Chapter 11: Behind the Wall

Lorenz's POV

The finders at the gate were twenty yards away, with their backs to us and their pipes lit.

I kept my voice low.

"A man who drowned," I said.

Anke didn't move.

"In a country you've never heard of, a long way from here."

"There was a mine, and the water came up faster than the pumps. I was thirty-eight."

"And then?"

"And then I woke up under a sheet in your square, with your knife hole in my side."

She looked at me for a long time across the dark anvil.

I waited for her to laugh, or to call the finders, or to pick up the hammer.

"That's why you look at everything like you're counting it," she said finally.

"I suppose it is."

"And why you didn't know the Captain. Or Gerd. Or your mother's word."

"Yes."

She took a slow breath.

"Then the man I stabbed is dead."

"Yes."

"Then nobody alive knows where my sister is."

"Maybe not," I said. "But he wrote things down. The list. The maps. He was careful. Careful men leave tracks."

She put her hands over her face for a moment.

When she took them away, she was angry, and I was glad, because I'd rather have that than the other thing.

"I hated you," she said. "For two months I've hated you for things you never did."

"I'd have hated me too."

"What's your name? Your real one."

"It doesn't matter here."

"It matters to me."

So I told her.

Nobody had said it since the water closed over me, and it sounded strange in that cold yard.

She said it back once, quietly, getting the shape of it.

Then she said, "No. In front of people you're still Lorenz. They'll burn you for the other one."

"I know."

"Good." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Now what do we do about the warrant?"

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