Page 59 of The Words Beneath the Noise

Zielzeit: 22:00 Uhr, 17. Dezember.

Target time: 22:00 hours, 17 December.

Three days from now. Three days to pass this information up, to let the proper authorities decide what to do with it. Three days for people in those coordinates to go about their lives not knowing that the Germans had already marked them for destruction.

Three days for me to live with the knowledge that I could read the death warrant but couldn't stop it.

And underneath it all, the other thing I couldn't stop thinking about: Tom was back.

I'd seen him this morning. Brief glimpse across the drive as he climbed out of the transport, rifle case in hand, face carrying that particular blankness that meant he was holding everything inside. Our eyes had met. He'd nodded. I'd nodded back. And then he'd walked toward Building C and I'd walked toward the hut and we'd both pretended that was enough.

It wasn't enough.

My other hand found the edge of my scarf, fingers rubbing the knitted wool in a repetitive pattern. Thumb across, fingers back, thumb across, fingers back. Soothing. Grounding. Mother's scarf, made with her careful hands, and touching it helped remind me I was a person who existed outside this room, outside this work, outside this particular fresh hell.

But today even the scarf couldn't quite calm the static in my head.

Nutzlast: V-2. Erwartete Wirkung: bedeutend.

Payload: V-2. Expected effect: significant.

Significant. Such a bloodless word for what it really meant. Buildings collapsing. Fire. Screaming. Bodies in the rubble. Streets Bea walked transformed into craters. The pub where Peter's sister sheltered reduced to smoking brick and shattered glass.

Significant damage.

Significant casualties.

Significantly my fault if I was too slow, too distracted, too broken to do this job properly.

My leg bounced faster. My fingers worked the scarf harder, pulling at the threads until I felt one start to give.Stop.Had to stop before I destroyed the one thing anchoring me. But my body wouldn't listen, kept moving, kept stimming, kept trying to process the overload through physical motion because words had stopped being adequate hours ago.

“Art.”

Ruth's voice, close enough that she must have crossed the room without me noticing. Dangerous. I was usually hyperaware of people entering my space, but today everything felt slippery, hard to hold onto.

I looked up. She was standing beside my desk, her own decrypt form still in hand, expression caught between worry and professional urgency. Her eyes flicked down to the intercept sheet in front of me before coming back to my face.

“That one's priority,” she said quietly. “Finch wants all V-weapon intelligence immediately.”

“I know.”

“So why is it still sitting on your desk?”

Because writing it down made it real. Because once I submitted it, people would act on it, and if I'd made an error in translation, if I'd misread a number or miscalculated a coordinate, then whatever happened next would be on my head.

“Just checking my work,” I said, which was true but incomplete.

Her hand landed on my shoulder, brief and warm. “It's good work. You don't make mistakes with this kind of thing. But we need it filed. Now.”

Right. Yes. Of course.

I forced my hand to move, finishing the translation with mechanical precision, filling in the final boxes on the form that would send this information up to people who'd decide whether to evacuate, to intercept, to do something or nothing or whatever calculus they used to weigh British lives against operational security.

My handwriting got smaller and tighter as I worked, letters compressing until they were almost unreadable. Happened when stress spiked. My hand wanted to make everything smaller, take up less space, be less visible. Wanted to disappear entirely into the work.

Ruth took the form as soon as I'd signed it. She was already moving back toward her own station when Noor intercepted her, the two of them conferring in low voices over a discrepancy in the call sign logs. I watched them work, the practiced efficiency of it, the way they communicated in half-sentences and knowing glances born from months of shared labour.

I pulled the next intercept toward me and started the whole process over.