The bomb had crashed through three floors before coming to rest beneath the foundation, where it lay quiet and malignant as cancer. From his vantage point wedged beside the iron eggshell of unexploded ordnance, Reg glimpsed a patch of sky far overhead. An azure circle shone through the clean round hole punched neat-as-you-please by the bomb’s passage through the hospital.

He lay on a tarpaulin over a pile of broken timbers, legs wrapped around the nose of the bomb. It had come to rest at an angle, leaving just enough room for Reg and his kit. A stabilization fin dug into his shoulder. The bomb case still retained a bit of warmth left over from atmospheric friction, but not enough to thaw the sheen of hoarfrost over the pit in Reg’s stomach.

Was this the one? Would he snuff it on his last job? Would this crater become his grave?

It would be a closed-casket service, of course.

He caressed the bomb with trembling fingertips, tracing the curve of the shell like the small of a woman’s back. But instead of the buttons and latch-hooks on Sybil’s dress, he fumbled for the sharp corners of steel bolts, harder and smaller than a schoolgirl’s nipples, that would give him access to the bomb’s deepest intimacies. He counted eight bolts arranged like the crosses on the Union Jack. Felt a rough weld along one seam.

Reg whispered into a glass funnel affixed to a length of garden hose. “Looks like a Dietrich,” he said.

The hose snaked from the crater, through the wreckage, past red and white barricades (DANGER: UNEXPLODED BOMB) to the other sappers waiting anxiously outside the blast radius thirty yards away. Every model had a nickname; this was a Dietrich, after Marlene, because the bomb, just like the bint, could seduce you, make you think she was easy.

Ease could be a trap. God knew Sybil had been easy enough.

“That’s good news, Reg,” said Captain Hollister. Holly led the 246 Field Company, Royal Engineers, Third Division.

“Right,” Reg said. “Got my number three spanner, taking it to the aft-most bolt.” Somewhere up top one of his mates recorded this, documenting each step in the procedure. A formality in the case of a Dietrich, but still absolutely necessary.

Sappers learned the ins and outs of each model by trial and error. Hence the shortened life expectancy. Sometimes a bomb didn’t go off because it was a rum fish—a dud. But sometimes a bomb didn’t go off because it was booby-trapped: based on a familiar model, but designed to blow when some poor bastard tried to disarm it. This was a good method for killing sappers. Also, sprinkling unexploded bombs around the city disrupted civilian life long after the all-clear sounded. The UXB was a tool for spreading terror. Bloody Jerries.

Quivering hands caused Reg’s spanner to jitter around the bolt, rapping and tapping against the bomb like bursts of Morse, telegraphing his fear to the outside world. He took a slow deep breath to settle his nerves. And realized the smell was off. Mud, yes. Shattered brick and plaster dust, yes. The sharp odor of sweat trickling from his armpits, yes. But there was something else.

Reg took another whiff. It left his head spinning and his vision blurred. But there, beneath the stink of his own terror: the cloying scent of diethyl ether.

In an instant, he realized what had happened. The Dietrich had smashed through a surgical theater on its way down, shattering the cabinet where the nurses stored vials of anesthetic. Invisible ether fumes, heavier than air, were cascading into the crater. He lay in a cloud of it.

He had to work quickly, before the fumes overwhelmed him. Reg pressed the funnel to his mouth and sucked down a lungful of relatively clean air from up above. It tasted of tobacco; Holly always smoked when he had a man down-hole. The hose stuck to Reg’s fingers. Ether had a nasty tendency to break down rubber and plastic. Those same corrosive tendrils would soon work their way inside the bomb casing and play merry hob with the wiring.

He relayed the problem up top. In moments he heard the crackle of glass beneath work boots as a few mates quickly located and cleared away the chemicals. Nothing they could do about the fumes in the crater, though.

Bolts one, two, three, and four came out easy. Five and six were a bit stubborn. Seven fought back. And number eight wouldn’t budge.

