leap, she said, “Adele was my lover.”
***
The Préfecture de police was guarded—roof and street and courtyard. To Mary and Ruth, human guards weren’t much more than an inconvenience. They slipped within like shadows, breaching a window with no more sound than the whisper of the hinges, and found themselves in a fifth-storey hall, dim at this small hour. Ruth shut the casement tightly, so no alerting draught could herald them.
“Well?” Mary gestured along the hall. Emergency bulbs glowed faint red at each intersection: more than enough light for the dark-adapted eye. The Prussians had covered the floors with luxurious Oriental runners—looted, of course—that would have hushed the sound of their footsteps if their footsteps made any sound.
“Letters of transit,” Ruth said. “They’ll be in the commandant’s office. This way.”
She led with a confident stalk, her gray skirts whipping about her calves. Mary glided behind, black jersey trousers not even whisking as she walked. Together, they rounded two corners, slipping into doorways when Ruth’s senses—which proved even more acute than Mary’s—warned her of approaching sentries.
Other than the sentries, the hallways were far more deserted than the streets. Whatever restless energy charged the streets, it had not reached the Prussian command.
“Ulfhethnar?” Mary asked, as they were paused inside a men’s washroom.
“If there are,” Ruth said, “walking softly will not hide us.”
But one more corridor brought them to the office. Here, Ruth paused with her hand in its fingerless mitt upon the doorknob. She looked at Mary, brows rising.
Mary nodded. The scent of Ulfhethnar hung around the doorway, but it was cold. Well, the commandant would have wanted to meet with the hunters. Somebody in Prague must have talked. “Three means they’re pretty sure they know where you are, do you think?”
“There were only six of us in my class to wear the Wolfsangel,” Ruth said. “They did not send Adele.” She delivered it as a report, emotionless, which alone was enough to reveal to Mary how much emotion she was hiding.
“Who did they send?”
Ruth cocked a pale eyebrow over one eye that glowed like flame with reflected light. For a moment, Mary thought Ruth would shake her off with a question—“What does it matter to you who they are?”
But the Ulfhethinn said, “Besides Katherine? Beatrice Small. And Jessamyn Johnson.”
Ruth’s hand whitened on the knob. Bitterly, she scoffed: “Wolfsangel. The wolf-hook. You know the Prussians pretended it was an ancient Aryan symbol? It’s not even a real rune. Like everything else they stole, they lied about it.”
Mary blinked, although her eyes did not require moistening, and because Ruth seemed to need it, she allowed herself to be drawn in. “What is it?”
“Heraldic device. A kind of brutal medieval wolf-trap.” Ruth wiped a hand across her mouth, hard enough to blanch the flesh for a moment. “Ironic, no?”
Yes, for the women trapped in it. But Mary couldn’t say that in the face of Ruth’s distress. She caught Ruth’s gaze, forcing a distraction. “Can you take them?”
Ruth drew herself up. Her chin lifted, showing the tendons of her throat, her larynx in stark relief. Then she looked down at herself, her painfully thin hands that still trembled slightly.
She said, “No.”
“Move your hand,” Mary said. “I need to pick the lock.”
***
It wasn’t so much the commandant’s office itself that interested them as the secretary’s antechamber, with its wall of filing cabinets. They selected the ones that were locked: Mary picked them open and allowed Ruth to do the unpleasant work of examining the contents. She’d seen enough death warrants over the course of the war to last her an (eternal) lifetime. The Prussians had made fifteen copies of everything; the Resistance had sometimes obtained the sixteenth one.
Both women worked in silence, one ear tuned to the door.
“Here,” Ruth whispered, over the whisk of the lockpick and the rustle of paper. A further, more irritated rustle followed. “There’s only one left.”
“Of course,” Mary answered. “The rest of them are in the pockets of staff officers. Who are likewise on their way to Calais.”
“I cannot take this,” Ruth said, the edge of the paper crumpling in her fist. “What about you?”
“I never planned to leave Paris,” Mary said. Her assistance to Ruth was becoming less a job than it had been, and more a labor of affection. She felt a pang, she admitted to herself, when she thought of Ruth leaving.
But if the Prussians couldn’t drive her from Paris, the wolf-hook of a mere pang certainly wouldn’t pull her out of it.
A sound in the corridor kept her