“Now,” Simone managed, her tongue too thick in her mouth. “Let’s go now.”

Phillip and Rebeka were too stunned to protest.

They dropped down onto the workshop floor of the furniture atelier and made their way through the radio room. Guillerme was hunched over the transmitter, sending out a frantic message, but Karl rushed toward them. “What’s happening out there?”

“Nothing good. You need to hide everything.” Simone gestured to the stacks of decoded messages, the radio equipment, Phillip’s freshly installed transmitter boxes. “Quickly. Somewhere they’ll never find. Destroy anything you don’t absolutely need to keep.”

“But we were finally making progress—answering the information requests—”

Like the Magpie’s. Cold iron gripped Simone’s limbs. “Did—did you answer the request about Wewelsburg—”

Karl glanced toward his son, but Guillerme was wrapped up in his sea of dits and dahs. “Not yet. You said there was nothing to tell—”

“Change of plans.”

She was going to regret this. Jeopardizing their mission on the whim of that idiot American boy and her own desperate hunch. “Tell the Magpie we’re headed to Wewelsburg.” She glanced at Phillip, who gave her an encouraging nod. “We’ll report from there as soon as we get communications established safely.”

Karl kicked open the hatch to the tunnel systems. “Then we’ll barricade this room from both sides.”

Simone started down the hatch. Phillip and Rebeka followed, hands and feet slapping along the metal rungs. The tunnels had a fetid, stale smell to them from disuse.

“When we are safe,” Simone muttered, “you’ll tell me how you made it out of that flaming hell.”

Rebeka stumbled behind her. “I will.”

“What about your brother?” Phillip asked suddenly. “Where is he? Oh, God, was he still inside—”

“No.” Rebeka’s voice was steady enough that even Simone felt comforted by it. “He’s safe. For now.”

Simone noticed she didn’t say the same for them.

Simone had learned a great many things about silence in her life. There was the silence of her and her brother huddled underneath their bed while their parents raged in Arabic just outside. The silence after their father left, went back to Algiers with scarcely a goodbye. Her mother’s silence was always pointed, the silence of shame and grief and embarrassment for raising her children alone, letting their faith fade, packed up with all the things that marked them as outsiders in a chest in the corner of their room. The heavy silence of night in occupied Paris, the long wait for the sound of boots, the crash of kicked-in doors.