She could save them; she knew that she could if only she had the chance. The train was still going slowly. It had to be now. Lea could leap onto the platform and then find her way home. She stood up, suitcase in hand, but the train was moving faster than she’d initially thought, and she stumbled. Ava reached out to stop her fall.
“We must do as we’re told,” Ava reminded her. “We will honor your mother and follow her instructions.”
“Because she is your maker?” Lea asked, her heart breaking.
Ava shook her head. “Because she is yours.”
Once they had left the outskirts of the city, Ava gazed out the window. She could see the world beyond men’s eyes. There were angels in the canopy of the trees that lined the train tracks. Melahel, angel of safe travel and healing. Haiel, angel of courage. Ornael, the angel of patience who guards against sorrow. Each time someone was born, three angels were sent to watch over her for a lifetime, and these angels were Lea’s. Seventy-two angels guided humanity, but men and women couldn’t see them and, on those rare occasions when the angels spoke, they couldn’t hear. But Ava observed their world as easily as she did the world of human beings. She spied Azriel, the angel that could be seen by human eyes in the final instants of a life. He was following the train, for his work was never done. He came to peer in their window, and Ava held Lea’s hand. She wasn’t about to let him come anywhere near Hanni’s daughter.
Lea pulled away. “I won’t run,” she said.
At least not yet, not until she was ready, not until she had a plan. She looked out the window, but all she saw was her own reflection in the glass. Lea was someone completely different than the person she’d been before her grandmother told her to pack up her suitcase. She was the tall, resentful girl who’d once had a mother and a grandmother and a father, who went to school and was the best student in her class, who always followed rules, who had never been kissed, not a real kiss, not one she wanted, who did as she was told, who had no idea there were angels above them.
All through the night they could hear the wheels of the train; the sound soothed them and made them forget everything that had happened. Berlin was far away, it was slipping into the darkness, a tiger of a city filled with soot and ashes, where glass was never swept up, and fires were burned in the hallways of apartment houses, and people disappeared without a trace, and shoes littered the streets, left behind by those who had struggled. The sisters fell asleep in each other’s arms and dreamed of their mother’s kitchen and the babies that had been born there. Lea curled up with her head against the glass. She still had her hand wrapped around the scissors, and in her sleep she saw flowers blooming in their yard, each grown from a murdered girl’s tooth, on a stalk of thorns.
Heart of my heart, love of my life, the one loss I will never survive.
Ava felt something dark approaching, a black cloud of angels. Angel of destiny, angel of confusion, angel of crimes and of discovery, angel of rage, angel of the wicked, angel of the fallen. It happened at dawn, just before they reached the French border. The train suddenly stopped, so unexpectedly people were thrown from their seats, roughly awakened from their dreams. In the thin blue light of morning, they could see German army trucks. Soldiers were shouting orders. It was nearly April but frost was still on the ground. Passengers with suspect papers, or those who had what were considered Jewish features, were pulled from the train and led into the field, clinging to their suitcases, their eyes squinting in the new light. Some wore coats, others had their shoes off and were in their socks as they walked through the tall grass. Women and children were separated, and panicked mothers called out the names of their daughters and sons. Men suspected of being Jews were forced to pull down their pants to reveal whether or not they had been circumcised. A woman argued with a soldier, insisting she wasn’t a Jew. In an instant she was knocked to the ground, where she lay sprawled and unmoving, disappearing into the tall grass. A shot rang