Page 9 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“Didn't ask if you were.”

I followed him out into the cold, too tired to argue, and the night air hit me like a wall.

The paths between buildings were barely visible, just the faint gleam of shaded lamps marking the way, and I was suddenly, viscerally grateful that I didn't have to navigate them alone.

Not that I'd ever admit it.

The canteen was nearly empty, a few stragglers nursing mugs and avoiding their billets. Sergeant Hale sat me at a corner table and returned minutes later with a plate of bread and cheese and a mug of something that might have been soup.

“Eat,” he said, sliding into the seat across from me.

I ate. Not because I was hungry, but because arguing required energy I didn't have. The bread was stale, the cheese flavourless, but my body responded to it anyway, some of the shakiness in my hands beginning to fade.

“You always work like that?” he asked eventually.

“Like what?”

“Like the world's ending and you're the only one who can stop it.”

The words stung more than they should have. “The world is ending. Or hadn't you noticed?”

“I've noticed.” His voice was flat. “I've been noticing for four years. Doesn't mean you have to kill yourself trying to fix it.”

“Someone has to try.”

“And it has to be you?”

I looked at him properly then. The weariness in his face, the shadows under his eyes that matched my own. The way he held himself, coiled tight, like he was expecting an attack that never came.

“What would you have me do?” I asked. “Go home? Sit in my mother's parlour and pretend none of this is happening? People are dying out there. Every day, every hour, people are dying because we're not fast enough, not clever enough?—”

“You think I don't know that?”

The words cut me of. His eyes met mine, and I saw something there that made my breath catch. Something raw and barely contained.

“I've watched men die because I was too slow,” he said, quiet and brutal. “I've held them while they bled out and promisedthem things I couldn't deliver. So don't lecture me about what's at stake. I know exactly what's at stake.”

The silence stretched between us. I looked down at my plate, at the bread I'd barely touched, and felt something shift in my chest.

“I'm sorry,” I said finally. “That was presumptuous.”

He didn't respond for a long moment. Then: “Finish your food. It's getting cold.”

I finished. He watched. And when I'd eaten enough to satisfy whatever standard he'd set, he walked me back to my billet in silence, our boots crunching in the frozen snow.

THREE

BLACK TEA & BLACKOUT

TOM

Voices layered over voices, laughter cutting through the clatter of cutlery on enamel, chairs scraping against floorboards that had been worn smooth by a thousand boots. Steam billowed from the tea urns at the far end, fogging the blacked-out windows until the room felt sealed off from the rest of the world. Bodies packed the long tables, uniforms mixing with civilian clothes, WAAFs with their hair pinned regulation-neat beside men in shirtsleeves who'd apparently forgotten it was December.

I catalogued it automatically. Three exits: main door, kitchen service entrance, emergency door near the wireless. Four windows, all covered. Largest concentration of people near the tea station, creating a bottleneck that would slow evacuation in an emergency. Structural weaknesses in the roof beams where water damage had warped the wood.

Old habits. The kind that kept you alive when everything else was trying to kill you.

I grabbed a tray and moved through the queue, accepting whatever the server ladled onto my plate without comment.Grey meat that might have been beef. Potatoes boiled to mush. Cabbage that smelled like something had died in it. A thick slice of bread, a scraping of margarine, and tea the colour of Thames mud.