesander, who once delighted in discovering hidden chambers deep beneath Paris, now uses that same knowledge to guide others toward light and air. The man who had studied engineering to understand how things are built now applies those skills to undermine an architecture of destruction.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Kristof finally asks. “Why take the chance of exposing yourself?”

“Because what’s happening at Sainte-Anne’s—at all the psychiatric hospitals—is worse than you know. We’ve intercepted internal memos. Patient transfer orders. Budget reallocations.” He pauses. “They’re implementing a program called Aktion T4. It began in Germany, and now it’s spreading here. The ‘elimination of lives unworthy of life,’ starting with psychiatric patients.”

Kristof feels the blood drain from his face. “Elimination? You mean—”

“Yes. Exactly what you’re thinking,” Alesander adds with a grim look. “The food shortages in your chronic wards aren’t accidental. Starvation is quieter than other methods. Harder to trace.”

“No.” Kristof shakes his head reflexively. “The administration assured us the shortages affect everyone. That their hands are tied.”

“Of course they would say that.” Alesander’s laugh is bitter. “How many of your colleagues have noticed? How many have questioned? How many will look the other way, believing they have no choice?”

Kristof thinks of his patients—people he cares deeply about, and who trust him. Who depend on the institution to protect them. Has he failed to see what’s been happening right before his eyes?

“Our cell has connections to other resistance groups. We’ve established a network within several hospitals. But we need someone at Sainte-Anne’s—someone who knows the patients, who has access to the wards, who can identify those most at risk.”

“You’re asking me to help you.” Kristof finds he can’t use the word spy without feeling like a fraud, even though he has often thought of how he might be useful. How he might push back.

“I’m asking you to save lives,” Alesander replies as he stands, stretching cramped muscles. “There are others who are already working for us. They can explain the medical aspects better than I can.”

Kristof nods, still trying to process it all.

Alesander checks his watch. “I need to get back before curfew, and so do you. But think about what I’ve said. If you want to know more—if you’re willing to help—meet me at the same place, same time, three days from now. I’ll take you to our operations center. You can meet some of the others.”

As they climb back toward the surface, Kristof feels himself torn between competing imperatives. The doctor’s oath to do no harm. The citizen’s duty to obey authority. The human obligation to resist evil. The friend’s instinct to trust Alesander. The survivor’s need to protect himself.

At the maintenance door, Alesander pauses. “I’ll understand if you don’t come. It’s an impossible choice—I know that better than most. But remember what we talked about that first night at Le Sous-sol? About resilience? How it wasn’t just the ability to bounce back, but to become something new under pressure?”

They had been so young then, so theoretical. Discussing qualities like strength and survival as abstract concepts, not daily necessities. “I remember.”

“Well, I’ve learned it’s also about choosing your ground. Finding the place where you can stand, even when everything else gives way.” He presses Kristof’s shoulder briefly, then slips out into the gathering darkness, becoming just another shadow among the trees.

CHAPTER 54

In the days that follow, Kristof moves through his hospital shifts in a fog, a kind of fugue state. He sees everything differently now—the reduced food portions in the chronic wards, the transfer lists that appear with increasing frequency, the way certain administrators avoid his gaze. He also finds himself studying his colleagues, wondering which ones might be complicit, which ones might be recruited to help.

The decision comes to him gradually, then suddenly—like the way night falls in Paris. One moment, there is still light enough to see by; the next, darkness has claimed the city. By the third evening, he knows there is only one path forward. Whatever Alesander is about to show him, whatever might be asked of him, he can no longer be in denial.

Alesander waits in the same place, near the tracks of the abandoned Petite Ceinture. This time, he wears a worker’s cap pulled low over his eyes. “You came,” he says simply.

“I did.” No other words are necessary for the moment.

As they pass into the tunnels that lead deeper beneath the city, some of the passages differ from the ones they traversed just days ago. Several show signs of recent modifications—newly installed electric lighting, communication wires running along the ceiling, even what appear to be alarm triggers at certain junctions.

“Where are we going?” he finally dares to ask.

“You’ll see,” Alesander says, noticing Kristof’s scrutiny. “We’ve been busy down here. The Germans don’t know half of what exists beneath their feet.”

Just when Kristof has begun to feel completely disoriented, the passage finally opens into a larger tunnel with rails. Part of an abandoned metro extension, Alesander explains. Another hundred meters farther, they reach a T-intersection and take the left branch, where a reinforced metal door bears the words Bâtiment Verdun.

Pausing, Alesander raps out a complex pattern of knocks. After a moment, the door creaks open. A woman stands there with sharp, intelligent eyes. Eyes the blue of a cloudless day. It’s Ursula, the beautiful Austrian nurse who disappeared from Sainte-Anne’s ages ago.

Kristof looks at her, astonished.

“Dr. Larsen,” she says coolly, as if they are on morning rounds, considering the same patient. Then she steps back and ushers them inside.

Feeling more and more bewildered, Kristof blinks to help his eyes adjust to the brighter lighting. The bunker is perhaps twenty meters square, with walls elaborately strung with fuseboards and wires. Heavy metal desks flank two of the walls, with a larger desk at the center covered with maps and architectural drawings. Besides Ursula, the only other figure in the room stands at a bulky, military-style short-wave radio that crackles in the corner—a small-framed man wearing a beret who doesn’t look any more like a spy than Ursula does. But what does Kristof know?

Alesander introduces the radio operator as Marcel, then sits on a stool, offering another to Kristof.

“So, this is your headquarters,” Kristof says, taking in the sophisticated setup. “I’m not sure what I imagined, but this is quite an operation.”

“We’ve been building this network for nearly a year,” Alesander replies. “The French resistance isn’t just about sabotage and assassinations. Information is our most powerful weapon.”

Alesander reaches into his coat, withdrawing a set of thin, yellowed documents. “These provide the evidence of what I told you about. Hospital records from Germany, administrative memos, transport logs—all pieces of the Aktion T4 program.”

Kristof takes the papers carefully. Unlike Alesander’s description three nights ago, these aren’t just rumors or secondhand reports. Here is tangible proof—letterheads from German psychiatric hospitals, lists of patient names with clinical notations, transport schedules. Some documents have been translated into French with neat handwritten notes in the margins.

Kristof’s mouth has gone dry. “How did you get these?”

“Various sources,” Alesander says. “Some from sympathizers in the Vichy administration. Some from German medical personnel who’ve become uncomfortable with what they’re being asked to do. Some from intercepted communications.”

One document in particular catches Kristof’s eye—a memo regarding “nutritional efficiency protocols” for long-term institutional patients. The clinical language can’t disguise its true purpose: systematic starvation.

“We’ve confirmed they’re implementing these same protocols here in Paris,” Ursula says, interjecting for the first time. She moves to Kristof’s side, pointing to specific lines in the documents. “They’ve already begun at Charenton. Sainte-Anne’s is next on the list.”

Kristof feels something clench in his gut. He thought the discharges were terrible enough—patients released into a city with no food, no shelter, no hope. He watched them vanish one by one, convinced that was the end.

But this isn’t neglect or abandonment. This is selection. Systemization. A weaponizing of silence and erasure.

They aren’t letting people die now. They are deciding who doesn’t deserve to live.

Kristof sets the papers down carefully, as if they might burn through the desk. Then he looks at Ursula, studying her face. “You worked at Sainte-Anne’s for what—almost two years? I never would have guessed you were involved in something like this.”

Ursula grows still beside him, her eyes darkening to the color of a stormy sea. “Looks can be deceiving, isn’t that how the saying goes?” She shrugs. “I’m not a political person. For me, this is personal. My family has already lived through this, in Vienna.” She straightens her collar where a small pin is affixed—a detail Kristof never noticed during their hospital shifts together. “My favorite uncle was a doctor there. A psychiatrist, like you. When the Germans came, he refused to implement their new ‘protocols.’ Refused to sign transfer orders.”

“What happened?” Kristof asks, though he suspects he already knows.

“They found him hanging in his office. The official report said suicide.” Her mouth twists. “But my cousin saw bruises on his neck that no self-hanging could explain. He had been treating the same patients for twenty years. He knew their names, their stories. To him, they weren’t just diagnoses.” She fingers the pin at her collar reflexively. Kristof recognizes it now. It’s a small caduceus, a symbol of medicine and healing.

“When I came to Paris,” Ursula goes on, “I thought I was escaping. I thought France would be different. But of course, we all know better now.”

Silence fills the room for a moment. Alesander has also been watching Ursula, his expression showing clear respect. Now he says, “Ursula was one of the first medical professionals to notice what was happening. She recognized the patterns because she’d seen them before in Austria.” He sighs, clearly not wanting to go on. “Hitler believes the mentally ill are ‘life unworthy of life’—abominations that weaken the so-called master race. Schizophrenics, epileptics, the chronically depressed, those with birth defects—they’re all targets. Even Aryan German patients. And children,” he adds, his grip tightening on the edge of the table. “In the führer’s eyes, mental illness itself is the crime.”

“There must be collaborators at the hospital, then,” Kristof says. “Doctors and administrators willing to sign the papers, to look the other way, to convince themselves it’s all for the greater good.” Like Claudel, he doesn’t say.

“Of course,” Ursula replies. “Which is why we’re building another team to push back. But we’re running out of time.”

“Why did you disappear?” Kristof asks, facing her. “I wondered about you for weeks.”

“I didn’t,” she corrects him. “The opposite. The only way I’ll ever disappear is if they kill me.”

“Ursula was moved to Salpêtrière,” Alesander adds. “But now that things are escalating, she’ll return and be the point person at Sainte-Anne’s. We’ll need to find more help, too, and soon.”

We. Kristof feels the word ripple through him, still trying to absorb the enormity of what he is agreeing to. He could lose everything, including his life. And yet how can his own survival be weighed against the larger costs if he does nothing?

One by one, all of his illusions have shattered. Sainte-Anne’s has been exposed for what it is—a mirage—a facade of care and healing with rot at its core. More help and soon—that is the imperative now. As he sits there, scanning through his closest ties at the hospital, the people he trusts most, only one name floats immediately to the top. Julian.

“Yes,” he finally says, as if they have been waiting for his response. Perhaps they have. “I’ll get working on that. I have a few ideas.”

LATER, THE TWO men walk through Parc Montsouris in near silence, boots crunching along the gravel paths, over the tender hush of rustling leaves. The iron railing by the dry pond gleams faintly in the lamplight. A blackbird startles from the hedgerow and vanishes into the dark.

Kristof waits until a strolling couple passes before speaking. “When did you learn about T4?” he asks.

“Not in Paris. Not at first.” Alesander stops and lights a cigarette, the flare catching the angle of his jaw. “After Marseille, I was sent to Germany. Hadamar. I was there to observe their methods and processes, they said. They were building a model.”

Kristof feels his stomach flip even before Alesander tells him the nightmarish details. A thirteen-year-old girl with epilepsy. A ten-year-old boy who wet the bed. Both were dead within two weeks. Pneumonia, their charts said. Obviously, a code.

“Hospitals used to be like churches,” Alesander says, looking down at the cigarette in his fingers, nearly burned to the filter. “A place to find mercy. You could walk into a hospital and know you’d be safe there.” He pauses, shaking his head as his face does something terrible. “They took out the children’s brains. For research.”

Kristof has no words. Only the dull pounding of his pulse in his ears.

“They built gas chambers that looked like showers. Told patients it was delousing. Nurses heard them banging on the walls when they realized.” Alesander flicks the butt away, crushing it under his boot. “You think you’ll know where the line is,” he says. “You don’t. You just wake up one day and realize you’re on the wrong side of it.”

Kristof stares at the gravel path. He thinks of the hospital corridors he will walk through the next morning. Can he do it anymore—take even a single step through the door—without flinching?

CHAPTER 55

The plan is simple by necessity. After leaving the bunker, Kristof goes directly to Julian and presents the documents. Julian’s face pales, but without hesitation, he says, “Tell me what we need to do.”

Within days, they recruit Eric Anouilh, a senior doctor whose quiet disgust with Claudel’s new policies has become increasingly evident. The three of them spend the week examining hospital records, identifying patients marked with telltale crosses designating them for “transfer.”

These aren’t random selections. The targets are specific—chronic schizophrenics, the severely disabled, catatonics who haven’t responded to treatment. The so-called “incurables,” as Alesander put it. “Life unworthy of life.”

Their response evolves organically from their medical training: document, diagnose, treat. Only now, they doctor records instead of patients. For each marked file, they create alternative narratives in the documentation—not outright falsifications, which would be immediately detected, but subtle adjustments. Long-term conditions are reframed as episodic. “No response to treatment” becomes “periodic improvement noted.” Severe cases are downgraded to moderate.

The smell of carbon ink and old starch hangs in the air of the small annex they’ve borrowed to work in, supposedly to organize records for the upcoming inspection. Kristof hunches over a narrow desk beside Julian, the thin lamplight resting like a rose-colored moth against the dark pane of the window. Outside, the courtyards are quiet. Too quiet for Kristof’s comfort. The usual pacing of restless patients has stilled hours ago.

Julian’s pen scratches softly, pausing now and then as he flips between columns, cross-referencing birth dates, transfer orders, and diagnostic shorthand. A line of permanent tension has settled between his shoulders. His eyes are red-rimmed, his collar rumpled.

“This one,” Julian says, tapping a file. “Henri Allard. You’ve done a lot of work with him, haven’t you?”

Kristof feels a surge of anger, then panic. Henri has been making real progress—slow and painful, but real nonetheless. The file shows Henri’s original diagnosis—severe combat neurosis with violent episodes. But now Kristof dips in to make adjustments, adding small notes documenting improved sleep patterns, verbal responses during therapy, decreased frequency of nightmares. None of it is false, exactly—Henri has shown these improvements, in brief flashes. Kristof simply emphasizes them, making them seem more significant, more consistent, than they actually are.

“The Germans are efficient to a fault,” Ursula explains during one of their meetings. “They won’t waste resources transporting patients who might return to productivity. Our job is to make as many as possible appear salvageable. They still might discharge them, yes. But at least they’d stand some kind of chance.”

Studying the list, Kristof is surprised to find that many of the names are unfamiliar. Patients from the women’s wing, or from wards he rarely enters. And yet their fate will be no different. He points to one.

“She was transferred from Saint-Yon,” Ursula says. “They brought her in, left her on a cot in the far hall. By the time I saw the chart, she was already slated for transport. She hasn’t even been properly diagnosed.”

Julian exhales. “God help us, there are so many.”

“And the administration has just moved up the date,” she says grimly. “The next transport convoy leaves Monday. That gives us almost no time.”

Julian swears softly. “Which list?”

She taps one of the folders. “Saint-Dizier. Twenty-two names. Half of them are far too ill to travel. But that’s the point, isn’t it? They’re not being moved for treatment.”

“We’ll need to finish updating their charts, but we can’t do all of them,” Julian says. “That would look far too suspicious.”

“Now we have to choose who dies?” Kristof flares as heat rises to his face. “No.”

“I know it feels like we’re playing God, Kris.” Ursula rubs her ink-stained fingers against the worn fabric of her sweater, then glances at the stack of altered files on the desk, her mouth pulling into a weighted line. “I hate it too. But what’s the alternative?”

Before Kristof can respond, a noise carries in from the hall, but then stops, as if someone walking toward them paused or reversed their steps.

Julian flips to a fresh page in his ledger and, without fanfare, scrawls a single word across the top: Compromised?

Kristof looks toward the door. All is quiet now in the corridor beyond. But for a moment earlier—just a flicker—did he see a shadow pass?

Ursula pulls a small wooden stamp from her pocket. “I borrowed it from the desk of Claudel’s secretary,” she says in a low voice. “It needs to be back by morning.” A short while later, she slips away, leaving only a trace of her rose-scented perfume.

KRISTOF HAS NEVER known how much a single breath might give away. The way it can catch, just slightly, at the sight of a silhouette where none should be. The way it can deepen when forced to sound natural, steady, as if he is merely a man walking home at night, rather than one who has just defied the Reich.

When his shift finishes, Kristof washes his hands in the hospital’s sluice room, scrubbing under his nails, though there is nothing incriminating about iodine stains. The stamp has been replaced, the charts amended. The new list, written in his cleanest script, is gone now, folded into Julian’s coat pocket before they parted ways. Now, he only needs to leave as if he has done nothing more than complete his rounds.

He is crossing the darkened courtyard toward the main gate when movement ripples through the shadows along the stone wall. Kristof blinks, his tired eyes playing tricks in the dim light. Is it merely a swaying of branches in the plane trees that line the path? Or something more?

He forces himself to maintain his pace, neither slowing nor quickening. Panic is a luxury he can’t afford. He is nearly to the main entrance now, his pulse threatening to spike with each step. Then a voice calls from behind him.

“Kristof!”

It’s Julian. He stands about a hundred meters away, beneath the stone archway that leads to the Lacan Pavilion. His coat collar is turned up against the evening breeze, but otherwise his stance seems casual.

Kristof is about to move toward him when something catches his eye. Two men emerge from the dark near the administration building. They wear civilian clothes—the black leather jackets and wool trousers favored by Gestapo agents—but their rigid postures betray military training. One changes his stance, just enough for the courtyard lamp to catch the unmistakable glint of a pistol.

Kristof freezes, suddenly terrified that a trap might be closing around them. His first instinct is to go to Julian, to act naturally, to create an alibi if one is needed. But he hesitates. The placement of these men is too deliberate, their attention too focused. If Kristof misjudges, if he walks into their carefully arranged snare, then both he and Julian will be lost.

Suddenly, Julian lifts his hand. It could be an ordinary wave between colleagues, but Kristof notices the slight leftward tilt of his palm—a warning signal they established weeks ago. Don’t approach. You’re being watched. His face in the half-light gives nothing away, maintaining the perfect mask of professional indifference they’ve all learned to wear. Is that calm and composure genuine, or merely paralysis springing from fear? Kristof has no way of knowing.

Pulse pounding, his mouth sour with adrenaline, he simply waves back, just as casually. Then he walks out the gate and past the Milice officer who guards the exit. The man straightens slightly as Kristof flashes his hospital badge and identification card. Then he nods curtly, making no move to stop him. But Kristof feels his eyes, cold and assessing, as he walks away.

Kristof continues down the street, fighting the urge to look back, to run, to betray himself with anything other than the measured pace of a tired doctor heading home after his shift. Every footstep sounds unnaturally loud. Every shadow feels menacing. At any moment, he expects to hear the harsh command to halt, or worse, the sharp crack of a pistol fired at his back.

TWO HOURS LATER, he is home drinking his second glass of whiskey, and still, his hands shake. The apartment is dark; he’s too afraid to turn on the lights or make any sound at all. Outside, the occasional vehicle passes—each one making him freeze, glass halfway to his lips, listening for the telltale pause of an engine idling, doors opening.

The alcohol does nothing to quiet his fear. Instead, it hones the edges of his thoughts, replaying the scene at the hospital in endless variation. Sometimes Julian’s raised hand becomes a gesture of surrender. Sometimes Kristof imagines himself walking toward his friend, only to see him collapse as shots ring out.

When he finally slips into an anxious, troubled sleep, Kristof dreams of footsteps behind him. He runs through endless hospital corridors, patient files clutched to his chest, while faceless men pursue him. No matter which way he turns, Julian stands at the end of each passage, silently pointing to yet another escape route that inevitably leads back to the same courtyard, the same watchers, the same trap closing around them both.

Before dawn, he wakes with a start to the sound of engines. For a moment, he thinks the rumbling is part of his dream—until he makes out voices. Sharp commands. The unmistakable sound of hobnailed boots on the street.

CHAPTER 56

Sasha feels the buses before she hears them. The vibration comes up through the floorboards, through the thin mattress, and into her bones. It’s July 14, an early morning after forty days of wearing the star. Beyond the blackout screens, darkness still holds the city. She blinks, trying to clear the dream-fog from her eyes. Then comes the sound she has been dreading since Papa was taken.

“Levez-vous!” a voice bellows, accompanied by rapping at their door. “Immediatement!”

Panic climbs into her throat, metallic as a swallowed coin. The rumors were true then. A wave of arrests. She’s heard them so often, each one contradicting the last, that she had stopped listening.

“Un moment,” Maman calls through the thin walls.

Sasha stands and quietly crosses the room, the linoleum cool against her feet. Maman hurries past, a sweater thrown hastily over her nightgown, her usually perfect hair a tangle. At least Klara is quiet—for now.

“What is it?” Maman calls, and Sasha can hear the tremor she’s trying to hide.

“Police!” The voice fills their apartment like thunder. “Open the door!”

Sasha presses herself to the wall as the blue uniform of the gendarme fills the threshold. The room is warm and close from their sleeping bodies, yet Maman clutches her sweater tight, her bare legs indecently exposed. If only Papa were here. Maman, wonderful in so many ways, can sometimes freeze and become smaller when she is surprised. She is brave and determined, yes, but her kind of courage takes time to rise… like yeasted bread. Sasha sees this slow reaction now, a stillness coming over Maman as the officer hands back their documents.

“You have five minutes,” he says. “Bring only what is necessary.”

“Where are you taking us?”

No answer. Maman turns, meets Sasha’s eyes. In that instant, fear transfers between them like an electric current. It doubles, paralyzing them both.

Klara begins to cry from the bedroom, and Maman rushes by. “Get dressed,” she tells Sasha. “Pack a case for yourself. Warm things too. No books,” she adds sharply to Rald, who she knows would choose his copy of Jules Verne over a sweater and clean socks if given the option. “Just clothes. Just what we can carry.”

The empty valise gapes at Sasha from the foot of her bed, like a question she isn’t ready to answer. What does one pack for vanishing?

Finally, she begins, though her hands seem to belong to someone else. Brushing past the spines of her favorite books, she fixes on Metamorphoses, the green-cloth edition she was given the year she turned twelve. Maman specifically said no books, but how could Sasha ever part with it? The cover worn soft, the margins filled with notes she’d scribbled in every season. She places it in the case first, spine down, like a cornerstone.

Next, the small leather pouch with her medallion—the gift from Papa, depicting Daphne and Apollo. For luck, he’d said when she opened it. For memory, she has always thought.

Then a nightgown, clean socks, underwear, a hairbrush. A tin of peppermints, mostly full. She adds them with care and then steps into her favorite dress—sky blue, with a white collar. It’s the prettiest thing she owns, which feels silly and even strange, but it makes her feel stronger somehow. More prepared to face whatever comes next.

Finally, she pauses over the photograph tucked into her mirror frame. Rald and Klara on the carousel at Buttes-Chaumont, both grinning from ear to ear, cheeks bright with cold. She hesitates, then slides it between the pages of the Ovid like a pressed flower.

As she closes the case, she sees Rald in the doorway. He is already dressed, his school jacket buttoned wrong, but she can’t bring herself to fix it. His hand trembles on the handle of his canvas bag, but his face is set in that new mask he’s learned to wear. Who taught her little brother to hide like that?

With a gruff announcing cough, the officer takes a step into their apartment, and the walls seem to shrink. “Hurry up,” he barks as Maman flits between shelves and drawers, filling a bag with shoes, scarves, biscuit tins. She places Klara in Sasha’s arms. “Change her,” she says.

The dampness of Klara’s nightdress begins to seep through Sasha’s clothes before she notices and shifts her little sister to the bed. Beautiful Klara, who’s just turned two. The occupation has brought fear, humiliation, curfews, prohibitions. The star. The call-ups. But Sasha never imagined this. Families. Children. Toddlers like Klara, born here. French as the cobblestones. What can this possibly mean?

She steals a glance at the gendarme, his kepi sharp as a blade, his frame blocking the threshold like a shadow come to life. She wants to hate him, but his face is empty—like the missing photos in their schoolbooks, neat rectangular gaps where certain people used to be.

Klara has started to cry again. Sasha shushes her, patting her gently. Maman is still throwing things into cases, her hands fluttering from shelf to drawer like trapped birds.

At the sound of a new voice, Sasha’s eyes dart to the corridor beyond the open door. Dr. Larsen is standing there barefoot, dressed only in his undershirt and trousers. His blond hair is rumpled, his jaw shadowed with stubble.

“Go back to bed,” the officer snaps.

Sasha sees Kristof look at Maman. Their eyes meet for only a moment, but something tightens in his face.

“Let me help you,” he says quickly.

To Sasha’s shock, the gendarme steps aside. Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he only wants this over with. Kristof moves inside, stepping over a pile of scattered clothes. He walks toward Sasha. Klara is still tearful, her face blotched and wet.

“Can I hold her?” he asks.

Maman hesitates for half a second before nodding. Sasha watches as Kristof kneels, gathering Klara carefully, pressing her close. He rocks her from side to side, whispering something Sasha can’t hear until her fussing begins to lessen, just a little.

“Enough,” the officer barks, his voice slicing through the air. “Come now!” Maman takes Klara from Kristof. Sasha wants to scream, to demand answers, to make time stop. Instead, she leads Rald through the doorway. The officer locks the door behind them and pockets the key.

Before stepping into the stairwell, Sasha turns back. Kristof is standing in the half-light of the corridor. He looks helpless, even anguished. But what can he do to stop any of this? Even if he risked his own life, nothing would change. He would be dead, and they would still be taken away.

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 57

In the infirmary, Alouette slumps in the treatment chair, her body boneless, her thoughts thick and slow. The bloodletting always leaves her feeling hollow, but today is worse. Her hands tremble in her lap, her sleeve damp where the incision still weeps.

Today, there is no eager apprentice scribbling notes, asking questions with the tremor of a boy trying to impress a schoolmaster. Only the physician and his cold, steady hands. Without the brittle theater of instruction, everything feels worse. She is simply a body, and the lesson has already been learned.

“You are paler than usual,” Monsieur Moreau muses, his smooth murmur blending with the scraping of instruments being cleaned. “We wouldn’t want you growing too weak now, would we?”

Alouette stiffens at the familiar mockery of concern. The treatments are supposed to be curative, but they always take more than they give. She swallows, willing her voice to steady. “I think… the bloodletting is making me worse.”

The physician’s hands still. He studies her, his expression unreadable. Then, with measured care, he slips a clean lancet into its velvet-lined case.

“Ah,” he says softly, as if this is what he expected to hear. He tilts his head, the way someone might examine a delicate specimen. “And what would you have me do, little one?”

She hesitates. Her pulse hammers at her throat. She should not have spoken.

But she presses on, wary. “I thought… perhaps you could talk to the lay sisters. Tell them I don’t need further treatment.”

A slow smile. “No more bleeding?”

She nods. Hope kindles in her chest like an ember. Small, dangerous.

The fabric of his coat whispers as he leans closer. His voice drops, becoming soft, almost indulgent. “You’re not the first to ask.”

“I’m not,” she hears herself repeat stupidly.

“No.” His fingers graze the wooden arm of the chair beside her. A gesture too deliberate, too possessive, to misunderstand. “I have helped before,” he murmurs. “For the right… recompense.”

The words slither down her spine. She knows—of course she knows. She has seen the way some women vanish into the infirmary at night, the way others return with fewer bruises, fuller rations. She hasn’t let herself dwell on it until now.

The silence stretches. She makes herself meet his gaze, even though her stomach churns. If she blanches, he will enjoy it. If she shows fear, he will press harder. So, she lets herself give nothing away. Shapes her voice into something blank and neutral. “I see.”

A flash of amusement in his expression. He is a cat toying with a wounded bird. He leans back, as if satisfied. “You may go.”

Alouette hurries to her feet, though her knees nearly buckle. When the door closes behind her, she sucks in air as if she’s barely escaped drowning.

Nausea rises, twists through her like smoke. Her child—Étienne’s child—is still hidden, still safe. But for how long?

THERE ARE FEW weapons available to the women of Salpêtrière. Silence is one. Refusal another. But the garden holds its own quiet arsenal.

In her time of tending herbs and tinctures, Alouette has learned which plants are favored for healing—and which are whispered about when the sisters turn their backs. Pennyroyal, especially. Officially, it is brewed to settle stomachs and drive out fleas. But everyone knows what it can do when steeped strong and swallowed quickly.

No one speaks of this aloud. But the knowledge passes hand to hand. Woman to woman.

The morning light is wan, barely strong enough to cast shadows as Alouette moves through the physic garden. Several weeks have passed since she retched in the chapel. Since she began carrying her body differently, watching for signs, wondering how long she can keep others from guessing the truth.

Her fingers brush stems of pennyroyal, the scent sharp and clean. Medicinal. Dangerous. She hesitates, contemplating. If she takes it now, it could still work. It would be simple—brew it in secret, swallow it before evening prayers. It would be over before she had to think too much, or linger on regret. But of course, nothing is simple.

She thinks of Étienne, his voice, his hands, the impossible warmth of him. The way he had kissed her temple softly after they made love, as if sealing something sacred. What would he say if he knew? If she appeared before him one day, burdened with a child neither of them could afford? Would his expression harden? Would he turn away?

