Under the Same Stars
Libba Bray
To those who remain hopeful. And for my parents, two stars who lit the way.
We can be heroes just for one day.
—DAVID BOWIE
DODAUER FOREST. NORTHERN GERMANY.
DECEMBER 22, 1941
They had to hurry; there wasn’t much time.
The heels of Sophie’s dress shoes sank into the soft, cold earth with each step, slowing her pace. She shouldn’t have worn them, but they were her best and she couldn’t bear to leave them behind.
“Do you suppose he’s all right?” Sophie said, puncturing the stillness.
Hanna pulled her too-small coat tighter across her belly. “He’ll meet us at the tree.”
“What if…?”
“We have to keep going.”
Above the moonlit silhouettes of pines, a packet of stars bit holes into the skin of night. The forest was quiet except for the muted crunch of Sophie’s and Hanna’s shoes in fresh snow. The roads had been mostly clear. Only one Kübelwagen had made its inspection, searchlight scraping the fields left and right. Sophie and Hanna had dropped to their backs, lying as flat and still as possible behind a tall cropping of defiant weeds until the patrol rumbled away. By the time anyone in town realized what had happened, Sophie and Hanna would be long gone. They just had to make it to the tree first.
Hanna stopped and rubbed her side. Sophie patted her back.
“Just an ache,” Hanna said.
“Are we close?”
“I think so.”
It was hard to tell in the dark, and for a moment, the girls feared that the forest they knew so well had betrayed them. But soon enough, they found their way into the small clearing and there it was, the Bridegroom’s Oak.
The girls breathed in pine, spruce, and fir, holding the smell inside their lungs like a memory.
“We’ll see it again,” Sophie promised. She let out a small cry of joy and lifted a bedraggled branch from the forest floor. “Look! Our seidr wand.”
“It can’t be the same one. It’s just a branch.”
“Maybe we can cast one last spell?”
“We are not children anymore, Sophie.”
“No,” Sophie said quietly. “No one is a child anymore.”
An owl hooted twice and flapped its wings somewhere above them. Another sound followed, soft but even, like footsteps on dried leaves. Hanna put a finger to her lips. Sophie swallowed. They peered intently into the dark behind them. Moonlight illuminated the soft black eyes of a deer. It froze for a second, staring back at the girls, before scampering off deep into the cover of forest.
“I almost fainted!” Sophie said, letting out her breath.
“I almost did worse,” Hanna said with a small smile.
She moved toward the ladder at the oak’s side.
Sophie stopped her. “I’ll go.”
Hanna shook her head. “I’ll still be faster. You insisted on wearing those shoes.”
Sophie could dispute neither of these things. “Funny to think that this old oak really did bring true love.” The night was so clear it felt as if she could reach up and pluck a star from the sky.
At the ladder’s top, Hanna plunged her hand inside the tree’s slim knothole, feeling along its familiar crags and crevices. Sophie held her breath, silently counting the seconds. An owl hooted and lifted away with a sudden fluttering of feathers. Sophie glanced over her shoulder at the imposing dark.
“Please,” she whispered to the forest. “Please.”
“Sophie!”
The pale moonlight had made Hanna’s face a ghost of itself. In her hand was the envelope. Hanna scrambled down the ladder and tore open the seal. It was all there.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Sophie whispered into the silence.
“Come. There’s no time to waste.”
Somewhere behind them came the crack of a branch.
“The deer?” Sophie whispered.
Hanna shook her head. “Too heavy.”
Another crack. The longest night of the year was descending hard and fast. Hanna grabbed Sophie’s wrist and pulled her close. Something was coming.
The forest had betrayed them after all.
WEST BERLIN.
SUMMER 1980
“Jenny, hurry up, dear. The car is waiting.”
Jenny Campbell dutifully rolled her suitcase after her mother and younger sister, Alison, through Berlin’s Tegel Airport late on a Thursday afternoon in June. It was a new suitcase bought for this new life in West Berlin, where her father had taken a promotion. Over a dinner in May, her parents had explained that this was “an exciting opportunity for the family” full of “cultural experiences” that would “broaden everyone’s horizons.” While her friends back home in Dallas went to football games and junior prom, Jenny would be stuck at the American school in West Berlin trying to make friends of strangers. This summer was officially going to be the worst of her life, fer sure.
A gray-haired driver in a crisp suit met them just outside baggage claim. “Guten Tag, Frau Campbell. Welcome to Berlin,” he said with a bow, taking her mother’s suitcase in hand. Jenny’s camera, a Canon A-1, banged against her chest as she tried to keep up. The driver tucked their luggage into the trunk of a shining Mercedes, then angled the car into the neon thrum of West Berlin. Jenny stared sullenly out the back passenger window as the city paraded past. Yellow double-decker buses floated in clouds of exhaust. People crowded outdoor cafés to drink frothy beer. Sleek shopping centers rose beside centuries-old buildings. In Dallas, the buildings were new and made of mirrored glass that reflected endless highways. Here, history was everywhere you looked.