CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DANIEL

Yom Kippur was meant to be a day of forgiveness and atonement, but Daniel wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He and Rebeka scavenged their pre-fasting meal in near silence: a sad bounty of canned broth, stale bread, and pickled vegetables from Helene’s root cellar. Even as they shrank from their other traditions under the Gestapo’s watchful eye, their Yom Kippur meals back in Berlin had been extravagant, multicourse affairs with egg soufflés and rich, fluffy bread loaves. At their uncle’s farm in Luxembourg, they’d spend the day prepping the bread, speaking euphorically of how they would break their fast when Yom Kippur ended.

But even thinking of such a meal right now made his stomach churn. His stomach was shrunken, unsettled ever since their escape from Łódź another lifetime ago. Tonight was just another night with too little food in his belly and too much anger in his blood.

They took their scraps to the bell tower and spread out a pilled woolen blanket that smelled like a stable. He pulled the battered wooden mezuzah from his coat pocket and set it between them: an offering.

“We praise You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” The words in stilted Hebrew hung awkwardly between them, familiar and yet out of place. Rebeka unwrapped the stale bread slices with trembling hands. Daniel looked at the shafts of milky sunlight sliding between the rafters, the worn stone walls, the painted iron carillon dangling over them: anywhere but at her.

She chewed for a few minutes, then forced herself to swallow and faced him to continue the tradition. “Daniel?” she whispered. “May I ask your forgiveness? For . . . for anything I’ve done to hurt you this past year.”

Daniel managed a dry laugh at that. “I’m not sure you’re who needs to be forgiven.”

She picked at her nails, breath drawn as if there was something she wanted to say, but no way to say it. Finally, she relaxed and shook her head. “I’m truly sorry I’ve tried to stand in your way. I know you want . . .”

Rebeka trailed off, and at last he found the strength to look at her. She was only a sliver of the girl she’d once been: no longer the tall, strong young woman he admired, but whittled down and folded up, like perhaps she could fold herself away into nothingness.

“I know you want revenge. And I don’t blame you for that. I want it too.” Tears rimmed her lower lashes. “But I’ve lost everyone else. I can’t lose you as well.”

He laced his hand in her slim fingers. Perhaps she was still that pillar—that rock that refused to be worn down. How much did she endure to stay so strong for him? He’d assumed it was their suffering that had robbed the life from her eyes, but maybe it was the way she always acted as though she had to be strong enough to carry them both.

Well, there was nothing he could do to change it. The only other option—not getting revenge—was no option at all.

“I’m the oldest now. I have to do this.” His grip tightened. “For both of us.”

“You don’t have to give your life because our family lost theirs.”

“Yes. I do.” Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. Why couldn’t she understand? “You don’t have to go with me. It’s not too late. Maybe the partisan girl and her contacts can get you some false papers, you can take a train west out of Wewelsburg—”

“Stop trying to make me abandon you.”

The fierceness in her voice threw him. Tears shook free from her lashes as she stared him down, trembling. His strong, resourceful Rebeka, the one who always had spare winter gloves in her bag when he inevitably forgot his own; the one who had listened to him practice études endlessly, noting just forcefully enough when his rhythm went astray; the one who had stayed up late into the night each month, long after their parents had fallen asleep over their desks, until she could make the shop’s numbers balance out.

In that moment, he would have done or said anything to take away her hurt. He’d have lain down his knives and his pistol. He’d have pulled himself apart to keep her warm. She was his sister—she was all he had left. And always she’d been there for him, never questioning, never judging him, forever cheering on whoever he was or chose to be. She let him feel normal, she let him feel real.

But this was the only possible path for him. Why couldn’t she love that part of him, too?

“Fine. I forgive you,” Daniel said. He was done arguing about this.

She swallowed again and unscrewed the lid on the jar of broth.

His turn to ask forgiveness. Daniel shoved his knees up under his chin and stared at the floor. “Will you forgive me anything I might have said or done this year that hurt you?”

“I forgive you for dragging us across Poland and Germany,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t have asked for a better companion for it.”

He flinched at that. Ari would have been better: Ari, the lion of their family, would have never gotten her into this mess. Their parents would have been better—Mama, who always saw the sunrise through the dead of night, and Papa, who never, ever let any of them want.

“I forgive you for entangling me in your countless schemes, because it felt so good to be doing something with my brother. Remembering how we could be when there weren’t guards herding us around, people judging our every move.”

Daniel let his shoulders drop.

She managed a soft smile. “And I forgive you for thinking it’s perfectly reasonable to summon demons from another world. Though we both know it’s really because you can’t resist Herr Doyle and his damned dimples.”

His face burned. “I never said—”

“You didn’t have to.” Rebeka brushed a hand against his shin. “I know you.”

Daniel blushed, thinking of Liam’s babbling after the morphine kicked in the night before. Mostly a bunch of astronomical jargon that only Phillip understood; but at one point he’d stopped in the middle of it to stare straight at Daniel. You have beautiful hands, Liam told him. Promise you’ll play viola for me someday.

“You seem to know a lot of things,” Daniel muttered.

He hadn’t meant it as an accusation, but she reeled back as if she’d been struck.

“Rebeka?” Daniel reached out for her hand. “What is it?”

Sunlight danced across her face, making it look, for the briefest moment, flush and full once more. Then a cloud passed over the sun—she was nothing but shadows and hollow bones again.

“There’s—” She caught her breath. “There’s one more thing I must ask forgiveness for. A big one. But it’s not fair of me to keep it to myself any longer. Not when I could lose you without a moment’s notice.”

He furrowed his brow. “Of course. Anything.”

