The Darkest Hour(9)

He points at the door. “Out. Now.”

With a shaky nod, I exit his office right as the grandfatherly Laurent enters it. He’s one of our most trusted contacts within the French Resistance, and he usually has a smile for Sabine, Tilly, and me. Les filles, he calls us. The girls. But tonight his face is grim. Whatever update he has brought about Reims, it has to be important enough for him to break curfew.

In the hallway, Sabine shuts Harken’s door while she holds a glowing candle. “You’re quite lucky. I didn’t see any trace of the Nazis around the store.”

I know I should ignore her, but the words leap out of my mouth anyway. “I made sure to shake the Nazis before I arrived. I’m not completely useless, you know.”

She tilts her head to one side. “That’s not what I said.”

“You sure did imply it.”

“It surprises me how sensitive you Americans can be.” She sniffs. “It’s as if you’re looking for possible offenses.”

I’m about to brush past her when we hear a pounding at the hatch. Five crisp thumps. Footfalls descend from the ladder and soon Tilly steps toward us, dressed in a plain brown dress and even plainer brown shoes, an incredibly ordinary outfit that’s perfect if you want to blend into a crowd. And when you’re as tall as Tilly—over five foot nine—you need every ordinary detail to count. She’s certainly a sight for my sore eyes. After Harken’s tongue-lashing and Sabine’s gloating, I didn’t realize how much I needed to see a friendly face.

“What are you two gossiping about?” Tilly says with her usual grin. She pulls off her long mahogany wig to reveal her auburn hair beneath it. “Were you talking about how pretty I am?”

Sabine’s lips twitch a little, the closest she’ll give to a smile. “Why, of course, Matilda,” she says, using Tilly’s full name. Then her mouth tightens. “Laurent is here.”

“Oh?” The cheer recedes from Tilly’s face. “At this hour?”

“I wouldn’t retire for the night, in case Major Harken wishes to brief us. I’ll be in my room.” Sabine hands us the candle and disappears into the darkness. She must have eyes like an owl because I don’t know how she isn’t bumping into the walls or tripping over her shoes.

Tilly hooks her arm through mine and leads us to our shared bunkroom in the opposite direction. “You better fill me in on everything,” she whispers, right before she flops onto her creaky cot and sets her wig on the old milk crate she uses as her nightstand. “How was the mission? Do I need to start calling you Agent Blaise from here on out?”

I wish I had better news for her, but all I can remember is Harken’s fury. “I don’t know. It’s up to Harken, I guess,” I say, deflated. She gives me a puzzled look, so I tell her everything: about Travert, about the pistol, and about the Nazis who heard the shots. When I’m finished, Tilly sighs and moves over to my bed.

“Look at it this way: You took out the target,” she says, gently patting my back. “You completed your mission, and you escaped. How can Harken kick you out when you did what he sent you to do?”

“You should’ve seen him, though, when I told him about the patrols.”

She winces. “Did he blow a fuse?”

“More like he blew every fuse in Paris.”

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions. He could be in one of his moods again.”

“Maybe,” I say, but I doubt it. Tilly hadn’t been there when Harken reprimanded me. Granted, he did tell me that I was the perfect agent on paper, but paper doesn’t do much good in a war zone, now, does it?

After Tilly retreats to her cot, I let out a sigh of my own and open the lone drawer of my nightstand, where I keep my valuables. To anyone else they’re not really “valuable,” just a square of chocolate, a bar of lavender soap, an empty glass bottle, and the V-mail letters that Theo wrote before he was killed. I carried these letters with me when I parachuted into France, and I’ve read them so many times that the papers have gone soft. All except for the last one. It still hurts too much to read it, even six months later.

I let the letters rest and reach for the bottle lying on top of them. It’s an old soda pop bottle that I found on the street one afternoon, but it reminded me of Theo. When we were little, we’d write letters to our grandparents and stuff them into glass bottles that we’d then throw into the city harbor. We’d never even met our grandparents—and they passed away long before I reached French soil—but Theo loved talking about where those bottles might go.

“Think about it, Luce,” he told me years ago. We were standing on a dock at the time, and he was staring across the bay and chewing a piece of gum. He always had something in his mouth: gum or candy or a cigarette when he got older. “Those letters could make it to Greenland or Iceland or all the way to Maman’s old place in Saint-Malo.”

“That’s awfully far,” I said. I didn’t know where Greenland or Iceland were, but I did know that our mother had grown up in Saint-Malo, a whole ocean away.

“Not that far. I’ll go there one day.”

“You better bring me, too.”

“If you’ll fit in my suitcase.”

“Theo!”

“I’m joking.” He winked at me, and I could see traces of the bruise around his jaw that Papa had given him. Those bruises had been meant for me. I was the one who had burned the bakery croissants, but Theo had taken the blame when Papa saw the blackened trays. “We’ll buy a big fancy sailboat.”