He already supports the grandmother who helped to raise him, and his young wards. His life is full of responsibility. And they are his blood, his duty. While this child—this child—could ruin everything. Could risk his position. His security, becoming just another mouth no one knows how to feed.

And what of her own future? If she is released in three years as promised, how could she raise a child alone? If they even let her take the child with her, that is. She hasn’t forgotten Sylvine’s grim story, her belief that her own baby hadn’t died at all but was taken from her. Could the same thing happen to Alouette if she decides against the pennyroyal and carries the child to term?

“You’re woolgathering.”

Alouette startles. Christiane stands a few feet away, basket in hand, staring at her with those too-knowing eyes.

“Just going over what needs harvesting,” Alouette fibs, gesturing toward the sage. “The sisters want a fresh supply for the infirmary.”

“Marguerite says there’s fever in the Saint-Joseph wing again,” Christiane says, moving quickly now, more certain of herself after weeks in the garden. “Three women have taken ill so far.”

Alouette’s stomach clenches. Saint-Joseph is where they often transfer the heavily pregnant women, the ones who can’t hide it anymore or who lack the protection of more powerful inmates or the sisters. Where they stay until they’re taken to Hôtel-Dieu to deliver. Or until their babies come too early, like Sylvine’s. Too small. Too weak or too unlucky to survive.

She touches the pennyroyal again, feeling the wrinkled texture of the leaves between her fingers. She says nothing, but her choice is nearly made.

TWO DAYS LATER, when she returns from morning chapel, Alouette finds something beneath her thin pillow—a bundle wrapped in clean linen. Inside: a small stone lark, hardly bigger than a coin, its wings tucked close as if sleeping or biding its time. Its features have been carved with such delicate precision that she can feel each feather beneath her fingertips. Nestled beside it, a scrap of paper with smudged writing: I won’t forget you. I wait. —É

Alouette presses the bird to her lips, tasting limestone dust—and a promise. Her eyes sting. She doesn’t know how Étienne’s gift found its way to her. She wants to believe someone kind intervened on her behalf. That there are still such people in the world.

But she cannot forget the flicker she saw in Thibault’s eyes. The way he walked away too easily. Or how Jean-Baptiste enjoyed dangling hope in front of her like meat before a starving dog.

That night, when everyone else is asleep, Alouette shows Sylvine her treasure. The older woman takes the carving in her calloused hands, turning it to catch the faint moonlight from their high window.

“He’s skilled,” Sylvine says softly, returning the lark. “And persistent.”

Alouette traces the wings with her thumb. “Who could have left it?” she whispers.

Sylvine shakes her head, but a knowing look crosses her face. “Someone with eyes in the right places. Someone who doesn’t always speak her kindness aloud.”

Alouette looks up, startled. “Do you know who?”

Sylvine only smiles. “Sometimes things end up where they’re supposed to. Even in a place like this.”

Alouette tucks the lark back into its hiding place between her straw mattress and the wall—and folds her arms around herself. For a time, she says nothing. Then, softly: “You were right. About the child.”

Sylvine nods solemnly. This could never be happy news. “How long have you known?”

“Long enough. I was afraid. I still am. But this”—her hand closes over her ribs, protective, almost reverent—“everything is different now.”

Sylvine watches her for a moment, then nods again. “Then let it be.”

CHAPTER 58

The tunnel breathes dust. Étienne drops low as the stone groans—a dull pressure straining from behind the wall. Then comes the crack. Sharp, sickening. Wood splintering, rock giving way. Shouts echo. Then silence.

He’s on his feet before thought catches up, torch swinging as he follows Jean-Luc into the corridor. The air boils with debris. The vault ahead is all wreckage—mud, shattered beams, rubble scattered like loose bones.

Étienne stares. He knows this place. Knows it hasn’t been safe of late—moisture seeping in, pillars gone unstable. And yet he said nothing. No one did. Not about the work. Not about the risks.

Now a man lies pinned beneath the ruin, his leg mangled, his face white with shock, blood running freely.

Kneeling, Étienne braces a hand on the broken beam, trying to lift it. Others scramble to help. The man moans once, then falls quiet. Not unconscious. Just beyond pain.

Jean-Luc watches grimly. “He was asking too many questions,” he says softly, unemotionally.

Étienne doesn’t answer. This isn’t news. These last weeks, he has carried crates that aren’t on anyone’s log, helped brace hidden passages with wood paid for by hands he never sees. The “too many questions” are likely about things he has done. Things he has justified, telling himself that it’s the Gobelin family robbing the crown, not him. He is simply there with two arms, a pair of boots.

And yet the truth is plain, even in the haze of dust. He might have prevented this disaster by making different choices.

The beam shifts with a groan. The man screams as they finally manage to pull him clear. His body sags limp as they carry him away half alive. Étienne watches them go as torchlight flickers against the walls, shadows rippling like a current.

For weeks now he’s been moving through these tunnels like a man underwater, breathing borrowed air, holding too much inside. Slowly, steadily drowning.

AT HOME THAT night, the fire burns low. Marie stitches in a chair by the hearth, her head bent over her work. Thomas arranges pebbles along the floor, solemn and silent.

Mémé watches from her usual place, her eyes clouded but sharp.

All this time, Étienne has told himself the clandestine work was for them. For the bread on their table, the scraps of hope he could offer.

But he knows now—if the price of survival is silence and guilt, then what exactly is he teaching them? What is he leaving them?

He reaches for the slate and writes a single word: Skylark.

Then wipes it clean. Writes again: I have not forgotten. This time, he doesn’t erase what’s there, stark and uneven in the firelight.

If Thomas and Marie are to have any chance for a good life, it won’t be carved from this dying ground. One day, he will have to find a way to take them beyond it.

But not yet. Not while Alouette might still return.

Two nights later, Étienne does not show up for his secret courier’s shift. He knows that this might cost him more than coin. In the tunnels, someone will notice the absence. Somewhere, a whisper will begin. But at least now, his conscience is clear. His heart rests easy.

At home, Thomas presses a pebble into his hand before school—a small white one. Étienne pockets it without a word. All that day he carries it with him, like a truth too small to deny. A vow he can no longer unmake.

CHAPTER 59

Between work and prayers, there is a narrow measure of time carved out for silence or solitude. The sisters call it l’heure de répit—the hour of respite. Some women gather in tight knots, sharing scraps of gossip or bartered memories. Others sit alone, stitching quietly or tracing shapes with their fingertips onto the clay paths, as if drawing maps to places only they remember.

But Alouette walks. Her feet follow the uneven trails beyond the courtyard, past crumbling walls where ivy grips the stone here and there, like lingering regret. The asylum feels different in these moments—less like a cage, more like a shell emptied of the sound of the sea.

Today, she is thinking of her father. Wondering if he is alive. If he is, can he see from Bicêtre what she sees now—this length of wan blue sky resembling the work of an inexpert dye maker? Does he feel the season shifting in his bones and think of her, wishing they could have escaped Saint-Marcel while there was still time? Or does he only dream, even now, of his phantom red, elusive as lost love?

Whatever his own feelings might be, she has come to see the two of them as irrevocably tethered. Father and daughter, two figures on opposite sides of the city, bound by love and lost dreams.

The thought makes her chest ache. She rounds a corner, her steps slowing as she catches sight of something. Someone. The superioress stands alone in an enclosed orchard, framed by rows of gnarled trees. Their branches are dotted with late-season fruit—blowsy apricots and pears that fill the air with a sweet rot.

But it’s not the orchard that has Alouette fixed there, watching. She has come to know the superioress not just by the sweep of her words and actions, but by how she holds herself—an architecture of control carved into every line of her posture, every deliberate tilt of her chin. Even in silhouette, her shoulders are tightly squared, as if braced against some invisible force.

And yet here among the trees, she kneels. Her dark robes billow around her like spilled ink, her bare hands pressing gently into the earth. She’s tending to something.

A small, twisted sapling near the wall has grown crookedly, exposing its roots. The superioress smooths the dirt back over them with surprising care, brushing away debris, anchoring the fragile thing as if this is a matter of great consequence.

Alouette’s instinct is to retreat, to slip away unnoticed. But before she can move, the superioress speaks.

“You’re far from where you’re meant to be.” Her expression is the same as always—severe, with sharp lines etched deep by time and authority—but there’s a flicker of something else. Not warmth, exactly. Just the absence of command.

“I was walking.”

The superioress only nods and then looks back at the sapling. “This tree has not had the most auspicious start in life. Still, it grows.” She tamps the last of the loose soil around the root base firmly, indifferent to the dirt on her palms, under her fingernails. “Survival isn’t always beautiful.”

Alouette stands in bewildered silence, wondering at the strangeness of the encounter. After a moment, the superioress speaks again, her voice imbued with a dreamy quality, almost as if she’s forgotten Alouette is there.

“I was born with nothing, you know. Raised with less. I clawed my way to where I am—through men who never thought a woman could hold more than a broom or a prayer book. Now I oversee the Hôpital Général. This asylum is mine to protect, to grow.” She touches the root base one last time, her fingertips lingering, hovering. Then she straightens, brushing dust from her hands and the folds of her robe. “Everything worth keeping must be tended. Sometimes at all costs.”

Before Alouette can reply—should she even dare reply?—the superioress steps past her onto the clay footpath and hurries away. Moments later, the bells for prime begin to ring.

Alouette considers the crooked little tree for a few seconds longer, its fragile branches trembling in the breeze, before heading toward the chapel. All the way there, she thinks about the puzzling combination of the superioress’s almost maternal attentions and her ferocity, her ambition. She’s like a lioness bravely guarding her den, unafraid to spill blood to do it.

Everything worth keeping must be tended. Sometimes at all costs. The words cling to Alouette. She can’t decide whether they were meant as a warning, a threat—or as a confession.

BY EVENING, THE sky has cooled to slate. She returns to the garden feeling restless, needing the comfort of work, of motion. That’s where Marguerite finds her. The look on her face—tense, watchful—sends a flutter of alarm through Alouette.

“Have you seen little Christiane? She was meant to bring fresh yarrow to the infirmary, but she never arrived.”

Alouette freezes. “No. Not for hours.”

“The archer, Pierre. He changed posts early today.” The way Marguerite shapes each word makes her meaning all too clear. “The one who watches from the north wall.”

Together, they search. Finally, there she is: curled behind the holly hedge like a wounded bird. Her gray shift is torn at one shoulder, and there are marks on her throat already darkening to bruises. When Alouette reaches for her, Christiane flinches away.

Marguerite kneels beside them, close enough that Alouette can feel the tension in her body. “Let me see if you’re hurt.”

Christiane shakes her head, pressing herself farther into the shadows. Her breath comes in sharp, uneven gasps.

“We have to tell someone,” Alouette says. “Sister Marthe—”

“No.” Christiane’s voice cracks. “It isn’t the first time he’s done it. Besides, who would believe me anyway, or even care? I’m nothing. Just an orphan. Not even a real person.”

Rage wells up, hot as bile. “You are real,” Alouette says fiercely, drawing Christiane close. The girl allows it this time, her small frame shaking. “You are real, and what he did was brutal and wrong.”

Over Christiane’s head, her eyes meet Marguerite’s, a shared fury sparking between them. Later, Alouette will remember this moment. How the light fell just so across Christiane’s face, painting her in amber and shadow. How Marguerite’s hands were gentle as she helped the girl stand, though her eyes burned with a wrath Alouette had never yet seen in her. How Christiane had let herself be held, if only for a moment, like a child.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 60

They go down the stairs in a line. Maman first, with Klara in her arms, then Rald. Sasha reaches for the banister, suddenly aware of everything, as if time has slowed expressly for her. For this.

She sees every nick and scuff mark on the stone steps, patches of uneven paint on the plaster, a small brown button covered with fuzz, as if it’s been there for months. And yet she’s never noticed it before. Maybe she has never really noticed anything, she thinks as the suitcase bumps against the wall. Each thud echoes like a time bomb, counting down to zero, but no one steps out to see what the commotion might be. Their neighbors, who just yesterday would have called out to say good morning, stay silent behind their doors.

In the courtyard, Madame Gagnon stands by the front gate. She is fully dressed despite the hour, her witch-gray chignon coiled against her skull. Sasha can’t make sense of her presence, or her stillness. As the family passes, she doesn’t look at them—only at the gendarme, who places the keys to their apartment in her outstretched palm.

Along the curb just down the street, a bus idles, its taillights casting an eerie glow. It’s one of the familiar green-and-cream municipal buses Sasha sees in the city every day, from the Compagnie de Transports. Not SS or Gestapo. Which means what? Madame Klein looks down at her from inside, through one of the windows. Sasha knows her smile from the market, but she isn’t smiling now.

“Stay together,” Maman says. She has arranged her hair too tightly, Sasha notices. A thin line shows at the part, pale as chalk, as Maman gently pushes Rald in front of her, onto the bus.

Inside, rows of faces turn toward them, then away. Names Sasha knows: the Kleins, the Levys, old Monsieur Cohen, who feeds the pigeons. All of them together now, becoming a list. Becoming cargo.

“We’re going on an adventure,” Rald tells a smaller girl in the seat next to theirs. The girl looks terrified.

“Pitchipoi?” she asks Rald, as if everything depends on his answer. It’s a word Sasha has heard some of the children whispering at temple—a magical place where all the missing people have been taken.

“Yes,” Rald says. “Pitchipoi.”

The little girl nods, attempting to smile at him through her tears, but Sasha flinches. Pitchipoi obviously doesn’t exist except as a children’s fairy tale, a fiction to soften the hard edges of disappearance. Now, she wishes she didn’t have to be alone with the truth of it. She would rather be a child again, half blind with naivety, than to carry this reality, like a piece of metal she has swallowed and now can feel pressing up through her skin.

This is what growing up means. This rigid seat beneath her, and Klara’s muffled sobs against Maman’s shoulder, and no other explanation for them. Not even her beloved myths can help Sasha now. Egeria melting into tears that become spring. Procne becoming a swallow to soar above her grief. There is no other story but this one.

CHAPTER 61

Stay together, stay together. Don’t be afraid. This is the last thing Kristof hears Rachel say as she leads the children down the stairs and through the courtyard. He follows at a safe distance, still in a state of shock.

On the street outside the building, several gendarmes shout orders, herding everyone toward the waiting buses. Kristof has never felt weaker or more insignificant. More reduced by material facts. How can this be the world? Where Jews aren’t human and have no rights. Where the Germans and even these marionette gendarmes have given away their humanity, and nothing in the world feels powerful enough to reverse the tide.

In the commotion, he loses sight of the Brodskys and feels like he might vomit from dread and anxiety for them. He stands in the lingering cloud of fumes as the buses pull away. His knees go liquid as he looks up and down the block—the windows of his neighbors still shuttered and dark, as if nothing has happened.

Everything about this moment feels boneless. Unsupportable. What is he supposed to do now? Is there anything to be done, or is it far too late to help them? If children are being taken away, there is little hope now that Felix will be released and return home. He should have seen immediately how dire things were, even before Felix was arrested. Instead, he threw himself into busyness and false optimism, downplaying the extremity of the signs and warnings, because he didn’t want to believe the worst could happen. But it can. It has.

The last time he felt this carved out and hopeless was after Annelies’s death. Before then, he had never guessed that an ordinary day could become a nightmare. That life could collapse in a matter of hours, or even minutes, and never be the same again.

Now, Kristof walks numbly back to his flat, trying to think of where he might go to gather information. On the kitchen table, his Dictaphone lies on its side where he abandoned it. He was transcribing patient notes when he heard the gendarme banging on the Brodskys’ door. Now, it seems a foreign object and pointless. How does one go on? And yet what instead? Why?

In a kind of trance, he goes to the cupboard for a bottle of vodka. His hand shakes as he pulls out the stopper, dropping it to the floor, where it bounces dully and goes still. He half expects it to fly or explode. Why should gravity behave when natural law no longer pertains? His head throbs. Everything aches.

Not bothering with ice, he pours several fingers into a glass and swallows it back as quickly as he can, thinking of the officer’s face. The despicable coldness in his eyes. The way he spoke to Rachel as if she weren’t a woman and a mother, but some sort of lower being. A thing.

He might have expected such behavior from the Nazis. But the gendarmes who took them all away were French, and the buses too. The barricades on the street were set up by la police de l’état français.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand this can’t be a discrete occurrence. These arrests must be happening in neighborhoods all over the city.

It makes Kristof’s stomach heave. He has spent his life trying to decipher the mind—how people work, what drives them to act, to feel, to suffer. Yet standing here, gripping an empty glass, he understands nothing at all.

And Annelies—if she had lived, what would she have made of this world? She spent her life studying poetry and philosophy, underscoring meaning and beauty wherever she found it. Would she have pointed out some old German legend to explain this madness? A cautionary tale to map its trajectory? Or would she, like him, be left staring at the wreckage, unable to comprehend how the universe and the men inside it can turn so unspeakably ugly?

He lets out a breath, long and slow, and reaches for the vodka again.

CHAPTER 62

The streets look wrong in the dark, as if someone has rearranged them while she slept. Buildings Sasha has known most of her life—the fishmonger’s, where before the rationing Maman used to buy yesterday’s catch at half price, the shop where Papa bought his pipe tobacco—have become flat and strange, like the painted backdrops in a play.

They pass Sasha’s school, its windows dark and blank. Just months ago, she had stood in front of her best friends and tried to joke about the star, while they had already decided to forget her name. The shame of it had filled her pockets, like stones, until school finally ended for the summer holiday. Sasha had told herself that by autumn, things would be back to normal again. Either the war would be over or the star would become nothing special. How strange it feels to have been so mistaken about everything.

Now, their bus slows to a stop on the rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles, before they are even out of their own neighborhood. Again, whatever Sasha might have expected, it’s not this. Through the window, she sees the piscine’s redbrick facade rise flat as a sheet of notebook paper against the sky. How many summer afternoons has she spent here, watching other children splash and play while she sat with her books in the shade?

Jews haven’t been allowed in the pool for a while. Now it’s shut down completely. The great windows gape, dark and empty. No blue water shimmers behind the glass. No echoing laughter or whistle blasts from the lifeguard. Just shadows and the sound of boots on tile.

Once off the bus, they are herded through the entrance in groups. The chlorine smell still clings faintly to the walls, but underneath there is sweat, fear, too many bodies in too small a space. The locker rooms they pass are padlocked. An obsolete sign hangs askew: “No street shoes on pool deck.”

In the piscine, lined with rows of blue tile, the pool has been drained. In the stark, dry basin, a hundred people or more sit pressed together on the sloping floor. Children sleep on coats against the walls. Women hold babies who won’t stop crying.

A man in uniform checks their papers. Sasha recognizes him. It’s Monsieur Mercier from the third floor of their building. The officer who throws cigarette butts into Madame Bernstein’s once-glorious flower boxes. His pencil scratches tick marks by their names, black as the legs of insects. He’s pretending not to know who they are. Sasha can hardly believe it when he simply tells them to join the others, all without meeting their eyes.

Maman’s hand finds hers, squeezes once before Sasha descends the metal ladder slowly, each rung feeling colder and stranger than the last. At the bottom, they find a space against the deep-end wall. Not enough room to sit properly, but Maman makes it work, arranging them like pieces in a puzzle: Rald at her knees, Klara in her lap. Sasha is behind them, the concrete hard and rough against her back.

Through her daze, she sees Maurice from school sitting with his parents near the shallow end. His shirt is half untucked, one sleeve pushed up higher than the other. For once, he’s completely still—no bouncing foot, no nervous grin. He stares at her, his face as blank as she imagines her own must be. Instead of looking away, they hold each other’s gaze, as if trying to anchor themselves in something familiar while their world dissolves around them. He isn’t a stupid boy anymore, a clown. They are the same.

After a while, Sasha leans back against the wall and closes her eyes. Whispers rise and fall in shushing waves. Rumors passing from mouth to mouth: This is temporary. Just a registration process. We’ll be home by morning. Others say the opposite. Drancy. Drancy, she hears hissed back and forth. The all-too-familiar work camp north of Paris. It’s also been called a transit camp. A way station for other bases in Germany or Poland. She’s often wondered if her father was sent there. A place close enough to walk to or from. She has even dreamed about his release. How he might appear like Odysseus, barely recognizable after so long away—except to her.

Somewhere in the shallow end, a woman begins to sing—a lullaby Sasha half recognizes from her own childhood. Other voices join in, soft and uncertain at first, then stronger. The sound threads its way through the gathered bodies, filling the space where water should be.

Maman has a beautiful singing voice, but she doesn’t join them. Instead, she sits very straight, her eyes fixed on some vague point. She strokes Klara’s hair with one hand, the other still holding their papers. As if she knows something the others don’t. As if she is counting down to a detonation that only she can see coming.

THE HOURS BLUR through the long morning and into the afternoon. The air is stifling and too warm because all the windows have been sealed shut. There is one open bathroom, in the men’s locker room. No one explains why the women shouldn’t be allowed to use the other one, marked for women, or why they can only go one at a time while a guard stands outside. No one bothers to justify that, with so much space all around them, they should have to be squeezed into the dry pool, like bog creatures in a makeshift subterranean prison.

Sometime after midday, Sasha is dozing against her mother’s shoulder when a commotion begins. Near the ladder above them, a superior officer with several gold braids on his cap and jacket confers with Monsieur Mercier and one of the other gendarmes. When the braided officer leaves, Mercier turns and shouts directly to the group. His words ring strangely through the acoustics of the empty piscine.

“All children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen are being released,” he orders, “as long as they are French citizens.”

One mother shrieks. Several begin to cry and clutch at their older children. Maman’s body goes rigid, but only for the briefest moment. Then she reaches for Sasha’s wrist, gripping it so hard it hurts. “Listen to me carefully,” she whispers, her voice steely and unfamiliar. “When they call for the children, you will go.”

“No.” Sasha presses closer to her mother’s side. “I’m not a French citizen.” I don’t want to leave you.

“They won’t be checking.” Her fingers dig deeper with this conviction—however desperately guessed at. “Go before they change their minds.”

“But Rald and Klara—”

“They’re too young.” She’s talking fast, her eyes strangely bright. “You’re clever, Sasha. You’ll know what to do. Know how to be invisible when you need to be. Like Perseus when he approaches Medusa. Remember?”

Sasha does remember—all those tales of survival she’s collected, stored away like treasures. But stories are stories. This is her mother, her family. “Maybe they’ll only make us work at Drancy. I can work. Maybe Papa is there, too, and we’ll all be together. I can help with Klara, like I always do.”

Maman’s face softens fleetingly. She touches Sasha’s cheek—a quick brush of fingertips, as if checking for a fever. Then she snaps back to herself. “Listen to me. When you leave here, go to Dr. Larsen. You’ll be safe there.”

“Maman—”

But she is already standing, pulling Sasha up with her. Other mothers are doing the same—pushing older children toward the ladders while clutching their younger ones closer. The air fills with protests, with promises to return, with tears.

“Now,” Maman says, and suddenly she is lifting Sasha’s small case into her hand, guiding her toward the ladder. Her strength is shocking—when had she grown so strong? Or has Sasha gotten weaker?

“I’ll come find you,” Sasha says, her voice ragged. Breaking. “I’ll bring help—”

“Go!”

Stunned, Sasha moves toward the rungs. The climb is awkward with one hand, and yet she doesn’t regret having the case to balance. What else does she have now? As she reaches the top, she looks back once. Maman is standing very straight, her arms around Klara. Rald stands next to her without moving. He doesn’t even blink. He’s like a figure in one of Papa’s old albums—formal portraits where no one dared to smile. Then the image breaks. He yelps and buries his face in Maman’s skirt, while Sasha falters, wanting to run back. To jump, to fall.

“Vite!” the guard snaps. “Move along!”

Sasha hardly feels the motions of her body as the gendarmes push the group toward the exit. The taller officer holding the clipboard watches them go. Maman was right—they are so eager to be rid of these loose ends that they can hardly be bothered to check papers.

In moments, they are outside, beneath plane trees and the harsh sun. The street stretches away, both familiar and impossibly alien. “Run,” she hears someone say. “It’s a miracle.” Sasha hesitates, blinking. Through her stupor, she sees Maurice a few meters away. His eyes flick over and then past her. Somehow, they can barely look at each other. What is there to say? That they are the lucky ones? They stand there for a moment, two survivors of a shipwreck neither of them can fathom, before the crowd separates them.

She looks back at the piscine one last time. The red brick glows in the afternoon light, beautiful and terrible. Like everything else in Paris now—the same on the outside, but hollowed out, transformed into something else entirely. Eventually, her legs move without her telling them to, carrying her through streets she knows by heart. Toward the only person left who might help. Every step feels like falling.

AS SASHA WALKS, her thoughts are as scattered as the scraps of newspaper tumbling along the gutters. If Papa were here, he would know what to do. Papa, who can fix anything—watches, radios, broken promises. Who would say Nie martw się, kochanie in that gentle way of his.

A military truck rumbles past. Sasha presses herself into a doorway, trying to become nothing. That was what Maman had meant about being invisible—and at least this once, she has succeeded.

The boulevards gape open around her, too wide, too silent. Paris doesn’t feel like a city anymore. It feels like a body that has forgotten how to breathe.

Crossing place d’Italie, she sees a few others like her, young people walking alone, some with satchels or cases like hers, some carrying nothing. They don’t speak to one another. Speaking would acknowledge what has happened, what is still happening. Better to drift like ghosts through the afternoon crowds, unseeing and unseen.

The streets grow quieter as she nears home. Home—but how could that be, without her family there? She has never spent a night alone. Once, she longed for this more than anything. Just to have space without her brother and sister pawing at her, needing something. Without washtubs and laundry and the smell of cabbage in her hair. Now, she would happily spend a thousand years of just that and nothing more, for eternity.

Her own door is locked, she knows. Madame Gagnon has the key, and Sasha would rather eat nails than ask the concierge for what rightfully belongs to her. Instead, she climbs one more floor and knocks at Dr. Larsen’s apartment. Five knocks, then ten. He is either asleep or not there.

At the edge of tears, Sasha sits against his door, her legs finally giving out. The hallway smells of boiled potatoes and floor polish, scents so ordinary they make her throat ache. Through the walls, she can hear someone’s radio playing a waltz. She presses her fists against her eyes until colors bloom in the darkness.

Be clever, Maman had said. Be invisible. But for how long? When will Dr. Larsen return, and what then? Will he be able to tell her what to do next? How to go on until the world makes sense again?

The waltz ends. Another begins. Through the window at the end of the hall, Paris goes about its business as if her family and so many others haven’t just vanished into the empty belly of a swimming pool. As if she isn’t sitting here, alone, watching the sun hanging motionless in a sky that has no right at all to be so blue.

The piscine still echoes inside her—the shouting, the weeping, the stunned, orderly horror of it all. She tries to think of something else. Anything else.

And somehow, impossibly, she thinks of Gérard.

How he had stood half in shadow at the corner of her street, the violin pressed under his chin. The sound of music winding its way toward her like a lifeline.

She fixes her mind on the memory, trying to recall the notes. But she can’t. Only the feeling. The way the song had gathered and unfurled, ringing past every raw and hopeless feeling in her to say: You are not alone. The way it had made her believe, for one fragile moment, that beauty could still exist in the midst of all this wreckage.

Had it even happened? The question catches in her chest like a stone. It feels unimaginable now. Would any boy and girl ever find something so sweet and pure again in a world so hollowed out, so mutilated?

She hugs herself against the gnawing emptiness, the buildings and people outside shifting past her like flecks of ash. She does not know if she will ever see Gérard again. She does not know if any of them will survive. But somewhere, deep in the scaffolding of herself, she shelters it anyway: the soundless, stubborn memory of music.

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 63

In November, a late-autumn storm arrives with shocking violence, rain hammering against the slate roofs with enough force to wake the entire dormitory. The smell of damp settles into everything—wool, straw, skin. The floors become slick. As she moves, Alouette’s shift clings to her skin, making her all too aware of her swelling breasts and rounded belly.

Working beside Alouette, Christiane begins to cough. A hoarse bark that seems to worsen by the hour.

Alouette studies her pale face, thinking of how quickly sickness spreads here, how little choice anyone has once weakness shows. “You should go to the infirmary.”

“It’s nothing.”

A lie. Alouette feels a fierce ache rise in her throat. Christiane is all bone and hope, stitched together by the thinnest thread of survival. And yet somehow, against everything, she is still here.

With the shifting season, they have been assigned to a small storehouse where herbs are dried, tinctures and pastes are prepared.

Sometimes the smells turn Alouette’s stomach, especially lately, but she breathes through it. Here, grounded by simple tasks and measured things, she can still pretend she has control. In a way, this is the last thing that belongs to her—the weighing out of powders, the slow transformation of plants into potent remedies. The crushed herbs and roots stain her fingers, reminding her of her kitchen workshop, her experiments deepening over carefully watched flame. She used to believe color meant freedom. Now it means survival.

