They drove for quite some time, Ettie in the passenger seat as they barreled down the roads at a high speed. She couldn’t see through the blindfold, but she knew they were headed into the countryside, for the roads were now bumpy and steep. They stopped once and the back door was wrenched open. A man got in and sank heavily into the backseat. He stank of cigarette smoke and he brought the cold inside with him. Ettie felt a wave of panic. She didn’t like the idea of being outnumbered. The driver must have sensed her fear.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “He’s one of us.”

So that was it, she was one of them now, and she didn’t even know who they were. They were simply fools the priest had sent for her, who she hoped knew how to do battle. They drove for perhaps an hour. She learned that the fellow in the backseat was Claude. At last the car turned down a rutted road filled with puddles the tires splashed through, coming to a stop in a half-cleared spot in the woods where the parked car would not be seen. Victor got out and came around to help Ettie from the passenger seat. When he took off her blindfold, she saw they had come to a small abandoned house. They walked past it, into the woods. It was nearly midnight now. Ettie knew the café owner would find her empty cot, and the knife she kept there, and curse her. Let him. She was never going back. She had leapt from a cliff and now all she could do was wait to see where she fell.

There were two more young men, and a young woman. Jean and Arno and Bettina. They greeted her, and gave her supper, then asked what she knew about fighting. She knew how to hate, nothing more, so she shrugged. The others were not impressed.

“She’ll be fine,” Victor said. “All she needs is a teacher.”

They laughed because Bettina had been an art teacher in Paris.

“If you’re ready, so am I,” Bettina said.

Ettie nodded, her face glowing. Someone had come for her.

When the snow began to fall, Victor and Claude and the other men piled into the car and took off, saying nothing of where they were going or what their mission was.

“We don’t discuss such things,” Bettina told Ettie. “It’s safer for all of us that way. If one of us is caught, we know that no one can resist torture, and the less you have to say the better.”