Read Chapter 2: Dirt and Grief

Félix’s leg looked worse in the yellow lantern light. Émile peeled back the field dressing and winced at the angry red bloom spreading from the gash, the skin around it hot to the touch. The field hospital had been overwhelmed since the last push, and Roussel had waved away Émile’s request with a dismissive hand—sappers were worth more than moans.

“Stop fussing. It’s a scratch,” Félix muttered, but his jaw was tight, and sweat had pasted his dark hair to his forehead.

“It’s not a scratch. It’s dirt in the wound.” Émile reached for his pack and pulled out a small tin of antiseptic powder, rationed and precious. His father had sent it from the mines, along with a note that read *for the rock’s bite*. Félix had laughed at that—said the only rock that bit him was the one trying to bury him alive.

Émile didn’t laugh. He sprinkled the powder into the wound, watching Félix’s face go white, then wrapped it in clean gauze. “Keep it dry. No digging for three days, maybe more.”

“And what am I supposed to do? Knit socks?”

“You can hold the lantern and look pretty.”

Félix snorted, but the laughter died quickly. They sat in silence in the corner of the billet, a half-collapsed farmhouse that smelled of damp straw, tobacco, and the unwashed bodies of the twelve men crammed into it. The other sappers were scattered around, some sleeping, some writing letters by candle stub. Rain drummed on the roof in a steady, mindless rhythm.

Émile’s hands were still caked in chalk dust. He hadn’t washed them since they came back up from the tunnel. He kept looking at his palms, at the white residue etched into the creases, and thinking about the carved walls—he’d thought at first that he was hallucinating, that the lack of air and the fear had conjured shapes where there were none. But no. The carvings were real. Spirals and lines, intricate and deliberate, too neat to be the work of his own pickaxe accidentally scraping against stone.

And the word, LUXE, carved deep and clean, the letters elegant, nothing like the scratched initials soldiers left behind.

“You’re quiet,” Félix said. He had pulled his injured leg up onto a crate and was staring at the ceiling where a patch of plaster had fallen away, exposing the laths beneath. “Ever since the tunnel. What did you see down there?”

Émile forced a shrug. “Same as always. Dirt and darkness.”

“You marked it, didn’t you?”

The question was casual, but Émile felt it land like a blow. He glanced at Félix’s face, but his friend was still looking at the ceiling. “Marked what?”

“The breach. You chalked a corner stone before you came back up. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

Émile’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t thought Félix would see—he’d done it while Félix was slumped against the tunnel wall, eyes squeezed shut with pain, as the stone fall had buried the shaft behind them. But Félix had always been observant. A good sapper couldn’t afford to be blind.

“I put a mark so we’d know where not to dig,” Émile said. “When we have to go back and seal it.”

“Roussel ordered you to seal it.”

“He ordered a lot of things.”

Félix finally looked at him. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, and there was something tired behind them that had nothing to do with his leg. “You’re not going to seal it, are you?”

Before Émile could answer, a messenger ducked into the billet, shaking water off his coat like a dog. He was young, maybe seventeen, with the hollow cheeks of someone who had never eaten enough in his life and would likely never get the chance to. “Marchand? Émile Marchand?”

Émile raised a hand. The messenger crossed the room and pressed a crumpled envelope into his palm. “Came up with the rations wagon. From your village.”

Then he was gone, back into the rain.

Émile turned the envelope over. The handwriting on the front was his sister’s—small, neat, proper. Céline had always written like a schoolteacher, even as a child. She had been twelve when he left for the army, and the handful of letters he’d received from her since had started with the same carved opening line: *I hope this letter finds you well.* This one did not say that. It said, simply, *Émile—*

He cracked the wax seal and unfolded the single page. The writing was smaller than usual, cramped, as if she had been saving space, or perhaps saving her hand.

*Mother is worse. The fever came back on Tuesday, and she can’t keep anything down. Doctor Leblanc says it’s the lungs, that the damp in the fields has rotted them through. She asks about you every day. She asks about Antoine.*

*Émile, I know you are doing your duty, but I need you to try to find out what happened to him. She can’t die not knowing.*

The rain filled the silence while he read. Then he read it again.