The storeroom is warm, thick with the bitter perfumes of valerian root, poppy resin, and dried angelica. Alouette works methodically, pressing a mortar into a mixture of powdered rosehips and rue, while Christiane strips dried chamomile buds into a jar. The younger girl is moving more slowly than is typical for her. Though she does her best to hide it, her breathing is shallow.

“More lemon balm,” Alouette murmurs, handing her a bundle of the coarse leaves. She doesn’t say you need it, but Christiane seems to understand.

She takes the bundle, grinding a few of the leaves between her fingers before bringing them to her nose. “It smells like summer.”

Alouette nods but does not answer. Summer seems to belong only to faraway places, distant lands. Left-behind lives. And the next time June or July comes around, will she be a mother, with an infant kept away somewhere, wet-nursed by a stranger? She cannot picture any of it clearly.

SINCE ALOUETTE’S ARRIVAL, the population within Salpêtrière has swelled, pressing bodies into every available corner. The king’s decree to sweep clean the streets of Paris has sent wave after wave of women through its gates—beggars, vagrants, the sick and the poor—until the asylum groans under the weight of them all. The dormitories are overflowing. The infirmary is stretched beyond its limits. Disease creeps in with the damp; hunger gnaws at the edges of every day.

Poor weather makes everything worse. After weeks of intermittent rain, everyone talks of the Seine, which is all too near. The threat of rising water. Only a small levee along the Ivry Plain separates the asylum from the river.

But Alouette finds herself thinking instead of the Bièvre. She dreams of it one night, lapping at her hands like a mongrel dog. A small thing, cowering and mewling. Then it grows, swelling in coils, dark and endless, until it threatens to cover everything. Her limbs, her unborn child. Even her mind.

She gasps awake from the nightmare—and finds the floor of their cell is glassy with moisture. Sylvine sits up sharply beside her, blinking through the dark. The moon is a smudge behind thick clouds, but even in the dimness, Alouette can see from the rippling sheen along the floor that it’s spreading, rising.

When she swings her legs over the edge of the cot, the water bites like ice against her bare skin. She grips the edge of the pallet for balance as the chapel bell begins to ring—too early for morning prayers. A warning or alarm of some kind.

Sylvine’s voice is grim. “I hope they don’t make us work in this.”

The thought alone makes Alouette’s stomach churn. But she is not thinking only of herself. She is thinking of what it means to carry a child in this place. Of the sickness building in Christiane’s lungs. Of the slowly growing boy or girl inside her, a heartbeat keeping time with her own.

CHAPTER 64

The flood rises faster than anyone expects. First puddles in the courtyard, then water spilling into corridors, saturating every wall. After a week of rain, Alouette hears a scream—short and sharp as a pistol crack—from the far side of the compound. She doesn’t know yet what it foretells. But she feels the sound in her marrow just the same.

An old well has given way near the laundry yard. Wading to do her work, a laundress stumbled onto something half buried in the thick sediment. A pale shape caught in the willow’s exposed roots. It seemed to be a branch at first, or perhaps a stone. But as the laundress stared, it became a child’s skull, no larger than a fist.

Now, women come running as she shrieks, their feet sucking in the mud. They gather at the well’s edge, a tight knot of bodies, their breath steaming in the cold air. None here are naive observers. They have seen starvation and sickness, seen others torn apart by the machinery of the asylum. And yet they recoil. Hands rise to cover mouths, to grip crosses, to press against pounding hearts.

ALOUETTE FEELS THE shock of the discovery spreading through the compound long before she can piece together what the details mean. It’s not until she talks with Sylvine that she even begins to suspect the full truth.

“So, they still use that place,” Sylvine murmurs. “I should have known.”

When Alouette presses, the older woman’s gaze drifts across their cell as if she’s looking through it, as if time itself has opened a small wound.

Finally, she says, “They told me that my daughter had a proper burial in the cemetery just beyond our walls.” She looks down at her hands. “I tried to believe them. For a long time, I did. But now?” She glances up again, her eyes dark and clear. “Even the ones they say survive—the ones sent to wet nurses, to other homes… maybe that’s a lie too. Maybe it always was.”

Alouette doesn’t answer. She can’t. A lump of fear and dread has lodged in her throat. Sylvine might very well be describing what’s to come for her in a few more months. When her own contractions begin.

Sylvine goes on, her voice dropping. “They would never dare dispose of those born to privilege, of course—the ones whose fathers would notice if they vanished. But the rest? For women like us?” She shakes her head. “No one asks. No one cares. The sisters probably tell themselves it’s a kindness. Another mouth spared from hunger. Another soul released before it can suffer.”

Silence pools between them, deep and still. Alouette can scarcely breathe inside it.

THE NEXT MORNING, the rumors have spread too far to be ignored. An officière stands in the yard, her hands folded primly before her, voice carrying over the assembled crowd.

“It has come to our attention that falsehoods are being whispered about the old cemetery. It was here long before we came and has nothing to do with the asylum. Let there be no mistake: The babes born to our women are placed in the charge of wet nurses and sent where they will be properly cared for. We do not harm or abandon children.”

The women remain silent. Some because they believe. Some because they know it’s dangerous not to. Alouette says nothing, but the lie rings in her ears like a struck bell.

Later, as Alouette moves through the corridors of the infirmary on an errand, she catches sight of a figure in the alcove, half hidden. Marguerite is there with her back turned, a small, battered ledger in her hands. It looks as if she might be taking inventory of the linen, but as soon as she senses Alouette’s presence, she stiffens and tucks the book away too quickly.

Alouette frowns. “What is it?”

Marguerite stares at her for a long moment, an exposed rawness in her expression. “Someone has to remember them,” she says finally, her voice taut, barely contained.

“What do you mean? The cemetery?”

“No. The dead have their witness now. But what about the living?”

“The physician,” Alouette murmurs as the pieces click into place. “You’re documenting what he does.”

“What they all do. The guards. The sisters who look away.” Marguerite exhales, glancing toward the infirmary doors. “They think if no one writes it down, it never happened. Just like those babies in the ground.”

She hesitates, then adds in a lower voice, “I think the physician uses valerian. To quiet the ones who resist. Never the jewels, of course. He wouldn’t dare. Only those beneath notice. Beneath contempt.”

Alouette swallows hard, her throat raw. “You’re brave,” she says.

“I don’t know about that.” Marguerite blinks several times, her fingers tightening around the spine of her ledger. “Someone has to do it.”

Alouette nods, reaching out to touch Marguerite’s wrist. The two look at each other in the quiet alcove, among rows of folded linen, as an unspoken pact is made. A flicker of rebellion, passed hand to hand like a matchstick, waiting for the moment to strike.

CHAPTER 65

After two weeks of rain, the path to the dining hall is a misery of wet skirts and sodden hems. The women move in a slow procession, shuffling through the mud and standing water. Their breath steams in the cold. The wool shawls stretched over their heads do little to keep the damp at bay.

Inside, it’s scarcely better. The air swims with rancid steam, foul breath, and the press of too many bodies. Silent on her bench and fighting nausea, Alouette struggles to finish her meal when she catches several sentences of gossip at the next table.

“Did you hear?” A woman leans toward her companion, voice low but carrying. “About the girl from the infirmary?”

Alouette’s spoon stills halfway to her mouth.

“Who?” asks another woman—older, with the scarred hands that mark her as one of the ropemakers. “The pretty one who works with the physician?”

“Marguerite.” The first woman glances around before continuing. “They found something she’d written in the linen stores.”

Alouette forces herself to breathe.

“She must have hidden it there,” the woman goes on. “She’s been keeping records of things that happen in the infirmary.”

“Bold!” someone hisses.

“Yes. And foolish.”

Alouette doesn’t dare turn to ask for more information. The sisters are like hawks on fence posts, eyes always searching for a movement out of place. Instead, she holds terribly still while her heart ticks out of rhythm.

“As if the superioress doesn’t already know. As if they all don’t know. But she had proof.”

Alouette glimpses the speaker out of the corner of her eye. A thin woman from the weaving room.

“Proof doesn’t matter,” the older woman replies. “They can burn a book. They can break the hands that wrote those dangerous words.”

A hush falls over them as an officière passes. They all bend over their bowls, silent until the footsteps fade.

“Where is she now?” The question comes from a newcomer, young and unwary. Several women shush her.

But the first woman answers anyway, her voice barely above a whisper. “The isolation cells below Saint-Augustin’s. Ten days, they say. Though some don’t come back the same after even a few.”

Alouette hears nothing more. Her pulse beats too loudly, hammering a dreadful rhythm as she pushes her bowl away, sick with worry. She should act. Marguerite is resisting courageously—while she does nothing. And yet, if she speaks, if she dares to intervene, what then? The superioress would not protect her any more than she protected Marguerite. The lay sisters would pretend that nothing happened, as they always do. And what of her child?

A shudder runs through her. If they decided she was a threat, if they sent her to the isolation cells, too, her child might be endangered now, before it can draw a single breath. She must think of that most of all, though her insides twist with rage and shame. The urge to help her friend burns inside her, but she does not move. Not yet.

THE CONSTANT DRIP of water echoes like a mocking heartbeat as Alouette waits to see what will become of Marguerite. The paths through Salpêtrière have become treacherous with December frost, the stone black and slick underfoot.

New whispers travel through the corridors and cell to cell. Some claim to hear crying in the walls at night, a thin wail that weaves through the steady drip-drip-drip until no one can tell which is water and which is grief. The lay sisters command silence on the matter, yet even they have begun to murmur their prayers more fervently.

Through it all, the superioress moves like a dark star, her long robes flapping, her feet and hands never still. When she finally summons the women to assemble in the chapel, she seems untouched by the wet chill.

“My daughters,” she begins, her voice carrying to every corner. “This suffering is not without purpose. The trials we endure are the trials of the saints—refining us, purging what is unworthy. The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart.”

Alouette swallows back rage, bitter as communion wine. Almost nothing can surprise her anymore.

“There are those among you who have given in to fear, who mistake tribulation for cruelty,” the superioress goes on. “You whisper of bones, of disappearances, of things you cannot understand. But our Creator does not abandon his own. He calls each soul to account, and so must we.”

A hush follows while she pauses. A calculated silence.

Then: “Repairs will be made. The flood will recede, and we will endure, as we always have. The infirmary will be restored. The dormitories reinforced. The work we do here must go on.”

Alouette studies the women around her. The silence within the chapel is thick, but it isn’t reverence. It’s the muteness of those who have learned what happens when they speak.

Her gaze flickers toward the front of the hall, where the jewels stand in their customary place—dry and untouched. They have suffered nothing. Their linens are still pressed. Their faces glow with health.

WHEN MARGUERITE FINALLY returns, Alouette scarcely recognizes her. It is not only that her friend has become thinner, her cheekbones like knife blades. Her eyes have changed. In them Alouette sees a brittle stillness that was not there before. Like water frozen to black ice.

Marguerite refuses to speak of what happened to her in isolation, which concerns Alouette even more. “You could have lied and said you had nothing to do with it,” she says, watching Marguerite crush a sprig of wormwood. Its bitter scent curls up, sharp as a warning. “You could have protected yourself.”

“No,” she replies woodenly. “That’s what they want—for us to deny what’s real. To bend to their deceptions.”

“Marguerite, I—” She falters, the words tangling like thread. “I’m sorry. I should have tried to intervene somehow.”

For a long moment, Marguerite says nothing. Then, slowly, she lifts her gaze. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

Alouette wants to argue, but she cannot. The truth is as undeniable as the rising water. One truth, but perhaps there are others? She glances at the herbs on the shelves, row upon row of vials and jars. Wormwood. Hemlock. Belladonna. A dozen ways to take back power. A dozen ways to end a man’s hold over them.

“The physician,” she says finally. “He isn’t untouchable. No one is.”

Marguerite follows her eyes and nods. It isn’t yet a plan, but the seed of one. A dark aspiration taking root in the damp air.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 66

Kristof hasn’t slept. He doesn’t expect to. After the buses disappeared, he paced his apartment, feeling more and more agitated. Finally, he left his flat and started walking—first to Sainte-Anne’s, where no one had any answers or useful information about the mass arrests. Then to the Mairie, the lycée, the market square. All this searching has been pointless so far, and yet pointlessness seems a better option than utter despair.

By the time he returns to his building, it’s midafternoon. He climbs the steps slowly, automatically, meaning only to drink some water, to rinse his hands and face—and maybe find something to smash.

He has only reached the second floor when he stops cold. Rachel’s Singer sewing machine—the one she uses to help support the family—sits in the hallway next to the Brodskys’ door. The machine still smells faintly of oil, its black surface gleaming like polished onyx. He can’t count the number of evenings he watched Rachel hunched over it, her fingers a deft blur. Now it looks as alien and out of place as a letter box on the moon. Kristof is still staring at the thing, bewildered, when Madame Gagnon appears at the threshold, a stack of towels in her arms.

“What are you doing?” he fumes.

She draws herself up, chin lifted. “I was given the key. The prefecture told me that I’m to inventory the apartment.”

His ears begin to ring faintly. The woman doesn’t even have the decency to feel embarrassed, ashamed. “You’re stealing from them.”

She won’t meet his eyes. “You’re a foreigner. You don’t understand how things work now. Everything must be accounted for. It’s the law.”

“The law allows you to take another family’s possessions? To strip their home before they’re even—” He can’t finish the sentence for wanting to strike her. To tear Rachel’s and Felix’s things from her clawlike hands.

“Keep your voice down,” she hisses. “Unless you want the whole building to know about your visitor.”

He feels the blood drain from his face. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh yes, I heard someone go up to your apartment earlier,” she continues smugly. “After the arrests, they let some of the older children go. Who can say why? Though they might change their minds.” She smooths the nap of one of Rachel’s towels with her palm. “And there are always questions about papers, about birth dates. Mistakes can be found.”

Kristof’s first thought floods him with relief. If Sasha has come to him, at least she isn’t wandering the streets alone. But she is still in danger, if he understands Madame Gagnon’s insinuation correctly. “Are you threatening me?”

“I’m explaining how things work now. The prefecture appreciates citizens who pay attention. Who notice things that seem… irregular.” Her eyes flick toward the stairs, indicating his apartment. “You’re a foreigner yourself, Doctor. You should be more careful about drawing attention.”

Her words chill him, not just because of the warning they carry, but because of the casual way she says them. As if she is describing the weather, not the possibility of sending a child to her death. How long has she been waiting for this opportunity?

“Everything here belongs to the Brodskys,” he says, his voice shaking. “To a family. Neighbors you’ve known for years. Rald brought you flowers on May Day, for God’s sake.”

“These things once belonged to Jews,” she corrects flatly. “And now they belong to France.”

Kristof can’t think straight, can’t even see straight as he pushes past her and rushes up the stairs, fumbling with his keys. As soon as he reaches the third-floor landing, there is Sasha, huddled on the floor against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest. He drops beside her, his medical training kicking in through his fear. Her dress is soaked with sweat. He notes her pallor, the slight tremor in her hands, the way her eyes don’t quite focus. All signs of shock.

“Are you hurt?”

She doesn’t respond at first. Then: “I don’t understand.”

His fingers find her wrist, checking her pulse. Too fast, too thready. Her skin is cool and clammy despite the summer heat. “Let’s get you inside,” he says, helping her up.

Her legs nearly buckle. How long has she been sitting here, alone? He opens the door and guides her to the kitchen table, pours water into a glass. “Small sips,” he instructs, watching her hands shake. “Where is your family?”

“The piscine. In Butte-aux-Cailles.” She wraps her hands around the glass but doesn’t drink. “They separated us. I heard the guards talking about transports, to Drancy, they said. Why would they arrest families? All this talk of work camps. Is Rald supposed to work?”

He can’t process it all. “The piscine?”

She nods. “It was so hot in there. They put us in the empty pool. At least a hundred Jews, mostly from the neighborhood.”

“My God. Why did they release you? I don’t understand.”

“The guards said children over fourteen could go, but the little ones…” Her voice cracks. “I didn’t want to leave, but Maman made me. She wouldn’t even look at me when she pushed me away.”

“Your mother did what she had to do.” He doesn’t say: What any parent would do if faced with what Rachel must have known was coming.

He studies Sasha’s face, still pale with shock. Her eyes seem to look through him rather than at him, focused on something he can’t see—perhaps her family, perhaps the piscine, its emptied pool filled with terrified people. The weight of what is happening—to the Brodskys, to thousands of others—settles over him like lead.

Kristof picks up her water glass and moves to a cupboard in his kitchen, where he adds a few drops from the small bottle of valerian he keeps for his insomnia. “Drink this,” he says, returning to her. “It will help calm your nerves.”

She takes the glass automatically, her fingers trembling slightly as they brush against his. “What happens now?” she asks in a voice that’s barely audible.

The question hovers, seeming to vibrate. He could speak of the hospital, he thinks, of colleagues who might help, of safe houses and resistance networks. He could mention Alesander, Ursula, the tunnels that run beneath their feet. But these are fragments of possibility, not certainties. And he has learned enough in the past years to know how quickly certainties collapse.

Looking at Sasha—this bright, resilient girl who has always reminded him so painfully of his sister—Kristof feels an overwhelming desire to reassure her, knowing full well those reassurances might be utterly empty. Rachel sent Sasha to him knowing she might never see her daughter again. The labor camps, the “resettlement” programs—these places can’t resemble what they’ve been told, what they tell themselves. Rachel knew it too.

He thinks of the piscine as Sasha described it. Not the charming sanctuary this neighborhood has always been proud of, with its sweeping architecture and graceful lines. But a holding pen, a way station to somewhere even worse. Much worse, if his instincts are correct. The world he once believed in—of reason, of medical ethics, of fundamental human dignity—is gone, replaced by something monstrous. And they have all let it happen, one small compromise at a time.

As his mind wheels numbly through ways to answer her, Sasha rises from her chair and slides in next to him, tucking her head against his shoulder. It is a gesture of tender alliance that he knows he hasn’t earned yet. But circumstances have pushed them past all that.

“You’re all I have,” Sasha says simply.

As her breathing gradually steadies, Kristof glances toward the window, all too aware of how exposed they are. Madame Gagnon’s threat still hangs in the air like smoke. How long before she makes good on it? How long before a knock at the door brings uniforms, questions, another journey to the piscine—or worse? Tomorrow, he will need to find Alesander. Tonight, they will have to be careful. Very careful.

CHAPTER 67

Through a small gap in the curtains, Sasha watches the street below. It’s strange to see the usual neighbors coming and going. In front of a doorway across the street, two younger boys are playing with bottle caps. A woman hangs laundry on a line, grasping for clothespins in her basket without needing to look. In their world, nothing has changed, she supposes.

Meanwhile, for Sasha, the ropes have been cut at each anchoring point of a terrible balloon. Just through the floorboards beneath her feet, the three rooms that have held all the important moments of her life are still there—still intact—and yet they are unreachable. More than unreachable: erased. And she is floating, farther and farther away, without knowing what—if anything—she can safely hook onto to keep from being swallowed up by space. By nothingness.

She keeps replaying the moments in the piscine. The wild brightness in her mother’s eyes as she pushed her toward the ladder. Toward freedom—freedom she would give back instantly if she could. Maurice’s pale, nervous face in the crowd of released children, his eyes meeting hers before they were separated in the chaos. Drancy, Pithiviers, a concentration camp in Germany—any hardship or brutality, she thinks, would be bearable if she were with her family. But alone? Alone she hardly knows what it means to be alive.

Her eyes begin to fill with hot tears. Then she sees him on the street below—through the film of tears so that he swims, too, blurring into watercolor. Dark beret, dark eyes, rumpled shirt and vest—Gérard. She blinks several times in utter disbelief and spots Maurice as well. How on earth did they find each other? she wonders. These two, as unalike as boys could be. Gérard, with his quiet center of gravity, his sensitive, intelligent questions, the way he seems to carry a melody inside him even in silence. And Maurice, who can’t be still even now, his fingers bouncing against his knee, something raw and dazed in his posture, like a bird stunned mid-flight.

With them is a third figure—standing slightly apart, her ponytail askew, her arms crossed tightly in front of her chest, as if she’s trying to hold herself in place by sheer force of will. Sasha recognizes her from the grade above her in school. Annette Gaston is her name, though Sasha can’t remember ever giving the girl a second look. Now, she is here with the boys—all of them looking up at the building where Sasha should be, one floor below.

Gérard knows my house number? But yes, she remembers now. She showed him that day when he walked her home from the library. Sasha only knows his last name, Nordmann, and that he lives in the 12th arrondissement. That he plays the violin and reads poetry. That he carried her books for her, that halcyon day, a million years ago.

As if he can feel her gaze, Gérard glances upward and their eyes meet. Something flaps and lurches in her chest—a dove in a snare. He raises his hand, the smallest gesture. They have recognized each other as the newest kind of refugees in this ever-stranger war. Adolescent boys and girls, untethered from their families and staggering up the streets of Paris on their own.

She lets the curtain fall and turns to Kristof, who is in the small kitchen, making tea. “Some other kids are here,” she says. “Down below. I know them.”

Kristof leaves the cups to join her at the window. “Here? Now?”

“Yes. I just saw them.” She meets his eyes. “They need help too.”

He studies her for a moment, then nods. “Let me check to make sure Madame Gagnon isn’t nearby. Then we’ll bring them up. Quickly, though.”

When the coast is clear, Sasha lifts the curtain again and makes three motions slowly, so that Gérard understands. A wave to come, the number 3, and a finger over her lips: Make no sound.

Soon they hear the whisper of careful footsteps treading through the stairwell. Sasha and Kristof both go to the door to usher them inside.

“This is my neighbor, Kristof Larsen,” Sasha explains. “He’s a good person, and a doctor. Annette and Maurice both go to my school. Gérard is another friend, from the library.” She looks at him for a moment, and she feels a tugging sensation in her chest—a tether of connection, a rope thrown and caught. They are not the same people they were a few weeks ago at the library, at school. Not who they were even yesterday.

“Please sit down,” Kristof says. “You must be hungry and thirsty.”

When he moves off toward the kitchen, rifling through the cupboards, Maurice whispers to Sasha, “Can he be trusted?” His voice cracks slightly, the bravado of school lunch tables replaced by something thinner, stripped thin as wire.

She nods. “He’s already promised to help me. What happened to all of you?”

“They took my parents this morning,” Annette murmurs quietly. “I was sleeping at my grandmother’s house. When I came home, they were gone.” Then her eyes dart toward the door as if she expects someone to appear, either to make things worse or declare it all a dream.

“Like you, I left the piscine,” Maurice says to Sasha. “But I didn’t know where to go. Gérard found me hiding near the synagogue.”

“In the late morning, I went to my music lesson,” Gérard adds. “My father told me not to come home if I saw police in our street.” He blinks as if to dispel the image. “I did anyway. Through the back. They were already gone. The apartment was empty.”

They fall silent, the enormity of their collective loss filling the small apartment. Four children adrift in a city that has abandoned them.

Moments later, Kristof sets down a tin of crackers, a small wedge of cheese, and two hard-boiled eggs he’s sliced into portions. Sasha notices how Kristof’s gaze passes over each of them in turn—herself, Gérard, Maurice, Annette—his expression changing subtly, as if he’s mentally calculating what it will take to keep them all safe. Maurice keeps blinking fast, almost in rhythm to his chewing. It seems to be taking all his effort not to cry. Annette eats nothing—her arms a tight “x” over her narrow rib cage, dark eyes fixed on a crack in the wall.

“We can’t stay here,” Kristof says after a while. “It’s too dangerous.”

“The concierge,” Sasha explains to the others. “She knows I’m here.”

Kristof nods grimly. “She made it very clear that she’s tempted to call the police. She’d report all of you. We need to find somewhere safer. Once I get you settled, I’ll come back and gather more food and blankets. Water.”

“Where can we go?” Gérard asks.

“To someone who can help us,” Kristof says. “Someone I trust.”

“What about our families?” Annette chimes in, fear plain at the edge of her voice. “If we leave, how will they find us?”

Sasha knows his answer before Kristof speaks it aloud.

“Right now, we focus on keeping you out of harm’s way. Later, when this is over, we’ll search for them. I promise.”

Maurice makes a nervous sound in his throat. There’s a tear in his sweater where he’s ripped off the Jewish star. Except for the day they first had to wear the horrible badge at school, Sasha has always felt so irritated by Maurice. Only wishing that he would be quiet, that he would go away. Now she finds herself on the verge of sobbing just to know that he is alive and she is too.

And Gérard. Her heart flutters, embarrassing her. She has only ever seen him twice, and yet she has memorized his face. His high, smooth forehead; the small mole to the right of his nose; his eyebrows full and straight above deep brown eyes. These details are like familiar words leaping from the page of an indecipherable text.

“I’m glad you came to look for me,” she says, meeting Gérard’s look across the table.

He leans forward, not missing a beat. “I thought we should stick together.”

She nods, too overcome to speak. Hours ago, she was a castaway, alone on a deserted island. Now a flare soars, illuminating three more survivors. “How can this be real?” she asks quietly, not expecting an answer.

Later, after Sasha and the others have removed their stars like Maurice and gathered a few belongings, Sasha pauses at the threshold. She takes in the room one last time—the kitchen table where she sat just hours ago, trembling with shock. Mensa. The window where she first spotted the others on the street below. Fenestra. Dr. Larsen’s front door with its off-white paint, its tarnished brass keyhole. Door, porta, portae. She clings to the Latin words to ground herself. But this moment itself is untranslatable. Kristof turns his key in the lock, a sound that feels terribly final.

“Stay close together,” Kristof whispers, checking the hallway. “Don’t speak unless necessary. If we’re stopped, let me do the talking.”

The stairwell smells of floor polish and someone’s supper cooking—ordinary scents that became artifacts from another life the moment her family was led to the buses. Sasha breathes them in, knowing they may be the last remnants of home.

“Where are you taking us?” Maurice breathes as they descend the stairs in a tight group.

“Somewhere the Germans haven’t mapped yet.”

CHAPTER 68

In the thickening twilight, Kristof leads the four teenagers through back streets and narrow passages, avoiding the main boulevards where patrols might stop them. They move in silence, the young people following without question. Each time they approach an intersection, he pauses, scanning for uniforms or suspicious onlookers before signaling them forward.

“Try to walk naturally,” he whispers as they cut through a deserted garden behind an apartment block. “Keep your heads down if anyone passes.”

He’s not at all certain Alesander will be at the bunker—they haven’t arranged a meeting—but the souterrain is their best chance for temporary safety. The tunnels themselves offer countless hiding places, even for a substantial length of time, though he hopes it won’t come to that.

Sasha stays just behind him, her face set with determination despite her exhaustion. Gérard keeps a protective hand near Annette’s elbow, steadying her whenever she stumbles. Maurice brings up the rear, constantly glancing over his shoulder. Their stars are gone, yes, but if anyone looked closely, they would see how the torn fabric and bits of frayed thread make it obvious that something’s missing, like scars barely healed over a wound.

As they approach the Parc Montsouris, Kristof slows their pace. The last traces of daylight are fading, and the park will soon be empty except for the occasional patrol. Perfect timing if they’re lucky, a disaster if not.

He leads them to the place where the old tracks dip into shadow. In the dimness, they resemble the outline of a river. The Bièvre, perhaps, which he knows is buried well below parts of this neighborhood—choked, poisoned, forced underground, but still alive beneath the city’s weight. Survival, in its oldest form. Quiet. Hidden. Stubborn.

“How old is this railway?” Maurice asks, his nervous energy channeled into analytical curiosity.

“Very. This is what’s left of the Petite Ceinture. More than a hundred years ago, these tracks circled the old fortification walls of the city. Do you like history?”

“I like to know how things work. History is full of war—like now.”

Kristof glances at each of the teenagers—their drawn faces, the dark circles under their eyes, the way they carry themselves as if bearing invisible burdens. Twelve hours ago, they were children with families, with homes, with futures they could imagine. Now they’re refugees in their own city, their entire worlds dismantled between sunrise and sunset. How many wars, he wonders, have these ancient stones witnessed? How many desperate flights through darkness?

“This,” he says as they draw closer to the overgrown bridge tunnel, marked with fading layers of graffiti and half swallowed by ivy, “will take us to a part of Paris most people have forgotten, if they ever knew to begin with.”

He scans their surroundings one last time before pulling aside a panel of loose boards. Behind it, a rusted iron door stands closed but unbolted, which means Alesander or someone else in their inner circle is here. He tugs open the door with a groan as the teens exchange glances, uncertainty giving way to curiosity.

“In,” Kristof urges. “Quickly.”

One by one, they slip through the opening. Kristof follows last, carefully replacing the boards before closing the iron door behind them. Darkness envelops them completely.