And wasn’t that just like a bint. Sometimes a girl started out easy at first, but refused to let go. Why couldn’t Sybil take a hint and shove off? If he kept having it off with girls on the side, that only served her right.

She said they needed to have a talk, but he knew what that was about. He wouldn’t let himself get cornered. His mum had done that to his dad, and look how that turned out.

Reg sucked on the hose again, held his breath, gave the bolt another tug. Nothing. A dent in the access plate had pulled the bolt out of true.

He fought off a dizzy spell, and struggled to clear his mind. Reg pressed his forehead against the bomb. He imagined his awareness expanding through the casing, and tried to picture the state of affairs. The Dietrich’s dark innards took shape in his mind’s eye, like the pieces of an elaborate puzzle. If he loosened the last bolt, the release of tension in the dented plate would tip it inward about half an inch. Just far enough to brush the altimeter cable. The ether fumes had been working on that same cable for several minutes now; the insulation would be wearing thin. Reg looked deeper.... No, the battery hadn’t been dislodged by the hard landing.... The cable was live. Contact with the plate would cause a short. And that would trigger the detonators.

Severing that cable would render the bomb inert. Only problem, the Dietrich was a mess of wires. Hit the wrong one and . . . closed casket. Reg fished out his pocketknife. The exertion left him light-headed. The patch of blue sky above swirled and sparkled like a kaleidoscope.

“Plate’s stuck,” he wheezed, tasting rubber and cigarettes. His lips tingled. “Gotta cut. The altimeter.”

Urgent murmuring on the other end. Then Peter’s voice echoed down the hose: “Reg! Stop! You’re not thinking clearly. That’s not how you do a Dietrich!”

Reg pushed his knife blade into the gap. Gently. Met resistance. Pictured it: no, not there. Slid it backward. Deeper now. Nice and easy, just like Sybil’s first time. There, something caught. That had to be it. In his mind’s eye, the blade rested square on the offending cable.

He thought a quick prayer. Lord, I’ll never cheat on Sybil again. But he knew he couldn’t keep that promise. I’ll give Sybil what she wants. I’ll buy her a ring. I’ll take care of her. Don’t let me die here.

His hand had gone numb. Reg had to reach around and hold the knife with two hands. They were both numb.

He counted. One. Two—

The severed cable twanged apart.

Like a dented access plate, the tension came out of Reg in one go. A moist chill dampened his shirt throughand-through. He took up the hose again, fumbled it with sweat-slick fingers. The tingle spread from his lips to his face, neck, chest, arms. The crater started to spin. He could barely hold the hose.

“‘Sclear,” he mumbled.

The last thing he did before passing out was try to check his boilersuit for a damp stain. No self-respecting shop girl would bed a fellow who pissed himself. But the anesthetic overwhelmed him before he could find out.

He awoke in a part of Guy’s that hadn’t taken a Luftwaffe calling card through the ceiling. Pain had brought him round; his shoulders felt as though they’d been pulled within a wire’s width of dislocation. A cool draft tickled him, and he realized his shirt was torn under the arms. Felt like he had some rope burn there, too. The other men of the 246 must have hauled him out on a harness.

“Terrific work, Reg.” Holly’s voice.

Reg tried to sit up. Wobbled. Heaved. His breakfast—reconstituted egg and the last pieces of his week’s bacon ration—became a puddle between his feet.

“That’s the ether wearing off,” said Holly. “Quacks should be around in a few.”

The room teetered to a halt, more or less. Reg chanced a gentle shake of his head. “They get it? The Dietrich?”

As if to demonstrate the foolishness of his question, a hoist creaked and a chain rattled somewhere down the corridor. Peter yelled, “Ho! Easy, lads!”

Reg hopped to his feet. Holly caught him when he stumbled. They went outside to where the other engineers of 246 Company had just finished transferring the Dietrich from a gurney to a flatbed lorry. They’d done the final bolt and pulled out the access panel. A mess of wires and cables spilled out like a drawn man’s entrails. The thickest one, deep in the rats’ nest, was cut clean in two. It was exactly what Reg had pictured.

