Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(65)

‘Siebentausendsiebenhundertzwei, Siebenstausendsiebenhundertdrei, Siebentausendsiebenhundertvier . . .’

I looked down at the cinders, scuffling my feet nervously, trying to keep warm. A small black pool of slush and dirt formed beneath me.

Siebentausendsiebenhundertfünf. That was Ró?a, 7705. They called Karolina’s number, and Lisette’s. I glanced at Irina, but she was staring straight ahead.

The messenger doing the announcement was an SS woman, in one of their grim black rain capes over her uniform. She came to the end of her long list of numbers and paused. Then she barked an order in German. She paced from one end of our first row to the other, her cape flapping shadows in the dark as she peered at the numbers on people’s sleeves. It was pretty quiet, except for the usual coughing and sniffling. The turkey buzzard messenger yelled at us again. No one moved. She hadn’t called our numbers.

She barked an order at the guards. They’d sent extras, expecting a fight. She took hold of a dog’s leash and started prowling among the first rows of silent, stubborn language professors and music teachers and widowed mothers and orphaned daughters, and projectionists and spies and bartenders and cleaning ladies and Resistance agents and Red Army soldiers and Girl Scout saboteurs. And taran pilots.

And, in our first real moment of glory, the lights went out.

I think, if there could be anything I am glad I was there for, it is that moment.

We let out a ragged roar of sheer excitement, all 50,000 of us at once. I swear, it was all of us at once, and this time they couldn’t control anything. We had nowhere to go, of course – we still couldn’t get out – we were all too starved to overpower anyone, and we couldn’t see who we were fighting anyway, but BY GOD, we weren’t going to let them count us. They weren’t going to count anybody that morning.

‘Line up for work! Work details!’ we all shouted ridiculously – like we were trying to get organised, when in fact we were hurling handfuls of gravel.

I felt the flat of Irina’s hand against my shoulder. She rocked her palm. Taran. She did it against my shoulder because we couldn’t see each other in the dark.

Maybe it wasn’t really fighting back – maybe it was just pathetic passive resistance. The lights go out and everybody runs around in the dark, throwing dirt and screaming. But it felt like we were fighting back. There’s only so much fighting you can do in one day on a slice of bread mostly made of bonemeal and two bowls of lukewarm turnip broth.

I wish I would stop sidetracking on to food. Even now, when I am not hungry, I can’t stop thinking about what it was like to be starving.

It is true though – we got tired. Some of the women actually just went back to bed, climbing back through the broken windows of the block to snatch another hour of sleep. That also made it hard to count us! By the time it was light we were so disorganised that they gave up on the roll call – they also half-heartedly tried to stop Block 32 from getting our morning ‘coffee’ (there I go again), but a group of Polish prisoners from another block came running over with a couple of the big saucepans from the kitchen and passed us a desperate breakfast through the chain-link fence.

And there weren’t even any Rabbits in there with us at that point. That’s how determined everyone was.

The lights went out again at the evening roll call. Irina and I stood pressed close to each other, our shoulders touching, standing still amid the chaos.

‘How many times will she get away with it?’ I whispered. I was worried about Irina’s friend from the Moscow Metro, the Russian technician responsible for the lights going out. Irina didn’t answer; I hadn’t really expected an answer anyway.

The lights went out at every roll call for a week.

‘Rose! Rose Justice! Rosie!’

Through the never-ending background of coughs and groans and creaking bunk slats I heard my name, low and tuneful, coaxing me in my sleep. The Demon Nadine, asleep on her mat by the small stove in the knitters’ workroom, would never have been able to hear it. I sat bolt upright and banged my head against the ceiling. Irina grabbed me by the arm to steady me, instantly awake like a soldier.

‘Outside the window,’ Irina said.

We climbed down to the level below us and crawled over people to the broken window. There was a sort of human-shaped bundle of rags standing there in the black slush, tapping for attention on the window frame with a stick while simultaneously trying to hang on to the side of the building and avoid the filth that was smeared all over the wooden wall from the ground to about three feet up – that was where we all went to the bathroom now.

‘It’s one of those schmootzichs begging to get in,’ I whispered. ‘Oh God, they’re so creepy. How do they get away with wandering around the camp like this? How did she figure out how to get through the Block 32 fence? Nadine will kill us if we let a schmootzich into the bunks.’

I do not like to admit how much the schmootzichs scared me. Ever since that first day, when they swarmed over me with their starved claws, I had been scared of them. I was scared of them touching me and I was scared of becoming one of them.

‘Rosie, that is not like you! She would sleep under the bunks if we let her in,’ Irina suggested. ‘The schmootzichs do not care about the mess.’

‘You f*cking morons!’ the schmootzich hissed. ‘I’m Ró?a!’

The stick she’d been tapping on the window frame was her crutch. Irina climbed out the window and hoisted Ró?a up to me and I hauled her in, using my coat to pad the frame this time (we all slept in our coats by then, and they let us because there were so few blankets left).