But mostly, she couldn’t control it. If she could, she would’ve used it to follow Daniel even as he left her for tonight’s strike. Instead, the only vision that taunted her was a stone tower, crumbling, shadows circling it like wolves as a coppery charge filled the air. It was nowhere she recognized, nowhere she’d seen on their long trek west. All she knew was the stench of blood and suffering that clung to it—it was nothing Daniel could resist.

Tonight, though, she could keep it at bay. He was only going one village over—no towers in sight. He’d chosen the tavern because it was small; the cadre passing through, smaller still. Yet as he’d scrubbed the blood from the dead guard’s uniform, the stone tower loomed large in Rebeka’s mind.

“Six officers of the SS,” Daniel had said, a curl flopping down over his brow. “And Junker—he’s near the top. We’re getting close now.”

Close—as if there was an end in sight. As if he wouldn’t want to go after Kreutzer next, or Gerstein, or any of the countless men they’d encountered in Łódź. She hated the sight of her brother in that uniform, but said nothing as she helped him button the collar, the cuffs. What more could she say that she hadn’t screamed at him a thousand times? None of it would bring their family back. She didn’t need a vision to tell her that.

Eight months now they’d been crawling, starving, clawing their way across Germany, but Daniel was further from her than ever. All he wanted was to dwell on what had happened and drown himself in the blood of anyone responsible. There was already more than enough blood on her hands.

Sometimes, it was the only thing she could see.

She wanted to dream of what lived on the other side of their grief. She wanted to believe they might someday leave this purgatory of stolen clothes and cold barns and blood forever staining their hands. But grief turned the world into a stranger—nothing worked quite right in it, none of the old rules applied. Grief lied and lied and lied; it swore things could be fixed, with the right sacrifice, the right exchange. Grief held you in an in-between, kept you from moving forward or back. She feared what would happen to Daniel when there was no more revenge to serve.

The sheep bleated restlessly below her. Did they sense a wolf in the woods? Soldiers and their dogs? She burrowed deeper into the hay. If Daniel was caught, they might just shoot him on sight. But if they took him alive; if they had any sense of what he’d been responsible for—she’d be next.