He hears Annette’s sharp intake of breath, Maurice’s nervous shuffling. “It’s all right,” he says, retrieving a small flashlight from his pocket. The weak beam illuminates stone steps descending into blackness. “Watch your step. The first few can be slippery.”

The stairs plummet downward, the July heat quickly peeling away, replaced by cool, clammy, mineral-tinged air. When they reach the bottom, the tunnel opens into a low-ceilinged passage just wide enough for two people to walk side by side. He flicks his flashlight ahead, at the crudely formed walls, the tamped clay floor.

“This is the souterrain,” Kristof explains. “Underground tunnels that run beneath much of the city. Some are ancient quarries where the stone for Paris was mined hundreds of years ago. Others were dug later, for sewers or the metro. Most people don’t have the faintest idea they’re here.”

“Amazing,” Gérard breathes, clearly taken with the play of shadow and light from Kristof’s flashlight beam.

“What keeps the ceiling from falling?” Annette asks with a small tremor in her voice.

“Don’t be afraid,” he reassures her. “The quarrymen left pillars of unmined stone behind them for support. Later, engineers reinforced the weaker sections with masonry.”

Maurice bobs his head. “Ingenious. A whole hidden infrastructure.”

“Yes, but not infallible. Stick close by and don’t even think of wandering off on your own. These tunnels stretch for miles, like a convoluted rabbit’s warren. I know my way around them well, but you could get lost in moments.”

Even in the dimness, Kristof feels Sasha’s attention shift to him with curiosity and perhaps admiration. That he, her predictable-seeming neighbor, who never once managed to beat her father in a round of Go, could have a secret skill, a secret life?

Maurice runs his hand along the rough-hewn wall. “You’re a doctor. Why do you know this stuff?”

“A friend showed me,” Kristof says simply. “Someone who understands Paris better than most. We’re going to meet him now. Hopefully, he can help us.”

As Kristof leads the way forward again, moving deeper into the tunnel network, he feels both relieved and surprised at how quickly all four of his young companions, even Annette, seem not just to accept this strange journey below, but to grow lighter and more curious, minute by minute. Then again, isn’t childhood full of beloved portal stories? The whirling tornado that takes Dorothy and Toto to Oz, the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Children seem to instinctively grasp that other realms might exist side by side with this one, just beyond a hidden door or winking mirror. The draw of hidden worlds doesn’t end at the nursery either. The adult psyche needs escape hatches, too, particularly in times of trauma. The first time he’d read Carl Jung in school, about the collective unconscious, those shared mythic structures that help humans process the unbearable, he’d been struck with the mind’s resourcefulness as it pursues survival with staggering ingenuity. When reality becomes too crushing, creating an “elsewhere” can free the soul. Can mean salvation.

He turns to find Sasha paused before a section of wall where someone, centuries ago, carved a small bird in flight. Her fingers begin to trace the outline so gently that she might be touching a live creature. When she looks up, their eyes meet, and for a moment, Kristof glimpses the same Sasha he knew before today—the curious scholar, the eager imagination—not just the traumatized refugee. Perhaps this is the true magic of the underground: It allows them, however briefly, to be more than their circumstances.

“It’s so quiet here,” Sasha says. “You can almost hear the stories being whispered from the walls.”

“Yes,” Kristof agrees, warmth spreading through him at the shared understanding. “I felt that my first time here too.”

ANOTHER TEN MINUTES of walking brings them to the junction where a reinforced wooden door is set into the wall. Kristof opens the lock, using the combination he’s been given, and opens the door to the safe room. The chamber is small, perhaps four meters square. A kerosene lamp hangs from a hook bolted into the limestone. For furnishings, there are canvas cots, a wooden table, and several crates stacked in one corner that can be used as chairs.

“I know it’s a little rustic,” Kristof says. “Rest here and have some water. I’ll be just down the passage at the main bunker. Hopefully, Alesander will be there—the friend I mentioned.”

The teens enter cautiously, taking in their surroundings. Maurice immediately begins examining the crates, while Annette sinks onto one of the cots, exhaustion finally overtaking her.

“Lock the door behind me,” Kristof instructs. “Don’t open it unless you hear my knock. Three-pause-two. Remember that.”

The main bunker lies twenty meters farther along the passage, through a section where the ceiling dips so low he has to bend nearly double to pass. Will Alesander understand why he’s brought four teenagers into their secret world? Kristof wonders as he approaches the door. Or will he see it as an unnecessary risk? There’s a ruthless practicality to his friend that sometimes unnerves him—a willingness to sacrifice almost anything for the greater good. But Sasha and the others need more than cold calculation now. They need safety, hope.

As he raises his hand to knock, Kristof steels himself for whatever reception awaits.

When the door swings open, Alesander is in the bunker alone. He’s wearing his Vichy uniform, a pistol held casually at his side.

“Kristof,” he says, lowering the weapon. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight. What’s happened?”

“I’ve told you about my neighbors, the Brodskys. They were arrested early this morning. Sasha was released and came to me for help.” Kristof runs a hand through his hair. “And she’s not alone. There are three other teens with her. All Jewish. All separated from their families in the roundups.”

Alesander’s expression darkens. “Where are they now?”

“In the safe room. I couldn’t leave them at my place. The concierge at my building isn’t trustworthy. She’s already looting their apartment. ‘Inventory,’ she called it.”

“What? You brought children down here?”

“They’re not children, they’re teenagers. And I didn’t have a choice. Did you know what was going to happen this morning? Could you have done something to stop it?”

“I had no idea. Only those at the highest levels were informed of these arrests. I’m sorry, but even if I had been in that circle, I couldn’t have done anything to stop this. Tens of thousands of people, Kristof. The French police are involved. They’re the ones making the arrests.”

“I know. So, what now?”

“I don’t know. Let me think.” Alesander crosses to a cupboard, pulling out a bottle and two glasses. He pours a measure of amber liquid into each.

Kristof sips, but the smoldering liquor does nothing to quell the iciness at his center. “Do they really mean to deport all of the Jews?”

“Foreign Jews, yes. For now.”

“Whole families. Even babies.” The words feel toxic on Kristof’s tongue. Sticky with evil.

“Yes.”

“It seems strange to me that the older children were released.”

“Me too. I think we can assume they’re still in danger.”

“I know.” Kristof takes a large swallow of brandy for courage, letting the liquor burn down his throat. “Sasha says her family was taken to the piscine in Butte-aux-Cailles with about a hundred others. It must be a holding house for now. Can we try to reach them? Maybe from below… that whole area is undermined. You know it better than I do.”

Alesander sets down his glass. “That would be madness. We’d need dozens of operatives. Weapons. Explosives.”

Kristof’s leg has begun to twitch. He stands up, pacing, but there’s nowhere to go. “I know it sounds impossible, but we can’t just leave them there.”

Alesander sighs. “Listen to me. There are four frightened teenagers who need us right now. Thanks to you, there’s a chance—a small one—to get them to safety. And you want to throw that away on a suicide mission?”

Kristof shakes his head, his hands trembling. “There has to be a way,” he insists, but his voice has lost its conviction.

“You’re not choosing to save the Brodskys or abandon them. There’s no choice, don’t you see? There’s only a guaranteed failure that gets us all killed. Or we could focus on reality. We could try to save the lives in front of us.”

Kristof says nothing for a moment, as Alesander’s words settle inside him with unexpected clarity.

For as long as he can remember, he’s always been trying to rescue others—his sister, long after it was too late; his patients at Sainte-Anne’s, despite the machinery of death grinding around them; Felix, Rachel, the children. “I’ve been chasing ghosts,” he says finally. “Trying to undo what’s already done.”

Alesander nods, his expression softening. “We all do, at first. The hardest thing is recognizing the difference between courage and magical thinking.”

Magical thinking. Kristof can’t deny it. That’s what he’s been operating on for almost a decade—the belief that if he just tries hard enough, wants it desperately enough, he can somehow reach into the belly of the whale and free those he loves from suffering or violence. From death. As if desperation alone can bend and reverse reality.

Something gives way inside of Kristof then—a letting-go and a taking-up. Rachel sent Sasha to him—not because she thought he could return to save them all, like a hero in a film. But because she knew he would do everything in his power to protect her daughter. Sasha’s one life.

The weight of Rachel’s trust both crushes and steadies him. It feels like growing up, somehow. Like finally seeing the world as it truly is. “Sasha needs me,” he finally says.

“Yes. And the others too.”

“Will you help us?”

Alesander sighs again. “Let me give it some thought. We need to be strategic. If twenty or thirty thousand Jews are being arrested, think of how many teenagers will be roaming the streets, in harm’s way, with nowhere to go. Instant orphans. Their apartments sealed.”

“Are you seriously trying to make me feel worse?”

“Of course not, but after this, who knows what else will happen? Paris might soon be a trap with no exit. We need to establish these routes now, while we still can.”

“This isn’t just about Sasha and the others.”

“No,” Alesander admits. “Resistance groups have been developing escape networks since before the occupation began, but with all of France now under German control, the old routes through the unoccupied zone are compromised. We need new pathways.” He reaches for a map, tracing a line with his fingertip. “The souterrain connecting to rural monasteries and then the mountain passes—it could work. But someone needs to plot it, document it, identify the dangers and safe houses.”

“A pilot run,” Kristof fills in. “A reconnaissance mission.”

Alesander nods, his look hardening with resolve. “I won’t pretend that bringing children through untested passages is ideal, but the alternative is worse. And young people like Sasha—they’re resilient, adaptable. They can learn to help guide others later.”

“You’re thinking long-term, then.”

“Do we have any other choice? This war isn’t going to be over anytime soon. And what the Germans have done in Poland, in Germany…” He exhales heavily. “It’s just the beginning. I’ve seen internal communications, Kristof. Their plans for Jews in France are far more systematic and extensive than these initial roundups. They’re establishing a machinery of extermination.” He blinks several times as if trying to dispel the worst of these haunting thoughts. Kristof has never seen him quite like this. “We need to create escape corridors now, while there’s still time. Before they close every border, every hidden passage.”

“What should I tell Sasha and the others? It might not be safe for them above anymore.”

“Probably not. I’m glad they’re here while we figure out a solution. Though I can’t promise you that even this space will be safe for very much longer.”

Kristof nods. “Then we’d better get to it.”

Alesander’s laugh sounds exasperated, overwhelmed. But Kristof thinks he can hear something else too. A ripple of his old intensity at the challenge of it all. “I’d guess we’d better.”

CHAPTER 69

While Alesander teaches the teenagers the basic navigation symbols used in the tunnels, Kristof slips away from the bunker. He needs to return to his apartment for essential supplies—medicines from his cabinet, the hidden cash beneath his floorboard, warmer clothes to share with the others. The tunnels can feel cold at first, though the temperature never really changes—cool and steady, like the hush of something ancient.

The streets above seem charged with a new level of menace. Each person in uniform seems to watch him with suspicion. Each passing vehicle slows for a fraction too long. Shadows stretch like accusing fingers as evening settles over the city.

Just as he turns onto rue Bobillot, a sudden movement from the small, gloomy park stops him short. Ursula. Her sweater is unbuttoned, her scarf askew, and beneath her nurse’s cap, her face is pale and tight with urgency.

“You can’t go home,” she says without greeting. “They’re waiting for you.”

“What do you mean?” he asks as his pulse begins to accelerate.

“Not here,” she murmurs, already turning away from the main street.

Kristof hesitates, scanning the area. A few workers trudge past, heads down. A man on a bicycle clatters over the cobblestones. Nothing seems particularly out of place—but it never does, until the last minute, when it’s too late to react.

He falls into step beside her, his body tight with apprehension.

They take a winding route, cutting along narrow rue de la Colonie, past a closed pharmacy and a row of shuttered market stalls. When they reach a tight passageway behind an abandoned shopfront, she stops and faces him.

“They know,” she says.

He frowns, struggling to understand. “About Sasha and the others?”

“I’m talking about the network. They arrested Julian last night. From his home.”

Kristof reaches for the wall beside him to steady himself, as if he’s been sucker punched. Julian—with his young wife and newborn child. Julian, who was once so pragmatic, worried about his family. In the end, he didn’t play it safe at all. He had answered Kristof’s call to arms and done the right thing, plunging into risk. And now, he’s paying the price.

“What happened?” he finally manages.

“Someone informed. It’s hard to know who. One of the nurses could be spying for the Germans. Or an eager resident, looking to please Claudel and advance his career. Either way, the whole network is compromised. They have the records. Names. Contacts. Everything we built at Sainte-Anne’s…”

“Where is Julian now?”

“I don’t know.” Ursula wraps her arms around herself, her expression raw. “I went to check on his wife. The apartment was sealed. Neighbors said the Gestapo came before dawn.”

From around the corner, a sound erupts. Boots clack hard along the pavement. They both freeze, pressing deeper into the shadows until the patrol passes.

Kristof closes his eyes for a moment, leaning back against the crumbling brick and playing out their last mission again in his mind. How Julian had stood in the shadowed courtyard, coat collar turned up against the cool night air, his hand lifting in that quiet salute. A wave. A warning. A goodbye. Kristof should have fully understood the dangers then. Maybe he had. But what could he have done?

Julian had made his choice. They’d all done the same, in one way or another.

“You can’t go back to the hospital,” Ursula says once the patrol has moved well out of sight. “They’ll arrest you. Two agents were waiting in Claudel’s office when I arrived for my shift. I said I needed to retrieve something from the supply room and slipped out the service entrance.”

“And my apartment?”

“SS officers. I saw them in front of your building, speaking with your concierge.”

Madame Gagnon. Of course. She’d made good on her threat more quickly than he’d anticipated.

“What about my patients?” he asks, the new realization knocking him sideways again. Henri Allard, who won’t be saved from transport now. And all the others he’s been treating, caring about, never losing hope for.

“You’d be useless to them. You wouldn’t get through the front door without being stopped. And then what?”

Woodenly, they begin to walk again, saying nothing. Kristof follows Ursula without feeling his legs beneath him, through a city that no longer resembles Paris at all. Crossing into the Parc Kellermann, Kristof realizes they’ve made two-thirds of a large loop. In ten more minutes, he could be back at the Petite Ceinture having accomplished nothing except learning more dire news.

Beyond an avenue of linden trees, they wander deeper into the park, passing the skeletal remains of what was once the centerpiece of the International Exposition. Jacques Gréber’s vision of a great cascading waterfall, now dry and cracked, its concrete basin littered with fallen leaves and propaganda flyers. Just five years ago, this park was transformed into a celebration of progress, of art, of human potential. Nations from around the world had built pavilions showcasing their visions of the future.

Now Kristof stands before the modernist ruins, struck by the bitter irony. When great minds had dreamed of the advancements and progress that lay ahead for the world, they could never have imagined this. Art plundered, creativity and innovation turned to destruction.

The world has gone mad. Has disintegrated into some equation of pure evil. It’s taking all of Kristof’s effort just to hold up his own weight, to breathe in and out. The tragedies of this single day alone are too much to process. Why should he be free to run when others can’t? Rachel and the children. Felix. Julian. His patients.

He could go to the Gestapo and claim responsibility for the hospital resistance. Trade his life for Julian’s. Or perhaps set fire to the hospital records before they can be used to condemn his patients. He could plant a bomb at enemy headquarters.

The thoughts come at a feverish pace—a dark, desperate kaleidoscope clicking through outlandish possibilities. Glancing up at the edge of the waterfall’s upper basin, then to the concrete far below, a foolish notion flickers through his mind. One quick lunge off the precipice and it would all be over. His failures, his choices, his helplessness. “Dutch Doctor’s Final Protest,” the headline would read. But of course, there would be no headline. His death would not be news, would not register in any way. It would make no more of a mark in passing than the entirety of his cautious life. Annelies had chosen that path. The final refusal, the ultimate escape. He hates thinking it, but suicide is easy for the dead. Impossible for those who have to go on without them.

“Where will you go now?” Ursula asks, breaking into his dark thoughts.

Kristof sighs, feeling both tenuous and impossibly burdened. “To talk to Alesander. I don’t think he knows about Julian yet. He might have ideas about how to get him released. And the hospital… my patients. Can we really just walk away when they’re in such danger?”

Ursula studies him for a long moment. “When I was a girl, my grandmother told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said, ‘Great tragedies don’t ask for great heroes. They ask for ordinary people willing to do the next right thing.’ ” She looks toward the skyline, where evening lights are beginning to wink on. “Maybe that’s all any of us can do now.”

The words linger there between them, simple yet profound. Kristof thinks of the four teenagers waiting in the bunker with Alesander. Their trust. Their need. Sasha’s eyes, haunted but still alive with hope.

“The next right thing,” he repeats softly.

Ursula smiles faintly. “It’s not what we planned. It’s not what we trained for. But sometimes life narrows our choices until there’s only one path left.” She touches his arm briefly. “Take it.”

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 70

Time blurs. The days pass, one indistinguishable from the next. The dormitories are choked with damp straw, the infirmary overflows, and the women grow thinner by the week. Sickness spreads in the close quarters, feeding on vulnerability.

In the grinding room, the high, narrow windows are streaked with condensation that never fully dries. Christiane’s cough echoes as they work, a hollow sound that suggests fluid in the lungs. Her hands shake as she measures dried herbs, spilling more than she saves. No one corrects her. What does it matter? There is never enough medicine, never enough food, never enough of anything but suffering.

Alouette has other things on her mind as well. A little more than five months pregnant, her body has thickened steadily. She can still hide it beneath her shift, but each gesture, each bend or breath, reminds her she is not alone. She is two lives now—one fragile, growing quietly inside the other. She’s taken to keeping to the shadows when she can, drawing her shawl tighter during her treatments, or when a lay sister or guard passes too close.

“It’s too dangerous to go to the infirmary,” Alouette says quietly.

“I know.” Christiane’s voice is wisp thin. “There must be somewhere safe,” she says, but they both know there isn’t.

IN THE COMING days, Christiane’s cough worsens.

“Here.” Alouette passes her a tincture of thyme and honey.

Christiane shakes her head. “It doesn’t help anymore. Nothing does. I’m so tired, Alouette.”

The resignation in her tone makes Alouette’s skin prickle. She studies Christiane’s face—the fever-bright eyes, the strange calm settling over her features.

She is about to speak when they hear footsteps in the corridor. The physician’s measured tread, coming closer.

When he moves on, Alouette realizes that she’s bitten her lip. With her tongue, she tastes the iron tang of blood.

“You need to get better,” she tells Christiane. “Go back to your cell and try to sleep. Tell the sisters that the infirmary is too full, but that you cannot work. I’ll come and see you if I can. But now, you must think of yourself.”

Christiane hesitates, then nods. Alouette watches her go, her small, thin shoulders, the frail line of her spine visible through her shift. She knows that nothing in the girl’s experience has taught her that her life is worth fighting for. And yet, she must fight anyway. Alouette can’t bear to think of the alternative.

CHRISTIANE DOES NOT return to the grinding room that day or the next. Alouette asks after her, but the sisters say she is resting, healing. She’s relieved to hear it, to know that her young friend is tucked away in bed.

Then, one evening, Alouette hears a name murmured among the women at prayer and feels a shudder of apprehension. She leaves the chapel before the final amen, her heart hammering as she makes her way toward the Sainte-Claire dormitory.

Through the walls come the sounds of retching and wet coughs. There are rumors lately of typhoid fever. Part of Alouette is terrified that Christiane could succumb if she’s not careful. Or worse, that she might already be infected.

But as she parts the burlap curtain of the cell, a sharper unease settles in her gut. The air is stale and sour. The room is empty except for Christiane, curled on her side on the sleeping bench, her breath quick and uneven.

Alouette stumbles toward her, pressing the back of her hand to the girl’s cheek. Her skin is on fire.

A low murmur escapes Christiane’s lips, words tangled with delirium.

Alouette leans closer. “What?”

The girl shudders beneath the covers. Her eyes flicker open, unfocused, glassy. “You came.”

Alouette’s heart contracts. “Of course I came. I’ll stay with you now.” She brushes a strand of damp hair from Christiane’s forehead. “You’ll be much better in the morning.” She doesn’t know if she believes this. She only knows she has to say it.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” Christiane says dreamily, “that beauty can be the most dangerous thing of all? You showed me that.”

“Shh…” Alouette tells her, wishing she could silence her own sense of dread. “Just rest.”

“Don’t be sad for me. This is better.”

“Christiane, please.”

“You came into my life like an angel, you know.” Her breathing is so shallow, each inhalation whistles. “Thank you for teaching me their names. The plants. The things that can set you free.” She opens her palm slowly, revealing the sticky remnants of foxglove. The same flowers that they’d gazed at together months before, their deadly purple bells.

“No!” Alouette grips her hand hard, as if she can pull Christiane back from the edge she teeters on. But it’s too late. Has been too late for weeks now, she realizes.

She falls against Christiane’s chest, praying. She wants to shake the girl or scream. Instead, she holds herself impossibly still as Christiane’s body goes slack. Her light snuffed out.

Something cracks deep inside Alouette, sharp as a snapped bone. A long time passes before she is able to move. Finally, she pulls the blanket up over Christiane’s small, still form. Her fingers tremble as she smooths it, her breath hitching in her chest. She forces herself to stand, to push away the weight of grief before it drowns her. There is no time for sorrow. Not yet.

CHAPTER 71

Alouette awakens, shivering, the chill of the stone seeping through her mattress and threadbare quilt. But it’s not the cold that unsettles her. Christiane’s absence drags on her heart, and her conscience.

She had shown Christiane the herb, never dreaming she might use it. If only I’d been more careful, she thinks. But another voice—colder, truer—whispers: In this place, kindness is a cruelty of its own. Here, the meek do not inherit the earth. They inherit shallow graves and and controlling silence. Erasure.

Over the last few days, the floodwaters have finally begun to recede slightly. In the infirmary, Sister Geneviève summons her sharply. “The ledgers,” she says, barely glancing at Alouette. “Retrieve them from my office in Saint-Augustin’s. It’s the last room on the top floor.” A pause, slight but telling. “Only the bound records from the wooden cabinet. Nothing else.”

Geneviève does not look at her again. She doesn’t need to. She is certain—as certain as they all are—that Alouette will obey meekly. That no matter what she might see, she can and will do nothing.

Workmen have come to clear the worst of the mud and debris—and yet the dormitory is still far from habitable. Just over the threshold, Alouette sees a bloated rat on its side, claws raised and curled, as if it died trying to swim for its life.

Swallowing back her disgust, Alouette moves on through the ruined corridors, the air reeking of mildew and waste. Sister Geneviève’s office is damp but orderly, the ledgers stacked like soldiers on the shelf in the unlocked cabinet. Alouette has never liked the sister, exactly—but she has respected her. The woman’s steady hands, her calm voice in the physic garden, her clinical devotion to routine. In a place where chaos reigns, that discipline had once felt like a kind of safety.

But something here makes her skin prickle, even before she retrieves the ledgers and opens one with an unmarked spine. For of course she could never resist the urge to look. Inside are records of the bleeding schedules, the restraint logs. Purgatives, confinement orders. Nothing she hasn’t already suspected. Nothing she hasn’t seen written on the other women’s bodies, and her own.

She is about to close the book when movement from outside catches her eye. Beyond the asylum’s easternmost boundary wall—which she hasn’t seen past in the months of her captivity—lies a sunken strip of land. Then the Seine behind its high levee. Along that flooded plain, she can see a graveyard, or what’s left of it.

The constant saturation has peeled away layers of earth. Men with mud-caked boots and handkerchiefs tied across their faces dig through the sodden earth, their spades ringing with dull, hollow sounds that carry on the wind. She sees scraps of cerecloth tangled in the debris. Crosses snapped and scattered. The cemetery has surrendered its dead.

Then something smaller is lifted from the muck. A bundle. Then another. Not scattered—clustered. A gathering of infant sacrifices.

She grips the sill to steady herself, thinking of Sylvine and her loss. Her grief. How many others had been told their children were born dead? How many had been forced to live with not just the sorrow, but the doubt—that terrible, gnawing doubt that makes one question one’s own mind?

When Alouette turns away from the sordid scene back to the ledger, it reads differently. The words swim before her eyes. Administered strong purgative to correct female humors. Child did not survive the night. Mother recovering from treatment. A child stillborn, called to God’s grace. Each line signifies a death shrouded in lies, a tidy obfuscation of violence. Not illness or misfortune or accident. But system.

A system, yes—and more than this. A solution. The wheel turns: Women are used; children are conceived, then swept away. And the institution goes on, feeding hunger, redirecting blame. The unwanted must be unmade, and someone must do the unmaking.

Beside these entries in the ledger, far too many to be natural, to be coincidence, Alouette notices the same signature appearing again and again, in the same tight script: Léontine de Mouchy. Superioress.

She hugs the book to her chest, her hands trembling. When her gaze clears, she finds herself recognizing one last piece of the puzzle. Beyond the window, one of the gravediggers is shouting to another, his words snatched away by the cold wind. Her eyes scan the ravaged cemetery fence, half submerged in reeds and runoff, and land on an arched stone culvert. A stone-framed mouth at the base of the levee, dark and waiting. Its iron grate is broken or rusted away, and muddy water, swollen and iron-red, spills through it toward the greater river beyond.

Alouette’s mind whirls, remembering something her father once said while measuring dye near the vats: Follow the Bièvre and you’ll reach the sea.

He had meant it as an irony, she assumed. But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Using all her strength, she lifts the sash and pushes the window open. Immediately, the reek that wafts up is so familiar to her it may as well be her kin. A deep, muddy, rot-filled scent.

She almost wants to laugh. To shout up at the God she’s been forced to pray to a dozen times a day for months now. For what other power could have managed to arrange it so perfectly and completely? The Bièvre—Alouette’s noose, her shadow—has followed her here. Now, in this moment of ruin and revelation, it has opened its mouth.

And mouths, after all, are meant to speak.

“THERE’S A WAY out, if we can find it,” Alouette tells Marguerite later, in the infirmary.

Marguerite’s fingers hover over the herbs she’s grinding in silence. Since returning from isolation, she keeps her back to walls, more vigilant than ever. “You’re certain?”

“From the top floor in Saint-Augustin’s… I saw a culvert where the Bièvre empties into the Seine. The grate is broken, or maybe part of it has washed away.” She hesitates. “After what happened to Christiane… we can’t stay here.”

“No. We can’t. But surely the tunnels will be guarded.”

“Not with the flooding. They’re too busy moving women, managing chaos.”

Marguerite’s gaze darkens. For a long moment, she stares into the mortar bowl as if it might provide some answer. Then she says, “We need to move soon, then. Before they realize what’s beneath their feet. And yet it doesn’t seem right, somehow. We’ll be free of this place, but what about all the others?”

Pulling the ledger from her sleeve, Alouette points to the superioress’s signature written over and over. “It’s a list of the babes that were supposedly ‘stillborn.’ They were buried without names. Without prayers. Without guilt. While the sisters claim to be scouring our souls, setting us free.”

“It’s damning evidence,” Marguerite agrees, blinking. “But what can we do with this? Who would believe the word of madwomen?”

“I don’t know yet. But if we can get these records out and share them with someone trustworthy, someone good, then the truth of what’s being done here can never be buried or dismissed again.”

Outside, a gust of wind rattles the shutters as Marguerite nods. Something has shifted in her expression—not belief, not yet, but nearly.

She says, “When I was in isolation, I might have heard it. The river. I thought I was dreaming or that I was losing my mind. It seemed to be whispering to me.”

Alouette looks at her. “Maybe it was.”

CHAPTER 72

Late that night, when the asylum is cold and still, Alouette closes her eyes, imagining that she can see blue. The perfect blue of her dye. The way it clung to cloth, soaked into every fiber like a promise. A color so rich it could almost trick you into believing it went on forever, like the sea.

Once, her experiments had seemed like the answer to her suffering—a way to escape her gray world, trading Saint-Marcel for some distant place where she could create openly. But now she sees that escape alone doesn’t equal freedom. Not while others remain trapped in darkness, their misery hidden behind holy walls.

Hope doesn’t exist in some faraway world. It’s this world that must change.

Near dawn, before the bells of lauds toll to begin another unspeakably grim day, Alouette wakes Sylvine quietly, while everyone else still sleeps.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Christiane,” Sylvine whispers. “I already know.”

Alouette swallows against the knot in her throat. “No—I’m leaving soon. Marguerite too.”

Sylvine’s eyes widen. “How?”

“Say you’ll come with us.”

“It won’t work. Do you think no one has tried? Where do you imagine Thérèse is now? Or have you forgotten? She was caught before she made it halfway over the wall. The guards sent her straight to La Force.”

“I’ve found a new way out, a way that will work. But we mean to do more than just run. Marguerite and I have proof of what’s being done here.”

Sylvine scoffs, shaking her head.

