Read Chapter 34: The War's Edge

The church bells start it. Not ordered, not official—just some old priest in a village somewhere behind the lines pulling rope with shaking hands, and then the sound spreads like fire through dry grass. Bells from ruined steeples. Bells from towns I thought the war had swallowed whole.

In the aid post at Vieil-Moulin, the wounded hear it first. A boy with one arm missing—a boy who hasn't smiled in three weeks—grabs my wrist with his remaining hand and says, "Madame. Madame, listen."

I listen.

The guns have stopped.

Not a lull. Not the breathing space before the next push. *Stopped.* The silence is so absolute it hurts, a pressure in the ears like diving deep. I've been at the front for four years. I have forgotten what the world sounds like without artillery.

"November eleventh," Leclair says from the doorway. He looks older than when I met him, older than the war itself. "Eleven o'clock. The armistice is signed."

I drop the bandage roll. It bounces across the floor, unwinding white, and no one moves to pick it up.

The aid post empties. Men who couldn't walk an hour ago drag themselves outside, staring at the sky like they've never seen it. Some weep. Some just sit down in the mud and put their heads in their hands. A French soldier with a voice like gravel starts singing the *Marseillaise*, and other voices join him, ragged and raw.

I'm already running.

Camille's voice behind me—"Élise! Élise, where are you going?"—but I can't stop. The locket bounces against my chest beneath my uniform. James's letter is folded in my pocket, worn soft from rereading. I've read it so many times the pencil has begun to fade.

*Finish the war, Élise. Survive it. Meet me on the other side.*

The road to the village is clogged with soldiers. French, British, American—men pouring out of trenches and dugouts like the earth itself is giving birth. They're laughing. They're crying. They're throwing helmets in the air and catching them, embracing strangers, waving flags I haven't seen in years.

And I'm pushing through them, against the current, searching.

The crowd is a living thing, a tide that doesn't care about one small woman with mud-caked boots. I'm swept sideways, around a group of Australians singing something bawdy, past a cluster of Canadian officers passing a bottle. Every face I check. Every khaki uniform I scan.

He's not here. He's on the other side of the front, at Saint-Quentin. I knew that. But the bells said *over*, and my heart refused to listen to anything else.

"Élise!"

Leclair has followed me, pushing through the crowd with his captain's shoulders clearing a path. He reaches me, breathing hard, and grips my arm.

"You can't cross the lines yet. No one knows where the boundaries are."

"James is out there." My voice sounds strange. Too high. "He was coming north."

"If he was coming north, he'll be coming to *you*." Leclair's grip tightens. "Not to the town. To the place you'd be. That's what I'd do."

Vieil-Moulin. He's right. If James was fighting his way toward me, and the armistice caught him mid-march, he'd make for the last place he knew I'd be.

I wrench free and start back toward the aid post.

The crowd has thickened, a tide flowing the other way now. Soldiers pressing forward to see the village, to find wine and food and answers. I duck and weave, taking the long way through a field, scrambling over a collapsed wall. Mud sucks at my boots. The locket swings against my collarbone like a second heartbeat.

I round the corner of the ruined barn that marks the edge of our position, and I stop.

He's there.

Lieutenant Colonel James Whitmore, mud-covered, blood on his sleeve, exhaustion carved into every line of his face—but standing. Alive. Ten meters away, scanning the crowd outside the aid post with the desperate focus of a man looking for one face in a sea of thousands.

I see the moment he finds me. His whole body changes, tension bleeding out of his shoulders. He holds his ground for half a second longer, like he's afraid that if he moves, I'll disappear.

Then we're running.

The distance closes. Five steps. Three. He reaches for me, I reach for him—

A truck lurches out of the chaos. Driver half-drunk on celebration, wheels spinning in the mud, swerving to miss a group of soldiers crossing the road. It catches James at the hip, flings him sideways like a rag doll into the wall of the barn.

He doesn't cry out. That's the terrifying part. He hits the stones with a sound I feel in my own bones and crumples, silent, still.

"No—*no*—"

I'm at his side in three strides, dropping to my knees in the mud. Blood on his temple. His eyes closed, mouth slack. His chest rises and falls—thank God, thank God, he's breathing—but he doesn't open his eyes.

"James. James, look at me. *Please.*"

The truck has stopped. The driver is shouting something, but the sound is far away, underwater. The celebration noise recedes to a dull roar behind the roaring in my ears.

He doesn't respond.

His blood is on my hands. The war is over, and the last bullet never fired has found him anyway, in the no-man's-land between peace and what comes after.

I press my palm to his cheek, feeling the faint warmth of him, the faint pulse at his jaw.

The bells are still ringing. The soldiers are still singing.

And James lies at the edge of the war's end, caught in a peace he didn't live to walk into—but still breathing, still fighting, even unconscious.

I look up. Leclair has appeared, with two men and a stretcher forming out of the chaos. His eyes meet mine, and he reads the answer to a question he doesn't need to ask.

"Get him inside," I say, and my voice doesn't shake. "Get him inside now."

The war ended today.

But James's fight, it seems, is just beginning.