The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  Simone didn’t trust him as far as she could spit, never mind with a solid oak door and a whirring projector between them. But the sooner they dragged him off to Wewelsburg for his stupid manuscript, the sooner she could be rid of him.

  Running, always running, Evangeline’s voice teased inside her head. Always from and never toward.

  As if Evangeline was one to talk. At least Simone had the courage, the stubbornness to do anything at all.

  Helene showed them to the catacomb tunnels that stretched beneath the village’s square, a forgotten relic of an era before radiator heat and snowplows. They thanked her for her help, and she grunted, nodded a curt farewell.

  “And you’re sure they have everything we’ll need?” Phillip asked Simone for the hundredth time as they followed the tunnel that linked to the furniture maker’s atelier.

  “Everything your friends dropped for them last month,” Simone replied. “But the rest is up to you.”

  They rapped on the trapdoor overhead, and an old man appeared behind it, staring down at them with bushy brows drawn. He helped Phillip first, then Simone, climb up into the hidden room.

  “Nice design,” Phillip said in English, surveying their radio setup. “Did you build this yourself?”

  “Some time ago. Thought it might be useful.” The man limped toward the cabinetry that housed a wide array of radio equipment. At one end, a man who looked like a younger copy of him was intently transcribing a Morse code message. “Turns out I was right.”

  “Only receiving messages so far, right?” Phillip asked, and the man nodded. “We’ll get you set up here in no time.”

  “I’m Karl,” the older man offered. “My son, Guillerme, he’s the operator.”

  Guillerme finished notating his transcription and pulled off his headset to greet them properly. He gazed up at Simone with wary, shell-shocked eyes. Her gut twisted at that look. She was always feeling sorry for herself for what she’d been through; sometimes it was easy to forget how many others were relying on her.

  “You’re sure it’ll be safe?” Guillerme asked. “I understand they have high-frequency direction finders. The trucks go through our village sometimes, looking for anyone who might be broadcasting.”

  Phillip fiddled with the latch on his tool kit. “Once I get these scramblers configured, the broadcast signal will look like it’s just passing through from somewhere further down the line. Their huff-duffs won’t be able to tell you’re the source. And we’ll bounce some extra noise off the ionosphere to keep ’em busy.”

  Guillerme eased, offering a tentative smile. “It would be a godsend. The information we’re collecting . . . It’s useful, but by the time we’re able to pass it to agents, get it across the channel or into the Free Zone, it’s too outdated. We want to be able to answer the Magpie’s inquiries as soon as we can. He seems to get better results now that he’s in our network.”

  “Who is this Magpie?” Simone asked. “Georges-Yves mentioned him as well. Said he’s putting out a lot of radio traffic, leaking troop movements and so on.”

  He shrugged. “Someone in the Occupied Zone, I can only assume. But it’s safer not to know.” Guillerme lowered his gaze. “I’ve been able to defer service thus far, but if I’m ever dragged to war . . . I don’t want to know all our secrets.”

  Simone flinched. He and Karl and Helene—they were Germans, banding together to do the best they could, given the circumstances. But was it enough for them to fight back this way? What would they do when the Wehrmacht came and forced them to fight? At least they had each other, she supposed. Simone glanced at Phillip, and finally admitted to herself she was glad not to be here alone.

  Phillip pulled a small electronic box out of his case and started teasing the braids of wiring from its slots. “This’ll handle encryption for you. It’s coded to roll over to a new scheme every few days, matching the schedule for our operators in Dover. Designed it myself with a few tweaks,” he added, lips tugging toward a smile. Simone cocked her head to one side, watching him. “And then this—you can input your message, then it’ll store the contents and parse them out over a longer period of time. Up to a day, if you need. As long as there’s no interference on the line, we’ll have no trouble picking it up. That way the goon squad can see your shining, happy face going about your business in town at the same time the broadcast is transmitting.”

  “That’s amazing,” Guillerme said. “They’re starting to keep track of our comings and goings, you know.”

  As Phillip set up the equipment, Simone’s gaze wandered toward a stack of books on the back table, spines cracked open, the exposed pages heavily marked in pencil. One in particular caught her eye—Rilke’s only novel, written while he was in Paris.

  The copy was in German, but Simone could practically conjure up the French translation out of nothingness, the words like a stylish perfume. Silk sheets, spring breeze teasing at soft curtains, Evangeline’s lips moving over the haunting phrases like a prayer. Those are the noises. But here, there’s something more terrible: the silence.

  “Why do you have this?” Simone hissed. She’d caught herself reaching for it, but had drawn back at the last moment, as if it might burn her.

  “We use it as a codebook.” Guillerme left Phillip to his work and joined her at the side table. His fingers traced a set of underlined words. “Different phrases to decrypt messages in the network. Something the Magpie set up.”

  Her fingers traced over one of the underlined passages for encoding. One has to do something about fear once one has it. Evangeline had hugged the book to her chest after reading that line, and Simone swallowed, recalling how tiny she’d looked—how tiny they’d both felt. They’d been the shape of loneliness and loss, of a simple truth that should have torn them apart so long ago. But Simone had wanted to believe. She wanted to believe they could someday overcome it.

