He hears the cracks before he sees them, and then it is not even a second before they are racing out under his feet. He sees them shoot, suddenly multiplying and accelerating from his boots, and leaps momentarily before he plunges. He makes a grab for the ice, but it just breaks away and there is nothing to hold on to. He flails, his legs wheel, and he screams, but the black water takes away his words and thrusts into his lungs. He is full of it then, numb with it and falling down. He looks up, and sees the light flickering and retreating on the far-above surface of the water, as the cold pulls him down.

No hands break the receding light above. No fingers reach down to save him this time. Harry’s legs stop kicking and he lets it take him down. The silence of the water wins—until that moment, at the very edge of it being too late, when Francis’s fingers push through the light above and he is hauling Harry out. In that instant, Harry is thirteen years old again and he looks into his brother’s face and gasps.

Strangely, it is something similar that he feels now as he stands and looks at Francis’s grave. He cannot quite believe that he is standing here. That this really is Francis, and that it has all ended here. The sight of Francis’s grave marker takes all of the air out of Harry’s chest, and though it is a warm spring day, he shivers like the boy who has just been pulled out of the reservoir by his brother.

“You’re trembling,” she says. She takes his arm.

“It’s real, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

How odd it is to stand in this place again. To stand here with her. When he looks at the concrete, and the rusting railway tracks, and the bales of barbed wire, it’s October 1917 again, he is following a tape line, and Francis is at his side. He remembers it all as it was; the vibration of the hands of Summerfield’s wristwatch in the second before it started, and then all the leaping black water and the white of his brother’s eyes. Standing here, he can almost feel the convulsion of the bombardment again and, in the heavy silence, hear their screaming. How long will it be before this place forgets all of that, until the signs and the vibrations are all gone, and the silence is really still?