But the force of the impact swept their hands back and knocked their bodies together. The stark bones of Ruth’s wrist rattled against the stiff flesh of Mary’s hand.
Ruth must have kept her breath, though—how, exactly, Mary couldn’t imagine—and as Mary tugged her through the turgid water she seemed to orient herself and begin to swim. Mary released her wrist and struck out downriver at an angle, trusting Ruth to follow.
Behind them, two objects struck the river in quick succession—each with a heavy splash—followed a few seconds later by a third.
That didn’t kill her? Mary thought, amused that she felt more outrage than fear.
She stroked faster. Ruth kept up despite the drag of her skirts, thirty feet, fifty—and a tap on Mary’s shoulder. She turned to Ruth; through murky water and the blur of darkness Ruth jerked a thumb up. A slow trickle of bubbles rose from her nostrils. The streamers of her blood faded into the moving water all around.
Mary put a hand on Ruth’s neck, a hand on her belly, and pulled her down.
Ruth’s eyes widened. For a moment, Mary thought she would struggle. But Mary pushed gently against her diaphragm, and Ruth, after a moment’s resistance, breathed out. Mary raised that hand to Ruth’s shoulder and pulled her close.
She fitted her lips to Ruth’s, and filled Ruth’s lungs with the air she had hoarded.
It was enough to get them to the destination—a sewer outflow channel—that Mary had used before. She clung to the brickwork, supporting Ruth, with only their eyes above the channel until the Ulfhethnar—two swimming strongly, and the straggler—swept past on their way downriver. Then she hauled Ruth—dripping and shivering—up into the mouth of the arched masonry tunnel. There was a grate; Mary simply loosened the bolts that had long ago been replaced by cunning hands and lifted it aside.
The Prussians might rule the streets above. The catacombs belonged to the Resistance.
“I hope you’re not afraid of the dark,” she told Ruth.
Ruth snorted through her shivers. “I hope the ink on these letters is waterproof.”
***
They walked in darkness, their footsteps plashing in sorcerously decontaminated filth until they came up the trunk to a walkway. The trickle of water sounded and rebounded all around them; the noise was such that they leaned their heads together to talk in low tones. The echoes might carry, but as far as Mary was concerned, if the Ulfhethnar could track them by sound through this noise, they deserved to eat them.
She might, she allowed, be a bit tired.
By scent and familiarity, Mary led them as far as a cache of electric torches and batteries wrapped in a rubberized sheet and thrust into the back of a niche. The second torch she tried worked, once she inserted the batteries by feel. Even a wampyr’s eyes were no use when the darkness was total.
She shielded the torch with a fold of her shirt, so it cast only a dim and indirect glow, and looked up to find Ruth regarding her.
“Thank you,” the Ulfhethinn said.
“Thank you,” Mary responded. She should look down, she knew, but it wasn’t happening. And Ruth wasn’t looking down either.
“You’re wondering,” Ruth said, “why it took me three years to assassinate the bastard.”
“I had assumed you had to work your way close to him.” No answer, not immediately. Mary turned away. “Let’s walk.”
“Lead on, Valjean.”
She could feel Ruth stewing, though, and she wanted to give the girl an opportunity to spit out some of the poison so obviously corroding her soul.
“Killing him doesn’t make you a monster, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“My worst fear,” Ruth said bitterly, striding alongside so her wet skirt slapped, certain of her footing in the halflight, “was that someone else would find a way to turn the tide. To break the Prussian war machine. And then everything I’d endured, everything I’d done would have been in vain. So yes: you ask if I think I am a monster? If nothing else proves it, doesn’t that?”
They passed through an archway of rough stone, into a narrower side-channel. The echoes were less here, or at least more attenuated, and the floor was dry except for a foul, slender trickle. Mary trailed her left hand along the rough cemented stone, feeling for a gap you could not see. Here, they were constrained to walk single-file.
“Sweetheart,” Mary said. “What it proves, if anything, is that you are most exquisitely human.”
Ruth fell silent again. Mary felt her fingertips skip on air. “Ah,” she said. “Follow me.”
She turned into the