“Not me.” No pride or arrogance bolstered George’s claim. He stated the words as calmly as if he’d just told Thomas the sky was blue. “Only people like you, who have something to lose, fear death.”

Thomas remembered the small potato he’d carried in his pocket from Dover to Trafalgar Square on the day he’d met George. If George hadn’t convinced him to meet Norton-Griffith’s recruiter, Thomas might have starved on the streets of London. “I’m a coal miner from Dover. I’ve never had much to lose.”

The tip of George’s cigarette glowed bright red as he pulled another drag deep into his lungs. “You have everything, and you don’t even know it. You should go home to your family while you still can. Leave before this war kills you, Thomas.”

George’s use of his real name cut through Thomas with a chill, more disturbing than his warning of the possibility that the war would claim his life. He clutched his saints medals. He wanted to believe they would keep him safe and help him find James, but each night in the tunnels and every day in the trenches carved away at the foundation of his faith, inch by inch, until all that remained now was a gutted hole, cold and empty. He traced the raised image of Saint Joseph with his thumb. “I can’t. Not until I’ve found my brother.”

George turned to Thomas. “You’ve almost died twice already. What if you coming here to find your brother ends with your parents mourning two sons?”

Thomas shook his head. “It won’t. I will find him. And I won’t die.”

“And if you don’t find him? And if you do die?”

The questions had scratched at Thomas’s thoughts night and day since Johnny had shown him the bodies of missing soldiers strewn across no-man’s-land, but hearing them spoken aloud by George gave his own doubts a voice he could no longer dismiss or ignore.

“You know the chances of your brother having survived this war are about as good as our chances of surviving it,” George said, “which, if you haven’t noticed, are getting slimmer by the minute.”

Thomas tucked the medals under his shirt. “I have to find him, George.”

George sighed. “I know, and I hope you do.”

Silence hung between them like the smoke lingering around George’s head.

Thomas combed his fingers through his hair. “What about you? Isn’t there anyone in London wondering where you are?”

“Aside from the men I owe money?” George shook his head. “No. I’m sure no one’s even noticed I’m gone. You could have let me drown in that tunnel today, and no one would have mourned my death.”

An aftershock of the panic Thomas had felt when Mole had said George wasn’t breathing shuddered through him. He’d come to not only rely on George, but to trust him with his life. “That’s not true.”

“That’s nice of you to say, but let’s be honest, if I die under this godforsaken battlefield, no brother will come looking for me. No father will bring my body home. No mother will cry over my grave. I will leave this world the same way I came into it, forgotten.” His voice weakened as the truth in his words settled heavy around them. “But in the end, aren’t we all.”