Thomas squinted, straining to make sense of the shapes, but his mind couldn’t puzzle the pieces together. In all his years in the mines, he’d never seen a rock like this before. He waved the light closer.

Bagger adjusted the lantern. Light and shadow swept through the opening, casting movement over the wide curves, sharp corners, and flat holes of the rock. When the swing of the lantern settled, a shaft of light cut above Thomas’s head into the opening, sending the shadows on the rock scattering, and the pieces fell into place.

Thomas scrambled back from the wall, knocking Bagger over. Mole reached down to help Bagger up, and the others gathered around.

“What’s wrong, Tommy?” George whispered.

Thomas couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breathe. He needed air. Pushing past George, he sprinted to the shaft and upper galleries. Dan’s words echoed in his mind with each panicked step.

If we don’t bury our dead, the war will, and us with them.

Thomas stumbled out of the tunnels and into the support trench. And then he vomited.

Back in the gallery, George grabbed the lantern and peered into the opening. “Oh, no,” he whispered as the light fell upon the object they’d mistaken for a rock.

A dented helmet.

Cracked goggles.

A gas mask.

And tufts of blond hair. The same shade as Thomas’s.

THIRTY

TIME, FOR THE young soldier, dissolved in a haze of drug-induced sleep and paralyzing flashbacks. He could no longer measure its passing in minutes, days, weeks, and months. He marked it by the only constants in his life: morphine injections, recurring nightmares, nurses’ shifts, and the changing faces of the occupants in the beds surrounding him. A few of the occupants recovered enough to be transferred to prisoner of war camps, but most lay behind the field hospital, in shallow unmarked graves.

The young soldier had been in the German field hospital for nineteen new faces when he woke from another nightmare about his first night in the trenches and found himself staring into the terrified eyes of the twentieth new face. Bandages hid most of twenty’s features, as well as his small body, but his messy black hair and dark eyes, swimming with tears, sparked memories of the last time the soldier had seen another young boy with a headful of cowlicks, crying and waving goodbye from the platform of a train station.

Twenty, noticing the soldier staring at him, reached out a bandaged hand and spoke in a hoarse, hurried whisper. The young soldier did not know the French words spilling from the prisoner of war’s trembling lips, but he had no trouble interpreting their shaky, hitched delivery. The boy was in terrible pain and very scared. The faster he spoke, the more his tears flowed, until they choked off his voice completely. His wide eyes locked on the young soldier’s face. The boy’s chest heaved in panicked breaths.

The young soldier stretched out his hand and took hold of the boy’s exposed fingers.