The Darkest Hour(23)

“Did it work or not?”

“It did,” she says, glaring knives at me. “But next time, if there is a next time, I’d rather be ready for the pain than be taken by surprise.”

“Next time, you can pop in your shoulder by yourself,” I mumble, but it’s not loud enough for her to hear. It doesn’t matter anyway. Sabine no longer pays me any attention. She has reached into her purse—our only piece of luggage that has survived our escape—and takes out the compass and handkerchief Harken gave her. She uses both to scour our new surroundings, an unceasing patchwork of sheep pastures and apple orchards that Normandy is famed for. It almost reminds me of home.

When we were young, Maman would bring Theo and me to a farm outside the city where we’d pick strawberries as big as our thumbs. Back then Papa would join us, too, and he’d treat us all to Italian ices at Mr. Benedetti’s café on the way home. This was before their restaurant closed and the drinking began. The memories of those outings course over me, but those strawberry fields didn’t carry the scent of fresh blood on them like the one I’m standing in now.

Sabine swears under her breath, and I glance up.

“We’re nearly fifty kilometers from Cherbourg,” she tells me.

I feel like cursing myself. Looking the way we do, with dirt and blood smeared all over our clothes, we can’t exactly hop onto the next train and expect to go unnoticed. We’ll have to walk to the safe house through this Nazi-infested region of France.

“Do you have extra papers at least?” she asks.

Thankfully I do, as does Sabine. But not even these papers will help us reach the safe house any faster. It’s not like we can double back to the train station and buy more tickets.

“We need to walk northwest.” Sabine chops her hand through the air.

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly. I know this area.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Not here exactly, but yes. My father’s family hails from the town of Brix. We’d spend weeks along the coast during the summer, my brother and I.”

Well, that’s something I never knew before. Sabine has never mentioned a brother to Tilly or me. She rarely speaks about her family or her life before Covert Ops, as if she sprouted out of the earth at the start of the war, fully formed and ready to kill Allied traitors. She’s like Major Harken in that way, and I wonder if she has taken a cue from him by keeping everyone she meets an arm’s length away from her.

But her revelation about her brother is neither here nor there given where we’re standing. “Shouldn’t you have mentioned that you’ve been to Normandy?” I ask.

“I didn’t think it would concern you or the mission,” she says with a shrug. Then she speeds ahead of me, showing no sign that she dislocated her shoulder recently or that she wears a ring of bruises around her neck.

After I stick the knife into my shoe and put them both back on, Sabine and I forge deeper into the countryside. Once we’ve put a few miles behind us, we turn out our pockets and dump out the contents of Sabine’s purse to survey our remaining supplies. It isn’t much at all: one pistol pen, one revolver with two remaining bullets, the dagger from my shoe, and a thin stack of forged francs. It’s paltry pickings compared to what we left on the train. I can’t help but wince thinking about all those grenades, pistols, and our bag of Aunt Jemima that now belong to the Nazis.

A gunshot pops in the distance, and Sabine shoves everything back into her purse. “Go, go!” she whispers.

I stumble to my feet but tears sting my eyes when I put too much weight on my wrist. When Sabine looks for me behind her, she scowls.

“What are you doing? We have to hurry,” she says.

“I’m trying!”

“Try harder.” She returns to my side and attempts to push me along, but I jerk away from her.

“If I’m holding you back, then go on without me,” I snarl.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Just go! Isn’t that what you wanted in the first place?”

She looks like I’ve smacked her. “Why must you assume the worst about me?”

I gape at her words. Me assume the worst about her? “Ever since I set foot in Paris you’ve treated me like a pebble in your shoe!”

“How can you think that after all those times I’ve tried to help you?” She throws her hands up in the air, and I figure that she’ll leave me for good now, but she does the complete opposite. She clenches on to my arm and drags me forward. “Enough of this. Major Harken gave us his orders. Move.”

I try to wrest myself free from her, but Sabine only tightens her hold. I’m sure this is Harken’s doing. He must have told Sabine to stick to me like glue, and that’s why she’s towing me through a copse of trees that look older than Charlemagne himself. Yet all the while, her question lingers in my ears. How exactly has she “helped” me over these last few months? She’s always sniffing at me and correcting how I pour my tea and saying that I should hold my dagger this way. If that’s what she calls helpful, then she can keep her henpecking to herself.

As we draw closer to Cherbourg the tiny villages grow into plump towns. More than once we have to lie flat on our stomachs as we hear a truck rolling in the distance. We’ve been walking for hours, but we’re still miles away from the safe house.