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The empty seat next to her was, happily, still unoccupied when the motor came to life.

Zoe leaned back in her seat and adjusted her bag and the precious sack of vegetables at her feet.

Her last conscious thought was of her father’s regret that he could not drive her to the bus station.

His eight-year-old Volkswagen still sat behind the house, but of course there was no petrol to purchase even if there had been extra funds.

She was reflecting on that, her eyes heavy, when the bus lurched to a stop, pitching her forward so abruptly that her head hit the seat in front of her. Parcels flew out of overhead bins. People jostled and shouted.

The bus crept forward, pulling to the curb, and everything went quiet until the doors screeched open, the lights flickered on, and two Gestapo officers – she thought she recognized the Gestapo insignias – stepped up into the interior.

“ Ach tung!” the larger of the two shouted, his face a menacing red. “Stay in your seats and be silent.” He moved forward, followed closely by his smaller cohort, took a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket, and read.

“Johan Gruber… Gerda Gruber...Stand, bitte , at once.”

The ‘please’ was token only, Zoe realized, because the two clearly meant business. They advanced up the aisle, looming larger as they neared. Passengers cowered in their seats.

“Johan Gruber…. Gerda Gruber,” the German said again. “We know you are aboard zis vehicle. Stand up and identify yourselves or we begin to hurt others until you do.”

There was faint murmuring, a craning of necks. Zoe sat frozen in her seat.

With no warning, the larger Nazi reached for the passenger just across the aisle from her. He yanked the man up out of his seat, held him with his left hand as though he were a rag doll, and with his right hand punched him squarely in the face.

The man, barely conscious, from what Zoe could see, grunted, and sank into his seat. For an instant, the silence was palpable.

The German stepped backward to the seat just in front of her, held up what looked like a heavy baton, and thrust it downward with force. Bones cracked, the sound unmistakable, and a man howled in pain.

The German reached for his pistol, held it over his head. “Who is next?” he shouted, yanking a small child out of her seat. “Perhaps this pretty little fraulein ?”

The child’s mother shrieked, people stirred and mumbled, the man with the broken bones groaned louder.

“No!” Zoe found herself shouting. “Put her down. She is an innocent child. Choose someone your size, please, mein Herr, bitte !”

Releasing the child, the big man moved forward, stopped directly in front of Zoe, and shoved the pistol in front of her face.

Terrified, Zoe sat wide-eyed.

A long moment passed.

“Stop!” someone behind her shouted. “Stop! I am Johan Gruber. ”

The Nazi slowly holstered his pistol and strode toward the back of the bus. “Johan Gruber, you have been named an enemy of the Reich. This is your frau , Gerda Gruber?”

There was a shuffling of papers, the sound of handcuffs clicking into place, and muffled sounds as the Germans half-kicked, half-dragged the man and his kerchiefed wife down the aisle, down the steps, out into the pearly gray darkness.

The flashing lights of a German Kubelwagen lit frightened faces red and blue as the doors of the bus wheezed closed.

Outraged cries, tears, shouts. Zoe heard it all, her heart still racing, loudest to her ears the moans and groans of the injured passenger just in front of her. The driver was pleading for people to return to their seats, but before the bus pulled back onto the roadway, Zoe was out of hers.

She stopped briefly to assess the passenger across the aisle, a middle-aged man in a suit and tie with bright red bloodstains on his clean white shirt. Palpating his bloodied nose as gently as she could, she noted with surprise that it did not appear to be broken.

“Apply pressure,” she reached into her coat pocket and handed him a lace-trimmed handkerchief. “I will be back in a moment,” she told him, moving to the seat in front of her.

A glance at the keening man’s bloodied trousers told her the sound of bones breaking she had so clearly heard had been the fracture of his right knee cap when the German’s baton smashed into it. There was a jagged tear in the woolen pant leg and the knee appeared to be swelling.

“My name is Zoe Visser,” she told him in low tones. “I am a veterinarian, not a medical doctor, but I think perhaps I can help ease your suffering a bit until you can be seen by a doctor.”

All around her, there was chatter, shouting, the sounds of people sobbing.

“Help, please.”

“My daughter needs help!”

“I can’t find my medication!”

Zoe bent to her patient in the low light, gingerly palpated the knee .

“Aah!,” the man groaned.

“What is your name, sir?”

“Hans…ah, it hurts!”

“I know, Hans. Take a deep breath. I will try to fashion some kind of tourniquet.”