“Bad news?” Félix asked.

Émile folded the letter and shoved it into his breast pocket, pressing his hand flat against it as if to keep the words from bleeding through. “My mother’s sick.”

Félix’s face softened. He reached out and clapped a hand on Émile’s shoulder, and for a moment they were not soldiers but just two boys from the same valley, two sons of miners who had grown up on coal dust and the deep, patient sound of the earth. “I’m sorry, Émile. What do they say?”

“They say she asks about Antoine.”

It hung between them, that name. Antoine. The older brother who had disappeared at Verdun in the spring of ’16, along with forty thousand other men who were never found. The Army had sent a letter—*regretted to inform*—and that was all. No body. No grave. Just a name on a list.

Émile had spent months after that digging through the mud, not for tunnels, but for his brother. He had crawled through craters, pulled at shattered limbs that turned out to belong to strangers, shouted his brother’s name until his throat bled. Nothing.

And now his mother was dying, asking after a son who was already gone, and the only son she had left was sitting in a damp billet in Flanders, lying to his friend about a tunnel he had secretly marked instead of sealing.

“She’ll be all right,” Félix said, but his voice had no conviction.

Émile didn’t answer.

That was when the billet door swung open again, and a man Émile didn’t recognize stepped in. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a British uniform that seemed polished despite the mud caking it to the knees. He carried his helmet under his arm like an officer, but his insignia marked him as a mere corporal. His eyes swept the room quickly—assessing the men, the space, the exits—before settling on Émile.

“You the sappers who were working the listening post tonight?” He had a crisp, northern accent. Yorkshire, maybe, or Cumberland.

“Who’s asking?” Félix said.

The man stepped closer, extending a hand. “Corporal Bryce. Royal Engineers, tunneling companies. I’ve been assigned to your billet for the next few days. Coordination work.”

Émile took his hand automatically. Bryce’s grip was firm, his palm calloused in ways that were familiar—the hard ridges of a man who had spent his life gripping tools and rock. He looked at Émile’s hands briefly, then back at his face.

“You’re the one who broke through under the German lines.”

It wasn’t a question. Émile’s stomach tightened. “There was a collapse. We were forced back.”

“Right,” Bryce said, but there was a flicker in his eyes. He sat down on a crate near Émile and pulled out his pipe. “Collapse. That what your officer reported?”

Émile felt Félix’s gaze on him and didn’t meet it. “That’s what happened.”

Bryce finished his pipe, slow tamper, an unhurried ritual. He struck a match, and the flame briefly lit his face—older than Émile had first thought, with a scar across his jaw that had healed pale and puckered. He took a deep draw and let the smoke curl toward the roof beams. “Funny thing about collapses,” he said, almost idly. “They usually sound like a good bit of digging before they happen.”

Émile said nothing.

“And they don’t leave white chalk on your hands,” Bryce added, nodding at Émile’s fingers.

Émile looked down. The chalk was still there, ground into his skin, impossible to wash out completely. He closed his fist.

“It was ordinary soil,” he said. “Nothing more.”

Bryce studied him for a long moment, and Émile had the sense that the man could see through his lie as easily as through a cracked windowpane. But Bryce only nodded and returned to his pipe.

“Right. Ordinary soil,” he said, words thick with smoke. “We’ll leave it at that. For now.”

The rest of the evening passed in the low murmur of men settling down. Émile helped Félix shift his weight off the injured leg, then took the watch from two o’clock to four. He stood at the sandbagged window, peering out into the rain-soaked dark of no-man’s-land, listening to the distant thunder of artillery that never fell entirely silent.

But there was something else. At first, he thought it was his imagination, the echo of the day’s work still bouncing through his skull. He pressed his ear to the wet earth of the barricade and held his breath.

*Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.*

He frowned. Then, shaking his head, he turned away.

It was a rhythm. Not random shellfire. Not the drip of water or the squeak of rats. It was regular, deliberate, almost as if—and the thought made him stop cold in the middle of the billet, his hand reaching involuntarily for the chalk mark he had left in the tunnel, his heart beginning to pound—

As if someone were tapping back.