Bitter Seeds

nine

10 September 1940

Soho, London, England

Will spent the afternoon at the Hart and Hearth, waiting to plant the W bomb in his briefcase. He stared at the empty pint in his hand, listening to how it rang as he slid it back and forth along planks of polished beech. The glass clinked when he tapped it against the brass rail and asked the barman for another.

He wondered if the Nazis would commandeer the breweries when they arrived. He wondered if German beer differed greatly from British beer. Perhaps they'd build biergartens, too. That wouldn't be so bad.

Then again, if things went well to night, the invasion would be postponed at least until spring. If not ... well, he'd have blood on his hands, no matter the outcome.

The barman refilled his glass. Will nodded his thanks. Drinking made it possible to endure the wait. God bless you, Pip, for introducing me to the wonders of the pint.

There had been a time when Will resisted such simple comforts. It seemed silly now. As much as he hated the man, he understood his grandfather differently these days.

His new drink had a thick head of foam. Will imagined it was sea foam, and that if he listened, he could hear the crash of advancing surf. It wouldn't stop until he drowned.

The Hart and Hearth that Will remembered so fondly had become a thing of the past. Gone were the roar of conversation, the clink of glasses, the shimmering firelight on the ceiling. The fireplace was dark. The drive to conserve fuel, even firewood, had trumped tradition.

People still came, people still drank, but the atmosphere had changed. They greeted each other a little too enthusiastically. They laughed a little too loudly. And they drank—when there was drink to be had—a little too seriously. It was the cumulative effect of months of living with a siege mentality.

These were the men and women who huddled in the shelters at night, got up the next morning, climbed over the rubble, and returned to work. Day after day after day. They came to the pubs for companionship, for the illusion of normalcy. But in truth, every person there was drinking alone, seeking the fortitude to make it through the night. Like Will.

He did his best not to notice them, or to be noticed. Rubbing elbows felt a bit ghoulish to night.

As the afternoon wore on toward evening, Will saw many people glancing at pocket watches or the brass-and-mahogany grandmother clock in the corner. The barman clicked on the wireless a few minutes before six. It gave the valves time to warm up properly.

He rang the bell over the bar with two quick clangs on the hour. “Six o'clock!” he announced.

The pub fell silent. Listening to the BBC six o'clock news was a national daily ritual. The patrons abandoned conversations and dart games to crowd the bar. A tradesman inadvertently kicked Will's attache case. Will held his breath as the case toppled over with a leaden thump. Nothing happened. Will, shaken but relieved, leaned the case against the bar, and shielded it from further offense.

Frank Phillips read news of the war. Luftwaffe raids had leveled the foundries in Shropshire, Lincolnshire, and Dorset. In Africa, General O'Connor's offensive against the Italians had begun to falter. He might have had a fighting chance with reinforcements, but of course there would be none. Fighting continued in Greece and Italian East Africa. Admiral Decoux, the Governor General of French Indochina, had granted the Japanese basing and transit rights throughout his territory. The tonnage of lend-lease shipments from the United States continued to decline, owing to ferocious wolf packs and a flagging commitment overseas. President Roo se velt's impassioned arguments for increasing aid to Great Britain were increasingly unpopular with the American people and its isolationist Congress.

Hitler's naval blockade was in some ways worse than the Blitz. Common knowledge said they'd stopped dyeing horse meat green. It was no longer unsuitable for human consumption. The Ministry of Food denied this vocally.

Interest in the state of the outside world had been more keen in the spring, before Dunkirk, when Britain still believed it was in this war, and that victory could be had. These days, the state of the outside world was somewhat academic. The topic on everybody's mind, the subject of true interest, was the weather.

But Will didn't need the wireless to tell him about the weather in the Channel. He'd helped shape it. The fog had lifted, and a stillness had come upon the sea. The Eidolons had returned to their demesne, receded into the crawlspaces around time and space.

But the Met Office knew nothing of Eidolons and blood prices. It simply reported that the Channel was calm and clear. The unspoken corollary was that nothing stood between the south coast of England and the German invasion fleet in France. Will drained his glass and swallowed loudly, drowning out the gasps, the sobs of dismay.

