Read Chapter 16: The Long Night

The whistle came first—that long, descending shriek that made Maggie’s blood turn to ice before the ground even shook. She was halfway down the platform when the station lights flickered, and someone screamed.

“All clear!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “Everyone to the lower level! Move!”

The crowd surged past her, faces pale in the dim emergency glow. Above them, the world broke apart. Each concussion rattled through the tunnel like a giant’s fist hammering the earth, and the dust sifted down from the ceiling in fine, choking curtains. Maggie counted seconds between impacts the way Thomas had taught her—one, two, three—but the bombs were coming too fast, too close.

She pushed through the press of bodies, helping an old man with a cane find his footing, grabbing a crying child’s hand and pressing it into its mother’s.

“Stay down,” she ordered. “Don’t move until I say.”

Then she was climbing back toward the surface, because there were always the ones who didn’t make it below in time. The night outside burned. Searchlights carved frantic arcs across a sky that had turned the colour of rust, and somewhere to the east, a wall of fire rose and fell like a breathing thing.

“Hollis!” someone shouted. It was Wilkes, the senior warden, his helmet askew. “Bomb’s landed on Marlowe Street—residential. Half the block’s still inside.”

Maggie ran.

The houses on Marlowe Street were old, terraced rows that had stood for a century and now stood in pieces. The crater yawned where Number 14 had been, and attached to the wreckage of Number 12 hung a shape that made her stomach turn—a bomb, longer than a man, its fins still smoking, embedded in the collapsed roof like a monstrous egg.

Around it, the bomb disposal team was already scrambling. She saw the flash of their marked helmets, heard the shouted commands, and then—impossibly—saw him.

Thomas.

He was crouched at the base of the rubble, wiring kit in hand, shouting something to a sergeant who was backing away. His face was smeared with soot, and he moved with a calm efficiency that would have been admirable if it hadn’t terrified her.

“Get them out!” Thomas shouted, pointing toward the shattered window of Number 9. “Now!”

Maggie’s legs carried her forward without her permission. She reached the window and found an old woman huddled behind a wardrobe, clutching a photograph to her chest.

“Come on, love,” Maggie said, pulling her up. “We have to go.”

She half-carried the woman across the broken street, past sandbags and splintered timber, and set her down with the other survivors huddled in a church doorway. Three more. There were three more houses to clear, and Thomas was still working, still crouched over the bomb with his steady hands and his steady eyes.

“Clear!” she heard him call. “All clear! Give me space—two minutes and I’ll have the fuse out.”

She should have kept running. She should have taken the last family and gone. But she turned, and she saw him, and she knew with a cold certainty that she was not going to walk away from Marlowe Street without him.

The bomb made a sound. Not the detonation she’d braced for—a smaller sound, a click, like something releasing. Thomas’s hands stilled. He looked up, and for one brief, terrible moment, their eyes met across the rubble.

Then the world went white.

The blast threw Maggie backward like a rag doll. She hit the ground hard, the air driven from her lungs, and for a long moment there was nothing but ringing and dust and the taste of blood on her tongue. She pushed herself up on shaking arms. The crater was larger now. Where the house had stood, there was only fire and smoke and tumbled stone.

“Thomas,” she rasped.

She crawled. Stones cut her hands; heat seared her face. She called his name again, and again, her voice breaking, until someone caught her shoulders and held her back.

“There’s a man under there,” she screamed. “Let me go! There’s a man under there!”

The rescue team moved past her, picking at the rubble with their bare hands. Maggie watched them work, counting the seconds, the minutes, her heart a trapped thing beating against her ribs.

Then a voice cut through the chaos. “Found him! He’s alive—get a stretcher!”

She ran. And there he was, bloodied and unconscious, one leg bent at a wrong angle beneath him, his face pale beneath the grime. He was breathing. His chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven waves.

They shifted him onto the stretcher, and Maggie followed, her hand finding his, cold and limp in her grip. The ambulance doors closed behind them, and the sirens began to wail, and she held his hand all the way to the hospital, whispering the only prayer she knew.

*Stay. Please stay. I haven’t told you yet how much I want you to stay.*