At lunch, Lea was so famished she could barely restrain herself from reaching for the hard heels of bread until all of the prayers were recited. Then the other girls chattered away about the baker who had left; there’d been nothing to eat but old bread all week, although they knew they should be grateful. After lunch had been served Sister Marie stood to announce there was a new student. Lea had no choice but to stand as well and be introduced as Lillie Perrin. Everyone greeted her in unison, in perfect French, except for a petite, dark girl called Renée, a recent arrival from Berlin who refused to speak anything but German. She had been rescued, fortunate to have been among a group who had managed to escape when being moved from one camp to another. She had a tattooed number on her arm that she rubbed at when she thought no one was looking and she never undressed in front of the others. The OSE brought her to France, and to this convent. Her name had been Rachel. Her mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents, sisters, and brothers had all been on the trains. She was older than Lea, perhaps already fifteen. In the attic, her bed was next to Lea’s. That evening as they prepared for bed, Renée glared at Lea. She looked fragile, but there was a core of fire inside her. “Rühr mich nicht an,” Renée said. Never touch me. “Und schau nie unter mein Bett.” And never look under my bed.

It was difficult to follow the rules, much less understand them, and now, after Lea’s encounter with Renée, she felt even more unsure of herself. No one dared to break the silence before going to chapel in the morning or at breakfast. There were scores of prayers to recite, many more than her mother had taught her. The sisters looked sterner than Sister Marie in their stiff black habits. She thought of biting the soldier in the alleyway, of the wolves in the snow, of the blood on their shoes, of how fast she had run. After a while she wasn’t afraid, but she kept her eyes lowered when she greeted the sisters, and she stayed as far away from Renée as possible.

In class, she did her best to follow along as they studied the stories of the martyrs, including the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, who went to the guillotine. She was imagining the death of the first and youngest sister to die, Sister Constance, who was said to face her fate with the grace of a queen, when in the midst of the lesson, she heard the heron on the roof call out with joy. Lea gazed out the window, and there was Ava, coming into the courtyard.