Page 34 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“I'm alright.” Art's hand found Ruth's where it rested on his shoulder, squeezing briefly. “Truly. The worst is over. I just need a few minutes.”

“We can wait.”

“You don't have to. I know you both have work.”

“Work can wait.” Noor's voice was firm. “You can't.”

Something in Art's expression cracked. Not breaking, exactly, but softening in a way that suggested he wasn't used to people prioritising him over duty. “I don't deserve friends like you.”

“No, you don't,” Ruth agreed. “But you're stuck with us anyway, so you might as well accept it.”

I watched the three of them, this small constellation of people who'd found each other in the chaos of war and decided to matter to one another. Ruth with her fierce protectiveness and blunt honesty. Noor with her irreverent humour and steady presence. Art, holding his notebook like a talisman, surroundedby people who saw his oddities not as flaws but as essential parts of who he was.

This was what I'd been missing. Not just since the war started, but for years before that. The sense of belonging to something, of being known and valued despite the rough edges.

“I should go,” I said. “Leave you to it.”

Art's head came up. “You don't have to.”

“You've got people looking after you. Don't need me hovering.”

“Maybe I want you hovering.” The words came out before he seemed to think about them, and I watched a flush creep up his neck. “I mean. You found the notebook. You didn't have to stay, but you did. That means something.”

Ruth and Noor were watching this exchange with poorly concealed interest. I felt suddenly exposed, like I'd wandered into a spotlight I hadn't noticed.

“I'll be outside,” I said. “Finish my patrol. Make sure no one disturbs you.”

“Thank you.”

I nodded once and left before I could say anything else. Before the look on Ruth's face could turn into questions I wasn't ready to answer. Before the warmth in Noor's eyes could make me examine too closely what I was feeling.

Outside, the cold hit me like a slap. Good. I needed clarity. Needed to remember who I was and what I was supposed to be doing here.

I was a soldier. A guard. A weapon pointed at whoever threatened the people under my protection.

I wasn't supposed to care this much about one of those people. Wasn't supposed to feel my pulse kick up when he smiled at me, or want to stand between him and every threat in the world, or spend my evenings in a pub teaching him words that could destroy us both.

But I did.

EIGHT

SNOW AND SMALL MERCIES

ART

The Lorenz intercept had been mocking me for three hours straight. Standard Wehrmacht traffic on first glance, routine weather reports and supply requests encoded in the usual patterns. But something sat wrong. A dissonance in the rhythm that my brain kept snagging on like a fingernail catching on rough fabric.

My desk had disappeared under layers of paper: previous intercepts for comparison, frequency charts, my own scrawled annotations spiraling out from the margins in increasingly frantic handwriting. Three pencils lay scattered across the chaos, two of them chewed to splinters at the eraser end. A habit I couldn't break, the need to put something between my teeth when my brain was working too hard.

Around me, Hut X hummed with its usual controlled frenzy. Typewriters clacked in syncopated rhythm. Someone sneezed. Noor laughed at something from across the room, the sound bright and incongruous against the weight of the work. But it all existed in a different dimension, one I couldn't quite access when I was this deep in the code.

My finger traced the repeated sequence for the fortieth time

QXMPL VRTNZ QXMPL.

There. Again. And again, seven times across a message that should have had more variation. Repeated sequences meant either lazy encryption or deliberate obfuscation, and Wehrmacht operators weren't usually lazy.

Which meant this was intentional. A signature, maybe. Or a tell that revealed the operator's habit, the human element underneath the machine.