To night, of all nights, the Jerries would come in droves. And not just bombers, but paratroopers, too, if Milkweed's gamble worked. The first tendrils of invasion.

The warlocks had concluded their marathon negotiation with the Eidolons; now they sought to begin anew from scratch. But the intervention would be costly. By unspoken agreement, none of the Milkweed warlocks worked near his home neighborhood to night. It was easier that way.

Will had chosen the Hart and Hearth for two reasons. First, he knew he'd need the services of a public house before the night was through. Second, it had a shelter on the premises. This he knew through firsthand experience, having been stuck here during more than one raid.

He called for another pint. The world had gone fuzzy at the edges. He wanted to keep it like that until the work was done and his share of the blood price paid.

The barman left the wireless on after the BBC update ended. Jack Warner and Garrison Theatre filled the void in conversation. It was unnatural for a pub to be so quiet. As unnatural as a stove without a teakettle.

A number of patrons filed out in ones and twos. Probably those with families. Will begrudged them the excuse to leave.

It was a long wait spent keeping himself on the edge of numbness. But when the banshee wail of air raid sirens finally broke the monotony, he found they'd come too soon. He wasn't ready yet. He could still feel his fingers, his toes, the quickened beating of his heart.

The barman flung open the door behind the bar. A narrow staircase led down to the cellar. “Right!” he called. “Everybody down here!”

The patrons queued up behind the proprietor. Will tried to look natural as he lugged the attache case, but it was quite heavy and threatened to overbalance him. Another door at the bottom of the stairwell opened on the cellar proper. An overpowering latrine stink wafted out of the shelter when the barman cranked this door open. Men and women covered their noses as they filed inside. Somebody, probably the barman's son, had forgotten to empty the pails and coal scuttles from the previous raid.

The air was cool and damp down here, but not enough to suppress the smell. Several cords' worth of firewood were stacked along one wall. Pillows, blankets, and thin mattresses had been laid out between rows of metal shelves. The shelves themselves were bare but for dwindling supplies of tinned meat and withered, eye-studded potatoes.

Will took a seat by the door. He counted nineteen souls in the shelter. Part of him was clinical, and obsessed over the mathematics. A simple calculation, he told himself. Dozens of lives for the sake of thousands. But most of him yearned to run away and drown in the surf.

Several faces he recognized, regulars like himself. He imagined they recognized him, too, as he'd been coming here for tea and atmosphere since long before the war. Before everything changed. Will remembered the evening he'd introduced Marsh and Liv, right upstairs. He wondered how many married couples over the years had met right here at the Hart and Hearth.

The ground shook. Tins rattled on the shelves.

He propped the attache case on his lap. He waited for the others to hunker down for a long night. When it appeared they were settled and unlikely to surprise him, he cracked the case open, using the lid to shield the contents from casual onlookers. He'd already smeared his blood on the explosive charges, so that through him the Eidolons would gather new blood maps for nineteen souls: Will's share of the blood price. Will set the timer for ten minutes. Then he double-checked it, closed and locked the case, and slid it behind a pile of firewood.

Will waited as long as he dared—less than two minutes, to be sure, though it felt like eternity—until a moment when it seemed he'd been forgotten. He slipped out through the cellar door as quietly as he could.

He hoped that if anybody saw him, they'd presume he'd gone barmy and leave him to his fate. It happened on occasion; people went mad in the shelters. Above all, he prayed that nobody followed him outside. That would make for an awkward confrontation when the Hart and Hearth demolished itself. The blast would level the building. Tomorrow, the overworked rescue men combing through the debris for bodies wouldn't be bothered to notice that the damage pattern didn't match that of Jerry's bombs.

Whether or not his departure went unnoticed, nobody came after him. Running about outdoors during a raid was a fine way to get oneself killed.

Upstairs, he paused again to take in the pub one last time. He'd been sitting right over there, at the table under the stag head, when he first met Liv. The three of them, she and he and Marsh, had chatted there, one table over. Will shook his head, said his farewells, and pinched a bottle of gin from behind the bar. He'd earned it. He dropped the slender bottle into the deepest pocket of his coat. Then he stepped outside.