Glancing around her, she spied a towheaded child clutching something that looked like a wooden cribbage board.

“ Behagen ,” she bent to the boy’s level. “How would you like to be a hero today, and let me use your cribbage board to help that man whose knee was broken?”

The boy looked at her, blue eyes wide, and silently held out the board.

It was small for her purpose, but placing it beneath the man’s shattered knee cap, she pulled the wool scarf from around her neck and wound it tightly around the makeshift splint.

A small crowd had gathered behind her.

“Back in your seats, please,” the bus driver shouted. “For your safety, please, back in your seats!”

The mother – perhaps grandmother – of the little girl who had been threatened, pulled a pin out of the lapel of her coat. “Can you use this?”

Zoe accepted the pin. “Perfect, bedankt . Thank you. Ja .”

Pinning the scarf into place around the injured knee, she gently lowered the man’s leg onto the seat. “This will help to keep your knee immobile, Hans, until you can be seen by a doctor.”

She looked around her at the slowly dispersing crowd. “Does anyone have some aspirin?”

A packet of aspirin was thrust at her. She offered two tablets to Hans.

“ Bedank t ,” he grasped Zoe’s hand.

“No need,” she said. “I hope this will help you to feel a bit better. We will see that you have help when we get to Haarlem.”

She crossed the aisle to check the bloody nose.

“It’s better, I think,” the man drew the handkerchief away. “It’s only bleeding a bit. ”

Zoe nodded. “But there is swelling,” she said. “And I would not be surprised to see your eyes blackened by the time you wake up tomorrow morning.”

“ Verdoemde Nazis,” the man growled

Zoe sighed.

He moved the handkerchief back to his nose. “Thank you so much for your help.”

Zoe sank into her seat, closed her eyes, and although she fought against the image, she vividly re-lived the stark terror of that pistol shoved into her face….

MILA

It was more than just audacious, Mila told herself, her footsteps loud in her ears on the worn boards of the wharf.

It was perhaps reckless, as Pieter suggested, to ask so much of an inexperienced girl.

But she had fine-tuned the details and discussed them at length with both Daan and Pieter, who reluctantly agreed that, given the proper training and back-up, the benefits might well outweigh the risk.

At the very least, she told herself, keeping an eye out for the Blijde Tiding , Lotte would listen and then decline. Mila might do so herself, she thought, if she were a mother and such a plan was suggested for her only daughter.

On the other hand, Evi was clever and strong-willed, and eager to help the Resistance.

Spying the barge, Mila descended the stairs and knocked softly, careful not to sound urgent enough to inspire fear inside.

“Who is there, behagen ?”

“It is I, Mila Brouwer. Hallo!”

The door swung open. Lotte’s tense face relaxed into a smile. “Mila, what a happy surprise! Do come in! ”

The light was low, what little there was provided by a small kerosene lamp next to an armchair and another on the table where Evi was bent over her books.

“Thank you, Lotte. I hope all is well.”

Lotte pointed downward. “As well as can be – for all of us. And you?”

Mila nodded her understanding. Someone was hidden in the hold. “I’ve brought you something,” she said, reaching into her handbag.

Evi stood.

Mila set two jars of cherry jam on the table, along with a packet of dried beef, a jar of yeast, and a small bag of flour. It was as much as she felt she could offer without appearing to condescend – or worse yet, to be bribing the two to come onboard with her plan.

“We are lucky to have supplies in our cellar that were stored years ago,” she lied, unwilling to disclose that her father’s German dinner guests provided more than they needed. “And our cook has been managing to stay below our rations.”

“Are you sure –-?” Lotte began, as Evi surveyed the treasure

“ Behagen , there is nothing more to be said,” Mila shrugged. “These days, we must share what we can.”

“Ah, dank u , Mila, thank you.” Lotte gestured to a chair. “Sit, won’t you? Will you have some tea? I found fresh peppermint tea leaves at a market stall in Middleburg.”

“Wonderful, thank you!” Mila sat and removed her gloves. “It is cold, and not yet December.”

“We have battery power on the barge, and kerosene – but we are careful to ration their use,” Evi told her, pulling her chair next to Mila’s. “We are already collecting as many candles as we can find.”

Mila nodded. Power, or the rationing of it, was one of the topics she broached now and then to her father’s Nazi dinner guests.

To date, she had elicited no useful information.

But she guessed the power they did have would be cut off even further when – if – the Allies neared and the Reich looked to tighten its control .