Doyle stood to the side, staring at the defanged bomb. He’d been transferred from another field company where he’d spent the first part of the war on a comfortable stint building citadels and bunkers for Whitehall and the Admiralty. Poor sod. He was too new to be useful, so the others had brushed him aside while they loaded the bomb. He was also too new to hide the way he kept well away from the Dietrich, and to hide the expression on his face when he saw its tangled innards.

He walked over to Reg, lifted his helmet, ran a hand through the black bristles on his scalp. His breath steamed in the cold sunlight.

Doyle swallowed. He tried to sound nonchalant, but his voice broke when he asked, “How’d you know it was a ringer?”

“I got lucky.” A lie, but Reg was feeling smug. What a way to go out. His final job was already the stuff of sapper lore. Not bad for a kid who left home at fourteen.

“Reg has the Sight,” said Peter. He lashed a tarpaulin, the same one Reg had lain upon, over the bomb. He jumped down and pounded his fist on a side panel. The lorry lurched into gear, leaving them coughing in a cloud of diesel exhaust. It pulled past the other sappers already at work dismantling the barricades. The crowd of onlookers gave a small cheer before beginning to disperse.

“The Sight?” Doyle asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s why you should stick close to Reg,” said Peter. “Do that and you’ll be right as rain.”

Reg said to him, “Why don’t you shut it?”

Peter wasn’t far off. Reg didn’t think of it in such mystical terms, but the fact of the matter was he did have a knack for seeing how things worked. If he could see something, or lay his hands on something, sooner or later he’d get a picture of how it went together. How it worked.

Until the war, Reg had only used it to talk women horizontal. After all, that was just another puzzle wanting a solution. You just had to see how all the pieces fit together: your words and her desires, her body language and your interests. The proper sequence of events led to an inevitable result, like chemical reactions within a fuse.

Sometimes he was too good at it. But maybe Sybil would give up if she caught him in the act with another girl. Marry her? He’d rather die.

The first time he’d gone down hole, during a cold September rain to grapple with a Lynn that had cratered West Ferry Road near the docks, Reg realized the same knack he had for knowing how to undress a bird could also save his life. Thing of it was, he never knew until it was all said and done. The Sight had a limited scope. A few feet, a few minutes.

But Peter needed to keep his mouth shut. However the Sight worked, it was Reg’s gift. His alone.

The captain didn’t miss a trick. He heard the edge in Reg’s voice. “I’d buy you a pint,” he said, clapping Reg on the shoulder. “But the quacks said you should go easy.”

“I can handle a pint if it’s free,” said Reg.

He was finished risking his life. He’d put in his time, and now he was done with the dangerous work. Time to move up the ladder a bit. He reckoned that’s why Captain Hollister wanted to have a chat.

“You lot,” Holly called, “finish that Dietrich. Meet us at the Bull when it’s locked down.”

Reg rode with the captain. Holly used his own car on the job because many sapper units still didn’t have their own vehicles. At least now they had a lorry; most sappers had to catch rides with civilians. Reg didn’t mind. Month back or so, on his way to a job, he’d met a nice bird whose husband worked on a merchant ship in the North Atlantic. Poor sod was gone for weeks at a time.

246 Company worked out of Bermondsey, which, thanks to the docks and warehouses, had suffered worse than many neighborhoods under the Luftwaffe’s affections. The city had become a patchwork of order and chaos. Some streets looked perfectly normal, as though there wasn’t a war on. Other places were nothing but piles of rubble. Spots where the shattered brick and timbers had been cleared away left gaps in the city as conspicuous as a broken incisor on a pageant queen’s smile. Here and there, a lone chimney or part of a wall towered over the wreckage, etched with curlicues of dust and soot.

“Doyle’s looking a bit green,” said Holly.

“Can’t say I noticed,” Reg lied.

“He isn’t ready.”

