The interrogation cell walls were always meant to be temporary; the prisoners were never actually meant to touch them, for they’d always be cuffed. That made the plaster so easy to punch through when she hacked at it with a dead Nazi’s knife for a minute or so. But she was running behind schedule; Simone was already waiting. If she’d survived. Evangeline choked back a cry—if she was still alive.

She crawled out of the back of the cell wall she’d torn through, armed with a knife, a broken thumb, and inordinate quantities of cyanide pellets. These she held loose in her good hand, a layer of fabric between her skin and the pellets; too much body heat, and perspiration could cause them to start evaporating, and then she was sure to have some serious regrets. She was within the penthouse ballroom now. To her left, she saw the backs of the cheap plaster cell walls, and to the right, the beautiful crown molding, marble colonnades, and expansive views of the Bois de Boulogne at the end of the boulevard, the park’s leaves bright with violent reds and golds. There had to be something—

And she spotted it: a box hung from the wall. An air raid kit. Complete with a gas mask.

Evangeline strapped the gas mask on, then kicked at the thin metal grating that concealed a ventilation shaft. The wide shaft, necessary to ventilate such a stuffy plaster and stone monstrosity as 84 avenue Foch, was perfect for her purposes. She braced herself with her legs, not trusting her hands to the painstaking process. Down one floor. Two. This should be the radio room. She peered through the vents.

“Carpenter hailing Magpie,” a voice pleaded over the static. “Magpie, come in!”

“Listen,” one of the operators said, rolling their desk chair toward a new outpost. “It’s from the Wewelsburg outpost.”

“But who is it?”

A fist squeezed around Evangeline’s heart. God, she hadn’t been ready to hear her voice, both gruff and unyielding, and small and desperate. But that—that made it all worth it.

She slid the cyanide pellets from her hand and pushed them through the ventilation grate, then pulled the lever to tug the grate shut.

By the time she’d recited most of a Rilke poem in her head, Evangeline heard the gasping, flailing sounds of men suffocating to death, their own body heat and respiration hastening the poison’s conversion to gas. She had to wait another minute before she dared open the grate, despite the satisfying thumps the Gestapo radio operators’ bodies made as they struck the tile floors. Bless the Germans for shoving their radio misinformation team into a veritable closet. Bless them doubly for outfitting that closet with an obscene number of locking mechanisms designed to protect its inhabitants from attacks from the outside.