She frowned at him, but she didn’t have time for this. Something sparked inside her—an unwelcome image, one she quickly tried to snuff out. A hand pulling away from hers. Snowy cheeks raked red with tears. A whispered apology that was no apology at all.

None of them had asked to face the Nazis. But the ones who chose to ignore the threat, the ones lucky enough to run—those she could never forgive. Those who cared enough to try, to even survive in this hellscape, for as long as they could—she could respect that grudgingly, she supposed.

“If there’s something you feel you must do, do it quick.” Simone sucked down the last of the cigarette and flicked away the ash. “Night is closing in, and we have a long way to go.”

Phillip plucked the cigarette from her fingers before she could snuff it. He made a vague gesture over the bodies, uttered something under his breath, and then grabbed a canister of gasoline from the basement’s corner.

“Won’t take long at all.”

It had been two years since the tanks rolled into Paris, since the bastards goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées and Marshal Pétain threw himself at their feet in surrender. For the people of Goutte d’Or, though, the change hadn’t been so momentous at first. They already knew how it felt to live with too many eyes following you on the streets and peering into your business. It was why the Khalefs no longer went to salaat-al-jumu’ah, where half the mosque’s congregants were likely undercover gendarmes; only her mother still prayed the salah. It was how her rat of a brother could be laid off from the factory one day, then bring home cuts of meat and sport a new suit the next, all for the modest price of spying on their neighbors.

“This is only temporary. It will be all right,” her mother chirped, shoveling potatoes and roasted goat into her mouth like she might never eat again. Her eyes were haunted with every cruelty they’d endured on Paris’s unfeeling streets. “We’ve survived far worse.”

But Simone had always wanted more than just to survive.

Several months earlier, April painted Paris with a thick smear of humidity, and nighttime was no better. Simone’s skin was clammy with sweat that wouldn’t dry, and Evangeline fanned herself relentlessly, her gaze somewhere far away. It was Thursday, their night together, when Evangeline could be sure her father would be trapped at work for hours on end, kissing the occupiers’ too-shiny boots.