Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(19)

What I’m not used to is being by myself.

How could it have happened? I don’t know how it happened. I LOST THEM. Irina and Ró?a, my more-than-sisters – Russian taran pilot and Polish Rabbit – I couldn’t have escaped without them, I couldn’t have survived last winter without them, and I have lost them both.

But I’m kidding myself. I do know how it happened. If I hadn’t been so set on getting to Paris – if I hadn’t rushed off with Bob Ernst in that convoy of American soldiers – if I had double-checked what was going on. We camped overnight with the Swedish Red Cross unit, and I was talking with Bob and that Minnesotan chaplain who was interpreting for the Swedes, and I told them myself that Ró?a needed medical treatment. Only it never occurred to me they would leave her with the Red Cross without asking me – without even telling me! Irina was with her and I was in Bob’s jeep, and we set off the next morning near the front of the convoy. I never dreamed Ró?a wasn’t following in one of the trucks with Irina. So stupid of me! Of course the Swedish Red Cross unit was going back to Sweden.

I’ve lost Ró?a and Irina.

I feel like my world has ended.

But it hasn’t – not even the war has ended yet. It just keeps going relentlessly on and on and on, like a concentration camp roll call when they can’t get the numbers to come out right. And I guess I just go on and on too.

I wonder what has happened to Nick since last August. Oh, Nick! I have dreamed of seeing him again for so long, made up all those stories about him coming to rescue me – but what will he think when he sees what a walking corpse I’ve become? How can I tell him what happened to me, all I’ve seen and had to do?

A lot of it is a blur anyway. I don’t remember the first time I thought I was so hungry I was going to die. I don’t remember when the chilblains started, or whether they were on my hands or feet first. I don’t remember the details of being beaten. I know my sentence was ‘with force’ which means on your bare backside, but I don’t remember them pulling up my dress, not either time. I remember trying to count the blows, but not what it felt like. I have blocked it out.

I remember standing through a roll call in the dark, at the end of a twelve-hour workday when I’d been so behind that I didn’t get to stop to eat, and being so cold it hurt, and someone behind me started to cry. And then I started crying too, and in ten seconds the whole block was crying. And they shut us up by threatening us with the dogs, and then they made us stand there for another hour – just those of us who were crying. Everyone else, thousands of them, went to bed, but Block 32 was still standing there trying not to cry while we all slowly froze to death.

But I don’t remember what it felt like to be that cold. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t imagine what it felt like. And it couldn’t have been more than a few months ago.

The strange thing is, nothing about the past winter has taken the edge off the memory of my last ATA ferry delivery, the day I took off from Camp Los Angeles in France and landed somewhere near Mannheim in Germany.

I’m going to write it down. I’m wide awake and I’m sick of thinking over and over about the last twenty-four hours’ worth of disaster. Maybe if I think hard about last September, I will be able to forget about today for long enough to let me go to sleep.

Uncle Roger left Camp LA before I did. The RAF pilot arrived in the Spitfire I was supposed to take back to England and we swapped planes; I stood next to the mechanic who telephoned Caen to say I might land there to refuel. I wonder if Caen ever looked for me. Maybe everybody thinks I ran out of fuel over the English Channel.

I remember that flight as if I had the map sitting on my lap with the route outlined in china pencil and a great big ‘X Marks the Spot’ over épernay. That is where I met the flying bomb. Was it aimed at Paris? Was it one last attempt to destroy Paris? It must have been air-launched, but I don’t know where it was heading. It was too far inland to be aimed at London. I think about this a lot . . . Where that bomb was heading. Other than on a collision course with me, I mean.

I thought it was another plane at first. It looked like another plane. I had a perfectly clear view of it as it came slowly closer and closer, seeming to hover in the same spot just ahead of my wing tip, an unbudging speck in the distant sky like a little black star, or a bug. It didn’t scare me. I assumed it was an Allied plane because I was over Allied territory. So I did exactly what Maddie said she’d done when she saw a flying bomb in the air – I waggled my wings at it. And of course got no response.

I thought, gee whiz, the pilot must be looking at his map – or blind – or asleep – Or there isn’t any pilot.

I should have made a steep turn to get out of its way. This is what I dread telling Daddy. That I went after it on purpose.

I was so sure it was headed for Paris, beautiful Paris. Still intact. And if this bomb hit its target there would be a gigantic crater, broken glass everywhere, dust, summer trees that looked like winter, just like London – I couldn’t stand it.

I pushed the Spitfire’s nose down and went into a screaming downhill dive to gain speed, and the bomb sped straight on about a hundred feet over me. I glanced up and saw it, huge, in silhouette for a fraction of a second, a black cross of wings and fuselage blotting out the sky. Then I thrust on full power and pulled out of the dive in a climbing turn.