“No—you don’t understand.” She bit her lower lip. “I haven’t been telling you the whole truth.”

Rebeka clasped his hand with both of hers. He felt a sudden, sharp instinct to pull away, though he couldn’t say why.

“I . . . I see things, Daniel. Visions, or glimpses of somewhere else, or . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to call them. It’s like I’m watching other people through a foggy mirror. I learn things I shouldn’t.”

His brow wrinkled. “What are you talking about?”

“Usually it’s—conversations, but sometimes worse.” Her voice caught. “I know how mad it sounds. I never told anyone because of how mad it is. You wouldn’t have believed me before. But now that we’ve seen this—this other world, these shadows, maybe it isn’t so strange after all.” She looked up at him, eyes gleaming. “You believe me, don’t you?”

Daniel’s hands trembled in hers. “I—I don’t know. You’re right. It does sound mad. But I’ve seen a great many things that don’t make sense recently.” He tilted his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’ve seen the terrible things happening at Wewelsburg. You know what kind of man Dr. Kreutzer is. The things I’ve seen him planning . . . Please, Daniel. You can’t go there.” Her fingers dug against his. “You can’t.”

He felt a hot iron spike of anger. “You said you were all right with this. You said it was worth it, to destroy SS officers—”

“Well, I was wrong, all right? Kreutzer is doing terrible things—You can’t open that bridge, Daniel—”

“How do you know that what you’re seeing is real? Are you sure you aren’t just imagining it?”

“I’m sure.”

“But how?” he asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

She was silent a moment too long. “Because the visions never been wrong before.”

A heavy shadow hung over his shoulder, a truth he didn’t want to face. If he turned, if he looked at it, he could never be the same. “Rebeka . . .”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“Ari never sent you a warning, did he?”

The words came from somewhere outside of him, marching toward the answer he already knew. He felt the thick mud of the ghetto streets beneath his feet. He smelled the cramped tenement buildings and heard the hungry cries of other children through cracker-thin walls. He saw Rebeka running for him through the alleys, fist clenched around her book bag, her eyes wide with bottomless fear.

He would have given anything, in that moment, for her not to answer. He wished he didn’t have to know. But he did, and it was like stepping onto the train all over again: that certainty, that doom.

Rebeka dropped his hand. “I saw them planning it. My vision—it was like I was in the room with them, watching from behind a mirror. Kreutzer and the camp officers, they were discussing how to persuade us all onto the transports, what was waiting for us at Chełmno . . . I panicked. I knew we had to leave right away.”

There it was, the poison in his lungs, the cold dirt swallowing him up. She’d lied. She’d lied to him, but far worse—she’d left the rest behind.

Their parents. Ari. All their friends. They could have saved them—their path to escape had been so embarrassingly simple. Rebeka seemed to know just the route to take. The empty guard post, the hole in the fence, the unguarded alley in the judenrein city of Łódź beyond the ghetto fence. But she’d told him—she’d said—

“You were the first person I came across. I could see the empty guard post, but I didn’t know how long we’d have that opening—if we’d tried to find them—”

“You killed them.” His heart was scrabbling in his ribs like a trapped animal. “You could have saved them, but you left them to die!”

“No.” Her tears had clawed angry streaks down her face. “I saved you.”

What use was he? She could have saved Mama, with her laughter like wind chimes and her quick fingers on the piano and the rare holiday prayers that turned to melodies all on their own. Papa, whose butcher’s hands never once turned harsh, never once turned to violence like Daniel’s had now done; his eyes so soft and heart so full, he tried to rescue every sad stray animal that came across their path. And Ari—Ari, who was so in love with Tamar Adler on the next block, who talked of weddings and of beautiful little children he’d raise to someday be as strong and brave as his parents were.

She could have saved any of them. But she’d chosen him, with his short temper and brooding music and now his violent appetite—his helpless, flailing rage. She’d chosen the boy who used his hands so cruelly now instead of for the music he once loved.

Absurdly, a laugh bubbled up in his chest. Laughing at himself, his pitiful life, his traitorous sister. And now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop laughing, at the cruelty of the whole world and all its gifts. She’d rescued him, but couldn’t save the rest. So what use was his sister who saw things? Every outcome for them ended in pain.

“Daniel, please—”

He pulled away from her, and all at once, his laughter was gone. “You shouldn’t have saved me.”

Daniel stood, the world tilting around him. The jar of broth tipped over and spilled across the wood planks. He had to get out of here. Out of this church, this town full of hateful Germans, these woods that had swallowed him up with their shadows and whispers that promised if he could just kill the next Nazi, his debt would be paid. As if there could ever be enough. No, he had to get out of here, this life, this too-tight skin he’d been wearing. Rage had eaten up his insides like one of Liam’s shadow beasts, and now there was nothing of him left.

He’d promised himself he would die avenging their family. But now—knowing she’d left them to die while he lived—

It changed nothing. Soon enough, he could join them. The sooner, the better.

“Please, Daniel.” Rebeka tried to block his path toward the rickety stairwell. “Please, just listen to me—”

He ducked under her arm and continued down the stairs. “You’re free now.” Froth built up inside him, but he couldn’t direct his rage at her. No, he had to conserve it. “Go live the life you deserve.”

“Daniel, wait—”

The sound of several car engines below them drowned her out. They both froze, listening as the vehicles stopped at the front of the Kino. Car doors slammed. Boots ground against stone.

“You have to go,” Daniel said.

She shook her head, tears still spilling, darkening the blouse of the too-large dress Helene had given her.

“Find Simone and Phillip. Stay with them. They’ll keep you safe,” he said.

“I’m not leaving without you.”

“Yes. You are.”

Then he bolted down the stairs two at a time.