Alouette reaches for one of her hands and clasps it, waiting for Sylvine to look at her. “I know you’re still in pain about your daughter. That grief might stay fresh forever—who can say? But tell me this. How many more will suffer if we do nothing?”

Sylvine blinks once, twice. “Justice and mercy, can they exist in the same world as this place?”

“I don’t know. I’ve wondered the same many times.” Then Alouette says, “Once, my mother was helped by the Sisters of Saint Catherine. They saved her life. Maybe they would listen to us. Charities like theirs keep Salpêtrière running. Surely, the donors can’t all be corrupt.”

Sylvine doesn’t respond for the longest time. She seems not even to be breathing. Alouette is on the edge of thinking she will never agree. That she will have to leave her friend behind—another loss too great to bear, and yet unavoidable.

But then finally, Sylvine nods. Their eyes lock, forming a bridge. “Tell me.”

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 73

They’ve been in the tunnels for several days, trying to adjust to darkness and disorientation, the strange sense of timelessness that pervades this underground world. Trying to prepare for an uncertain future while terrible memories continue to grip and bind Sasha’s thoughts.

At night, lying on her makeshift bed, she can almost feel the city above them through twenty meters of earth and rock. Up there: patrols, curfews, yellow stars, the brutal present. Down here: a different kind of reality altogether, where history is layered deeply into the limestone and written on the surface of the walls.

Yesterday, she found revolutionary slogans from 1789 carved beside mason’s marks that must be centuries older. In the chamber they use for sleeping, an ancient stone pillar holds up a ceiling reinforced with modern steel supports. The past and present coexist in these tunnels, one holding up the other.

Alesander and Kristof spend most of their time poring over maps, speaking in low voices about routes and contacts that might get them safely out of Paris and the occupied zone, all the way to Spain, if they can make it that far—Alesander’s home country. A farmer in Chevilly-Larue who can shelter them for one night, possibly two. The widow of a Communist organizer near Orléans who still maintains her husband’s connections. A cluster of families near Tours who’ve been adept at hiding people in their barns since the last war.

Looking at the complex web of lines, at the immense distance they’ll need to travel, Sasha can’t keep the question inside any longer. “What about the others? Our families? We can’t just leave Paris without knowing what will happen to them.”

For a long moment there’s only silence. Then Alesander sets down his pencil, turning to Sasha and the others. “Listen to me carefully,” he says. “Right now, there is no way to know. The Germans are very efficient at making people disappear. Very efficient at making sure no one can be sure where they are, or what will happen next. I’m not saying that you should give up hope. Only that for now, we need to focus on survival. On getting through this war.”

“But my mother,” Sasha says, her voice raw despite her efforts to control it. “My brother and sister. Klara is so young, so small…”

“I know you’re afraid for them,” Kristof says gently. “But sometimes all we can do is keep those we love close. To hold them inside us, like a candle in the dark, while we endure. Maybe you’ll all be together again, sooner than you know. Hold that close too.”

Gérard takes a step nearer, until his shoulder touches Sasha’s. Annette reaches for Sasha’s hand and squeezes. The gesture surprises her—they’ve barely spoken before now—but the warmth of it consoles her somehow. They all have the same fears, she realizes. The same losses. Which means none of them is truly alone.

“The last time I was in the mountains,” Alesander says, “I met a woman who had been separated from the rest of her family in Cologne. She told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said, ‘They took everything else. My home, my profession, my dignity. But they cannot take my ability to imagine a future where I see my children again.’ She carried that dream like a weapon. Like armor.”

The words settle into Sasha. She feels something beginning to crystallize inside her. “We survive,” she says finally, straightening her shoulders. “So that later, we can search.”

“Yes,” Kristof agrees, meeting her eyes across the table. “We start with saving ourselves. And then we keep going.”

THEIR DINNER THAT night is meager but oddly festive. If she tries hard enough, Sasha can almost pretend they’re somewhere else—on a camping trip or a school outing. Almost, but not quite.

Alesander has accumulated a store of tinned food in the bunker—sardines, hash, green beans, even some preserved peaches that taste impossibly sweet and extravagant. They eat by lamplight, gathered around the table, using crates as stools.

Maurice pours them each a cup of water from a steel can. “Not too much,” he cautions when Annette asks for more. “We need to be thrifty.”

Thrifty. It’s a word Maman might have used, Sasha thinks. Not the fourteen-year-old clowning boy who could never sit still in class and thought everything was a joke.

She looks at him appraisingly, wondering if she’s changing too. If they all are.

After dinner, while Kristof and Alesander go back to their maps and endless planning in the main chamber, the four teenagers retreat to the smaller safe room.

“What do you think it will be like?” Annette asks softly, her fingers working nervously at a loose thread in her cardigan. “I’ve never been to Spain. I’ve never been anywhere.”

For Sasha, the idea of crossing into a new country, so far from her home and her family, particularly when they’re in such danger, is just too hard to contemplate. She finds it easier to just be here in the tunnels without thinking too far ahead, not home but not exile, not freedom and not a prison. A passage between what was and what might someday be.

As Sasha sits absorbed by her thoughts, Gérard says, “My father took me to Toulouse once. The countryside between here and there was beautiful. Green hills, vineyards. But that’s the farthest south I’ve ever been.”

“Are there Germans in Spain too?” Maurice asks.

“Probably,” Sasha says, not wanting to offer false comfort. “But maybe fewer. Maybe different.” The group falls quiet again.

Maurice turns to a book of puzzles he’s brought. Annette starts to write in her journal, tucked into a corner with her knees under her sweater. Meanwhile, Sasha finds herself watching Gérard as he absently traces patterns along the concrete wall beside him. His hands are musician’s hands—long-fingered and precise.

“Do you miss your violin?” she asks.

“Every day,” he admits. “Sometimes I play pieces in my head to help me fall asleep.”

“Which ones?”

“Bach, mostly. Something complicated enough that I can lose myself in it.”

Sasha thinks about the concentration on his face when he played for her on the street that day. She tries to picture music flowing through his mind, a river of notes he knows by heart. “That’s a kind of memory palace,” she says. “With sound instead of images.”

Gérard smiles. “I never thought of it that way. But yes, I suppose it is. My violin teacher once told me something I’ve been thinking about,” he continues after a moment. “He said that in an orchestra or string quartet, each performer must listen as much as they play. That the music exists not just in individual notes but in the space between them.” He pauses long enough to draw an invisible line on the wall, then another, intersecting it. “I think people are like that too. Even when we’re separated, there’s still something connecting us. Something that can’t be broken.”

Sasha looks down at her hands, remembering how Papa folded them around a Go stone when she was very young, teaching her the correct way to place it on the board with an emphatic click. She says, “I don’t want to forget anything. Not even the painful parts.”

“You won’t. You’re too good at remembering.” Then he says, “I had already noticed you before that day at the library, you know. But I was scared to talk to you.”

“Really? Why?”

His cheeks go pink, but he answers her. “For a start, you’re so pretty, and I’ve always been shy around girls. I know that. But you seemed so confident and sure of yourself.”

“I’m not pretty,” she stutters, overcome by his attention.

“You are,” he says quietly, not looking away.

It gives Sasha a strange feeling to know that she existed for Gérard before they ever exchanged words. As flattering as it is, it’s also confusing. Unfamiliar. “By the way, I’m not confident,” she confesses. “I doubt myself constantly.”

“Maybe so, but you never showed it. You used to float through the reading room as if you didn’t really need any of us.”

“That’s not true. I do need people. I’m not sure I could do any of this if you weren’t here. All of you.”

“It’s the same for me.”

Something in his tone makes Sasha look at him more closely. In the lamplight, he seems older than sixteen. Shadows define the angles of his cheekbones, the straight line of his nose. There’s a small cut above his right eyebrow—new, probably from being in the tunnel earlier.

Without thinking, she reaches out to touch it. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing.” His breath catches, but he doesn’t pull away.

For a long moment, they stay like that in a fragile bubble of contact. Then Alesander calls from the doorway, breaking the spell. “Everyone should get some rest. We’ll be heading out first thing tomorrow.”

Sasha withdraws her hand, suddenly self-conscious. “He’s right. We should try to sleep.”

Gérard nods, but before they move to their separate pallets, he searches his pocket and holds out a small object. “I found this today when I was exploring. I want you to have it.”

It’s a stone, no larger than a walnut, but with a perfect fossil embedded in its surface. A tiny fern frond preserved for millennia. Sasha wraps her fingers around it, feeling its cool weight. “Thank you.”

That night, turned toward the wall on her makeshift bed, she listens to the others’ breathing, wondering about the strangeness of this place. The tunnels are steeped in history—old enough to remember an ancient sea but also immediate, unfolding moment by moment. They’re a passage from one place to another, and a landscape in themselves. They’re invisible to most, existing apart from time. And they’ve been shaped by every era, every life that has passed through them.

Maybe, in a way, she and the others huddled around her in the dark are like that too. Caught between. Not children anymore, but not grown up yet either. Not part of the past, the things they’ve lost, and not part of the future, which they can scarcely even imagine. All they truly have is this crossing, this liminal space. And one another.

Sasha opens and closes her hand in the dark, feeling the rough-smooth outline of the fossil. A remnant of something ancient, preserved against all odds. A touchstone of betweenness, buried and waiting for eons, for this moment. For now.

CHAPTER 74

Night has fully settled in the tunnels, though there’s no real way to tell beyond their watches and their own battered rhythms. After the kids have finally succumbed to sleep, Kristof and Alesander finalize their route for tomorrow’s departure.

“The passage near Cachan might be flooded,” Alesander says, pointing to a place on the map where mineral springs are known to overflow. “We should look for another route, just in case.”

Nodding, Kristof starts to mark a possible detour with a pencil when a sound from the tunnel outside makes them both freeze. A pebble clatters along the stone floor, followed by soft, deliberate footsteps. Alesander immediately extinguishes the lamp, then moves silently to position himself beside the door, pistol drawn.

Three knocks, a pause, then two more—their pattern.

When the door swings open, it’s Ursula. She steps inside, her nurse’s coat traded for workman’s trousers and a dark sweater, a canvas bag slung across her chest. Her face is pale with fatigue, but her eyes are bright, determined.

“I thought you’d want to know—Julian has been released,” she says. “He and his wife have a route south. They should be halfway to Marseille by now.”

Kristof stares at her, barely able to process the news. The last he heard, Julian had been taken by the Gestapo.

“How?” he manages.

Ursula smiles thinly. “Let’s just say Dr. Claudel found it a convenient moment to discover his conscience. Or at least to fabricate one.” She drops her bag onto the table. “Julian was accused of administrative irregularities, nothing more. Compassion mislabeled as carelessness. No one in power wants to waste time sorting out the difference.”

Alesander exhales through his nose. “They let him slip through.”

“I assume they were promised bigger prizes elsewhere,” Ursula says. “Claudel knows who to offer up instead. And he knows exactly what they want to hear,” she adds. “That he’s a loyal administrator. That he can keep Saint-Anne’s running smoothly, without disruption. Then he gives them names to prove it.”

She doesn’t need to say more. Kristof already understands—it isn’t conscience or anything like it that saved Julian. It’s strategy. He sits back in his chair, the tin lamp casting shadows across the map-strewn table.

If they weren’t so appalling, Claudel’s choices might almost be fascinating—a case study in plausible deniability and perfectly timed obedience. He shows no force, no open loyalty. Only the quiet adaptability of a man determined to survive intact. He reshapes himself, chameleonlike, into an asset—while telling himself he’s staying faithful to medicine, to progress, to Saint-Anne’s itself. But what he’s really preserving isn’t the institution. It’s his place within it.

And yet now, sitting across from Kristof is someone who has chosen the opposite.

Ursula opens the box she’s brought, offering stale biscuits like communion, though no one immediately reaches for them. “I thought I might lend a hand, if there’s work to be done.”

Kristof and Alesander exchange a look.

“There’s something you should know,” Kristof begins to explain quietly. “We’re refining a new operation, but it’s a little complicated.”

Her gaze sharpens.

“Four teenagers,” Alesander goes on. “Escaped from the roundups. They’re asleep in the next room.”

“We’re moving them tomorrow,” Kristof says. “Out through the tunnels. If we make it, we hope to build a route. A way to get others out too.”

Ursula is quiet for a long moment. Kristof watches her do the math, adding up the danger, the hopeless odds. Finally, she nods. “Then you’ll need all the help you can get. I don’t know the tunnels like you do. But I’m a good nurse. I know how to read a map. Keep morale up. I can even sing, if I have to.”

Alesander smiles. “Singing is good.”

“I didn’t say I was great at it.” She chuckles. “But I do it with gusto.”

“We’d be lucky to have you,” Kristof tells her, trying to shake off the sudden, foolish ache in his throat. He wants her with them more than he can admit. Not because they need Ursula’s skills—though they do. Not even because she offers another set of hands to deal with whatever waits ahead. But because somewhere along the way, whether or not she intended to, she’s become a compass point for him.

Unlike Claudel, who only knows the path of least resistance, Ursula charts her course in full light with eyes wide open, and still she chooses danger. Chooses—over and over—not to surrender.

CHAPTER 75

Three days, Alesander says. Three days through the tunnels to reach the first safe house in Chevilly-Larue. Sasha struggles to imagine it—her world contracted to this bubble arced by flashlight beams, this strange family of refugees moving through stone arteries beneath Paris.

They begin at the bunker, without going back to the surface first. The first few hours are surprisingly easy and uneventful terrain, with brick-lined walls that still bear the soot marks from old railway lanterns. But as Alesander leads them deeper, the tunnels transform—first to the limestone quarries with their cathedral-like chambers, then to narrower passages where the ceiling hangs so low they have to stoop.

By midmorning on their first day, they pass beneath boulevard Saint-Jacques, where Alesander points out a junction of tunnels. “The old Roman road ran above here,” he explains. “The quarrymen followed it centuries ago, taking the stone that built half of Paris.” The walls are marked with mysterious symbols—ancient quarry signs and newer markings that Alesander seems to understand intuitively. Finally, they come to the Cité Universitaire section, named for the area above them. The air feels cooler and somehow charged. Water drips steadily from fissures overhead, forming small shimmering puddles. Somewhere nearby, the rushing sound of the Bièvre’s underground channel echoes through the stone. Sasha keeps time by conjugating Latin verbs in her head, building new rooms in her memory palace with each turning. Mutatas dicere formas corpora. “I sing of bodies changed.”

They stop to rest in what was once a quarrymen’s shelter, its walls still bearing the ghostly marks of ancient tools. The chamber is roughly hewn, but there’s a stone bench along one wall and niches where candle and oil lanterns once hung. According to Alesander’s whispered conversation with Kristof, tomorrow they’ll need to navigate the partially flooded sections beneath Gentilly before reaching the network of tunnels that stretch toward Arcueil and eventually Cachan.

Gérard sits beside her, close enough that she can feel the warmth of his shoulder but not quite touching.

“What are you whispering?” Maurice asks Sasha.

“It’s Ovid. From his Metamorphoses.” She touches the rough wall, adding this chamber to her mental map. The limestone feels cool beneath her fingers, pitted with fossilized shells from an ancient sea. “I’ve been memorizing it. Well, trying to. It’s fifteen books long.”

“Why?”

In the dim light, she sees Annette pretending not to listen while the adults confer over maps, their voices low and focused. They’re discussing how they’ll navigate the collapsed section near L’Haÿ-les-Roses, where they’ll need to squeeze through a narrow gap one at a time.

“Why memorize anything?” Sasha replies. “Because it might be important. Because it might be beautiful. Because…” She hesitates. “Because they can take our books, but they can’t take what’s inside us.”

“What’s the story about?” Annette asks tentatively.

“Nothing much.” Sasha smiles. “Only the history of the world. Every transformation from the very beginning to right now. Gods becoming swans, women changing into trees.”

“Cheerful,” Maurice says.

“Actually, yes. It’s about survival, really. How people endure by becoming something new. Even terrible changes can lead to beauty, eventually. Like Daphne taking the form of a laurel tree to escape Apollo. Or Echo…” She stops, remembering her mother’s face as she pushed her toward freedom.

Gérard has been quiet until now. “Tell us one.”

So she does, settling on the myth of Philomela, who, transformed into a nightingale after unspeakable trauma, finds her voice in song. As Sasha recounts the tale, she feels the others listening. Maurice abandoning any pretense of disinterest, Annette moving closer. Even Ursula pauses as she checks their medical supplies.

“Flet modo, seque miseram, se comparat illi,” Sasha recites. “She weeps, and calls herself a wretched thing…”

“But she survives,” Gérard says.

“She flies.” Sasha touches the wall again, feeling the coolness of stone against her fingertips. Her flashlight catches the glint of mica in the rock, tiny stars embedded in darkness. “They all endure, one way or another. Even when that seems impossible.”

Like us, she thinks to herself.

Salpêtrière 1664

CHAPTER 76

The valerian is ready. Marguerite has been steeping it in the small storeroom where they keep the medicinal herbs, measuring each dose with the same precision she once used to record the asylum’s crimes. Her hands move steadily over the dried flowers, crushing them between her fingers until the sharp, earthy scent fills the air.

“Too much will kill them,” she murmurs, more to herself than to Alouette, who watches from the doorway. “Too little and they’ll raise the alarm before we reach the tunnels.”

Alouette touches the small of her back where an ache has settled, deep and constant. Only recently has she begun to feel the child quicken—alive, insistent, restless as the thoughts that won’t let her sleep. “How many guards on the night watch?”

“Four at the main gate. Two in the courtyard. Three who patrol the walls.” Marguerite’s voice gives nothing away, but her fingers tremble slightly as she works. “The wine comes up from the cellars at sunset. That’s our moment.”

They have explored the possible routes, asking questions of others when they dared, until finally they learn about the sewer tunnel that runs beneath the asylum to the Bièvre. An entrance sits near the crypt below the chapel.

As stealthily as possible, they have gathered what they’ll need. Sisters’ robes stolen from the laundry. Marguerite’s accounts of what she witnessed in the infirmary, the records that hadn’t been confiscated when she was locked away—enough to show the blatant abuses, the deaths that could have been prevented, the girls who were attacked, or who vanished in the night. Herbs bundled and hidden in the hems of their skirts.

But it is the timing that matters most. With winter upon them, the nights are long enough to give them an advantage.

“The moon shouldn’t be much more than a sliver later,” Sylvine says.

Marguerite nods, not looking up from her work. “Good. We’ll need every shadow we can get.”

Silence falls, a hushed chill. They each know the risks. They have seen what happens to those who try to escape—the isolation cells, the beatings, the transfers to places even worse than Salpêtrière. But staying means a different kind of death, slow and certain as poison.

Alouette’s hand drifts to her stomach as movement flutters there. She thinks of how the child growing inside her will be born into bondage or worse if they fail. Of Christiane and all the other women who will never see beyond these walls.

“We strike or we die,” Sylvine says.

“No,” Marguerite counters, her eyes steady as agate in the dim light. “We endure together. Or none of this means anything.”

After a moment, Sylvine begins to check their supplies—again. Marguerite returns to her measuring. Alouette lingers by the door. Her gaze drifts to the shelf above the storeroom’s narrow window. A scrap of linen pokes out from behind a broken jar.

She reaches for it, recognizing the small pouch that she moved from her cell months ago for safer keeping, then turns the seeds out onto her palm. Five of them, small and flat, with a thin winglike margin flaring all around. After she hid them here, they slipped her mind, the seeds she’d kept without knowing why.

“Marguerite,” she asks softly, crossing the room, “what are these?”

Marguerite squints down at the dark flecks, then lets out a short breath of something, half distracted. “Spreading bellflower. It’s not medicinal. You can’t even dye with it.”

Alouette folds the seeds back into the cloth, tucking them into the hidden pocket at her waist. She knows the bellflower, which grows wild in untended corners. Purplish blue flowers in a downturned array, like a row of falling stars.

Instead of being disappointed at their commonness, Alouette feels strangely satisfied. These seeds, which have quietly kept time with her these last grueling months, serve no purpose at all except beauty. Except to bloom, all summer long, wherever they choose.

HOURS LATER, WHEN the chapel bell rings for evening prayers, echoing solemnly, Alouette feels each toll like a hammer strike against her ribs. She kneels at her pew beside Sylvine, mouthing the words without sound, while smoke from the censers fills the air with choking sweetness. Through the high windows, she can see the sky darkening to slate, heavy with more rain to come.

Sylvine’s lips move in what might be supplication but isn’t. She is counting—measuring the minutes until the guards change, until the wine will be brought up from the cellars, until their chance will come.

The cleric’s voice drones on, Latin phrases falling like stones into the hollow space between Alouette’s shoulders. Libera nos, Domine. “Deliver us, Lord.”

She thinks of Christiane, of all the prayers that have gone unanswered in this place. This time, they will deliver themselves.

DARKNESS FALLS, FINALLY. It comes like a tide—swift and absolute. Alouette waits in the shadows of the herb room, alone with her own heartbeats, while Marguerite slips away to the kitchens with the drugged wine.

Time slows, thickens like honey. She imagines Marguerite moving through the lower halls, quiet as a ghost. Imagines the guards lifting their cups, drinking deeply against the raw night. Imagines the valerian working its way into their blood, dulling their senses one by one.

When Marguerite returns, her countenance is rock-steady. “It’s done.”

They change quickly, pulling the stolen robes over their gray shifts. The wool feels dank and cold against Alouette’s skin. She touches the precious bundle sewn into her hem—the herbs they will need, the coins Sylvine has somehow managed to save, borrow, or pilfer, Marguerite’s documentation of the things they’ve had to endure.

Sylvine appears in the doorway like a phantom, her own dark robe making her nearly invisible in the gloom. “The guard at the south wall is sleeping at his post,” she whispers. “The others are struggling to keep their eyes open. It’s time.”

They glide through the corridors like water, silent and inevitable. Into the empty chapel, through the hidden door in the nave that leads to the crypt below, and farther down, into the sewer. A stairwell plummeting toward a darkness that breathes up at them from below.

CHAPTER 77

The sewer tunnel reeks of decay and stagnant water, the stench so thick Alouette can taste it, metallic and foul at the back of her throat. Water drips steadily from cracks in the vaulted ceiling, each droplet echoing like a tiny hammer strike against stone. There are other tunnels, too, snaking away in unknown directions. Half-forgotten passages that wind beneath the asylum and beyond.

“Stay close,” Marguerite whispers, her voice barely audible above the constant dripping. “One wrong turn and we might never find our way back.”

Alouette nods, one hand instinctively moving to her belly before she forces it back to her side. The child has grown quiet in the last few hours—too quiet. There’s also the low, dull ache she’s been trying to ignore. Just exhaustion, she tells herself. Just fear. She can’t afford weakness now, not when they’re so close.

Alouette steps cautiously, bracing her hand against the wall. The darkness is near absolute, broken only by the occasional flicker of their small candle lantern, its flame guttering in the stale air, threatening to leave them in perfect blackness.

A sudden splash breaks through the eerie quiet. Moments later, a rat, large as a small cat, scurries across Alouette’s foot. She clamps her mouth shut against a scream, her heart hammering wildly. Sylvine grips her arm, steadying her.

“There are more ahead,” Sylvine murmurs, and indeed, Alouette can see them now—dozens of gleaming eyes reflecting the candlelight, furry bodies churning through the shallow water.

“Step carefully, but don’t stop,” Marguerite warns. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

Alouette isn’t sure that can be true as she feels something brush against her ankle. Her skin crawls, but she urges herself forward. “The culvert should be close,” she whispers. “If the water hasn’t blocked it.”

The farther they go, the higher the water rises, cold against their shins, their knees. Then even higher. Alouette’s legs ache with the effort of pushing through it, her skirts growing heavier by the minute. She winces as a cramp grips her lower abdomen—sharp, as if she’s been punched. She bites her lip to keep from making a sound.

In places, the tunnel narrows until they have no choice but to turn sideways, stone pressing against spine and belly. Alouette fights down panic as the walls seem to close in, focusing on her breathing, on the steady movement of Marguerite ahead of her. The cramping only intensifies, a warning she cannot heed.

Then Marguerite stops abruptly. The tunnel ahead is partially collapsed, leaving a narrow gap where the ceiling has caved in. Broken stones jut out like jagged teeth, leaving a passage barely wide enough for a person to squeeze through.

“I’ll go first,” Marguerite says, examining the opening. She hands Alouette the lantern, drops to her knees, and begins to crawl, wincing as stones gouge her back through the robe.

For a terrifying moment, Marguerite seems stuck—then she wriggles forward with a grunt of pain, disappearing into the darkness beyond.

“Give me the light,” comes her muffled voice from the other side. Alouette passes the lantern through.

“You go next,” Sylvine says, sounding hesitant. “Can you make it?”

Alouette grimaces. “Do I have a choice?”

The opening seems impossibly small as Alouette approaches it. She takes a deep breath, then lowers herself awkwardly to her hands and knees. Icy water seeps through her shift, numbing her skin. She pushes her head and shoulders through first, feeling the saw-edged perimeter catching at her clothes. Her shape makes it difficult to maneuver, and for a heart-stopping moment, she feels trapped—wedged between unyielding stone, unable to move forward or back.

“I can’t—” She gasps.

“Yes, you can.” Marguerite’s voice comes from ahead, firm and steady. “Take a breath, make yourself as small as possible, and push with your feet.”

Alouette forces herself to exhale completely, allowing her body to sink slightly, then drives forward with her legs. Pain flares as another cramp strikes. She cries out, unable to contain it. Then all at once she’s through, tumbling into Marguerite’s waiting arms.

Moments later, Sylvine scrambles toward them, inching her way through the opening. The rocks shift ominously. Pebbles tumble onto her back and patter into the water around her.

“Hurry,” Alouette says, suddenly terrified.

Marguerite reaches for Sylvine’s hands and tugs her to safety just as the opening collapses with a cloud of dust. The passageway entirely sealed with rubble.

“No going back now,” Sylvine says grimly, brushing mud from her clothes. A thin trickle of blood runs from a cut on her temple.

“You’re hurt,” Alouette says, reaching for her, but Sylvine waves her away.

“It’s nothing. We need to keep moving.”

BEYOND THE COLLAPSE, the tunnel widens a little, but the water is deeper, reaching past their knees. Every step becomes a battle against the current, which grows stronger as they move toward the river. The cold seeps into Alouette’s bones, making her limbs heavy and clumsy.

“Watch yourself here,” Marguerite calls out, her voice barely carrying over the sound of rushing water. “The floor drops away without warning.”

Alouette tests each step before committing her weight, but even so, she nearly falls when her foot meets empty space instead of stone. Sylvine catches her arm for balance.

“The current’s getting too strong,” Marguerite says, her brow furrowed with worry. “We may have to swim part of the way.”

The thought sends a bolt of fear through Alouette. “I’m not sure I can,” she admits, one hand cradling her belly protectively.

“We’ll help you,” says Sylvine, tightening her grip on Alouette’s arm. “Together, we’ll make it.”

They move forward again, the water now reaching their waists. Alouette gasps at the cold, feeling her child kick frantically in response. Each step becomes a test of will—to lift her feet against the weight of water, to fight the current pushing her back, to ignore the growing numbness in her extremities.

They press on in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. Just when Alouette thinks she can’t move another inch, when her legs are deadened and her lungs on fire with effort, Marguerite gives a small cry of triumph.

“There! Look ahead!”

Through the gloom, Alouette can make out a faint glow—not the warm yellow of lamplight, but the cold silver of moonlight filtering through an opening. A wide iron grate and beyond, the levee. Freedom.

They stagger toward it, hope lending them strength for these final steps. The grate is a rust-covered iron lattice blocking their path. Sylvine reaches it first.

“Thank God,” she whispers, tugging at the bars. But the grate doesn’t budge. She pulls harder, grunting with effort. “It’s stuck.”

Marguerite edges her way forward, examining where the bars meet the stone archway. “Not stuck. Rusted shut. It probably hasn’t been opened in years.”

Alouette feels a flutter of panic. “What do we do?”

“We push,” Marguerite says firmly. “All of us together.”

They position themselves shoulder to shoulder against the grate, feet braced against the uneven floor. The water swirls around their thighs, the current tugging at their sodden skirts.

“On my count,” Marguerite says. “One… two… three!”

They shove with all their remaining strength, muscles straining, teeth gritted against the effort. Still, it doesn’t move.

“Again,” Sylvine gasps. “Harder!”

They push a second time, then a third. The grate groans slightly but holds fast, the rust like cement binding metal to stone.

Alouette sags against the bars, her energy gone, like her faith. “It’s no use. We’re trapped.”

“No,” Marguerite commands sharply as she wedges herself into a different position. “Try once more. Put your back into it.”

They reposition themselves and push again. Nothing.

The silence that follows is crushing. Alouette stares through the iron lattice at the night beyond—so close she could almost touch it, yet impossibly far. Behind them, the tunnel stretches back into darkness, any chance at retreat blocked by the collapsed ceiling.