  She should have known, like a split in otherwise beautiful wood: no amount of sanding could smooth that fracture away.

  “Do you . . .” Her voice came out all dried and cracked. She swallowed and tried again. “Do you have any of the Magpie’s messages?”

  “I keep his transmissions over here.” Guillerme rolled his chair toward a stack of torn-off notebook papers weighted down under a coffee mug. “In case we come across any of the things he’s requested.”

  Simone scanned through the unscrambled notes. Most of it was garbage to her—the message date and time, the sender’s identification code, and the numbers signifying the length of the message to follow. Her eyes skidded over these clusters toward the meat of each message.

  Request guest list for upcoming Wewelsburg conference 15 09 42.

  Request update on munitions distribution to OZ.

  Request last known location for Haupsturmführer Kreutzer.

  And then, from just that morning: Request details of Siegen attack.

  “The information he sends out—it has a lot to do with the Vichy government’s distribution of munitions, food. I imagine someone in the network is able to use that to steal supplies.” Guillerme smiled. “Whoever he is, he’s pretty helpful. But it’s always the helpful ones who get caught first.” His smile faded. “He’s only been active for a few months. Let’s hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “The Vichy government?” Simone started, then stopped herself.

  Evangeline.

  Stop imagining things. The Magpie could be anyone. Simone bit down on the inside of her cheek without any Gauloises to huff. “Are you going to answer this request about Siegen?”

  “I thought I might, as soon as your friend is finished with his work. Why do you ask?” Guillerme twirled his pencil between his fingers as he said it. Too casually. Simone couldn’t blame him for getting suspicious. She was being too naked in her hope. Her absurd, desperate belief that somehow Evangeline was not the callous coward Simone had branded her after all.


  She dropped the stack of decoded transmissions and took a step back. “N-never mind. It isn’t important.” A fist of ice closed around her heart. “Not anymore.”

  Even if—if—somehow Evangeline had seen the truth of what Simone fought for every day. Even if she had devoted herself to fighting her way out of her cage rather than nestling up inside it, so comfortable while the world burned around her. What did it matter if she carried a vial of poison with her to every meal with their occupiers if she never found the courage to use it? What did it change for Simone?

  Not a damned thing.

  Something passed across Guillerme’s face—a wrinkle in his brow, a frown, but gone just as quick. “If there was something you want me to put in the transmission,” he started, “I’d be happy to—”

  An electric buzz interrupted him. Karl, his father, bounded to his feet as he and Guillerme looked hard at one another. “Excuse me,” Karl said in English, his face suddenly slack and pale. “I—I think I have a customer in the store.”

  Karl limped toward the far end of the room and shoved aside a panel that let out into what looked like a furniture studio. A tiny pang beneath Simone’s ribs reminded her how much she missed her own work. Her fingers itched to reach out and grab a lathe, a sander. But curiosity and fear won out. As he fitted the panel back into place from the other side, she and Guillerme both crept closer to listen in.

  “Keep working,” Guillerme told Phillip in English, smile stretched taut across his face. “No need to worry.” But the look he shot Simone was pure panic. Her heart squeezed. She wondered if he was aiding them for similar reasons to Helene’s. A blessing that so many people were willing to risk everything to do what was right, she thought—and a curse that it was still nowhere near enough.

  “I’m almost done.” Phillip bound two wires together, then started packing bundles of cords back into place inside the machine. “Do we need to—”

  Simone held up one finger as she tried to catch the tail end of Karl’s conversation, but they were too far away. It was safer for her not to hear, but she needed some way to unfurl the tension so tight in her gut. She needed a cigarette. She needed to shoot another Nazi.

  At last Karl limped back into the room, face white as paper. “They’re looking for the people responsible for what happened at Siegen.” He looked from Simone to Phillip. “I think you’d better go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DANIEL

  Yom Kippur was meant to be a day of forgiveness and atonement, but Daniel wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He and Rebeka scavenged their pre-fasting meal in near silence: a sad bounty of canned broth, stale bread, and pickled vegetables from Helene’s root cellar. Even as they shrank from their other traditions under the Gestapo’s watchful eye, their Yom Kippur meals back in Berlin had been extravagant, multicourse affairs with egg soufflés and rich, fluffy bread loaves. At their uncle’s farm in Luxembourg, they’d spend the day prepping the bread, speaking euphorically of how they would break their fast when Yom Kippur ended.

  But even thinking of such a meal right now made his stomach churn. His stomach was shrunken, unsettled ever since their escape from Łódź another lifetime ago. Tonight was just another night with too little food in his belly and too much anger in his blood.

  They took their scraps to the bell tower and spread out a pilled woolen blanket that smelled like a stable. He pulled the battered wooden mezuzah from his coat pocket and set it between them: an offering.

  “We praise You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” The words in stilted Hebrew hung awkwardly between them, familiar and yet out of place. Rebeka unwrapped the stale bread slices with trembling hands. Daniel looked at the shafts of milky sunlight sliding between the rafters, the worn stone walls, the painted iron carillon dangling over them: anywhere but at her.