Chaos. Sirens echoed across the city while the thunder of ack-ack guns rattled windowpanes up and down the street. Chuffchuffchuff. Chuffchuffchuffchuff. A fireball illuminated the skyline to the north. The ground rippled. Paving stones clattered beneath Will's feet.

He took the first cross street, eager to put at least one street between himself and the pub. He tried to pick a direction that took him away from the heaviest concentration of bombing, but it was all around him.

The blackout had become a jumble of flickering shadows. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, blazing through the smoke and occasionally flashing across a barrage balloon. When that happened, the reflected glare shone on the streets below like a few seconds of full moon. Meanwhile, a flurry of tracer rounds from a nearby battery cast shadows that slithered underfoot. The sky glowed orange with fire.

Will ran. The gin bottle knocked against his hip. The earth shook again, rattling the bones of London. When the bomb he'd planted became just another element of the pandemonium, he was several streets away and bounding down the stairs of the Tottenham Court Tube station. Several of the people taking shelter there looked up in surprise when they saw him. Clearly, said the looks on their faces, this latecomer was a madman.

How right they were.

Early the next morning, while the Hart and Hearth still burned, and while an invasion fleet sailed within sight of British soil, the Eidolons returned to the Channel.

12 September 1940

Reichsbehorde fur die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

If you can spare a moment, Herr Doctor,” said Klaus, “there's an issue with the new incubators.”

Von Westarp paced the length of the debriefing room. The breeze from his passage elicited a papery rustle from the dried wildflowers arranged in milk bottles on the sill.

He paused at the window long enough to glance outside again. “She did this to humiliate me,” he said before launching into another circuit of the room. “Where are they?” he asked nobody in particular.

The doctor had put his dressing gown aside long enough to squeeze back into his SS-Oberfuhrer uniform. It didn't fit as it once had; the past year had been good to him. Klaus made a point not to look at the paunch straining at the doctor's belt and buttons.

“There is confusion regarding the equipment,” continued Klaus. “I gave specific instructions to the machinists. Still, they've wasted time and resources requisitioning unnecessary supplies.”

Von Westarp reversed his circuit of the room. His boots pulverized a handful of wild rose petals that had fluttered to the floor. The air became sweeter and oilier as his continued pacing crushed blossoms knocked loose from Gretel's improvised drying racks.

Nobody had objected when she'd decided to use a corner of the debriefing room for her craft project. Her advice had led the Luftwaffe to dominate the skies over Britain; tolerating her eccentricities was the price for access to her precognition. For much of the summer, the ground floor of the farmhouse had smelled like a perfumery.

Reinhardt insisted it smelled like a Spanish whore house. He would know.

Klaus said, “I confronted them. They claim to be working to your specifications.”

At the window again: “I've been too lenient with her. Far too lenient.”

“But I'm certain,” Klaus concluded over the doctor's muttering, “that a few words from you would clear this matter up immediately.”

The doctor squinted at him. “What are you babbling about?”

“They've ordered the wrong equipment.”

“They've done no such thing! Why must you and your sister turn everything into an ordeal? Second-guessing my every instruction.”

The door opened. Standartenfuhrer Pabst entered, pulling Gretel along with a strong grip at her elbow. Pabst shoved her toward a chair before joining the doctor at the window. They spoke in urgent whispers. Pabst and the doctor had been conferring much lately, though it seemed they agreed on little.

Her damp hair had left a trail of dark moisture spots down the back of her smock. Watertight plugs made from rubber and ceramic had been fitted over the connectors at the ends of her wires. A trail of white salt rime dusted the edges of her face, tracing a line along her forehead, across her ears, and under her jaw.

Pabst must have pulled her from the sensory deprivation tank without giving her time to wash. He and Doctor von Westarp had long since conceded, however reluctantly, that physical violence was of no use in controlling her. They'd resorted to more experimental punishments.

She'd been in the tank for over thirty hours. Von Westarp had locked her inside minutes after learning of the invasion fleet's destruction.