“We should have known,” Sylvine says hollowly. “No one escapes Salpêtrière. No one.”

CHAPTER 78

Alouette wonders if she has ever felt this desperate. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, both to her friends and to the life inside her. “I led us into this snare.”

“Don’t.” Marguerite’s reply slices into the darkness. “Don’t you dare give up now. Not after everything.”

“What choice do we have?” Sylvine asks, gesturing at their surroundings. “We can’t go back. We can’t go forward. We’ll either freeze or drown when the water rises farther.”

“Or we find another way,” Marguerite insists, studying the stonework around the bars, her fingers probing between the blocks. “The flooding has weakened everything. The collapse we saw earlier—the force of the water is dissolving the mortar.”

Hope rises weakly in Alouette’s chest. “If we can’t open the grate, perhaps we can remove the stones that hold it.”

“Is that possible?” Sylvine asks.

“I don’t know,” Marguerite admits. “But I’d rather die trying than wait for the water to claim us.”

They each search for rocks and begin scraping at the mortar, chipping away tiny fragments. The water continues to tug at them, wearying their already fatigued muscles. Alouette’s fingers begin to bleed, but she barely feels the pain.

“Wait,” Sylvine yelps suddenly. “I think this one is loose.” She pushes against a stone block near the bottom of the archway. It shifts slightly, sending a small cascade of debris into the water.

Encouraged, they focus their efforts, scraping away more of the binding material, pushing and pulling until—with a sudden lurch—the block slides free. Water rushes through the gap, creating a powerful current that nearly knocks them off their feet.

“Another one,” Marguerite urges. “Quickly!”

The second stone breaks loose more easily, weakened by the loss of its neighbor. Then a third. The opening is still too small for them to pass through, but the structure of the archway is compromised now, iron bars shuddering against the building surge.

“Stand back,” Sylvine warns, her eyes fixed on the ceiling above them. Small chunks of stone are already falling, splashing into the stream around them. “I think it’s coming down.”

They retreat several paces, watching as more debris tumbles, the current growing ever stronger. Then, with a grinding roar, the remaining stones give way, the grate collapsing with them into the churning water below.

When the dust settles, they see their path is clear—but what lies beyond is not the solid ground they had hoped for. The opening leads directly to the swollen Seine, its black waters rushing past with frightening speed.

Marguerite stares out at the river, her face pale in the faint moonlight. “I didn’t realize… the levee must be completely flooded.”

“We have to swim,” Sylvine says bleakly.

Alouette feels the blood drain from her face.

For a long moment, the three women stare at the churning water. The winter Seine is treacherous even for strong swimmers. They are exhausted. And then there is Alouette’s condition.

“How far to the bank?” she asks, fighting against dread and helplessness.

“Fifty yards, perhaps,” Marguerite replies, squinting into the darkness. “The current will carry us downstream.”

“Downstream is still away from here,” says Sylvine. She turns to Alouette. “I won’t leave you.”

Alouette nods, swallowing her fear. The child inside her has grown still again, as if sensing the danger that awaits them.

“We should go one at a time,” Marguerite says. “I’ll test the current.”

Before the others can argue, she pushes past them, plunging into the river. The water swallows her immediately.

“Marguerite!” Sylvine cries.

They watch with anxiety until her head breaks the surface. She flails, struggling against the river, pulling her farther away. Then, gradually, she begins to angle toward the distant bank. Her strokes grow more confident as she finds a rhythm, using the current rather than fighting it.

“She’s going to make it,” Alouette whispers, the words trembling on the edge of belief.

After what seems like an eternity, Marguerite reaches the bank. They can just make out her form as she drags herself onto the muddy shore, then waves at them.

“Our turn,” Sylvine says. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but once we’re in the water…”

“I understand.” Alouette takes a deep breath. “We can do this.”

Sylvine squeezes her hand. “Remember, don’t compete with the current. Let it carry you somewhat but keep veering toward the shore.”

Together, they edge forward. Alouette gasps as the cold hits her full force, stealing her breath.

“Ready?” Sylvine asks.

Alouette nods, unable to speak.

“Now!”

They push off into the river, the current catching them immediately. The icy water is a physical shock, driving every thought from Alouette’s mind except survival. Waves pulse over her head, muffling the world in a roar of darkness. She feels herself being pulled under, sheer exhaustion and the weight of her clothes dragging her down.

She fights desperately. Her lungs burn, her muscles scream in protest. Just when she thinks she can’t hold her breath any longer, she breaks through the surface, gasping and coughing as water streams down her face.

“Kick!” Sylvine shouts from close by. “Keep kicking!”

Alouette forces her leaden limbs to move. Each stroke is agony, her body already drained long ago.

The bank seems impossibly far, but Marguerite is there now, on a spit of land, wading into the shallows, arms outstretched. Alouette wills her way forward with her last reserves of strength.

Her feet scrape against something solid—river bottom. Marguerite lunges in, catching her arm, pulling her toward the bank. Sylvine is just behind them, gasping for breath but still moving, still fighting.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 79

They’ve been underground for sixteen hours when they find the first German survey marks—crisp chalk numbers methodically placed at a sharp bend in the tunnel. A short while later, even more alarming signs appear. Bright white rectangles stamped with black warnings. Ruhe. “Quiet.” Rauchen Verboten. “No Smoking.” Vorsicht Instabile Bedingungen. “Caution: Unstable Conditions.”

Alesander crouches to examine one more closely. “These are recent. I can still smell the paint. I knew the Germans had the old École des Mines surveys. And they’ve been building bunkers beneath Luxembourg Garden for months. But this far south…” He shakes his head, confidence visibly faltering. “We’ve got to get moving. Clearly, this area isn’t safe.”

From then on, they pick up the pace whenever the terrain allows, aiming for a chamber on Alesander’s map called the Cathedral, a massive space with pillars of stone left by the quarrymen to prevent collapse. Just past that point, the tunnel begins to narrow, squeezing at them from both sides until they’re forced to walk single file, turning sideways through some sections. It feels claustrophobic to all of them, Kristof can tell. And worrisome. They might be heading into a trap, in more ways than one.

Then they come to the tightest opening they’ve encountered yet. One they’ll have to crawl through. Alesander drops to all fours, exploring as much as he can with his flashlight. “I think it’s okay,” he says. “Things seem better up ahead.”

“Maybe we should turn back,” Maurice says. No one has seen much of his comic side since the first day. Now, he just seems nervous. “There must be another way.”

“With those German warnings behind us?” Ursula asks. Her eyes carry strain as she looks from Maurice to Alesander, then to Kristof.

“I agree,” says Kristof. “If Alesander thinks it’s safe, we need to trust him.”

Maurice nods, still looking tentative.

Alesander consults his map again, wanting to be sure. “The only other alternative would take us west, then north for a bit, angling toward Montrouge before gradually looping back south again. It would probably add at least a day to our journey.” He glances up, scanning their exhausted faces.

“But there’s no guarantee that route hasn’t been staked out as well,” Kristof says.

“That’s right.”

Annette twists the end of her ponytail. “Are we in danger?”

Surprisingly, it’s Gérard who answers first. “No more than before. But I’ve been thinking that we probably should be careful about not leaving anything behind us when we stop. Or any clear footprints. Nothing that could be followed.”

“That’s smart,” Kristof says. He looks around the group, making sure everyone understands.

With no further discussion, they stick to the original plan, even though that means scrambling on hands and knees through the coffin-size aperture, its ragged edges scratching at their arms, their backs. All of them breathe a sigh of relief when they’re through and the way opens enough for them to stand upright.

A bit farther they come to a long, oval-shaped space with a curved, sturdy-looking roof. To one side, there’s a small dark mound that’s clearly not stone.

Maurice freezes. “Are those skeletons?” he whispers.

“They’re oyster shells,” Alesander explains quietly. “The quarriers used to carry them down in their pockets and shuck them down here. Easy to carry. This must have been their lunchroom.”

“I wish we had oysters,” Annette sighs longingly. “And beef sausage.”

“We should stop and rest,” Alesander finally says, noting the obvious flagging of everyone’s energy. “Just long enough to catch our breath.”

They settle in an alcove where a small niche has been cut into one wall, perhaps once used for a saint’s statue or a quarryman’s lamp. Now it holds one of their flashlights, its beam casting elongated shadows across the sloped ceiling. Ursula shares water and what remains of the morning’s bread. The teens huddle together, not talking much but seeming to draw comfort from proximity.

Alesander stands off to one side, watching them. When Kristof moves nearer, Alesander sighs. “When we first started out, I thought I knew what I was asking of them. Of all of you. But those German signs and survey marks have really rattled me. This isn’t theory anymore. It’s not just my own life on the line.”

Kristof nods. He feels it too—the sense of responsibility for Sasha and now the others. But Alesander is their guide, their leader. They follow his maps, his instincts. He has to be constantly aware and making decisions—about which sacrifices can be justified, or lived with later, if they fail.

“I trust you,” Kristof tells him. “No matter what happens, it won’t be your fault. We wouldn’t be here without you. We wouldn’t even have a chance.”

Alesander just looks at him, saying nothing. Then he gives the smallest nod, a vague throwaway gesture that could mean anything. Thank you or Go to hell or I’m still afraid. Maybe all these things at once.

“Half an hour,” he finally says before moving away. “Rest while you can.”

They settle into the most comfortable positions the crude alcove allows. Kristof notices how they arrange themselves—Gérard close enough to keep watch over Sasha while also giving her space, Maurice and Annette flanking the other two like posted sentries.

Above them, Paris moves on—unaware, indifferent. The city, Kristof thinks, will never know how these young people beneath its skin are adapting and evolving: becoming stronger, yes, but also kinder. More loyal. More willing to support each other when someone falters. Qualities that might, in the end, be more powerful than anything the Reich can plan.

He thinks of Annelies then, sharp and sudden—the way grief always returns, uninvited. Of all the changes he hasn’t seen coming. Of how sometimes, in the deepest dark, you lose yourself entirely. Or you find a new way forward—reinventing who you are. Who you can still become.

From nearby, he hears Sasha say, “I know we have Alesander’s map, but if we need to retrace our steps for any reason, I’ve been keeping track, too, building a memory palace. Like Ariadne’s thread, but in my mind.”

“More like Echo,” Gérard adds softly. The others look at him in surprise. “The nymph who could only repeat what she heard, but she used that limitation to save herself. To warn others.” As Sasha listens to Gérard, some emotion ripples between them that Kristof can’t quite translate but understands just the same. Then, in the hush, as if Sasha had somehow overheard Kristof’s earlier thoughts, her voice floats up, as fragile and binding as a silk thread: Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. “All things change, and we change with them.”

CHAPTER 80

After navigating a treacherous section where the tunnel floor shears away into a hidden cistern, a wine cellar appears unexpectedly, looming up behind a half-collapsed wall of medieval brick. It’s barely more than a recess carved into the side of what was once a monastery’s underground storage, but the curved ceiling and the remaining niches, where a few dusty bottles lie nestled, improbably preserved, give off a strange comfort.

“Just like old times,” Alesander says softly, holding up one of the bottles. The glass is thick with grime, but the level of wine inside looks promising. “Remember that first monastery cellar? Near Montparnasse?”

Kristof does remember—the taste of ancient burgundy, the feeling that they were brave men having the adventure of their lives. How terribly young and romantic that version of himself feels now.

Alesander works the cork free with his pocketknife. It crumbles like powder, sifting back into the dark liquid.

“We’re really going to drink that?” Ursula asks with a laugh.

“What? It’s fine,” Alesander says. “Have you never heard of Grand Cru?”

When the bottle reaches Kristof, the smell that wafts up is sharp but not unpleasant—tannic and earthy, with hints of something almost medicinal. “To absent friends,” he says, and drinks. The wine is rough, chalky. But it quickly spreads warmth through his chest.

He offers the bottle to Ursula as Alesander pulls out his notebook and pen.

“Grand Cru vintage and an art demonstration?” Ursula teases. She grimaces after tasting the wine but then drinks again.

Alesander keeps sketching. The scratch of his pen whispers as he works. Finally, he looks up. “Have either of you read any Surrealist poetry?”

“What?” Ursula bursts out, shaking her head.

Kristof watches her, grinning. This is clearly her first glimpse of the real Alesander.

“I spent a night in Marseille once,” Alesander begins to explain. “A very long night, in fact. With a group of them—artists, poets, some of the people the Emergency Rescue Committee was helping find a way out of the country. In one of the hotel suites, they played a game they called Exquisite Corpse, though for them, it wasn’t a game at all. They were creating pure art, to hear them talk. Tapping into the collective unconscious.” He chuckles softly. “I know I’m being a terrible snob about it. Anyway, someone would write the first line of a poem before folding the paper and passing it on to the next person, who did the same, and so on. Then they would read it aloud and spend hours, I’m not exaggerating, discussing the profundity of each line.”

“What is Surrealism, exactly?” Kristof asks. “Am I missing something?”

“I’m still not sure myself. I think it has something to do with irrational juxtapositions or dreaming—or dreaming about irrational juxtaposition. But sometimes they did the exercise as a drawing. I’ve started one for us,” he adds, folding the piece of paper and handing it to Ursula. “I’ve drawn the head, now you draw the body without looking at what I’ve done. Kristof will do the last part, also without looking.”

She looks at the blank sheet in front of her, smiling. “I don’t get it. The head of what?”

“You can’t know. That’s the fun of it.”

“You do it,” Ursula says, passing the page to Kristof. “I’m not artistic.”

“I’m not either.” He tries to hand it back, and soon they’re both laughing like children. “If I have to draw, we’re going to need more wine.”

On the other side of the cavern, roused by their silliness, Sasha stands up and picks her way carefully across the uneven floor. “What’s going on?”

“A game,” says Alesander. “I’ll show you how it’s played.” He rises to follow her back to the others. “Just wait,” he tells Kristof and Ursula. “I’m betting you that none of them will balk or seem confused or say they can’t draw. I might not know what Surrealism is, but children do—or simply are that. Anyway, you’ll see.”

Kristof and Ursula continue their game, if for no other reason than not to be shown up by adolescents. When Alesander returns, they unfold the finished drawing in the yellow-orange glow of the flashlight. A strange creature has emerged out of pieces—Kristof’s careful, almost mechanical legs fused to Ursula’s fluid, vaselike body, and then Alesander’s contribution. A head of snakes, à la Medusa. The elements don’t remotely belong together, but somehow the combination is still interesting. Still curiously appealing.

Alesander squints, looking satisfied as he examines their creation. “I probably couldn’t spend hours discussing the brilliance or profundity here, nor would I want to. But it’s fascinating that we can make meaning out of fragments. Even fragments we can’t see or don’t understand.” He illuminates one of the nearby walls with his flashlight to prove his point, the beam grazing over bits of ancient graffiti, mason’s notches, sketched-in or painted dates. Each representing someone who sheltered or hid in this same space long ago, perhaps during other wars, other occupations.

Kristof finds himself nodding in agreement and feeling moved. This aspect of the underground has appealed to him from the beginning. He says, “Humans have always made marks. Even cavemen left their palm prints in red ochre. They had their own reasons. Maybe they hoped someone else would see their work one day, or maybe they just wanted something of themselves to last.”

Alesander sets down his flashlight to reach for the bottle, his eyes catching glints of borrowed light. “I don’t think we necessarily need to know what the signs mean. We can still be changed by them, what they left behind. Because it’s still here.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Ursula says.

Just then, from their huddled group on the other side of the vault, the teens erupt in a chain of half-suppressed giggles. Alesander was right, naturally. With very little prompting, they’ve hit the ground running in their own game and haven’t looked back.

Kristof glances at the paper in his hands. The creature they’ve made is absurd, but in its own way, it belongs here. Like this crazy adventure and the rest of their story—makeshift and irreverent, set down piece by piece in the dark.

CHAPTER 81

Sasha presses her fingers against the damp stone walls, feeling the shift in texture as they move forward. If Alesander’s calculations are correct, they have been underground for nearly forty hours and are just past the halfway point to Chevilly-Larue. But such measurements feel meaningless.

Time doesn’t behave normally in the dark. Nothing does. The tunnels twist back on themselves, spiraling in ways that defy logic. At moments, it seems they are retracing their steps rather than advancing, descending when they should be climbing. The only reality is the terrain beneath their feet—sometimes packed and dry, other times slick with moisture, polished smooth by centuries of underground water flow. In these places, they move carefully, testing each step to avoid slipping. Much of their journey is measured out against landmarks. The Cathedral Chamber they cross before dawn, its massive limestone pillars vanishing into darkness beyond their flashlights. The narrow passages where they press themselves flat against stone.

And then there are the moments of unexpected beauty. A patch of tiny quartz crystals embedded in the wall, mirrored glints that catch the light and cast it back in miniature rainbows. A hollow cavity with almost magical acoustics, where water drips steadily from fissures above, creating a music that has played for who knows how long, for no one. A gallery where the limestone has wide bands of color. Rust-red, ochre-yellow, and deep violet. As if the earth has painted a message. Emblazoned its story.

LAST NIGHT—IF IT was night—the Exquisite Corpse game had ended in breathless laughter, their drawings growing more absurd with each round. Maurice’s head was one of the best, a cat with a monocle, winking. Even Annette joined in, finally able to forget how tired and how scared she was.

But today, the tension returns. When Maurice knocks loose a shower of pebbles while adjusting his pack, Ursula snaps at him. Kristof pulls her aside afterward and says something. Then he hugs her. Afterward, Ursula seems a little embarrassed, but Sasha can tell that she needed that touch to right herself again. The next time they stop, Ursula tells Maurice she’s sorry and then pulls him close. As if the kindness, the friendship, has created a physical chain.

There are times when Sasha feels so sad she thinks she might drown in it. Other times, she feels silly or distracted—like any other fifteen-year-old girl—thinking about Gérard.

She has never noticed boys before. Not in a way that mattered. They have only been background noise—annoying, arrogant, unimportant. But Gérard isn’t like that at all. He’s steady and observant, but never demands attention. He helps without making a show of it, staying close to her and Annette, offering a hand over difficult ground, waiting on the other side when they’re forced to squeeze through tight corridors. His presence makes the journey more bearable.

But how can she be thinking such romantic thoughts? Sasha wonders, criticizing herself. How, when she doesn’t know where her mother and siblings are now? If they’re safe and unharmed?

The truth is it’s easier to think about Gérard. If she worries too much about her family, she starts to wonder if she can bear it.

So, she makes a truce with herself. For now, she will hold her family lightly in her mind. She will talk to them, reassure them the way Thisbe does with Pyramus, through a crack in the stone wall that separates them.

I’m still here, she says to Maman and to Rald, to little Klara, and her father. In her mind and her heart, she whispers, I’ll never stop finding my way to you.

SO MUCH ABOUT this journey feels mythic to Sasha. They are like Orpheus descending into darkness, seeking not a lost love but a future where love might still be possible. They are Aeneas, following the sibyl through the underworld, seeing visions of past and future as they navigate the depths.

Alesander has given them so many astonishing signposts to follow. The Méduse Chamber, with strange formations snaking along the ceiling like petrified serpents. The Hall of Columns, where perfectly round stone pillars stand like an ancient forest. The Blue Spring, a pool so mineral-rich it glows an otherworldly turquoise. The Gallery of Shields, quarry walls marked with blazon carvings, the signatures of stonecutter guilds.

Each space is an anchor in the endless dark, a reminder that they are moving forward. But time underground has changed Sasha. She has learned to listen—to sense the difference between steady footing and places where the rock shifts. She has learned to read silence—how Kristof’s measured breathing means he is working out some problem, how Annette hums when she is trying to stave off fear.

For the past hour, Alesander has been studying his maps more often, touching the walls as if listening for something beyond their hearing. Twice, he stops to press his ear to the stone.

“What is it?” Kristof finally asks.

“This section doesn’t match the map. There’s been more erosion than I expected.” He reaches up to trace a thin crack in the ceiling. “The water table must have shifted.”

Watching, Sasha sees a flicker of doubt that hasn’t been there before. Not about his abilities. Not about his maps, but the stone itself. What’s under the surface of what appears solid.

Not long after, they come to the sinkhole. A gaping void in the tunnel floor that devours the beams of their flashlights. Moisture seeps through the high ceiling, feeding calcite patterns that drip like frozen tears.

Alesander tests the edge first. “Stable enough along the sides. We can go around.”

“How do we know it’s not worse ahead?” Ursula asks.

“We don’t.” Alesander pulls a coil of rope from his pack. “We use this. Two anchor points, one here, one across. If anyone slips—”

“They won’t fall far,” Kristof finishes, securing the rope to a limestone pillar. He tests its hold, then crosses first, bracing himself against the far wall as soil crumbles into the abyss beneath him. He makes it.

Ursula follows, and then Sasha, who takes one step and then another, trying not to look down. The ledge is narrow, barely a foot wide in places, disintegrating at the edges. She can feel the vibration of her own pulse through her fingertips against the damp wall.

One by one, they all make the crossing. Alesander is last. He moves steadily, shifting his weight like a tightrope walker. Sasha almost believes they are safe—until the ground shudders under her. There is a sharp crack, the sound of stone fracturing. The ledge beneath Alesander gives way.

Kristof is jerked forward off his feet. At the last second, he manages to catch and brace himself with his legs against a rock. He still has the rope. Still has Alesander’s life in his hands, as dust and debris fountain upward from the cavern below.

For one breathless second, everything holds. Then the rope snaps. Alesander falls. As the darkness reaches up to swallow him whole, Sasha screams.

Paris 1664

CHAPTER 82

They drag themselves onto the shore, collapsing onto the slick embankment of the levee. For several moments, they can do nothing but lie there, lungs heaving, bodies shivering violently in the winter air. Alouette sinks her hands into the mud, feeling it give beneath her palms.

“We need to move,” Marguerite finally gasps, forcing herself to her knees. “They’ll be searching the banks.”

Alouette attempts to orient herself in the darkness. They’ve emerged on the left bank of the Seine, at the edge of the Ivry Plain. The levee rises before them, a low earthen barrier meant to protect the plain from flooding—now partially submerged by the swollen river. Beyond it stretches a patchwork of market gardens and small workshops, ghostly in a scrim of moonlight.

And there, looming behind them no more than five hundred yards away, stands Salpêtrière. Guards with lanterns move along the perimeter, their lights bobbing like malevolent fireflies in the darkness.

“We’re too exposed here,” Sylvine says, scanning their surroundings.

She’s right. The open expanse of the Ivry Plain offers little cover—just scattered sheds and market stalls, many abandoned because of the cold. To their left, perhaps a quarter mile downstream, Alouette can make out the curved silhouette of the pont de la Tournelle, its arches spanning the churning river.

“The bridge?” she suggests, teeth chattering from cold.

Marguerite shakes her head. “There might already be guards stationed there by now. One of the first places they would look for escaping prisoners.”

Sylvine points toward a cluster of small buildings near the riverbank. “Those warehouses. We can find shelter, at least temporarily.”

They help one another to their feet, limbs stiff, clothes sodden, making every movement an effort. The mud sucks at their boots as they stumble up the bank, keeping low to avoid being silhouetted against the night sky.

As they reach the top of the levee, the full extent of the plain becomes visible—as does the challenge before them. The quickest route to the Sisters of Saint Catherine would take them directly through the heart of the city, across the Île Saint-Louis and into the Marais district on the right bank. But that path leads through well-patrolled streets, past the Hôtel de Ville, where city guards maintain a constant presence.

“We need to find dry things,” Marguerite says, straining to make herself heard over the wind. “We’ll freeze to death before we reach the convent.”

They make their way across the muddy ground, keeping to shadows, painfully aware of how visible they might be to anyone looking in their direction. Finally, they reach the closest warehouse, its wooden walls weathered and dark. A small side door, likely meant for workers, stands slightly ajar—either damaged by the recent flooding or left open in haste.

Sylvine pushes it open wider, wincing at the creak of hinges. They slip inside, into blackness that smells of damp hay and river silt.

“What is this place?” Alouette whispers as her eyes adjust.

“It seems to be wine storage,” Marguerite replies, moving carefully between stacked barrels. “Look for anything we can use,” she says. “Clothes, shoes, something to warm us.”

They separate, searching the shadows. Alouette moves deeper into the warehouse, past rows of crates marked for shipment to Le Havre. Her body aches with exhaustion, and the child within her has gone ominously still once more. She presses a hand to her belly, murmuring a silent prayer.

“Here!” Sylvine hisses. “Workers’ clothes.”

They gather around her in a small alcove where several rough shirts, a pair of trousers, and some worn cloaks hang on pegs.

“It’s not much, but it’s dry,” Marguerite says, already stripping off her sodden shift.

The herbs they hid away in their robes are ruined now. Thankfully Sylvine’s coins and the ledger are safe. They change quickly, dividing the warmest things among them. Alouette wraps herself in a coarse wool cloak that smells of tobacco and sweat and yet provides immediate relief. Sylvine discovers a pair of rope-soled work boots that she insists Alouette take.

“Your feet are already bleeding,” she says when Alouette tries to refuse.

Through a small window, they can see the continued activity around Salpêtrière.

“We can’t stay here,” Marguerite says, joining them at the window. “Which way to the convent?”

Sylvine considers for a moment. “If we follow the river downstream, we can cross at pont Marie. It’s farther, but less likely to be watched.”

“Will we arrive before dawn?” Alouette asks, dread edging into her voice. In daylight, three women in ill-fitting men’s clothing will attract immediate attention.

“We have to try.” Marguerite peers out the window again, then draws back sharply. “Guards. Coming this way.”

They all hear them now—a crunching of boots on gravel, the low murmur of voices growing closer.

The women hurry through the warehouse, navigating between barrels and crates, toward a loading door at the rear. Sylvine reaches it first, lifting the heavy wooden bar that secures it. The door swings open on surprisingly silent hinges, revealing a narrow alley.

“Wait,” Sylvine hisses, holding up a hand.

The sound of footsteps comes from both directions now—guards approaching from the front and others circling around the building. They’re being surrounded.

CHAPTER 83

Marguerite looks around desperately, then points to a shadow just inside the warehouse. A wooden ladder. Without hesitation, they ease away from the loading door and climb. Alouette’s hands shake with effort as they reach a hayloft, partially filled with straw. They’ve barely pulled the ladder up after them when the main door swings open below.

Lantern light blooms as guards enter, their boots heavy on the wooden planks.

Pressed flat against the loft floor, the women hardly dare to breathe. The straw provides some cover, but if the guards think to look up… Alouette’s heart pounds so loudly she’s certain they must be able to hear it below.

“Check the barrels,” someone says. “The rat-faced one is small enough to hide in them.”

Marguerite’s expression tightens at the description, but she remains perfectly still. The guards move methodically through the warehouse, opening crates, checking behind stacked barrels. One passes directly beneath them, close enough that Alouette could touch his head if she was fool enough to move.

“Sir!” a voice calls from the loading door. “Tracks leading away, toward the river landing!”

“Follow them,” the commander orders. “You two, continue searching here.”

Most of the guards exit through the back door, their footsteps fading into the night. The two that remain move more slowly now, their lanterns casting long shadows across the warehouse floor.

“Can you imagine how stupid these prisoners must be?” one asks, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. “In this weather? With the river so high?”

“Desperate women do desperate things,” his companion replies. “Especially the mad ones.”

“The valerian in the wine, though—that was clever. Too clever for lunatics.”

The men continue their half-hearted search, lanterns swinging lower as their interest wanes. Finally, after what seems an eternity, they make their way out. As the door closes behind them, the warehouse is plunged back into darkness. Even then, the women wait, counting silently to a hundred before daring to move.

“That was too close,” Sylvine whispers, lowering the ladder back to the floor.

They descend carefully, ears straining for any sound of the guards’ return. Outside, the plain has grown still again—the search moving farther away, following the false trail.

“We need to go now,” Marguerite says. “While they’re looking in the wrong place.”

They slip into the alley, keeping close to the walls. The night is waning, the eastern sky showing the first hints of dawn. They have perhaps an hour before the city wakes. An hour to find sanctuary.

Staying away from the open areas where they might be spotted from Salpêtrière, they move from shadow to shadow, using the warehouses and market stalls for cover. The ground is treacherous—muddy from the flooding, strewn with debris washed up from the river. Alouette’s borrowed boots, too large and rubbing blisters on her heels, still protect her feet from the worst of it.

They skirt the edge of a small settlement, a cluster of fishermen’s hovels and craftsmen’s cottages that huddle near the river. A dog barks somewhere in the darkness, making them freeze until the sound subsides.

“This way,” Sylvine murmurs, guiding them toward a path that runs alongside a row of winter-bare trees.

The route takes them past sleeping houses, their windows dark and shuttered. Once, they press themselves into a doorway as a night watchman passes, his lantern swinging, his eyes heavy with interrupted sleep. He doesn’t see them—or pretends not to, unable to rouse himself to care.

