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He swallowed hard.
“And my daughter?”
That stopped me. Only for a breath.
“How old is she?”
“Thirteen.”
Damn. I’d known about his daughter, but knowing about a teenager and being confronted with one were two very different things.
Farkas crossed his arms and set his jaw. “She is . . . she is everything. If she does not go, I do not go.”
I nodded once, slow and certain.
“Our plan accounts for her. We always assumed there would be attachments. You are not the first to make such a demand.”
His shoulders dropped, just slightly, enough to see that he’d been holding a breath since he arrived.
“We need to move,” I said, glancing about. “Tomorrow night. Same time. Different location. You will be contacted with details midday. Pack nothing. That would alert our friends. When the time comes, be ready.”
He didn’t answer, just stared past us, as if already trying to imagine what leaving meant—what staying might cost. After a long moment, he turned and disappeared into the shadows again, his footsteps swallowed by the frost and the waiting dark.
Will stepped up close, as if warmth I didn’t feel might magically flow from my body into his through our layers of clothing and heavy coats.
“Did we just promise to kidnap a teenager, dismantle a revolutionary machine, and smuggle them both past a military blockade?”
“Yes.”
“Cool,” he said, a grin parting his chapped lips.
“Still want to open that café?”
He snorted. “Only if we serve breakfast for spies.”
28
László
Eszterhadalwaysbeenso small.
Too small.
Even then, at thirteen, her frame fit beneath the thin wool blanket, her limbs delicate as reeds and wrists narrow enough to be circled by my thumb. She slept curled like a comma with her spine bowed slightly and knees tucked in tight beneath her. She was little more than a frail knot of warmth in a world that had never been gentle to her.
Doctors hadn’t been able to name it precisely—not in the years before the war, and certainly not now. Something congenital, they’d said. A defect in the bones. Whatever it was, growth came far too slowly, like a hesitant flower in winter. She rarely grew more than an inch in a year. Her hands were still child-small, her shoulders narrow, her back thin as a sparrow’s.
But, God, how fiercely she lived.
Eszter was whip-smart, with a laugh that lit rooms and eyes that saw everything. And though her legs ached in cold weather and her breath came short when she ran, she never let herself fall behind without a fight.
From the edge of a distant memory, I recalled the first time I realized she would eclipse me. She was five—barely that, really, small as a whisper, all knees and elbows and a tangle of hair that never stayed brushed no matter how I tried. I was hunched over my desk, scribbling formulas on the back of a ration slip, trying to work out the limits of a logic gate model I hadn’t quite solved. The room was dim, our coal stove long gone cold. The paper crinkled under my palm as I wrote, scratched out, rewrote again. My fingers were stained with failed formulae.
Eszter had been playing behind me with a row of mismatched wooden buttons she called her “library.” I hadn’t even realized she was watching me, but she was. She always was.
“Papa?” she’d said suddenly, padding over in her threadbare socks. “That one doesn’t belong there.”
I looked up, blinking at her.