She was no longer content with little errands, collecting bundles of papers “left behind” at a bookstore or on a Métro seat. She wanted to be like the people of Lyon, picking off the vermin in the streets. Making them afraid. Finally, he took her to the range in the countryside with Sanaz and Ahmed and a few others, starting her with a snub-nose pistol but quickly moving up to the hunting rifle when he saw how good her aim was.

Shooting was easy. It was like carpentry in just the right ways: angles and trajectories, curved planes, a sharp, measuring eye. Simone wished she could say she only imagined Nazis on the receiving end, but she didn’t. Evangeline’s father, her own absent father, her brother and his informer friends, all the cowards and crusty worthless sycophants of the Vichy—they all lingered in her mind as she fixed the rifle barrel, let out her breath, and pulled the trigger tight.

The first time she killed a man—a roadside convoy ambush on its way to Verdun—she didn’t feel much of anything at all. The soldiers’ angry shouts that she silenced. The wreckage of the German truck heaving and crumpling as it burned. It was only afterward that she felt the same satisfaction as completing a lengthy carpentry project. For a moment, however fleeting, it felt good and right for her hands to be still, accomplishment allowing her to rest.

But really, all she wanted was to do it again.

When she wasn’t aiding Georges-Yves, her hands became restless as ever. She shredded papers between her fingers over stilted coffee with Evangeline. Itched for cigarettes constantly. She tried to listen, tried to persuade Evangeline in her own bumbling, brute-force way of the value of resistance. But everything inside her was too much. Evangeline’s conviction, not enough.

The assassins of Lyon were heroes, she would say, as loud as she could without letting anyone else hear. They died for it, but they got the work done.

But Evangeline would only look at her coolly as she took another sip of coffee. If they were really such damned heroes, they wouldn’t have gotten everyone else killed, too.

ILSE

Ilse Weber’s morning had begun like any other. She unpinned the stiff skirt she’d worn yesterday from the clothesline and wriggled it over her hips, then uncapped her eyeliner pencil to draw thin lines up the backs of her calves. There was a war on—no silk or nylon to be wasted on such luxuries as stockings—but it was important to look the part. She had a terribly important role to play, after all.