“Don’t you dare—you can’t die on me now. Just let the doctors help you—oh, please, won’t someone help her? She’s so sick, and I don’t know what to do!”

“That’s all right,” Nina whispered. “I’m all right now.”

She was floating. She was rising, flying, soaring high over the wretched road and its caravan of ragged refugees, over the neat little towns and fields, higher, ever higher, until she was across the mountains and rushing down to the familiar hills of Mezzo Ciel.

She was home, and Nico was there, too, standing under the olive tree in the courtyard, his arms open wide. He was waiting for her. All this time, he’d been waiting for her to come home.

WHEN SHE WOKE she was in a bed, a proper bed with a real mattress and clean sheets and an ethereally soft pillow beneath her head. The room was bright with sunshine, and one of its windows was open, and she could hear children playing and laughing outside.

Children.

She blinked hard, and tried to raise her hand to rub at her eyes, but she only had the strength to lift her arm a centimeter or so before it flopped back onto the pristine coverlet.

“You’re awake!”

Stella had been sitting in the corner of the room, reading, and now she put down her book—a book, an actual book—and came to sit on the side of the bed.

“What happened?” Nina asked fretfully. “We were walking somewhere. You were helping me.”

“You don’t remember when we arrived?”

“I think . . . maybe? You were saying we were almost there. That there would be doctors. That we never had to see the oberaufseherin again.”

“Yes to all of that. We’re in Terezin now. Near Prague. They took you straight to the hospital and put you in quarantine, and I was worried they were going to leave you to die, or, well, just finish you off. But the nurses—they have proper nurses here, and doctors, too, from the Red Cross—they promised to take good care of you. And they did.”

“How long . . . ?”

“We got here on April twenty-first, but I wasn’t allowed to visit until just last week.”

“Oh,” Nina said, and already she was so tired, so tired. But she still had one more question for Stella. “Is the war over yet?”

WHEN SHE WOKE again Stella was still there, still waiting, and the look of delight on her face was enough to make Nina cry.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know. It’s just so good to see you smiling. And you’ve put on some weight.”

“Only a little. They’re very strict with us—in a good way. If we eat too much we’ll get ill, so we have a sort of diet to follow. The nurses say it’s safer to put the weight back on slowly.”

“Is the—”