“Either he’ll get ready, or the Jerries will take him off your hands quick enough.”

Holly parked in front of a chemist’s shop, just up the street from 246 Company HQ. He said, “And how many others along with him?”

“That’s why we evacuate.”

Holly pounded his fist on the fascia. “Enough, Reg. I’m not sending him in yet. That means we’re short and I’m begging you to stay on.”

“Like hell I will. Sapper teams are always down a man or two.”

Holly stepped from the car. Reg followed. Long streamers of spongy cloth had been strewn across the road. Reg recognized the tattered shreds of a barrage balloon.

Nobody Reg knew could remember seeing or hearing of the Sword and Bull prior to a few months ago. Yet the pub was clearly old, as evidenced by the weathered oak sign swinging above the door. The carving depicted a bull cracking the earth beneath its hooves, a sword thrust between its shoulders. The paint had long ago flaked away except where it covered the horns and hooves of the rampant bull. They glittered like gold in the late autumn sunlight.

The two men studied the pub with the same quiet deliberation they gave a fresh bomb crater. Somebody had chalked a note on the front door: Plenty of beer, bottle and draught.

Holly nodded at the pub. “Let’s give it a try.”

“I still want that pint,” said Reg.

When Holly opened the door, Reg might have sworn he caught a whiff of something humid, like a river. But they were a solid mile from the Thames, and it never smelled that clean. He shook his head, tried to clear the last remnants of ether playing with his senses. The pub itself was dark compared to the unusually bright winter day outside. It took a moment for Reg’s eyes to adjust.

He took an immediate dislike to the place: it had no snug. Reg preferred a bit of privacy once he got serious about chatting up a bird. And the hearth had no fire, only cold ashes. As public houses went, it wasn’t impressive.

The barkeep was a bloody giant. Easily twenty stone if he weighed a pound, yet tall enough to wear it well. He wore his long, coal-black beard in braids, and his skin was dusky bronze. His eyes, lighter than the surrounding shadows, glimmered in the half light like twinned opals.

Holly said, “Two pints of your best bitters!”

The mountain behind the bar said, “The best is also my only bitters.”

His voice rumbled like a dormant volcano tossing in its sleep. And it carried an odd lilt, like the faint suggestion of foreign lands. Reg couldn’t place it.

“That’ll do.”

When the barkeep turned his back to fetch a pair of glasses, Holly gestured at his bare chin. “Reckon he’s a Celt?” he asked, sotto voce.

Reg shrugged. “I reckon he’s a tough bastard.”

The captain introduced himself and Reg.

“Gil,” said the barkeep. He put two pint glasses on the bar. As he filled the second, he said, “Little early in the day for men in uniform.”

“Oh, we’ve already been hard at work,” said Reg. By now the life-and-death rush of adrenaline had evaporated, leaving him hollow and windblown. He’d come damn close to snuffing it, and the realization had transmuted his terror to giddiness. He downed a hefty portion of his pint.

Gil took a towel from the brass rail behind the bar, flipped it over his shoulder, and set to work rinsing glasses under a water tap. “What work is that?”

Reg wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Me? I work miracles, mate.”

“I’ve seen miracles.”

Holly clasped Reg by the shoulder. To Gil, he said, “Reg here is a bloody magician, he is.”

“I’ve seen that, too,” said Gil. He almost sounded serious. A very strange fellow.

“Best goddamned sapper there ever was,” said Holly.

Gil cocked an eyebrow. “Sapper?” He said it without letting his attention stray from the glass in his hands, as though merely making conversation in the centuries-old tradition of barkeeps everywhere.

Holly said, “Yeah, sappers. Royal Engineers, mate.” Gil let the silence speak for him. Didn’t even shake his head. “Unexploded ordnance?” More silence. “The Blitz?”

“Ah. That.” Gil gave the glass one final pass with the towel before stowing it under the bar. He pulled out another, inspected it in the half light. “Seen wars, too.”