  She chewed for a few minutes, then forced herself to swallow and faced him to continue the tradition. “Daniel?” she whispered. “May I ask your forgiveness? For . . . for anything I’ve done to hurt you this past year.”

  Daniel managed a dry laugh at that. “I’m not sure you’re who needs to be forgiven.”

  She picked at her nails, breath drawn as if there was something she wanted to say, but no way to say it. Finally, she relaxed and shook her head. “I’m truly sorry I’ve tried to stand in your way. I know you want . . .”

  Rebeka trailed off, and at last he found the strength to look at her. She was only a sliver of the girl she’d once been: no longer the tall, strong young woman he admired, but whittled down and folded up, like perhaps she could fold herself away into nothingness.

  “I know you want revenge. And I don’t blame you for that. I want it too.” Tears rimmed her lower lashes. “But I’ve lost everyone else. I can’t lose you as well.”

  He laced his hand in her slim fingers. Perhaps she was still that pillar—that rock that refused to be worn down. How much did she endure to stay so strong for him? He’d assumed it was their suffering that had robbed the life from her eyes, but maybe it was the way she always acted as though she had to be strong enough to carry them both.

  Well, there was nothing he could do to change it. The only other option—not getting revenge—was no option at all.

  “I’m the oldest now. I have to do this.” His grip tightened. “For both of us.”

  “You don’t have to give your life because our family lost theirs.”

  “Yes. I do.” Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. Why couldn’t she understand? “You don’t have to go with me. It’s not too late. Maybe the partisan girl and her contacts can get you some false papers, you can take a train west out of Wewelsburg—”

  “Stop trying to make me abandon you.”

  The fierceness in her voice threw him. Tears shook free from her lashes as she stared him down, trembling. His strong, resourceful Rebeka, the one who always had spare winter gloves in her bag when he inevitably forgot his own; the one who had listened to him practice études endlessly, noting just forcefully enough when his rhythm went astray; the one who had stayed up late into the night each month, long after their parents had fallen asleep over their desks, until she could make the shop’s numbers balance out.

  In that moment, he would have done or said anything to take away her hurt. He’d have lain down his knives and his pistol. He’d have pulled himself apart to keep her warm. She was his sister—she was all he had left. And always she’d been there for him, never questioning, never judging him, forever cheering on whoever he was or chose to be. She let him feel normal, she let him feel real.

  But this was the only possible path for him. Why couldn’t she love that part of him, too?

  “Fine. I forgive you,” Daniel said. He was done arguing about this.

  She swallowed again and unscrewed the lid on the jar of broth.

  His turn to ask forgiveness. Daniel shoved his knees up under his chin and stared at the floor. “Will you forgive me anything I might have said or done this year that hurt you?”

  “I forgive you for dragging us across Poland and Germany,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t have asked for a better companion for it.”

  He flinched at that. Ari would have been better: Ari, the lion of their family, would have never gotten her into this mess. Their parents would have been better—Mama, who always saw the sunrise through the dead of night, and Papa, who never, ever let any of them want.

  “I forgive you for entangling me in your countless schemes, because it felt so good to be doing something with my brother. Remembering how we could be when there weren’t guards herding us around, people judging our every move.”

  Daniel let his shoulders drop.

  She managed a soft smile. “And I forgive you for thinking it’s perfectly reasonable to summon demons from another world. Though we both know it’s really because you can’t resist Herr Doyle and his damn
ed dimples.”

  His face burned. “I never said—”

  “You didn’t have to.” Rebeka brushed a hand against his shin. “I know you.”

  Daniel blushed, thinking of Liam’s babbling after the morphine kicked in the night before. Mostly a bunch of astronomical jargon that only Phillip understood; but at one point he’d stopped in the middle of it to stare straight at Daniel. You have beautiful hands, Liam told him. Promise you’ll play viola for me someday.

  “You seem to know a lot of things,” Daniel muttered.

  He hadn’t meant it as an accusation, but she reeled back as if she’d been struck.

  “Rebeka?” Daniel reached out for her hand. “What is it?”

  Sunlight danced across her face, making it look, for the briefest moment, flush and full once more. Then a cloud passed over the sun—she was nothing but shadows and hollow bones again.

  “There’s—” She caught her breath. “There’s one more thing I must ask forgiveness for. A big one. But it’s not fair of me to keep it to myself any longer. Not when I could lose you without a moment’s notice.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Of course. Anything.”

  “No—you don’t understand.” She bit her lower lip. “I haven’t been telling you the whole truth.”

  Rebeka clasped his hand with both of hers. He felt a sudden, sharp instinct to pull away, though he couldn’t say why.

  “I . . . I see things, Daniel. Visions, or glimpses of somewhere else, or . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to call them. It’s like I’m watching other people through a foggy mirror. I learn things I shouldn’t.”

  His brow wrinkled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Usually it’s—conversations, but sometimes worse.” Her voice caught. “I know how mad it sounds. I never told anyone because of how mad it is. You wouldn’t have believed me before. But now that we’ve seen this—this other world, these shadows, maybe it isn’t so strange after all.” She looked up at him, eyes gleaming. “You believe me, don’t you?”