shook his head. “Lucky thing for Bill and me, meeting you.”
Bill—William Digby of a regiment and rank Nina didn’t catch—grunted something in English that Nina would have bet was Not so lucky for Sam. The three of them hadn’t lingered in the clearing among the carnage—Sebastian knotted a wad of rags around his leg where the second German’s wild shot had clipped him, as Nina and the towheaded Bill stripped the two dead men of clothes, weapons, anything useful. Sebastian had to lurch along with his arm around Bill’s shoulder as Nina hauled the overloaded pack, guiding them back to a quiet glade with a stream she had trekked past earlier that morning. They all collapsed panting, drinking their fill, and now Bill was wolfing down a bar of chocolate found on the second German as Sebastian rolled up his trouser leg to look at his wound, and Nina raked through the rest of the German spoils. This morning she had been one, and now she had become three. It was dizzying.
“Where are we?” she begged to know. It was the thing that maddened her most, after years of navigating by maps and coordinates—having no reference in this world of trees and Polish road signs except the points on a compass. “Are we still in Poland, or—”
“We’re just outside Posen. That’s what the Jerries rechristened Poznań. Fort Rauch in Stalag XXI-D—we’re not even three hundred kilometers from Berlin.” Sebastian Graham leaned forward eagerly. His leg had to be hurting him, but giddiness and freedom seemed to be blocking the pain. “Is the Red Army close? We had a camp wireless getting news of the eastern front, but if there’s an advance arm nearer than we thought—”
“No. It’s just me.” Nina looked down at the pile of German loot—matchbooks, penknives, ammunition—and wondered how much to say about how she’d got here. “I flew off course and crashed,” she simplified at last. “I had to abandon my plane.”
Sebastian looked back at his bloodied leg. “Well, there goes my dream of being ushered to a Soviet hospital tent and receiving a liter of vodka.”
“Be glad,” Nina said. “Soviet doctors would give you the vodka, then cut that leg off.” Her voice was hoarse, partly from screaming as she threw herself at the German, partly because she hadn’t spoken to a soul for weeks. She’d had no idea how hungry she was for someone to talk to until this oddly bilingual English boy dropped out of nowhere. “How’s that leg?” She peered closer, but Bill gave her a glare and a shooing motion, squatting over Sebastian’s foot himself. “Your friend doesn’t like me,” Nina observed. The man had spent a while squatting beside his dead friend, only rising after a hissed argument that they did not have time to dig a grave. Nina suspected she was being blamed for not springing out of the bushes with her razor a few heartbeats sooner. I helped save you two, she thought, returning Bill’s stare. I could have kept walking and let all three of you be shot.
“Don’t blame him too much,” Sebastian was saying. “Our compound was split down the middle between those of us hoping to see Uncle Joe coming over the hill to liberate the camp, and those who thought Uncle Joe and all his troops were barbarians.”
“We are barbarians.” Nina smiled in genuine amusement. “That’s why we’re beating the Fritzes.”
Sebastian smiled back. He looked no more than sixteen or seventeen to Nina, scrawny and big-eyed with the barest scruff of stubble. So even the English were sending babies to the front by now. His Russian was slow, peppered with odd English slang she didn’t understand, but his accent was surprisingly good. “Where did you learn Russian?”
“Before I came to the stalag in Posen, they bounced me through another camp, and there were Soviet prisoners in the compound next to ours. I was there a good long while, and there isn’t much to do in the lockup besides play cards and listen to your stomach growl, so why not pay Piotr Ivanovich from Kiev a few cigarettes if he’ll teach you his lingo? I always had a good ear for languages.”
“What happened to Piotr Ivanovich?”
“Hanged for stealing.” Sebastian grimaced, not from the water Bill was sluicing over his wound. “They left his body to rot. They always do that, with the Soviets.” He gulped a breath. “It’s no picnic being a Limey in German hands, believe me, but we have it better than you