"Theo?" Zander reached to touch his friend, then stopped. There seem to be nowhere on Theo's body that wasn't scraped, stabbed, or shattered.

At least he could shield Theo from the pounding rain. Zander crouched over him, angling his body to take the worst of the rain on his back and shoulders.

Theo's eyes were shut, his muddy face gray and his lips blue with shock. Zander dug through his pockets. In a deep inner pocket of his coat he found folded sheaf of paper that was still clean within the folds. The tunnel specifications. He drawn them himself two days ago. Zander turned one of the clean inner pages into a towel to wipe Theo's face free of mud and blood.

Theo's eyes opened. "Zander?" Then his eyes widened horribly as his mouth stretched in a rictus of agony. He drew in a harsh gasping breath. Zander could hear broken ribs creaking as he did.

And then the screams began.

There was nothing Zander could do. He had nothing to give his friend, not even the last dregs of his whiskey flask, which now lay buried under tons of Spanish mud.

Theo screamed until he lost consciousness again. Zander had a brief thought that the sound might reveal their presence to the enemy but with the thunder and continuing cannon fire there seemed little point in worrying for his own skin.

It was not fear for himself that made him weep when Theo lost consciousness. It was relief that now his friend had respite from the pain. Zander shielded his friend and swore that he would stay by Theo's side until he died.

But Theo didn't die. He woke up, and the screams began anew. He pawed at Zander with one misshapen hand. The other was a useless dead limb, shattered in so many places that it curled and shimmied in a dreadful boneless manner as Theo's body spasmed in pain.

Zander held Theo in his arms then, for he could hardly hurt him any worse. He sang and spoke nonsense, reciting Shakespeare's bloody Twelfth Night when he ran out of words of his own. It was stupid to think Theo could hear him through such hellish agony, but Zander refused to crawl away in the dark and the rain, to flee from the ghastly scene. Theo would never leave him. Zander could not abandon Theo while he yet lived.

Six or seven or a hundred hours later, the cannonade had stopped and the storm had moved on, although a steady rain still fell. Zander left Theo's unconscious side for a moment to look over the crumbling edge of their inadvertent foxhole. He could tell which cook fires were French and which were British by the lantern light up on the ramparts of Castel Burgos, as the Spanish called it.