Giddiness and ale together became a witch’s potion that left Reg feeling indignant. Sapper crews would be talking for years to come about what he’d accomplished today. He wouldn’t tolerate some outsider shrugging it off.

“Hey!” He leaned across the bar to grab Gil by the arm. “We’re fighting a war! Pikers like you need to pay attention to what’s happening out there.”

Gil looked at the hand on his forearm, and then slowly looked up to stare at Reg. Again, he didn’t say anything. But his eyes, those gray-green opals, bored into him. It didn’t take the Sight to see there was no winning a fight with Gil. Reg yanked his hand away.

“I meant it about you being the best,” said Holly. “Which is why I’m begging you to stay on. Just a bit longer before I put you in for promotion. Please.”

“I’ve already stayed on for you. I’ve done my bit, and now you owe me.”

“Does Britain owe you, too? The king?”

Reg could tell from the way Gil assiduously avoided them that he was taking in every word. He might have looked bored by it all, but the tosser was listening. Reg hated arguing in front of the barman. But argue they did, through their first pints, and their second.

Holly wouldn’t ease up. He kept dogging Reg until finally Reg said, “Sod off! I’ve done my bit, and that’s final. Promotion or none, I’m not going down hole again.”

He left Holly at the bar, and took up a game of darts. Thock. Who the hell did Holly think he was, anyway? Who did he think Reg was? Thock. Selfish git, treating Reg like that. Clack. The next dart missed its mark, bounced off the wall, and skittered across the floorboards.

The afternoon wore on. More folks wandered into the pub on their way home from work. The after-work crowd kept Gil busy; he ran the place by himself. The men from 246 Company arrived about an hour before sundown, their catch from the hospital safely disassembled. Doyle tried again to ask Reg how he’d known what to do, but Reg was too busy describing his exploits to a pair of tittering shop girls.

Holly kept to the bar, looking hurt. Peter joined him. They seemed to get on well enough with Gil. Reg caught bits and pieces of their conversation, and at one point thought he heard Peter carrying on about the Sight again, but by that point Reg had the shop girls in his thrall and thus was more concerned with choosing between them for a cozy overnight than with Peter’s rumormongering.

At sundown, Peter helped Gil pull curtains over the windows. The barkeep might not have paid the war much heed, but at least he obeyed the blackout regulations.

The evening crowd brought the pub to life. Doyle and Holly played darts. Their hoots and calls melded with the din of laughter and conversation, and the occasional rattle of the flue as a gust of wind eddied down the chimney. Knowing their services would likely be needed in the morning, the sappers cleared out early. They waved goodbye to Reg. All but Holly.

Reg was returning to the bar to fetch two more pints, and had just decided that he’d take the ginger-haired girl home rather than the brunette, when Gil cleared his throat and nodded at the door. Reg turned.

Sybil stood in the doorway. She’d come straight from work and still wore her frumpy Wren uniform. It wasn’t flattering. She scanned the room while unwrapping her muffler. Her horsey face cracked into a wide, desperate smile when she glimpsed Reg. He sighed.

She crossed the pub and flung herself on him. Her kiss clicked their teeth together. Reg’s ribs creaked under the ferocity of her embrace. The shop girls saw everything.

“Hi, Syb,” he managed.

“Oh, Reggie,” she said, still clinging to him. “I went down to the 246 and they said you were here. They told me what happened today. Thank God you weren’t hurt. I don’t know what I’d do.”

She kissed him again. Then Sybil finally withdrew her claws and relinquished a generous half inch of personal space. But the damage was already done. The shop girls moved their chairs to put their backs to Reg.

Reg groaned inwardly. The ginger girl had freckles. He loved freckles.

While Gil poured a drink for Sybil, she slipped her arm around Reg’s elbow, deftly as a trout fisherman setting the hook. “My Reggie is a true hero. Did you know that?”

“Is that so?” Gil’s stare bored through him for the second time that afternoon. Reg couldn’t decipher the strange look on his face. “Haven’t met many of those.”

