first, but her fingers closed around them in the second. She touched Dwight’s shoulder, and his eyes fluttered open.
“Tell the captain there’s a map. I’ll surrender, but I have to do something first. He can come and find me. Tell him that.”
Dwight didn’t answer, didn’t appear to understand what she was saying. She hesitated, not knowing what she might do for him, but Reynolds would be back any moment. “I’m sorry.”
SHE PAUSED IN the snow outside the front door. Faintly, the voices of Reynolds and Jennings floated to her from behind the cabin. She swung into the cab of the truck, and after several tries, it roared to life. She was reversing toward the snowy track when she saw Reynolds dashing around the cabin. She had no choice but to keep reversing as he ran directly toward her in the light of the front headlamps, slipping, recovering, shouting at her. Afraid of veering off into a ditch or a tree, she split her attention between the side-view mirror and the windshield, which fogged in her quick breaths. She was focused on the land behind her when she heard a crack-crack, and the splinter of glass. A gunshot—she saw Reynolds still running, but slower, arm extended, trying to aim again. The windshield was all right, but only one headlight now cast its beam over the snow.
She braked slowly, and then struggled to turn the truck. Reynolds had stopped, panting hard but still aiming. She knew he was shooting for a tire, and that would be the end of her. As she gently revved the engine, she saw out of the passenger window that Reynolds was now very close, had decided to reach the truck himself rather than shoot again. She changed gear, hit the accelerator, and he was obscured in exhaust. The next time she looked in the mirror, he was farther away, and then farther, until he vanished in the dark.
The road continued down a gentle slope, and then forked, and it was here that she guessed from the complete blackness on either side that these hills fell away into deep valleys. The darkness dismayed her, the lack of signs or other buildings. She tried to remember the land from her journey to the cabin, but she had been in the back and had seen very little. To orient herself, she drove slowly, looking for a sign of any kind. She found some at a junction, but for towns or villages that meant nothing to her. For now, she wanted to avoid people, and drove almost blindly through the hills.
When she reached another junction, she followed a sign that felt as though it might be the right way, since she had little else to go on. She was feeling horribly drowsy, the effects of the whisky she had drunk, and perhaps a little of the nutmeg too. She rolled down the window for a while and let the cold air snap her awake.
Even if she could get Willy out, she didn’t know what she could offer him in the real world that was any better than the delusional one he’d created for himself underground. It was no great honor to be connected to the Falkenbergs anymore. Only the Bergers and people like them believed that. At the thought of the people living in Elisa’s cellar, Clara wondered if they were the solution, at least temporarily. If she told them Willy was Theodor’s son and her brother, they would take him in out of loyalty to the family. Willy could live in his own home—his cellar at least—and stay with them until . . . what? But then, she wasn’t sure Willy could live in a normal family, with other children, after what he had gone through.
Cold and quite awake again, she rolled the window back up. Willy was too damaged to live with Jakob’s family either, even if she could convince him to take her brother in. She couldn’t place such a risk in Jakob’s home.
Lights were glowing and twinkling in the distance. The road was too long to double back and look for another route, and so she continued, rolling slowly into what looked like a town. It was more civilization than she’d seen in days—rows of houses along a street slick with stamped snow and ice. There were candles or lanterns in many of the windows, and here and there, people walked the pavements. She gasped with fear when she saw that some were British soldiers in groups,