Thomas knew the flap and scratch of the bird’s movement, the clip of its chirp, and the trill of its song meant life to miners. When a canary stopped singing and dropped from its perch, miners knew their deadliest enemy, carbon monoxide, was present and they had minutes, maybe only seconds, to escape.

Without odor or sound, the lethal gas crept upon unsuspecting miners as they worked deep beneath the earth, leaching away their oxygen and suffocating them into wakeless sleep. During his three years in the coal mine, Thomas had learned that explosions, even ones as small as a bullet firing, in confined, unventilated areas, could unleash the miners’ deadly foe. If you weren’t paying attention, if you forgot to regularly listen for the canary’s song, or if you neglected to check whether the bird remained on its perch, you were as good as dead.

As Thomas watched the canary hop around its cage, calling out to them with a rapid, high-pitched greeting, he pulled a long breath deep into his lungs.

“This is our dugout,” Bagger said. “We work in eight-hour shifts. One on. Two off. Our crew covers the nine P.M. to five A.M. shift. When you’re not working, you can go up top, behind the trenches, for some fresh air and to get some food, but we sleep, eat, and relax in here.”

Dread, cold and heavy, pooled in Thomas’s stomach. He’d left the coal mines of Dover and traveled to the Western Front only to end up underground again. Reminding himself of his reason for coming to Ypres, he pushed away thoughts of working and, worse yet, sleeping beneath the earth and started calculating how many hours of sleep he could survive on and how much time that would leave him when he was off-shift to search the trenches for his brother.

Now that he’d made it to the Western Front, Thomas couldn’t afford to waste any time. He knew finding his brother wouldn’t be easy, but he had to try. James would look for him if their roles were reversed. And when Thomas found his brother, they’d make their way home to their family, where they belonged.

While Bagger lectured the boys about storing food to keep rats from infesting the tunnels and explained where in the trenches they’d find the holes they were to use as their latrine, Thomas considered the fact that if he could convince one of the other boys to help him look for James, he would double his chances of finding him. But who could he trust?

His only interaction with Frederick Chamberlain was being on the receiving end of the Eton student’s disgusted glares. He’d be no help. Charlie seemed nice enough, but walking through the trenches, the boy had looked like he was about to jump out of his skin. Thomas doubted he could convince him to return to the trenches again on a regular basis. That left George.

Thomas knew him the best, but that wasn’t saying much. Despite the fact that he talked constantly, George never spoke about his family or home, and even though he’d been true to his word about getting Thomas to the Western Front, he’d only kept his promise because doing so benefitted George. Even his decision to enlist had nothing to do with Thomas or with helping anyone but himself. The lanky street urchin had only decided to enlist after he saw the contents of Thomas’s kit bag and overheard the recruiter say they’d be provided with two meals a day, a place to sleep, cigarettes, and five more shillings a day than the infantrymen.