“He’s got more courage than anybody,” said Sybil.

An uncomfortable moment passed among the three of them. Reg couldn’t bear to look at Gil. He couldn’t stand to make eye contact with Sybil, and though he couldn’t understand why, he also felt compelled to avoid his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Conversation ebbed and flowed around them. Nobody noticed the trio standing in their awkward little tide pool. Even Sybil seemed oblivious to it.

Reg was ready to turn on his heels and leave, and Sybil be damned, when Gil broke the painful silence. “In that case,” he said in that tooth-rattling rumble of a voice, “he deserves a drink on the house.”

“I think that’s wonderful,” said Sybil. She squeezed Reg’s arm, grinned at him. He flinched away.

Gil fished a key ring from a pocket in his apron. He knelt behind the bar. A lock clunked open. Gil stood again, one hand wrapped around the neck of an earthenware bottle, the other cupping a shot glass. The bottle had no label. A thick layer of dust turned the bright terra cotta a dull gray.

What kind of spirits would a man keep in a clay bottle? Reg couldn’t guess. But this was clearly special, wasn’t it, and he damn well deserved special recognition.

Gil wrenched out the cork. Reg caught another whiff of the phantom river, distant and clean. He expected something dark, like red wine or even a port, but Gil dispensed a finger of clear liquid. The shot glass warmed Reg’s fingertips. He took another sniff, but smelled nothing.

He nodded at Gil. Reg touched the warm glass to his lips and tossed the drink back in one go. It tasted like time, the ticking and tocking of millennia, and it burned like frostbite all the way down.

Gil’s mystery drink was a damn sight stronger than it looked. It turned Reg outside-in, twisted things about, made it feel as though he were standing outside his own head, looking in. Like déjà vu without the pleasant bits.

Reg sat heavily on a bar stool. Sybil frowned. From somewhere far away she said, “Reggie?”

But he couldn’t speak. Words carried too much weight. Every utterance he might have made became a cog in some vast machine, or one piece of an immense puzzle. Each choice of wording carried effects that rippled out like waves on a pond. It was as though the Sight had gone crazy, triggered by the slightest thought.

The banshee wail of air-raid sirens saved him from trying to answer. Reg never imagined he’d feel so grateful to the Luftwaffe.

The other patrons abandoned their drinks and their darts. They knew what to do; they’d endured dozens of raids since the Blitz had begun. Gil ushered everybody down a narrow flight of stairs to a cellar. Reg and Sybil went last. She had to help him down; he was too dizzy to walk on his own. The stairs shook underfoot in time to the crump-crump-crump of a nearby antiaircraft battery.

They huddled in the cold and damp, alongside barrels of beer and shelves piled with sacks of onions, bunches of carrots, and tins of meat. A cast iron wood stove from the previous century huddled in the center of the cellar; wood had been stacked neatly along one wall. Which explained why the hearth up top had been empty.

The thunder of a distant explosion rattled the shelves. A coal scuttle in the corner gave off a faint latrine stink; it wasn’t unusual to use such as makeshift privies during long raids. Reg glimpsed the corner of a clay tablet peeking from beneath a burlap potato sack. The tablet shared the same color and texture as Gil’s bottle.

It almost made sense.... Everything Reg saw, smelled, felt, heard, and tasted was just one piece of the vast, ticking machine called London.

Gil built a fire. A handful of patrons sat in a semicircle around the stove, soaking up its heat. Reg kept to the corner, and the chill.

Sybil shivered. He pulled a blanket from a shelf. The scratchy wool smelled of mildew and onions.

She whispered, “Reggie?”

“What, Syb?”

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

Another explosion shook the earth and knocked him from his reverie. A tin of meat crashed to the floor and rolled toward the ginger shop girl.

Reg sighed. “Can’t it wait, Syb?”

“I suppose.” Her voice cracked.

The bombing got worse as the night dragged on. Reg wondered if there would be anything left of the pub by morning. Or 246 HQ, for that matter.