Klaus took the seat next to her at the conference table. Under his breath, he asked, “How are you?”

“Well rested. Have you solved your materiel problem?”

He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her while Pabst and von Westarp argued. He motioned at the edges of his face. She licked an edge of the handkerchief, then dabbed it along her forehead. The tank used concentrated magnesium salts in the water to increase buoyancy and thus mimic the sensation of weightlessness.

Left to his own devices, von Westarp would have left her in the tank much longer. Perhaps even a week, though she'd have succumbed to dehydration before that; rage made him careless. But General Keitel had called an emergency inquiry into her failure to warn the OKW of Operation Sea Lion's doom.

“What will you tell them, Gretel?”

She said something in response to his question, but Klaus couldn't hear it. Von Westarp announced, “They're here.” Klaus glanced out the window to where a black Mercedes approached the farmhouse.

Von Westarp stood at one end of the conference table, Pabst at his right. “Answer their questions and do as they say,” said the doctor. “I will not be made a fool again.”

Gretel's disobedience used to be a private matter. A family affair. Such as when Rudolf had died. But now the Gotterelektrongruppe was plugged into the vast apparatus of the Reich's war machine; privacy in failure and success did not exist. Gretel's failure was the doctor's failure.

Three men stomped into the room. General Field Marshal Keitel, the Fuhrer's chief of staff on the OKW, was a silver-haired bull of a man. Klaus had never met the second man, but he wore the uniform of a Wehrmacht Heer generalleutnant. The toady man at Keitel's elbow, Major Schmid, was an opportunistic lickspittle, and grossly unqualified to head Luftwaffe Intelligence.

Also grossly outranked by his two companions, thought Klaus. How did he weasel his way into this meeting? Schmid was utterly dependent—almost pathetically so—upon Gretel for information. Who knew what might have happened had Schmid been forced to go it alone? If not for Gretel, Goring would still command the Luftwaffe. Oh. He wants to know what will happen to him if my sister is out of the picture.

What have you done, Gretel?

Keitel launched the inquiry as soon as he was seated. “At 0500 yesterday morning, an invasion fleet launched from embarkation zones across coastal France, bound across clear seas for the south coast of England.” He stared, unblinking, at von Westarp while he recited these facts. “At 0620, the advance forces sighted the coast. Spotters reported sudden heavy fog in the Channel at 0625. Contact with the fleet was lost at 0641.

“As of noon, all ships and barges remain missing. They are presumed lost with all hands.

“The combined losses to the Wehrmacht are incalculable.” He turned to face Gretel. “I am here, as the Fuhrer's representative, to know why this happened.”

Gretel watched the general with wide, innocent eyes. She said nothing.

“I demand to know why the OKW received no warnings.”

Gretel stayed silent. The corner of her mouth quirked up. Keitel went quite motionless, like a coiled spring. He didn't blink; he didn't breathe. He stared at her.

Oh, Gretel. What ever you're doing, you have to stop. This is bigger than you and me. Klaus wished she could hear his thoughts. These men think you're a traitor. These men will kill you. Even the doctor can't stop that.

Keitel's face assumed ever darker shades of red as the silence stretched on.

Finally, Gretel spoke. “In other words, you're wondering why I didn't save you from your own incompetence.”

The room was silent. The only sound came from the doctor, who made gurgling noises.

“What?” Keitel spoke so quietly that Klaus had to strain to hear him over the thudding of his own heart and the rush of blood through his ears. Klaus could see the general's pulse throbbing in the hollow of his throat.

“I can see the future,” she said in a conversational tone, “but I can't perform miracles.”

Oh my God. They'll kill us all now, just for spite. Klaus risked a surreptitious glance at the gauge on his battery harness. It was low, but not so low he couldn't grab her and yank her through the wall if Keitel pulled his sidearm. He plugged in, careful to keep his movements hidden under the table.

Keitel stood. Klaus prepared to draw upon the Gotterelektron. Von Westarp stood as well, imploring the general to, “Wait!” and Klaus to, “Make her behave!”

