“Thank you. But I think we are safe here for now. I moved her into the tunnel last night; my contact should be coming this evening to take her to another village.”
“And you?” Yona asked.
“I will stay here. There is more work to be done.”
“But if the Germans find out about you…”
“Then I will see my husband again sooner than I’d planned. I accept my fate. But you must go now. Surely you are no longer safe in the village if you were seen with the nuns.”
Yona looked away. Maja didn’t know the half of it. “I must go back to the Nalibocka Forest. There is a retaliation planned against some of the groups there. I need to warn them.” She looked back to see Maja and Anka staring at her with wide eyes.
“It will be dangerous,” Maja said. “I could send you along with Anka instead, help you to disappear.”
Yona shook her head. “This is something I need to do.”
“I understand.” Maja nodded toward the far end of the tunnel. “Walk that way until the tunnel ends. There is a door above that opens into the woods.”
Yona stared at her. “A door that opens into the woods?”
“It is how we move the children in and out without being seen. My husband, he built it during the last war. One day the Germans will find it, and I will be done for. But I don’t think it will be today. Now go, carefully. Once you emerge into the woods, head north for an hour, and then to the east. You will eventually find yourself back in the Nalibocka.”
“And Anka?”
“She will be taken the other way. She will be safe.”
Yona bent to the little girl, who had been watching the exchange with wide eyes. “How are you feeling, Anka?” she asked.
“Better.” Indeed, her cheeks were brighter, her voice stronger. “Where is Sister Maria Andrzeja?”
“She is not here,” Yona said gently. “But she is here.” She tapped the little girl’s chest on the left side, just over her heart.
Anka accepted this in silence. “Like my mother and father,” she said after a moment.
Yona could only nod.
“Then I will be safe.” Still, the little girl looked uncertain.
Yona took Anka’s hands and held them tight. “With so many people watching over you, how could you not be?”
The girl smiled a small smile, and then Maja tapped Yona on the shoulder and nodded toward the end of the tunnel. “Go,” she said. “Godspeed.”
“And to you,” Yona said. She didn’t look back as she hurried down the length of the tunnel, climbed up the ladder that hung there, and emerged into a dense cluster of trees. Then she ran for the Nalibocka, her feet already carrying her toward the only home she’d ever truly known.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The forest absorbed Yona quickly, ingesting her into its darkness. But as she moved deeper into the trees, moving east as quickly as her legs could take her, she didn’t feel comforted by the familiarity. She felt sick. The nuns were dead. She hadn’t been able to stop it. And she hadn’t done a thing to avenge their deaths. But vengeance would only taste sweet for a second, and then it would be a permanent stain on her soul. No, she was doing the most important thing she could: fleeing to warn Aleksander, Zus, and the others. But could she find them in time? It felt already as if precious minutes were slipping away like sand in an hourglass.
Yona stopped often, breathing into the stillness, waiting for approaching footsteps that never came. She had to be certain she wasn’t being tracked, that she wasn’t leading the Germans straight to their quarry. She walked on leaves and grass and strode through streams so her footsteps would vanish. And though grief weighed her down—she couldn’t take a step without seeing Sister Maria Andrzeja’s empty eyes—she also felt lighter, untethered at last from a past that had always been an invisible weight. She was not Jerusza’s—she never had been, and she knew that now. But neither was she her German father’s. She belonged only to herself, a dove of the dark forest, the forest that called to her now.
She walked for three days, pausing for only a few hours here and there to sleep in the hollows of fallen trees when the sun crested the sky. She ate berries and leaves, caught fish in the streams, picked green-capped russula mushrooms, and slowly felt like herself again as she put distance between herself and the carnage. By the second day, she found herself talking to Sister Maria Andrzeja, apologizing at first and then pleading for guidance, for some sign of a way forward. But the nun never replied. Jerusza had remained after she died, whispering from time to time in the wind, but the nun’s soul was already far away. By the third day, Yona began to talk directly to God, asking why he would let such terrible things happen to his earth. Couldn’t he hear them?