Read Chapter 15: New Orders

The briefing room smelled of damp wool and cigarette smoke. Thomas stood at the back with the other new transfers from the disposal unit, watching Lieutenant Commander Ashworth tap a pointer against a blackboard covered in diagrams he'd never seen before.

"Forty-eight hours ago, a parachute mine came down in Bermondsey," Ashworth said. "It didn't go off on impact. It didn't go off when we tried the standard clockwork extraction. Three men went in. One came out."

The room went very still.

Thomas felt the weight of his brother's name press against his chest like a stone. Arthur would have said something wry, something to break the tension. Thomas said nothing.

Ashworth pulled a photograph from the board. A bomb casing, split open like a rotten fruit, showing a tangle of wires and a dull brass cylinder at its heart.

"This is a Type Z fuse. German engineers mounted it on a secondary spring delay. It looks like the standard forty-three model, but the arming sequence resets if you so much as breathe on it wrong." He let the pointer drop. "Intelligence thinks they've started fitting these across the dockland shipments. Which means, gentlemen, our job just got considerably more interesting."

The men around Thomas shifted. Some wrote notes. One lit a cigarette with shaking hands.

"If you see this fuse, you don't try the textbook extraction. You notify command, you clear the area, and you wait for a cadre officer to talk you through a new protocol." Ashworth's eyes swept the room and landed on Thomas. "Hollis. You'll be on the first rotation for the new Type Z. Report to the dockmaster's office at 0600 tomorrow for your brief."

Thomas nodded once. The word *rotation* had never sounded less like routine.

---

Two miles west, Maggie sat in the tiny kitchen of her family's flat, listening to the wireless crackle through a news bulletin about shipping losses in the Atlantic. Her mother, Alice, moved between the stove and the sink with the practiced quiet of a woman who had learned to make herself invisible in her own home.

Maggie watched her. She hadn't spoken much since the confrontation with her father. The air between them had grown thick with things unsaid.

"Here," Alice said, sliding a cup of tea across the table. Then, after a pause, she reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small leather purse.

Maggie looked at it. "What is that?"

"Twenty-two pounds." Alice sat down across from her, folding her hands on the table. "I've been putting aside a little from the housekeeping for two years now. Your father doesn't know."

Maggie stared at her mother. The purse sat between them like a live coal.

"I don't understand."

Alice's jaw tightened. She looked at the window, where the blackout curtains hung heavy and still. "If you stay, you'll need something to start with. Rent. Food. A proper dress for whatever that young man's mother expects."

"Mother, I said I'd stay. I didn't say—"

"I know what you said." Alice didn't raise her voice. She never did. But there was a steel in it now that Maggie had heard only a handful of times in her life. "But saying it and living it are different things. If you stay, you'll be alone. You'll have no family money behind you. Your father won't speak your name for years, maybe ever. You need to know you can survive that."

Maggie's throat tightened. She reached for the purse but didn't open it. She just held it, feeling the weight of the coins and notes inside.

"Why are you giving me this now?"

"Because once you sign the solicitor's papers, or don't sign them, everything changes." Alice looked at her directly. There were new lines around her eyes that Maggie hadn't noticed before. "I wanted you to know that whatever you decide, you're not doing it without someone in your corner."

Maggie felt the heat behind her own eyes and blinked it back. "Father won't forgive you."

Alice let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Your father and I have been married twenty-six years. He knows I have my quiet ways. He just doesn't always want to acknowledge them."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The kettle ticked as it cooled on the stove.

"Mother, I don't know what's going to happen," Maggie said softly. "Thomas is taking on dangerous work. There are bombs in the docks they don't know how to defuse yet. And Father—"

"Your father is frightened." Alice cut her off gently. "He's spent his whole life building a name for himself, and the war took it away in a matter of months. He thinks if he can just get the family to Canada, if he can just get you there, he can build it again and pretend this never happened." She shook her head. "But you're not a building he can rebuild. You're not part of his business ledger. And I think some part of him knows that, and it terrifies him more than the bombs do."

Maggie held the purse tighter. Twenty-two pounds. It wasn't a fortune. But it was something. It was a bridge she hadn't known she had.

"Thank you," she said. The words felt small, inadequate.

Alice stood and smoothed her apron. "Don't thank me. Just make sure you use it to live the life you actually want." She paused at the doorway. "And maybe don't mention it to your father. Not yet." She said it with a flicker of dry humor, and Maggie found herself smiling despite everything.

After her mother left, Maggie sat alone in the kitchen for a long time. She thought about the cottage blueprint folded in her coat pocket. She thought about Thomas's hands, charcoal-stained, sketching a future that now seemed impossibly fragile.

She didn't tell him about the money.

It wasn't that she didn't trust him. It was that the purse felt like a secret promise to herself, a reservoir she could draw from if the tightrope she was walking finally snapped. To tell him would be to admit how real the possibility of snapping had become.

Instead, she tucked the purse into her coat pocket next to the blueprint and went to her volunteer shift.

---

Thomas didn't come to the tube station that evening. He sent a message through a runner—a crumpled note in his handwriting, terse, all business.

*New ordnance. Training rotation starts tomorrow. Will be out of touch a few days. Don't write to the usual address. I'll find you when I can.*

Maggie read it three times under the dim amber light of the shelter's first-aid station. She folded the note into a neat square and slid it into her breast pocket, next to her heart.

She spent the night helping an elderly couple find blankets and comforting a young mother whose baby wouldn't stop crying through the distant thunder of anti-aircraft fire.

When the all-clear finally sounded, she climbed up to the street level and stood looking east, toward the docks, where she knew Thomas was already somewhere in the dark.

The purse pressed against her hip.

The blueprint pressed against her chest.

The note pressed against her heart.

She had made her choice. She was staying. But staying in London while Thomas hunted new and unknown bombs in the docklands felt less like choosing a life together and more like choosing to watch a door close slowly, with no idea what was on the other side.

She walked home alone through the grey morning light, and she did not mention the money to anyone.