Gretel continued as though nothing had happened. “Some things are inevitable, even to me. The destruction of the Reich doesn't have to be one of them.”

“The Ninth and Sixteenth Armies. GONE!” Wham. Keitel punctuated his statement with a fist to the table. “Eleven divisions. GONE!” Wham. The floor shook under Keitel's rage. “Half a million tons of shipping. GONE!” Wham. Across the room, on the windowsill, flower stems rattled inside milk bottles. “Tanks. Artillery. Munitions. GONE! GONE! GONE!” Wham. Wham. Wham.

“And as I've told you,” said Gretel, meeting Keitel's fury with ice, “it couldn't be helped.”

“Your duty was to warn us,” bellowed the Wehrmacht generalleutnant.

“What would you have done, had I warned you? I'll tell you, because I've seen it: You'd have postponed the invasion for another day. And still it would have failed. But the long-term implications would have been far worse than they are now. Today it is a loss, yes, but not our destruction.”

Keitel sat again. “That's twice you've mentioned destruction.” A simple statement, testing the waters.

“Something is coming,” said Gretel.

“What is coming?” It was more an order than a question. Again, a simple statement, testing the waters.

“Our doom,” she said. The others fell silent while this prophecy sank in.

“The warlocks. This is their doing?” asked Pabst.

“Yes. They will destroy us all.” She shuddered, adding, “I've seen it.”

“If this threat you describe is real,” said Keitel, “what can be done about it?”

“There is a village in southwest England. Williton.” Shadows flickered behind her eyes when she uttered the name. “You must destroy it if you wish to avert our fate.”

Schmid said, “I've never heard of any such village.” To his superiors, he said, “It's not listed on the strategic bombing survey. I'd know.”

Gretel acknowledged his presence for the first time since he entered. “Oh, yes, Major Schmid's famous survey. You did such a fine job, identifying so many high-value targets all by yourself.” Gretel cocked an eyebrow. “One wonders how a former clerk achieved such brilliance.”

Keitel shook his head, still flushed with fury. “You did nothing to prevent the greatest defeat of this war. And now you insist we focus our efforts on an obscure, insignificant village. This is a waste of time.”

Gretel said, “Williton is the key. Demolish it, leave nothing standing.”

Keitel stood again. “We're finished here.” He headed for the door, the others in tow.

Klaus exhaled. They weren't, it appeared, going to kill her outright. But the doctor might, when all was said and done.

“Wait!” von Westarp followed them.

“Her madness is too far advanced,” said Keitel. “She can't be trusted. You should put her down.”

While they argued, Gretel walked to the window. She pulled a few sprigs of the most well-preserved flowers from each bottle. She arranged the collection into a little bouquet of primrose and aster.

“Herr General Keitel,” she called. “Your wife enjoys dried wildflowers, no?”

Keitel turned in the doorway, looking alarmed and impatient. “What?”

Gretel said, “Your wife.” She held the flowers up. “When you go home this evening, give these to her. Tell her all will be well again.” She crossed the room to place the bundle in Keitel's hand. He towered over her. “Reassure her,” she said. “It wasn't her fault.”

He stared at her over the dried blossoms, as though taking the measure of her. Could he see the shadows behind her eyes as easily as Klaus?

“What do you know of Lisa?” he asked.

“All will be well again,” Gretel repeated. “She will recover.”

He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but stopped. Then, without warning, he turned and exited. He didn't speak. Nor did he discard the flowers. His colleagues followed him out the door. The doctor joined them, as did Pabst.

Klaus waited until he and Gretel were alone. “What was that all about?” he asked.

“His wife will miscarry this afternoon.” Gretel said it with the same bored disinterest she might have used to pronounce the day's soup not to her liking.

Klaus mulled this over. He was coming to understand that mad or not, Gretel did almost everything for a reason. He tried to see the world through her eyes, tried to think as she did. Cause and effect.

“That's why you've been picking flowers.” He didn't ask, because it wasn't a question. “You knew he'd balk. But you also knew about his wife, and you knew how to exploit that situation to convince him to heed your advice.”

Gretel clucked her tongue. “Such a devious brother I have.”