Finally, the pont Marie appears before them, its stone arches darkly contoured against the sky. Unlike the more prominent bridges, this one has no permanent guard post—just occasional patrols by the city watch.

“Wait,” Marguerite whispers, holding them back in the shadows of a boathouse. “Look.”

Two guards stand at the near end of the bridge, speaking with a ferryman whose barge is tied nearby. They gesture toward Salpêtrière, then across the river, clearly describing the escaped women.

“They’ve blocked the bridge,” Alouette says, despair creeping into her voice. “We’re trapped.”

“No.” Sylvine’s eyes are fixed on the scene. “We’re not beaten yet.”

She points to where several skiffs are moored along the bank, bobbing gently in the current. Most belong to fishermen who will come for them at dawn, but for now, they sit unattended.

“We’re going to steal a boat?” Alouette asks, eyes widening.

“Borrow,” Marguerite corrects with grim humor. “We’re not thieves, just desperate.”

They work their way carefully down to the water’s edge, keeping below the level of the embankment, where the guards might spot them. The skiffs creak against their moorings, tossed by the rush of the river.

Sylvine selects one slightly larger than the others, with a dark awning that might provide some concealment. “Help me with the rope,” she whispers.

The knot is swollen from the damp, but eventually it gives way. They climb in carefully, the boat rocking alarmingly beneath their weight.

“Stay low,” Sylvine instructs, taking up the oars. “And hold tight. The current is strong.”

She pushes off from the bank, digging the oars deep into the water to steer them into the main channel. The Seine immediately catches them, pulling them downstream with frightening speed. Sylvine struggles to maintain control, her arms straining against the force of the river.

“Head for that landing,” Marguerite says, pointing to a small dock on the right bank, just beyond the Île Saint-Louis.

Alouette grips the sides of the boat, feeling every surge of the current threatening to capsize them. Above, the pont Marie looms, and for a moment, she’s certain the guards will spot them passing beneath. But their attention remains fixed on the bridge rather than the murky waters below.

The boat spins slightly as they pass under the center arch, the current growing more turbulent in the confined space. Sylvine fights to keep them steady, muscles trembling with effort. When they emerge on the other side, they’re past most of the danger. The city spreads before them—the jumbled rooftops of the Marais district, the spires of churches rising against the gradually lightening sky.

Sylvine guides them toward the small dock, fighting the river every inch of the way. As they draw closer, Alouette can see it’s part of a larger landing used by merchants, with steps leading up to a small square.

“Anyone watching?” Marguerite asks, scanning the embankment.

“Not that I can see,” Alouette replies. “But there’s a night watchman’s shelter near the top.”

Marguerite jumps out first, securing the boat with a quick knot, then helps Alouette onto the slippery boards. Her legs feel unsteady after the river crossing, her body still shivering despite the borrowed cloak.

“We’re close now,” Sylvine says, joining them on the dock. “The convent is perhaps half a mile from here.”

They climb the stone steps carefully, pausing at the top to survey the square. The watchman’s shelter is empty, its small brazier cold—perhaps abandoned when news of the escape spread through the city guards.

The narrow streets of the Marais are like a rabbit’s warren, old houses leaning toward one another across cobbled alleys barely wide enough for a cart to pass. Perfect for concealment, but also easy to become lost in.

“This way,” Sylvine murmurs, leading them into the maze. “Stay close.”

The predawn air is sharp with woodsmoke and the lingering scent of the previous day’s market—rotting vegetables, fish, the tang of spices. A cat watches them from a doorway, yellow eyes unblinking, before slipping off into shadows.

They move quickly now, energy renewed by the knowledge that refuge is close. Sylvine leads, being most familiar with Paris. She navigates by the church spires visible above the rooftops, heading steadily northwest.

The path grows even more narrow and convoluted as they enter the oldest part of the district—houses built during the last century, their timber frames warped with age, their upper stories jutting out over the street. Here, even at this hour, there are signs of life—a baker’s boy heading to stoke the ovens, a lamplighter making his final rounds.

They duck into doorways or side alleys when anyone approaches, though most pay little attention to three figures hurrying through the predawn gloom. In their borrowed men’s clothing, with cloaks pulled high to shadow their faces, they might be apprentices or laborers heading to early work.

Finally, as the eastern sky turns from black to deepest blue, Sylvine stops at a corner, pointing ahead. Past a labyrinth of streets along the right bank, the convent rises before them, its walls hewn from the same pale stone as the oldest parts of Paris.

“What if they turn us away?” Alouette asks, voicing the fear they all share.

“They can’t,” Sylvine says, but doubt etches her face.

Marguerite straightens her shoulders. “There’s only one way to find out.”

When they reach the door of the convent, Marguerite hesitates only briefly before tugging on the bellpull. The sound startles them all, surely loud enough to wake every guard in Paris.

A long moment passes. Then another. Alouette feels hope slipping away with each heartbeat. Behind them, the sky brightens perceptibly, the first rays of dawn not far off.

Then, the sound of footsteps beyond the door. A small hatch slides open at eye level, no wider than a prayer book, revealing the lined face of a nun. Her gaze flicks over them, taking in their bedraggled appearance, the terror and exhaustion in their eyes, how Alouette sways on her feet.

“What do you seek?” she asks, her voice kind but gruff. Like tumbled velvet.

“Sanctuary,” Marguerite says.

The nun studies them for a long moment. Then, with a nod, she unlatches the door and draws them inside.

Paris 1942

CHAPTER 84

Kristof’s mind sharpens to a single point: Get Alesander up before the tunnel collapses completely.

Locking another rope around the pillar, he tests it with three sharp tugs, then loops the end around his waist. The rough hemp fibers scrape through his shirt to his skin. The air in the cavern is thick with powdered limestone, each breath coating his throat with chalky dust. From below, the sinkhole echoes faintly with shifting debris.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ursula asks. “We can’t afford to lose you both.”

“We don’t have time to argue.”

Kristof lowers himself through the aperture, hand over hand, as the rope cuts into his palms. The fibers fray slightly with each pull, tiny strands shredding off against the ragged stone. Sweat stings his eyes. He tries not to think about anything at all, certainly not the danger involved, until his boots catch the tunnel wall below, scraping against an outcropping of exposed flint.

The chamber beneath is nothing like the engineered tunnels they’ve been moving through. This is an ancient cavern abandoned long ago or deliberately avoided. Nature has reclaimed the space in the absence of humans. Stalactites thrust from the ceiling, their tips glistening with mineral-rich water that has seeped through the earth for centuries. Pooling with the metallic tang of limestone, there is the iron-laced scent of fresh blood.

Alesander has fallen at least twenty meters, landing hard on a section where the cavern floor is littered with broken stone. He seems barely conscious, his eyes fluttering, each shallow breath releasing a small cloud of vapor. Blood soaks through his pant leg, spreading fast. His right leg dangles unnaturally, his foot caught at an odd angle. A compound fracture—the white gleam of bone visible even in the dimness. But that’s not all.

Alesander’s breathing is uneven and wet-sounding. One side of his chest barely moves while the other rises and falls in spasmodic jerks. Internal injuries. A punctured lung, maybe worse. Bright red foam froths the corners of his mouth.

Kristof swallows hard, tasting copper and chalk. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Kristof.” A weak exhale. “Not sure… I can.”

Ignoring him, Kristof shrugs out of his coat, folding it rapidly into a makeshift pressure bandage. The fabric immediately darkens as he presses it against the worst of the visible wounds.

Alesander’s eyes catch Kristof’s. Despite the obvious pain, there is a hint of a laugh in his voice when he says, “I think I miscalculated.”

Kristof has to smile at that, though he also wants to cry. “Just a bit.”

Securing the rope beneath Alesander’s arms, with another loop around his hips, he creates a makeshift harness. Then Kristof calls up, signaling to Ursula and the others. The harness tightens. Slowly, as Alesander’s body is elevated, he groans in pain, clearly suppressing the urge to scream. His skin has gone gray and waxy. Kristof has no idea how he’s managing.

Twenty meters has never seemed so far. The rope creaks ominously with each pull from above. The chamber is still settling, still unstable. Fresh cascades of pebbles rain down from the edges of the sinkhole.

Twice the rope slips, dropping him a few terrifying centimeters before catching again. Each time, Alesander’s face contorts in silent agony, he’s too weak now even to cry out. Finally, hands reach around him from above.

The moment Alesander’s body clears the ledge and the rope is thrown back down to him, Kristof scrambles up, his biceps quaking with fatigue. Alesander seems far worse. His eyes are unfocused, pupils dilated to black pools. His breath shudders with each inhale.

Kristof presses his hands to Alesander’s side, but there is so much blood. As he scans Ursula’s face, her look confirms what he already knows. Blood loss, pneumothorax, likely internal hemorrhaging. They have pulled him from one abyss, only to watch him slip away into another.

“I’m sorry,” Alesander whispers, barely more than a gasp. A fine mist of blood speckles his lips. “Such a theatrical exit, no?”

Kristof doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream. “I’m here,” he manages, through his spiraling emotions. This can’t be happening. He can’t be losing his friend—not this way. Not any way.

Alesander exhales slowly, almost peacefully. He fumbles for Kristof’s blood-slick hand beside him. “Tell me… what’s ahead?”

Kristof looks as far as he can down the tunnel beyond them. It’s so dark. Who knows what waits? He swallows, tasting grit and salt. “A clear path.”

Alesander gives him the ghost of a smile. “Good.”

The others make space, their lit shadows stretching and wavering against the tunnel’s rough arc. Gérard helps clear debris while Maurice keeps watch just ahead in the passage. Sasha kneels beside Alesander, holding herself steady despite the gravity of the moment. She is learning, as he had at Sainte-Anne’s, that death demands witness as much as anything else.

Alesander’s coat pocket holds a worn photograph, its edges dog-eared and soft with handling. The paper is stained and sepia-toned except for a patch of vivid blue sky. The image is of a sharply peaked mountain valley in bright sunlight. The Pyrenees. Home. Kristof smooths it gently, recognizing the significance of this talisman Alesander has likely carried for years, and close to the heart.

“Close your eyes,” he says in a voice he’s practiced and refined throughout his training, never imagining he would one day need to use it this way. “Find somewhere peaceful.”

“The country around Ochagavía,” Alesander murmurs, a wet rasp underlining each word. “Where I grew up. The light there… it’s like nothing else in the world.”

“Tell me about it.” Kristof finds Alesander’s wrist, monitoring the fading pulse. “Go there in your mind and tell me what you see.”

“There’s no place more beautiful. Wild thyme growing between the rocks. Cypress trees in bursts of green.” Alesander’s voice hitches, catches. “Air so clean it makes you drunk. Makes you believe anything’s possible.”

From somewhere above them, water drips steadily like the tick of a second hand. Annette begins to hum softly—a fragment of “Minor Swing” that she’s heard Alesander whistle time and again on their journey. The tune seems to ease Alesander’s labored breathing.

“The sun’s rising,” he murmurs, sounding distant now, floating. Untethered from pain. “Can you see it?”

“What?” Kristof asks softly, his own vision blurring with tears.

“Everything.”

Then he’s gone. Quiet falls. The pulse beneath Kristof’s fingers stills.

Gently, Sasha tucks the photograph back into Alesander’s coat pocket, handling it as she would something sacred, which it is. For a long moment, no one moves.

It doesn’t feel right to simply leave him there without a proper burial, Kristof thinks. But in another way, it feels beyond fitting. Alesander is one of millions, now, taking his place among centuries and centuries of Paris’s dead. This chamber will be his tomb, this limestone his marker.

Taking a piece of chalk from her satchel, Sasha presses it to the wall with a steady hand. Kristof watches with the others as the letters take shape. Non omnis moriar. “Not all of me shall die.”

“It’s from Horace,” she explains in the hushed silence. “He believed some things last forever. Memory. Love. The light in a painting.” Her fingers trace the words, leaving ghostly fingerprints in the chalk dust. “Like in Metamorphoses. People change, but they’re not erased. They become something else.”

With a few more reverent strokes, Sasha finishes her message and sits back on her heels in the low light. Manes, remember him. Traveler, listen: He lived bravely.

It’s an ancient invocation. The Romans carved such messages into grave markers to honor the dead, entreating both their spirit guides and the living to remember them, ensuring immortality. And yet Sasha has also added a liberty bird in flight, its head turned toward the path ahead.

Kristof lets out a slow breath as Sasha meets his gaze. “I realized something,” she says quietly. “The birds are here to guide whoever comes next. Philomela had no voice, but she still found a way to speak.”

LATER, AS THEY begin to move again, the tunnel stretches ahead with the same darkness and risk, the same yawning uncertainty, but they move as one now. No more hollow looks, no more doubt. Alesander has given them that.

And behind them, left on the limestone wall, Sasha’s liberty bird waits for the next lost traveler. A signal in the dark that whispers: We were here. We mattered. We never stopped looking for ways to be free.

CHAPTER 85

Alesander is dead. This reality sits like stone in Sasha’s chest, but there is no time to properly mourn. They need to keep going, no matter what, following Kristof through the remaining miles of this labyrinth.

Throughout the day, as they travel beyond the boundaries of the city, the narrow passage gradually widens. The way becomes more circuitous and less predictable—chambers crudely cut by long-dead quarrymen before being forgotten.

“These quarry voids were never touched by any of the consolidation projects,” Kristof explains. “They’re probably not so changed from when stonecutters were here centuries ago.”

As he studies Alesander’s maps by flashlight, Sasha watches his fingers trace the route. The pages are covered with Alesander’s precise architect’s handwriting, arrows and notations marking dangerous spots, collapsed tunnels, potential shelters. So much work had gone into preparing them for this moment. Preparing them to survive without him.

Gérard falls into step beside Sasha. For a while, they walk in silence, their footsteps echoing forward and back.

“I keep wondering about my parents,” he says finally. “What if they were released after the roundup and have been trying to find me?”

Sasha glances at him, his face half in shadow. “I’ve worried about that too. And about worse things.” She swallows hard and goes on, though her next question feels too big for the narrow space between them. Too big to hold anywhere. “Do you think we’ll see them again?”

“I have to believe it,” Gérard says after a moment. “Otherwise, what’s the point of any of this?” He gestures to the tunnel stretching ahead. “If we don’t believe we’ll ever find them again someday, why keep going?”

“I’m scared I’ll forget their faces,” she confesses. “That’s why I’ve always been so obsessed with memory. I don’t want to lose what matters most. My family. My home.”

Gérard’s hand brushes against hers in the dark, gentle as a thread drawing two pieces of fabric together. “I know. But you won’t. It’s like what you said. Holding the people we love in our hearts keeps them alive forever. That’s true, I think.”

“Me too,” she says, still feeling the warmth of his hand against her skin. “Let’s keep reminding each other.”

“Yes.”

THE JOURNEY IS heavier without Alesander. The knowledge of what they have lost seems to burden every step. Hours pass. Another day, even. Time is difficult to track in the dark, but Sasha feels the gradual shift in the air, the faintest promise of deliverance. Then—at last—a break in the tunnel.

Up ahead, a sliver of light cuts through the blackness. Kristof raises a hand, signaling for caution. They move forward, the passage growing wider and brighter until they spill out into an open meadow.

Sasha gasps. After almost seventy-two hours underground, the world outside feels impossibly vast. Beyond them, the land stretches in rolling hills, sparse trees bending against the wind. In the distance, beyond the wooded slope and a broad field, stands a low stone farmhouse. Pale smoke curls faintly from the chimney. A weathered fence lines a pasture where the pitched roof of a barn glows faintly with the coming twilight.

“There,” Kristof murmurs. “That’s our first stop.”

It looks modest, almost unremarkable—but that’s what makes it perfect. A place meant for safekeeping, for the calm between storms. For beginnings.

The sky continues to deepen, indigo stretching behind the clouds as dusk settles in. The last streaks of sunlight edge the hills in gold. It is neither day nor night just now—just that hushed in-between place when everything feels briefly possible.

As they rest, waiting for full dark to conceal their final approach, Sasha studies the landscape, struck by a feeling of calm. She doesn’t see any signs of the war here, or of occupation. The people in those houses might be going about their lives almost normally, baking bread, feeding animals, preparing for bed. She wonders if they know how disastrous things have become in Paris. If they care.

Her mother and siblings—Rald, baby Klara—remain somewhere behind them. Her father could be anywhere. With each step forward, she’ll move farther from home, from the last place they were all together. The thought brings stinging tears to her eyes.

If only Alesander could be here for this moment of surfacing. All of this was his doing. His maps, his dream, his sacrifice so that they could live. Someday—if all goes well—they will find themselves in his country, and many others will, too, if they can chart the way well enough. She imagines his beloved mountains waiting there to welcome them. Shelter them. A place where the air is so clean it could make you drunk, he’d said. Where when the sun breaks over the peaks, the whole valley fills with light.

In her mind, she opens a new chamber in her memory palace, promising herself that when the war ends, she will return. She will search every record, knock on every door, follow every shadow until she finds them. Her family will not vanish into silence. She will not let them become one more story without an ending. So many of her favorite myths involve desperate plans and impossible circumstances. Like Daedalus, who crafted wings for himself and his son—not from ambition or hubris, but from a desperate need to escape. Sometimes freedom exacts the highest price of all.

Kristof touches Sasha’s shoulder, pointing to the stars emerging in the deepening blue. When it’s time to move, she doesn’t look back. Not toward Paris, not even behind them to the passages that led them here. For now, there is only forward, one step following another, toward a future she cannot yet imagine but must believe in nonetheless.

“Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis,” she whispers, reaching for Gérard’s offered hand. “All things change, and we change with them.”

Paris 1664

CHAPTER 86

The change in the air strikes Alouette first—gone is Salpêtrière’s stifling mix of despair and wet stone. Instead, she breathes in woodsmoke, beeswax, the ghost of incense. As the door shuts and the cloister embraces them, Alouette exhales fully for the first time in days.

And then the pain comes—sharp and twisting, unlike the dull ache that’s been her steady companion. She gasps, doubling over.

“Alouette?” Sylvine is beside her instantly, supporting her weight.

“Something’s wrong,” she manages, before another spasm grips her. Warmth trickles down her inner thigh.

The elderly nun moves swiftly, calling out with urgency. Two younger sisters appear as if summoned by magic, their hands gentle but firm as they help Alouette to a small chamber off the main courtyard.

“How far along?” one asks, already gathering linens.

“Almost six months,” Alouette whispers, shame and fear knotting in her chest. They had spoken little of her condition during their escape. It’s been a secret held close, another vulnerability they couldn’t afford to acknowledge.

The sister nods, her expression grave but kind. “The journey was too much, I’m afraid.”

They help her onto a narrow pallet. The pain comes in waves now, each stronger than the last. Sylvine stays by her side, her face tight with a recognition that makes Alouette’s heart clench. Sylvine knows this pain. She has borne this loss.

“I’m sorry,” Alouette gasps, though she isn’t sure who she’s apologizing to. Sylvine, the child, herself, or Étienne, who will never know he was a father—almost.

“Hush,” Sylvine says, taking her hand. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.”

The next hours pass in a blur of agony and murmured prayers. The sisters work with quiet efficiency, their hands skilled and sure. They offer herbs to ease the cramping, press cool cloths to her forehead, speak words of comfort that wash over her like distant waves.

When it’s over, Alouette feels empty in a way that goes beyond physical pain. She presses her hand to the hollowness inside her, the silence where something had been growing, hoping. And she understands now, with a terrible clarity, why her mother had looked like a ghost even before she fled. Some losses steal not only the future, but part of the self.

The sisters wrap the too-small body in clean linen, treating this lost child with the same reverence they would show any soul.

“Would you like to name your son?” the eldest sister asks gently. “We will bury him with prayers.”

Alouette hesitates, her vision blurred with rising tears. She thinks of Étienne, of what might have been. After a moment, she nods. “René,” she says softly. “After my father.”

When they take the small bundle away, Marguerite sits beside her, replacing Sylvine, who has gone to speak with the Mother Superior.

“I didn’t even tell him,” Alouette whispers sadly. “Étienne. He’ll never know.”

Marguerite’s hand closes over hers. “You couldn’t have saved this child, Alouette. Not with what we endured. How far we had to run.”

“I know.” She does know. The truth of it sits bone-deep. Salpêtrière has claimed one more victim, even beyond its walls. “But I would have tried to hold on. If I could have seen what was coming.”

“You would still have run,” Marguerite says firmly. “Because staying meant death for you both. At least this way, you survived. You can heal. You can have another someday, if you choose.”

Alouette closes her eyes, too exhausted to argue. Even so, the smallest seed of possibility takes root amid the grief. Endurance. Healing. Choice. These are gifts—hard-won and precious.

Later, when the Mother Superior comes to speak with them, Alouette is sitting up, pale but composed. The older woman studies her with keen eyes that seem to see through her to her soul. “My child. I am very sorry for your loss.”

Alouette blinks at her, unable to speak past the rawness in her throat.

“Your companions have told me of your escape, of what you endured at Salpêtrière,” she says, her look sharp, even fierce. “Such cruelty cannot stand unchallenged. We have powerful connections in Paris. Families whose daughters vanished into places like Salpêtrière. Men who owe us debts of conscience. Trust me when I say that I won’t rest until reparations are made. What was done in darkness will be brought to light.”

“Thank you,” Alouette says simply. The relief she feels is too large and complicated to try and say more.

The Mother Superior rings a small silver bell, and a young sister appears, her face carefully blank. “Prepare the herb room for our guests,” she instructs. “They will stay until they are strong enough to travel. And inform Sister Benedict that we have patients in need of her care.”

“My mother found refuge here once, long ago,” Alouette says when the young nun moves off. “Her name is Henriette Voland.”

Something shifts in the Mother Superior’s expression. She looks at Alouette, studying her face with new interest. “Henriette,” she repeats softly. “Yes. I remember her well.”

“You do?”

“Yes, she came to us much as you have—seeking refuge, carrying wounds both visible and hidden.” The older woman’s hands fold in her lap, her eyes soft with empathy. “She stayed with us for nearly a year.”

“Do you know where she is now?” Alouette asks, remembering their last exchange in Saint-Marcel, how she’d begun to see Henriette in a new light. Far stronger than she’d ever given her credit for, and braver too.

“I believe she’s in Provins, at one of our sister convents, working as an herbalist. She’s very gifted, I hear, particularly with training novices.”

Alouette lets the words settle inside her. That Henriette has found a way to use her hands, her knowledge—that she is teaching others now—brings an unexpected sense of peace. Not closure, exactly, but something steadier. A kind of belonging, as if a thread still hums between them. If her mother has found a way to live beyond the world’s verdict—beyond shame, beyond silence—then perhaps she can too.

“Would you like me to write to her?” asks the Mother Superior. “To let her know you’re safe?”

“Yes,” Alouette whispers. “Please.”

The woman smiles gently, nodding. Then she turns to go. At the door, in a voice so low Alouette nearly misses it, she gives a last instruction to the junior nun: “Don’t speak of this visit to anyone.”

IN THE HERB room, they huddle close to the small fire, wrapped in clean blankets that smell of lavender. Alouette’s bones feel weightless, scraped clean by grief and exhaustion. The warmth seems to reach inside her, loosening muscles held tight through their escape, but the emptiness remains.

They sit in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. Alouette finds herself touching the walls, the neat bundles of rosemary and lavender, the rough wooden table—as if she needs to prove to herself that she’s not imagining it. That they really have come this far. Her body aches in ways she’s never imagined, but beneath the pain is something else. A recognition that she is still here. Still breathing. Still able to choose what comes next.

When the young sister returns, she brings clean clothes that might have once belonged to novices—simple wool dresses, sturdy and warm. “There’s a merchant heading west,” she tells them quietly. “He leaves in three days, when you’ve regained your strength. Mother Superior says… she says to walk with God.”

That night, as Sylvine and Marguerite sleep nearby, Alouette lies awake, thinking of the tiny grave the sisters will dig, the prayers they will say over a child who never drew breath. She thinks of Étienne, wondering if he still searches for her, if he still believes she might be found. And of the women still trapped behind Salpêtrière’s walls, who will never know the simple mercy she has received here—clean clothes, gentle hands, a space to grieve.

DAWN IS BREAKING, days later, when they slip out through the convent’s kitchen garden. The city is just coming awake, bells tolling across the rooftops. Alouette can’t see Salpêtrière from where she stands, nor does she want to—that forever-dark smudge in the distance, a savage fist against the pale, silvering sky. The merchant’s cart waits in a narrow alley, loaded with bales of wool and barrels of salt. He barely glances at them as they climb in among the cargo, his face carefully neutral. But his hands are gentle as he helps Alouette with her footing, and he has laid clean straw for them to rest on.

As the cart begins to move, picking up speed on the rutted streets, Alouette feels something break loose inside her. Tears come then, silent and hot against her cheeks. Sylvine’s arm slips around her shoulders. Marguerite clasps her hand tight.

“My family’s farm lies just outside Camaret-sur-Mer, in Brittany,” Sylvine says tentatively. “If it still stands. If they’ll have us.” She presses one hand against her eyes. “God, I can barely remember their faces.”

“How long has it been?” asks Marguerite.

“Six years. More maybe. My mother wrote, at first. Then the letters stopped coming.”

Brittany. The sea. Alouette is almost afraid to hope for something so good. “But they might shelter us?”

“My sister Maret…” Sylvine pauses, blinking away emotion. “She always said their door would be open. And the village is far enough from Paris that news travels slowly, if at all. The locals speak more Breton than French. It’s somewhere to disappear, at least. If we can. Or perhaps we should find our own place, where no one knows us. Where we can truly start fresh.”

“No, I like the idea of going there,” Alouette says. “It’s your home.”

“I can hardly believe this is real,” Marguerite whispers, speaking for them all.

But it’s not going to be that simple, they know. Freedom is more than escape—it is learning to live with the weight of what they’ve seen, what they’ve survived. It’s carrying the memories of those who are still suffering, the guilt of getting away when others can’t. It’s finding a way to build something new from the ashes of everything they’ve lost.

THE JOURNEY WEST is slow. Mile after mile, Alouette watches the land change beyond the narrow slats of the cart, fields giving way to hills, woodland, small villages. Alouette closes her eyes. At first, she can think only of the asylum. Slick dark water and senseless death, as if the walls of Salpêtrière are determined to close in even as she tries to leave them behind. But slowly, as the cart rolls on, she allows herself to imagine something else. The vision comes gradually, piece by piece, the way a quilt is made, or a song. What it might feel like to live a life beyond survival. A future shaped by their own hands.

Colline, France 1942

CHAPTER 87

The wind carries a bite, sharp with altitude and woodsmoke. Below the ridge, in a village whose name Sasha didn’t catch, a chimney exhales a slow ribbon of white into the sky. She tugs her coat tighter, the wool rubbing coarsely against her neck, her fingers stiff inside worn gloves.

They’re somewhere south of Toulouse now—two days past Moulis, and a little more. South of Saint-Girons, Kristof said this morning. Closer now to the border. Beyond that will come the mountains. The real ones. Not just the wooded ridges they’ve crossed so far, but the jagged spine of the Pyrenees—steep and snow-patched, piercing sharp enough to cut through everything they’ve left behind.

Nearly three months have passed since they surfaced from the tunnels, each day carrying them farther from the city and deeper into the hills. The path is narrow, worn smooth by boots and hooves. Shepherds, smugglers, guides. Resistance couriers too. Sasha steps carefully, minding where frost gathers in shadows, where roots rise underfoot. Her calves ache, but she doesn’t mind. Pain means progress. Forward is everything.

She can smell pine bark, damp moss, and the metallic scent of earth. The air has cooled and thinned, in the way that makes you want to breathe deeper, as if your lungs have forgotten how.

Kristof hikes ahead with the compass Alesander left behind, checking their path against a folded charcoal-marked map. Ursula and Annette walk together, just behind him. Maurice and Gérard are farther back, helping guide a group that has recently joined them—a family of four from Bruges. There are others too: a man from Lyon who speaks little and carries a child’s small satchel. A brother and sister who also escaped the roundup in Paris. None of them were meant to be together, and yet you wouldn’t guess it from the way they move, talking quietly, learning to rely on each other.

They stop to rest near a curve in the trail where an old stone wall crumbles into the slope. Sasha sits with her back to the rocks, watching a line of clouds part briefly over the valley below. Thin fields checker the land, stitched together by hedgerows. Somewhere nearby, a bell tolls. Once. Twice.

“Last night, the farmer who housed us said that he’s seeing more foot traffic along this route,” Kristof says. “That they’re starting to call it a corridor.”

“A corridor,” Sasha repeats.

“Or a chain.” He shrugs. “Whatever the word, it’s working.”

She attempts to read his face—the leaner lines, the threads of silver that have crept into his beard.

