think I’m proud of myself.”
“Proud? No. Not quite that either.”
“You were born here, Richard, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I love the Americas.”
A pregnant pause, which she did not fill.
He continued. “And what brought you here, loyal servant of the Crown? Whose wife did you offend?”
“No-one’s.” She glanced at her mudstained boots. “I chose to come here. It was…further from the memories.”
Disbelief in his eyes. “Chose to leave London?”
“It’s almost true,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Nothing at all.” He stroked her snarled hair once quickly, before she stepped away.
Introduction to “Underground”
This is one of the two New Amsterdam universe stories that does not have Abby Irene in it at all—except as a background presence. It is, in many ways, her actions that brought this state of affairs to pass…
“Underground” is set in the waning days of the Great War, which—in this universe—takes place somewhat later and under very different circumstances than in our own world, and incorporates some of the genocidal excesses of our own Second World War.
Underground
For Nisi Shawl
Paris, April 1941
Mary Ballard was the daughter of an indenture. She had been at various times the housekeeper of a forensic sorcerer, une Parisienne, and a private detective before the War…and a member of the Resistance during it. She had seen magic black and white; she had seen demons and monsters; she had seen women raped and starved and men torn apart by the Prussians and their guns. She had seen torture: all these things and more.
Now, she stood in a dingy cellar room—sparsely furnished with a battered stool, a paint-stained table, a salvaged cot—and opened a battered blue-painted steamer trunk, thinking that this was not even the first time she had seen blonde girls of eighteen or so packed alive into luggage. She’d seen more, in fact, than she had ever expected to.
But none of those had smelled of musk and rank damp beast in addition to the animal sourness of fear and close confinement.
The girl in the trunk wore a motheaten cardigan of gray wool, her knees drawn up beneath a full skirt, her head tucked down between her knees. Her hair escaped its braid in sweat-matted strands; her shoulder blades stood out beneath the sweater like incipient wings.
When the light fell across her, first she scrunched tight, drawing her knees to her face as if the squinch of eyes and mouth exerted a gravitational pull. There was no flesh upon her bones. The veins on her hands and wrists intertwined the tendons like serpents in Eve’s tree. And then she relaxed, joint by joint, breathing so deeply that Mary could see the bony ribcage swell.
Mary stood upright, pulling the lid stays straight. The girl turned her face up, still blinking in the electric light, squinting, so Mary moved to shade her with her body. The face was familiar, yes, but when Mary had seen it last, it had been in a newspaper photograph: not so gaunt, so bruised under the eyes, and balanced atop the stiff gray uniform of the Prussian Sturmwolfstaffel, adorned with black Wolfsangeln.
“Hauptsturmführerin,” Mary said. Extending her hand, she continued in English, stiff and awkward on her tongue. “Come out of there.”
Mary had expected a Sturmwolf to flinch from contact with her own brown hand, but the only hesitation in the girl’s movements was that of stiffness, disorientation, and pain. When Mary touched her, she grabbed and squeezed, the desperate human need for contact that seemed even more touching when neither of them were human.
The girl’s fingers were even colder than Mary’s. No wonder, that: it was a bitterly chill, dank April in Europe, as if spring itself were in mourning for the dead. And there would be more dead before long: too many hungry, too many displaced, and too many farms harrowed under the marching boot, the chewing tread.
“Ruth,” the girl rasped, and started coughing.
Mary helped the girl sit up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, cradling her through the spasms that wracked her gaunt body. Mary had no warmth to share, but perhaps the support would be enough.
Eventually, the paroxysm ended. The girl wiped a hand across her mouth, leaving no blood behind.
She took a rasping breath and said, “Please just call me Ruth. Ruth Grell.”
“Ruth,” Mary said. “I’m Mary Ballard. You’re in Paris. I’m with the Resistance.”
The Resistance. It was funny how some things became archetypal of their kind. As if they could have other, lesser cousins, but this was the one that mattered.
Ruth hugged herself as Mary helped her