She blew loose petals and crumbled leaves from the table. Then she carried an armload of bottles from the windowsill to the table and began to rearrange the flowers.

Cause and effect.

“Why didn't you warn them?”

She concentrated on her wildflowers, saying nothing.

Cause and effect.

Klaus watched her try another arrangement, saying, “If I asked, would you tell me what you're doing?”

“I'm arranging flowers. Perhaps you aren't so clever as I'd thought.”

“You know what I meant. Tell me, Gretel.”

“And allow you to be swept along in my wake? Never.”

Klaus stomped out of the room. He slammed the door.

The machine shop was a cacophony of drilling, hammering, welding, and sawing. It smelled of hot steel and oil. In addition to countermanding Klaus's directives regarding the supplies, the doctor had also increased his order. Now he wanted thirty incubators of each type.

Klaus remembered the day that the doctor first unveiled the devices. He had been perhaps eight or nine when the doctor first locked him inside his incubator. He'd screamed himself hoarse when the claustrophobia consumed him, pounded his fists raw. There was no room to move inside; it had been built especially for him, and modified accordingly as he grew over the years.

In those days, von Westarp had kept them all in the same room. When Klaus had become too exhausted to scream and carry on any longer, he listened to Rudolf, Heike, Kammler, and the rest cry all night long. Except Gretel, of course. Of all the children, she and she alone never cried. Not once that he could remember.

Klaus remembered something he hadn't thought about in years. There had been many more test subjects back then. So many, in fact, that the field behind the house was—

—And then Klaus knew why the doctor had ordered the machinists to requisition so much extraneous materiel. The gas lines, the lime, the earthmoving equipment. None of this was for building incubators. It was for the mass disposal of bodies.

The doctor was planning for a massive influx of test subjects. Too many to bury one at a time, as he'd done in the old days.

19 September 1940

Williton, England

nine hours of bombing had erased the road to Williton, rendered it indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. The churned and cratered earth still smoked in places. Here and there broken macadam peeked from the mud, but this only suggested a road, inasmuch as a shattered dish suggested a family dinner.

The undercarriage of the Rolls screeched as Marsh gunned the car over another hillock, causing debris to rake the belly of Stephenson's car. Then the suspension groaned when he forced the car to bounce across another cleft.

“What if she's cold?” said Liv, kneading a blanket in her fingers. It was pink, it had elephants and baby stains on it, and it smelled like Agnes. “I hope she's not out in the cold.”

“She could be safe. They could be in a shelter.”

In London, one heard tell of folks emerging from their shelters with nary a scratch, only to find their neighborhoods flattened. Sometimes they had to wait for the rescue men to clear away debris before the door could be wedged open.

The little information doled out by the BBC suggested this would be unlikely. Luftwaffe ... Carpet bombing ... Williton. The details were hazy to Marsh. He'd been out the door on the way to beg, borrow, or steal Stephenson's car before Alvar Lidell had uttered four sentences. In the end, he stole it. As well as the petrol canister that Marsh tossed in the boot while Liv urged him to hurry, God's sake, Agnes needed them, why couldn't he do it faster?

“I hope she's not hungry. What if she's hungry? We didn't bring her food. We should go back and get her food.”

Marsh drove on, wishing for Williton to emerge from the smoke, whole and pristine. It didn't. He stopped the car when he couldn't cajole it over the debris any longer. He killed the engine. They climbed out.

Rubble. They stood on the shore of a sea of rubble that stretched to the horizon. Here and there men in wide-brimmed metal helmets like sun bonnets scrambled over the mounds. Searching, or carrying stretchers. Sunset glinted on one man's helmet, highlighting the letter R painted over the brim. But for the occasional rockslide of broken brick and masonry, the rescue men moved silently, like ghosts in somebody else's graveyard.

TNT and baby. Two scents that should never mingle.

Liv mumbled, “She's cold. She's hungry and scared.”

“Where?” Marsh had never been to Williton, didn't know the village, didn't know where to find Liv's aunt.

