“You don’t have to declare yourself a de Gaulle supporter to be punished.” Evangeline’s hands squeezed at Simone’s hip. “Every time a resister kills a Nazi, they round up fifty French—a hundred—”

“That is why we have to stop them. Before they kill us all.” She cut her eyes sharply toward Evangeline. “If they kill enough of us, they might even make their way to you.”

Evangeline’s hands fell away from her. “That isn’t fair.”

Simone’s heart thudded. The truth was right there, on her lips—that she’d already joined the fight. She hadn’t yet told Evangeline about Georges-Yves and Ahmed and Sanaz, their secret shooting practice in the woods, the network of messages they’d tapped into. She hadn’t even meant to fall in with them, not really. Only Georges-Yves had found her wasting her days at the corner souk, hands fluttering over lumps of wood with a carving knife. He saw that restless energy and knew it needed a target.

You look like a hammer in want of a nail, he’d said, taking the seat opposite her as he blew steam off his cup of mint tea.

She’d ignored him at first. Men were always talking at her. The reasons they might be worth listening to were few.

Your brother, he’d continued. He’s a dangerous sort. Do you want to be like him?

Simone stopped, the knife’s blade pressed against the pad of her thumb. The extra ration cards. Promises of a new apartment bigger than the closet she and her brother and mother shared. Assertions that now that Germany had liberated Algeria, they could be free back home. Was it worth the screams in the middle of the night, the Gestapo storming up the stairs? The nervous smile that stretched across their mother’s face as she pretended not to hear? It made the meat her brother brought home taste rancid. She’d rather have worked herself raw in a factory than go on that way.

I am nothing like him.

His smile glittered like broken glass. Would you like a chance to prove it?

It began as petty thievery, lifting supplies out of the back of military trucks and picking the jacket pockets of soldiers visiting Paris’s many brothels. Simone’s fingers had been made for that, slipping folded scraps of paper free. But as Georges-Yves’s network grew, so did their opportunities. The missions that they’d planned, bigger and bigger, allying with the Partisans, with the Free French, with unknown entities who only existed in dits and dahs over the radio. And now Georges-Yves had offered her the biggest one yet, one arranged by the American government, no less, although Simone hadn’t given him an answer.

In the three years they’d known each other, it was the first secret Simone had ever kept from Evangeline.