Thomas peeked up at Charlie’s bunk. He couldn’t see Mouse’s face, but the shy boy lay still, his fingers resting against Feathers’s cage. Thomas listened for the slow, steady breaths of deep sleep before slipping off his bunk, grabbing his boots, and tiptoeing out of the dugout.

Muted light glowed at the entrance to the tunnel. Before ascending the incline, Thomas wedged his stockinged feet into his boots and pulled a photograph from his pocket. The edges were soft with wear, and the image yellowed with time. Six faces stared back at him. His mum, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, sat in a chair holding his twin sisters, Charlotte and Letitia, in her lap. Behind the chair stood his dad, a hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. Thomas and James stood on either side of their mum and sisters. Thomas ran his thumb around the creases lining the edges of the photograph, imprints of the frame that had protected it for the last four years, a frame that now stood empty in his parents’ bedroom.

Mum had kept the framed photograph on her nightstand next to a candle that she lit every night for James before saying her rosary. The frame held the only photograph of their family. It was Mum’s most cherished possession, the first thing her eyes sought out when they fluttered open each morning and the last image they held before they drifted closed at night. Like Thomas’s St. Joseph medal, the photograph kept Mum connected to James. It was her lifeline when grief threatened to drown her, and Thomas had severed it and left home, abandoning her to face the crushing waves alone.

For the thousandth time since he’d snuck into his parents’ room on the morning he’d run away to London, Thomas questioned his decision to take the photograph. He knew it was a sin to steal, especially something worth so much to his mum, but staring at James’s face, he knew he’d had no choice. His parents’ letters to the army begging for any information on James had gone unanswered for four months. Thomas had to leave Dover to find James. He would question every infantryman on the Western Front if he had to, and Mum’s photograph would help. There would be plenty of time for apologizing after he brought his brother home.

Tucking the photograph carefully back in his pocket, he exited the tunnels. The midday sky, heavy with clouds, provided little more light than the lanterns in the tunnels as Thomas made his way into the support trenches. No-man’s-land lay quiet between the Allied and Central Powers, but Thomas knew lack of artillery fire didn’t mean the enemy wasn’t watching. He looked down the communication trench that led from the support trenches to the front-line trenches, but, remembering Bagger’s rules and the consequences for breaking them, he kept his head down and scrambled along the communication trench in the opposite direction toward the reserve trenches. Thomas couldn’t afford to be transferred from Ypres, not until he found James.