“Because . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’ve seen the terrible things happening at Wewelsburg. You know what kind of man Dr. Kreutzer is. The things I’ve seen him planning . . . Please, Daniel. You can’t go there.” Her fingers dug against his. “You can’t.”

He felt a hot iron spike of anger. “You said you were all right with this. You said it was worth it, to destroy SS officers—”

“Well, I was wrong, all right? Kreutzer is doing terrible things—You can’t open that bridge, Daniel—”

“How do you know that what you’re seeing is real? Are you sure you aren’t just imagining it?”

“I’m sure.”

“But how?” he asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

She was silent a moment too long. “Because the visions never been wrong before.”

A heavy shadow hung over his shoulder, a truth he didn’t want to face. If he turned, if he looked at it, he could never be the same. “Rebeka . . .”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“Ari never sent you a warning, did he?”

The words came from somewhere outside of him, marching toward the answer he already knew. He felt the thick mud of the ghetto streets beneath his feet. He smelled the cramped tenement buildings and heard the hungry cries of other children through cracker-thin walls. He saw Rebeka running for him through the alleys, fist clenched around her book bag, her eyes wide with bottomless fear.

He would have given anything, in that moment, for her not to answer. He wished he didn’t have to know. But he did, and it was like stepping onto the train all over again: that certainty, that doom.

Rebeka dropped his hand. “I saw them planning it. My vision—it was like I was in the room with them, watching from behind a mirror. Kreutzer and the camp officers, they were discussing how to persuade us all onto the transports, what was waiting for us at Chełmno . . . I panicked. I knew we had to leave right away.”

There it was, the poison in his lungs, the cold dirt swallowing him up. She’d lied. She’d lied to him, but far worse—she’d left the rest behind.

Their parents. Ari. All their friends. They could have saved them—their path to escape had been so embarrassingly simple. Rebeka seemed to know just the route to take. The empty guard post, the hole in the fence, the unguarded alley in the judenrein city of Łódź beyond the ghetto fence. But she’d told him—she’d said—

“You were the first person I came across. I could see the empty guard post, but I didn’t know how long we’d have that opening—if we’d tried to find them—”

“You killed them.” His heart was scrabbling in his ribs like a trapped animal. “You could have saved them, but you left them to die!”