They walked. Every block was a jumble of senseless images. Pulverized brick. A dented tea service. Shattered window glass. A Victorian fainting couch half-collapsed beneath a heap of charred timber. Jumbled masonry. A child's shoe. A bathtub. A cracked chimney, the bricks pulling apart in a snaggletoothed grimace. A family Bible. A dining room wall. A teacup.

What they didn't see were the telltale mounds of Anderson shelters.

That could have meant they'd sheltered in cellars. Cellars. Yes. Perhaps they were trapped inside. Underfoot, just feet away, waiting for somebody to free them. If he could find a cellar, find people alive and well and waiting to be dug out, then he'd know Agnes was safe somewhere, too.

“She wants her blanket,” said Liv.

The debris tore his trousers, gouged his knees. Window glass sliced his fingers. When he hurled the bricks aside, they landed with a crash and tinkle, oddly high-pitched for such heavy things. More bricks. More crashing.

He found a rhythm. Lift, hurl, crash. Blood and dust caked his hands. Lift. Hurl. Crash.

“Raybould.”

He couldn't spare Liv more than a glance. A trio of rescue men had joined her: one old, one pudgy, one pale. Good. More hands.

“Raybould,” she said again, less quietly this time.

They stood there, watching. Why weren't they helping him? He wrestled a length of timber from the wreckage. It perforated his hands with splinters.

Footsteps crunched through the debris. A hand rested heavily on his shoulder.

“It's over, son.”

Marsh tossed aside another piece of timber.

The rescue man crouched beside Marsh and squeezed his shoulder. “That's our job,” he said. “There's nothing you can do.”

Marsh's fingers wrapped themselves around something solid, a brick or piece of masonry. Lift. Hurl. Crash.

The hand on his shoulder moved to his elbow and tugged. “Why don't you come with me. We'll get you some food.”

Marsh's fist closed around the corner of a brick.

“Come,” said the rescue man, standing up. “It's over.”

“Nobody fucking tells me to abandon my daughter.”

“What's that?” The rescue man leaned forward. “Why don't you stop for a moment so I can hear you better?”

Marsh launched to his feet as he spun. He put all his weight, all his rage, behind the thing in his fist.

It connected with the corner of the rescue man's mouth. Marsh felt something crack and give way. The man toppled backwards. His helmet clattered down a pile of debris. Marsh dropped the thing in his hand and leapt on him.

“I said nobody—” His fist connected again. “—fucking tells me—” Now the other fist. “—to abandon my daughter!”

A pair of arms wrapped around his waist and lifted. But Marsh's rage had been uncorked. He thrashed. He threw his head back, connecting with something that made a soft crunch. The grip on his waist loosened, but then more hands grabbed him from behind. He stamped down on the third man's instep and shoved his elbow back with as much force as he could muster, wrenching his shoulder as he did so.

“Oof ...” The third man grunted, but didn't loosen his grip. He outweighed Marsh by a considerable margin, and so was able to pull him away.

The pain in Marsh's twisted shoulder and his lacerated hands became cracks in the dike restraining something immense and black. He didn't want to feel it, but it flooded through his defenses.

“Nobody ... ,” he panted. He sat in the mud because the words were too heavy. “Tells me ... Oh, God, Agnes. Where are you?” The last came out as a sob.

He looked to the man he'd hit. He appeared to be in his mid-sixties. Spittle and blood trailed from his lips. His mouth was dark red. The pale fellow crouched beside him, helped him up with one hand as he pressed a handkerchief to his nose with the other.

Mud seeped through Marsh's trousers. Cold. Wet. He wished the cold would seep into his heart and numb him.

“We sent her away,” said Liv.

She was sitting on what had been the front stoop of somebody's home. Marsh pulled himself up and joined her.

The rescue men gathered up their fallen companion. The man with the bloodied nose took one arm over his shoulders, and the pudgy man took the other. They limped away, casting glares and curses in Marsh's direction.

“Why did we send her away?” asked Liv, shivering.

Marsh draped an arm across her shoulders. She pulled away. They cried.

Night fell. The stars came out. Liv shivered again.

“You tried to send me away, too,” she said.