“More traffic could mean trouble,” she says. “If someone starts asking questions.”

“Yes.” He pauses, letting his eyes follow a hawk wheeling high above the ridge. “But it also means people can find each other. Like we have.”

Sasha nods. The truth of it lodges in her, where bone meets breath. In the steady march of their feet. In the warmth of the bread a woman gave them that morning. In the way strangers share silence, share maps, share fire.

They sit together for a while, neither speaking much. Then Kristof stands up and offers her his hand.

“We’ll reach the border soon,” he says. “And after that—Basque country, if it’s safe. Alesander would be proud of us, don’t you think?”

Sasha nods, feeling a tug of sadness. “Yes.”

When they’re back on the path, Sasha notices that the light has shifted, the soft gold of late afternoon spreading across the hills. The others begin to move again, adjusting their packs, tightening scarves.

Sasha watches them for a moment—the slow, steady rhythm of bodies joined in purpose. Then she follows.

Lamballe 1665

CHAPTER 88

The farmer’s wagon lurches over another rut in the road, its wooden wheels groaning under the weight of hay bales and winter vegetables. Étienne sits at the rear, legs dangling over the edge, watching their course unspool behind them like thread from a spindle. Dawn mist clings to the fields on either side, ghostly and transient.

It’s been two days since the message reached him. He had acted instantly, making preparations as quickly as possible, making promises he’s not entirely sure he can keep. But he had to come. Even knowing the risks, even with the children left in Mémé’s care. Even though the quarry master might very well dismiss him for his absence.

Camaret-sur-Mer lies another four days ahead if they maintain this pace. Hour after hour for uncertainty to gnaw at him, for questions to swirl in his mind like autumn leaves caught in a whirlwind. Will she even want to see him? Salpêtrière changes people, he’s heard. Breaks them. And even before her imprisonment, things between them had grown complicated. She had pushed him away. She’d had her reasons, of course. But still, she had turned from his offer to build a life together. Why would she change her mind now?

Ahead, the road curves around a stand of birch trees, their silver trunks luminous in the strengthening light. The wagon slows, and Étienne tenses, one hand moving to the knife hidden in his boot. But it’s only a fallen branch blocking the path. The driver clears it with minimal delay, and they continue.

The sister had been specific: Alouette and the others will be traveling steadily north and west, headed for the far coasts of Brittany. For the sea, if they’re not intercepted. They’re fugitives, after all.

What if she’s changed beyond recognition? The thought chafes like a pebble in his boot. What if the woman he remembers—fierce and brilliant, with defiance burning in her eyes—has been reduced to something less? What if the colors have been leached from her, leaving only dullness behind? A shrunken spirit. Worse still: What if she blames him for not helping her sooner?

He pushes away these fears, or tries. Not long now. Another day’s journey to Lamballe, where they’ll rest before continuing to the coast. Where, perhaps, he’ll get word of her that will lead him on from there.

LAMBALLE GREETS THEM with rain—a fine, persistent mist that softens the outlines of buildings and turns the unpaved streets to mud. The farmer and Étienne part ways at an inn called Le Corbeau, situated at the town’s sparsely populated edge, where in the morning, he will seek another willing cart or carriage. A mule, if it comes to that.

The innkeeper, a sturdy woman with salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a severe knot, shows him to a room not much larger than a cupboard, high under the eaves.

“Food in the common room,” she says, her Breton accent thick. “Take it or leave it.”

She asks no questions about his business there, and he is hesitant to inquire about a group of women that might have recently passed through. She might very well have information—have seen them, even. But information has a price. Sometimes that price is more than coin. And there’s this: How could he risk drawing attention to Alouette when she is this close to sealing her escape? When he is closer than he has ever been to finding her again?

When the innkeeper leaves, Étienne washes the dust from his face and neck in the small basin and then watches through the narrow window to see if there’s any other foot or cart traffic. But no, the weak late-afternoon sun slides from the sky like a yolk from a tipped plate. And the day is done.

The common room below is hazy with pipe smoke and the steam rising from bowls of fish stew. Étienne claims a corner table, his back to the wall, where he can observe without being noticed. He’s halfway through his meal when the side door opens, admitting a gust of rain-scented air and a figure wrapped in a gray cloak.

A single figure, not three, so he glances away again.

But then he catches the slightest movement of a bared wrist reaching to pull away the hood of a cloak. His heart drops, then soars. If he never caught more of her than this—the bird-light flick of her inner arm—he would know her. The slight bones pressing against pale skin like the fragile architecture of a wing.

Her face is thinner, sharper, with deep hollows shadowing her cheekbones. He feels frozen, hardly daring to breathe as she finally lifts her gaze, scanning the room, and there—there are her eyes. The gray of smoke, of flint, of ancient limestone. Unchanged. Irreplaceable.

Everything else tumbles away like dross. She’s here. Not in Camaret-sur-Mer, not days away, but here—astonishingly, miraculously present. Their paths converging sooner than he dared hope.

Alouette hasn’t seen him yet. She stands uncertainly at the room’s edge, clearly searching for someone. Expecting a contact, perhaps, someone to guide her to the next safe house. Not him. Never him.

He rises from his seat, movements wooden with disbelief. The noise of the inn, the creak of floorboards, the murmur of voices—all fade to nothing. There is only this: the distance between them, shrinking with each step.

“Alouette,” he says, her name half question, half prayer.

She doesn’t move, except for the widening of her eyes. Startled gray clouds. She watches him approach with that vivid intensity he remembers so clearly.

When he’s close enough to touch her—though he doesn’t yet dare—he sees the changes more clearly. Her short, ragged braid. The plum shadows beneath her eyes. The way she holds herself, slightly curved inward, as if safeguarding something precious. Her heart, perhaps.

“How?” she asks in a hoarse voice.

“The Sisters of Saint Catherine sent a message. One of the women you’re traveling with urged them to find me. I would have come sooner if I could.” The inadequacy of the words burns in his throat. “If I had known—”

She shakes her head once, cutting him off. “You’re here now.”

A simple statement of fact, free of accusation or absolution. He doesn’t deserve the latter, but the absence of the former nearly dissolves him. He rests his eyes on her face, tracing every inch of her—the secret alchemist with autumn in her hair, bright fire in her veins.

“Do you have news of my father? I’ve heard nothing at all since he was sent to Bicêtre.”

He doesn’t answer at first. The story catches in his throat like gypsum dust. Then: “I’m so sorry, Alouette. He died in confinement. Two months after your arrest.”

Her eyes fill with tears that don’t spill over—not yet. “I think I must have known. I hope he didn’t suffer terribly. Maybe now he’ll find every color imaginable. I hope so, anyway.”

A silence follows. Not empty, but full. She breathes once. Twice. “The children? Your grandmother?”

“Safe. Waiting for me to send for them.” He doesn’t mention how Mémé’s health has deteriorated dramatically, making him wonder if she’ll live to make the journey. How Marie has taken over more of the household duties, how Thomas asks every day when they can leave Saint-Marcel behind. Those burdens can wait. “I brought something for you.”

From inside his coat, he draws out the first lark he carved for her. It’s small enough to fit in his palm, the limestone polished smooth. He offers it to her, suddenly unsure of his craft, of whether she’ll recognize what it represents.

For a long moment, she says nothing, just traces its wings with her fingertips. “Even stone can learn to fly?” she murmurs finally, echoing words they once shared.

“Perhaps.”

She looks up at him then, and something in her expression softens. Not quite a smile, but its distant cousin. “I didn’t think I would see you again. Not here. Not so soon.”

“I never stopped looking for a way.” It’s the truth, stripped of adornment. “Every day, every night.”

“I’m not who I was,” she says.

“How could you be?”

Alouette closes her eyes and then opens them again. “I don’t know what comes next. I don’t even know where we’re going. We won’t be safe anywhere near Paris. Certainly not in Saint-Marcel, not ever.”

The warning is clear, but so is the invitation within it. A choice to make. Turn back now to the known dangers of the past or follow her into exile and uncertainty.

“I know.” He touches her arm, finally allowing himself that simple contact. Her skin. Her loveliness, really and truly here. “I have a map of the coast, routes. There are ships bound for Holland, for England, even.”

She doesn’t say anything, just steps forward and rests her forehead against his chest. His arms come around her carefully, as if she might vanish. Her breath warms the hollow between his collarbones. She feels so small like this, all sharp angles and quiet strength.

When she finally pulls back, her eyes are wet but clear. She tucks the bird into the small bag at her side. Then she reaches for his hand.

Camaret-sur-Mer, Brittany 1666

CHAPTER 89

Alouette stands at the window, watching lightning fork across the dark sky. When the door swings open, it brings a gust of rain and Marguerite, soaked through but cheerful.

“The fishing boats are all in. Storm’s going to be a bad one.”

Alouette helps her out of her overcoat, then crosses to the hearth, adding wood to the fire. They have fallen into an easy rhythm here. Sylvine gathering herbs from the cliffs. Marguerite trading remedies with the local women, who have quickly learned to trust her quiet competence.

“You should be resting,” Marguerite says, drying her hair and face with a cloth. “The child will come soon now. Any day.”

“I know, and yet there’s so much to do.” Alouette rests a hand on her belly, feeling the child shift and turn. Sometimes she’s fearful, thinking of her last pregnancy. The child she never held in her arms.

That grief had stunned and hollowed her. But it had also made space for this child. For this life. For the kind of love that begins again.

THE JOURNEY FROM Paris had been arduous, each mile putting distance between them and Salpêtrière. When they finally crested the last hill and saw the ocean spread before them—vast and wild and ineffably blue—Alouette felt something unclench inside her chest for the first time in months.

The cottage clung like a tern’s nest to the cliff’s edge. It was small and weather-beaten, its stone walls bleached by salt and wind. The thatched roof had scarred patches where every sort of weather had taken its toll.

In truth, it was nothing like the sanctuary Alouette had imagined during those endless nights behind asylum walls. And yet she felt a sense of rightness settle in her bones.

Étienne had been the one to carry their packs the last half mile, steadying Alouette on the narrow path. He had walked in silence, but when he saw the cottage, something in his face had eased, too, as if he’d found something he hadn’t dared hope for.

Sylvine led them to the threshold. “It’s not much,” she said, hesitating with her hand on the rough wooden door. “The house has stood empty since our grandfather died. No one in my family wanted it—too remote, too exposed to the elements.”

“It’s perfect,” Alouette said, surprising herself with how deeply she meant it.

Inside, dust had settled over simple furnishings—a table, three stools, a cupboard with chipped pottery. Wind whistled through cracks in the mortar. But there was a hearth for cooking, a stone floor that could be swept clean, and windows facing the sea on three sides. Windows without bars.

That first night, they huddled close to the small fire they’d kindled, the wind howling wolflike. Alouette sat by the western window after the others had fallen asleep, watching the moonlight silver the waves below. The Bièvre had brought her here, and the Seine. Water belonged to no one.

For the longest time, she’d been reaching for freedom. And yet only now was she beginning to understand that you couldn’t possess it. Freedom was something you practiced, exercising it like a muscle. And beauty—it was everywhere. A jay’s wing flashing above the cliffs. The soft blue bloom of flax in a narrow patch of sun. The gray-lavender sheen on the underside of a mussel shell. All here, simply waiting to be seen.

At first, she only noted these things in the margins of her journal. A brief line, a comparison. One page became two, then ten. Soon, she carried small swatches with her, recording the hues she saw and the light that touched them—the plants and stones and sea things—and gave them form.

She was building her own color bible, she realized. And yet the recipes didn’t belong to her so much as they belonged to the world. At the palest edge, she placed dawn-blue—the color of the sky’s lowest rim before sunrise. At the darkest, midnight-sea—the color of deep water under a new moon. Where all other blues came to rest. Between these, she arranged dozens of shades. Coastal blues bleeding into sky blues, twilight, night. Each had its origin. Its place in the world.

“It’s like a map,” Étienne said, watching her arrange the swatches in their simple binding.

“Yes.” And it was. A map of blue, a continuum that had no beginning, really, and no end.

THE BOOK GREW daily as their first year passed, filled with tints born of lichen, berries, storm-washed stone. Alouette’s script neat and steady beside each sample. One morning, an elderly woman arrived at the cottage door with a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth. Inside: a chunk of pale blue stone.

“We find it in the southernmost caves. My grandmother showed me. Her grandmother before her. We used it to mark our linens. To bless a bride.”

That night, Alouette added it to the map: merbleu—the shade of morning mist where it meets the horizon. Shared by Mère Kerivel, whose bloodline kept this color alive.

More villagers came. A shepherd with blue-yielding lichen. A fisherman’s wife who knew how to coax a soft slate from crushed shells and vinegar. Alouette recorded each contribution—the recipe, yes, but also the name of the one who had carried it forward. Women’s knowledge, mostly. Passed hand to hand. Never written. The kind most vulnerable to loss.

Étienne helped her bind the pages. Marguerite brought cornflowers and hollyhocks from the cliffs. Sylvine copied entries when Alouette grew tired. The book was still not finished. It would never be complete. But it was growing, layer by layer. A living archive of wonder. Awe.

She included her first blue, too, the one that started it all. And beneath it, a quiet warning about the danger of its making. Once, she had imagined it might secure her future, make her name. But now she saw her future for what it was—curled inside the present.

And this: how what endures isn’t what we keep, or name, or guard. It’s what we offer, without asking for anything in return. Like salt on wind. Light caught briefly on water.

“What will you do with it?” Étienne asked.

“Share it.”

ALOUETTE’S BIRTH PAINS begin with the coming storm, urged on by the shift in the wind, it seems. “Marguerite,” she manages, gripping the windowsill. “It’s time.”

Marguerite is beside her instantly. “I’ll fetch the midwife. And Étienne—he’s in his workshop?”

“Yes,” she gasps.

Marguerite returns with both Étienne and young Marie, their cloaks dark with rain. Thomas is still in the village with Sylvine. They will come in time, but for now, Étienne crosses to Alouette in three quick strides, gathering her against him as another contraction takes hold.

“Ma coeur. I’m here.”

The pain subsides as Alouette leans into him. Meanwhile, Marie busies herself laying clean linens by the fire while Marguerite steeps herbs for the birthing. Raspberry leaf for strength, chamomile to calm, shepherd’s purse in case of bleeding.

The rhythms of the storm seem to match Alouette’s labor. Wind howling as the contractions grow stronger. Between pains, Étienne holds her. His calloused thumb traces circles on her lower back, finding the spots that ache most. Sometimes he whispers things meant only for her—memories of their first meeting at the quarry’s edge, a lifetime ago. How he’d known even then how rare she was.

His arms tighten around her. “I never stopped believing you’d come back to me.” She buries her face in his chest, breathing in the scents of wood shavings and salt air that mean safety now. Home.

THROUGH THE NIGHT, Alouette labors while lightning splits the sky. The child comes with the sunrise. A daughter, her cry strong enough to wake the gulls.

But Alouette’s bleeding won’t stop. She can feel her strength ebbing with each heartbeat, can see the fear in Marguerite’s eyes as she works to help stanch the flow. Marie hovers nearby with clean linens, but there isn’t enough cloth in the world to hold back this tide.

“The window,” Alouette whispers. “Please.”

Étienne lifts her as if she weighs nothing, cradling her against his chest. Sylvine brings the swaddled infant, placing her in Alouette’s trembling arms.

“Her name is Christiane,” Alouette says softly. Étienne’s tears fall hot against her hair as he understands—a way of carrying remembrance forward into hope. Belief.

The sky shifts then, sea and clouds merging in that perfect shade of blue she’s chased for as long as she can remember. That she’s never quite captured except in her dreams. Here it is, painted across the dawn sky where the sea meets the line of the horizon. Not born of any mordant or mineral. Not bound by rules or chains of any kind. It’s just light and water and air, as free as she is.

The tide churns and collapses, leaving a lace of foam. Pools like scattered mirrors on the sand. Years from now, a young girl will move between them, her bare feet sure on the wet stone, auburn curls lifted by the salt wind. She’ll bend to examine each pool, collecting periwinkles in the hem of her skirt.

When she laughs, startled by a tiny crab, the sound will carry on the wind like music. That’s when her father will scoop her up, spinning her around until her laughter mingles with the cry of gulls. Her collected shells scattering like stars, falling back to the sea.

In the cottage on the cliff, Marguerite will be teaching another young woman the proper way to extract dye from woad, continuing the knowledge that Alouette passed to her. Sylvine will sit by the fire, telling stories to children gathered at her knee—true stories of courage and survival, of women who refused to be silenced.

And in a small box that Étienne keeps near his workbench, a scrap of cloth will remain—dyed the perfect, matchless blue that once consumed Alouette’s dreams. Not a formula to be sold or exploited, but a gift to be passed down when his daughter is old enough to understand its significance. Skylark blue, he’s come to call it. The emblem he once carved in stone beneath Paris, now stitched into living memory. A testament to defiance, to persistence, to the beauty that can emerge from even the darkest places.

And one day, he will carry the culmination of Alouette’s work to the Sisters of Saint Catherine, not quite knowing how they will use the map of blue, just wanting it to be placed into careful hands, where it might be copied, protected, and passed on. A legacy to outlast them all.

ALOUETTE CAN NEARLY see it—how the future will unfold, skein by skein. She touches her daughter’s face, memorizing every detail. The curve of her cheek, the dark sweep of her lashes, the small bow of her lips. This child will carry forward their stories, their hopes. Everything.

She meets Étienne’s eyes one last time, saying all that she feels without speaking a word. Then turns back toward the horizon.

Little by little, her breathing slows as the dawn glimmers brighter. Then, like light on water, she’s gone. And still, the tide continues. Still, that impossible blue stretches wide and deep—forever and forever, without breaking.

Île de la Cité, Paris 1857

EPILOGUE

She works in silence, save for the soft rasp of diamond-tipped steel against glass. The atelier is small, tucked beneath the eaves of a building on the Île de la Cité, where the river’s light bends through narrow windows. From here, she can see the spire of Notre-Dame rising beyond the rooftops, Viollet-le-Duc’s new flèche piercing the Parisian sky.

The Seine moves steadily below, murmuring against the embankments like an old friend. The air is thick with the scent of molten lead came and gum arabic. Light filters through unfinished panels, shards of color caught in midair, waiting for their place.

She lifts the final piece—small but perfect—a fragment of blue her hands know well. She has studied its hue for years, traced its depths at every time of day, tried and failed to describe it precisely. It isn’t cobalt oxide, or manganese, or the copper compounds that give Chartres blue its fame. It bears no resemblance to the commercial smalt the other ateliers have begun to use. It is older than she is, older than this glass. Storied. Complex.

It is the magnum opus of a woman she has known only in tales, passed from mother to daughter like a thread too precious to break. A great-great-grandmother who once worked among dyers in Saint-Marcel, testing formulas by firelight, fighting for the right to create in a world that tried, again and again, to silence her. The formula, kept alive not in guild pattern books but in breath and memory, was carried forward by those who refused to let it vanish.

As she steps back, the late sun slants through the glass, unspooling color that’s waited lifetimes to be seen. To her, this blue has always seemed like the color of the soul. Not as priests describe it, perhaps, something immutable and divine. But a living thing: enduring, transforming, surviving.

In one corner of the panel, she inscribes something small, something only the light will reveal when it shines through just so. In years to come, the window will weather revolutions and occupations, bombardments and restorations. Smoke will darken its surface. Rain will polish it clean. New generations will gaze up, never knowing the hands that shaped it. The resistance encoded in its making.

The skylark will watch over them all, her wings forever caught in flight—a vow to those who rise, again and again, despite the weight of the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A novel carries within its pages not only the blood, sweat, and tears of its author, but also the strength, support, generosity, and encouragement of many souls. As the final words settle into print, it is both a privilege and a necessity to pause and acknowledge those who, by presence or by memory, helped carry this story from its uncertain beginnings to completion, and without whom (truth!) it would not exist.

Peter Borland and Libby McGuire believed in this story before I wrote a single word. Their commitment to my work, and to giving me a sublime new home at Atria Books, means everything. On those occasions when I lost faith in this project, unable to see a way forward, their confidence and conviction never wobbled or diminished—and thank goodness for that! Collaborating with a new editor can have a steep and emotionally exacting learning curve. And yet Peter showed up for this book in every way possible; his discerning, responsive, and painstaking editing is apparent on every page.

Julie Barer has been my agent, friend, champion, and compass for almost twenty years. Her brilliant, abiding, heart-centered guidance and advocacy has been nothing less than the cornerstone of my career. She has earned my unending gratitude, love, and respect. Plus, a bathtub of champagne.

Katherine Berko and Haley Sharp, my magnificent assistants, have become an indispensable part of my writing life. I couldn’t—and would never want to—do this work without you.

Heartfelt thanks to the incredible team at The Book Group, and especially to Brooke Nagler, for their incredibly smart and invaluable early read, as well as for fielding every query and task with patience, skill, and care. To Jenny Meyer, for helping my books find wonderful proponents in far-off corners of the globe; to Caspian Dennis of Abner Stein and Michelle Weiner of CAA, for many years of fruitful partnership and support; and to the matchless Anastasia Whalen. Your championing of my work has helped to open doors I could never have unlocked alone. Liesa Cole—goddess!—provided me with the loveliest author photo ever, with an assist from the amazingly gifted Celine Russell. Lorissa Shepstone of the marvelous Being Wicked has masterminded my web page forever, now, and is irreplaceable.

Kudos and deep appreciation to my extraordinary publishing team at Atria and Simon & Schuster—Kate Nintzel, Dana Trocker, Gena Lanzi, Lisa Sciambra, Zakiya Jamal: rock stars, par excellence. Thanks to whip-smart Hannah Frankel, who saved the day more than once, to Wendy Sheanin, for enthusiastically crowing about Skylark so that it might reach as many hearts and hands as possible, and to Karlyn Hixson, for cheering on this book from the moment it crossed her desk. Special thanks to the cover artist, Sara Wood, and interior designer Davina Mock-Maniscalco, whose vision captured the soul of the story with breathtaking clarity.

My research took me to extraordinary places, both above and below ground. I am deeply grateful to Vanessa Grall of Messy Nessy’s Cabinet on the rue de Bièvre, who led me to discoveries that changed the way I saw a city I thought I knew. And to my cataphile friend—who must remain nameless—thank you for guiding me under the streets of Paris and giving me an adventure, and an intimate encounter with history, that I will never forget.

I’m beyond fortunate to have a rare and treasured constellation of writers around me to share in the struggles and triumphs of the creative life. Who show me daily, and through example, why we do this, and why it matters. Patti Callahan Henry, Priya Parmar, Christina Baker Kline, Sarah McCoy, Adrienne Brodeur, Kristin Hannah, Chris Pavone, Eleanor Brown, Lily King, Meg Wolitzer, and many others. Heidi Pitlor offered crucial guidance and feedback in the fledgling stages of this book. Susanna Porter is still on my shoulder as I write, and probably always will be.

I have always been rich in friends—now, more than ever. Much love and gratitude to those whose love, acceptance, and encouragement have transformed my life. Lori Keene, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Brad Bedortha, Beth Howard, Brian Groh, Sharon Day, Beth Hellerstein and Dan Jaffe, Terry Dubow, Boo Geisse, Karen Sandstrom, Sarah Willis, Toni Thayer, Cari Nelson, Rosemary Pierce, Linda Perl-stein, Cynthia Baker, David Kline, Jon Zeitler. Thanks to the Chatfield Drive Book Club—the loveliest neighbors and friends. To David Katz for building such a wonderful community at The Kauai Writer’s Conference. To Ava Corsa, for changing the way I think about my body, and to Andy Getz, for changing the way I think about the past, and regard my soul.

To my sisters, Teresa Reed and Penny Pennington, who were with me in the foxhole from the beginning, and who save me every damned day—thank you. My nieces and nephews constantly remind me, just by being around them, how lucky it is to like as well as love your family. Finally, thanks to my children, Connor, Jamilya, Finn, and Beckett. As I write this, they are no longer children, alas. But they will always be home.

Libraries and bookstores are sacred spaces, sanctuaries where stories find readers and readers find themselves. To the librarians who fielded my endless requests for obscure research materials, and to the booksellers who recommended novels that shaped my style and thinking, you have been indispensable companions on this journey.

There are, inevitably, countless others whose encouragements, large and small, have helped bring this novel into being—friends from distant chapters of my life, extended family, kind strangers, and even the reviewers whose words, whether praise or critique, pushed me to grow as a writer. If I have failed to mention you by name, please know that your presence and support have not gone unnoticed.

Finally, to the reader holding this book: You are the truest recipient of my gratitude. Thank you for choosing to spend your precious time with these pages and these characters. Every novel is incomplete without someone to receive it—by reading, you become a vital part of the journey, and for that, I am endlessly grateful. It’s you who give this story wings.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

The seeds for Skylark were planted by several extraordinary books that opened the earth for me. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and Will Hunt’s Underground introduced me to the hidden worlds beneath our feet—the Paris below Paris, layered not just in limestone, but in memory, mystery, and revolt. The catacombs and old quarries had served for centuries as escape routes, smuggling channels, and hiding places. Spaces of secrecy, yes—but also of survival and rebellion.

As I traced one research thread, another surprising one emerged: the world of color. I became obsessed by the complex and dangerous beauty of seventeenth-century dyeing—when recipes were guarded like treasure, and color itself was bound to power and privilege. A woman like Alouette could touch brilliance but never claim it. The act of dyeing—of transforming raw elements into color—becomes for her a kind of rebellion, a quiet, radiant insistence on agency and creative freedom, which she pursues at any cost.

So far in my career, I have deliberately avoided writing about the German occupation of Paris. I felt that it had all been written, that I had nothing to add. And yet I found myself returning to the question: Could that ever really be true? What moved me most were the firsthand accounts of young lives caught in the undertow of history, like the searing clarity of Maurice Rajsfus’s Operation Yellow Star and Black Thursday. And Hélène Berr’s journals, which reminded me that even in the darkest times, teenagers still think about love, still hope for things, still reach for tomorrow. These voices felt urgent and unfinished, inspiring me to create the character of Sasha Brodsky, whose experience of that awful and indelible moment in history lives not in sweeping gestures, but in quiet acts of courage and connection.

To write historical fiction is to listen—to the forgotten, the overlooked, the nearly lost—and then to imagine what remains, deep in the silences. Instrumental in helping me hear, see, and conjure places and experiences essential to the book were La Pitié-Salpêtrière by Gilles-Antoine Langlois and Anne-Sophie Pimpaud, City of Incurable Women by Maud Casey, Madness in Civilization by Andrew Scull, A Lust for Virtue by Philip F. Riley, Paris: The Biography of a City by Colin Jones, The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel, The Art of Splitting Stone by Mary Gage and James Gage, and Sur les traces de la Bièvre parisienne by Renaud Gagneux, Jean Anckaert, and Gérard Conte. Paris Underground by Caroline Archer, Atlas du Paris Souterrain by Alain Clément and Gilles Thomas, and Catacombs et carrières de Paris by René Suttel.

I hope that reading this story stirs something in you. That you close the final pages with the sense that a thread has passed through your hands—fragile, but unbroken. A reminder that the past isn’t behind us. It’s beneath us. Waiting to be found.

With gratitude,

Paula McLain

Also by Paula McLain

When the Stars Go Dark

Love and Ruin

Circling the Sun

The Paris Wife

A Ticket to Ride

Like Family

Poetry

Stumble, Gorgeous

Less of Her

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025938834

ISBN 978-1-6680-2815-5

ISBN 978-1-6680-2817-9 (ebook)

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph

Île de la Cité, Paris: 2019

- Prologue

Saint-Marcel, Paris: 1664

- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4

Paris: 1939

- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8

Saint-Marcel, Paris: 1664

- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13

Paris: 1940

- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18

Saint-Marcel, Paris: 1664

- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22

Paris: 1940

- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25

Saint-Marcel, Paris: 1664

- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28

Paris: 1940

- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33

Saint-Marcel, Paris: 1664

- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 53
- Chapter 54
- Chapter 55
- Chapter 56

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 57
- Chapter 58
- Chapter 59

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 60
- Chapter 61
- Chapter 62

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 63
- Chapter 64
- Chapter 65

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 66
- Chapter 67
- Chapter 68
- Chapter 69

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 70
- Chapter 71
- Chapter 72

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 73
- Chapter 74
- Chapter 75

Salpêtrière: 1664

- Chapter 76
- Chapter 77
- Chapter 78

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 79
- Chapter 80
- Chapter 81

Paris: 1664

- Chapter 82

- Chapter 83

Paris: 1942

- Chapter 84

- Chapter 85

Paris: 1664

- Chapter 86

Colline, France: 1942

- Chapter 87

Lamballe: 1665

- Chapter 88

Camaret-sur-Mer, Brittany: 1666

- Chapter 89

Île de la Cité, Paris: 1857

- Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Copyright