Reg flinched.

Sybil snored with her head on his shoulder. He wanted to shrug her off, but the thought triggered the Sight again: Sybil wakes. . . . Can’t avoid it.... Long talk. . . . Wedding dress. . . . A baby cries. . . .

He waited until the all-clear before waking Sybil. She peered up at him. Relief softened the weariness in her eyes. The skin beneath her eyes was dark and puffy, which made her look twice her age. She kissed him on the cheek with too-cool lips. He realized she’d chosen to sit beside him in the cold, damp corner all night long, rather than join the others by the stove.

Guilt? What the hell was wrong with him?

No. Reg wouldn’t get trapped. Why should he? His father had been gone for months at a time, but Reg still turned out perfectly well.

Sybil asked, “Time?”

“Early morning,” Reg said.

She shifted. Stretched. Nudged something with her foot. An onion rolled away. Scattered tins and vegetables littered the floor. Sybil shuddered at the sight of the toppled shelves.

Reg stood. “I’ll take you home.” He took her hand and pulled her to her feet.

They went upstairs, to where the day had dawned under a leaden-gray sky. They found Gil sweeping up broken glass. A bomb—big one, by the look of it—had ripped through the chemist’s across the road. The impact had broken Gil’s windows and knocked pint glasses from the bar. But the bomb must have been a rum fish. Otherwise, they’d still be waiting for rescue men to dig them out of the pub cellar.

Captain Hollister studied the crater. Doyle strode into the wreckage with a ladder over his shoulder while Peter unfurled a coil of garden hose. They hadn’t come to collect him; that meant the captain was honoring Reg’s promotion. Reg wondered who Holly would send down.

He felt Gil’s stare piercing the back of his skull. “Come on,” he said, and tugged at Sybil’s hand. They picked a path through the rubble.

Peter saw them. He’d lost a bit of color. “Hi, Syb.” He nodded toward the cratered chemist’s shop, and spoke a bit too quickly. Must have been his turn to go down hole. “I guess your promotion came through just in time, Reg.”

Sybil squeezed Reg’s hand. A flash of relief broke through the fear and weariness on her face. “That’s brilliant! Why didn’t you tell me? I’m so proud of you.”

Holly retreated from the crater with Doyle in tow. Doyle asked, “A Piaf? Is that good?”

Peter flinched as though he’d been stricken. He glared at Reg while he answered. The disapproval in his eyes reminded Reg of Gil. “No. It’s not good.”

The Piaf, named after Édith, was one of the Luftwaffe’s worst. Every living sapper knew its reputation. Some speculated that it had multiple independent detonator mechanisms. But nobody knew for certain, because nobody had successfully—

Reg could see the bomb laid open at his feet. It was so obvious.

Preposterous. He’d never even seen a Piaf, much less laid his hands on one. His gift didn’t work that way.

Yet another scenario with that damnable baby.

Reg reeled while his newly expanded Sight shuffled the pieces of his life into new sequences of events. New inevitabilities.

Sybil hugged the blanket around herself. “Let’s go, Reggie. I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday and I’ll faint if I don’t eat before I’m due back at work.”

She still wore her Wren uniform. She’d stayed at his side all night. She loved him. He would never love her.

There he was again. Sybil’s boy.

Oh, bugger. No wonder she was so desperate to have a talk. She was carrying his son.

The realization became a stray spark that ignited a flare of rage. How could she have been so careless? How could he have been so careless?

No. He worked a bloody miracle at Guy’s Hospital. He deserved recognition for it. But Sybil’s efforts to raise the baby on her own were rubbish. Why did she have to be so useless? The boy deserved better.

Reg flinched again, feeling ill. No. He would never become that man. He’d made that vow years ago.

The thing growing in Sybil’s womb was a cancer. It killed every version of the happy life Reg sought for himself. If he left her, his reputation would be destroyed. No matter how he tried to move on, to build a new life, the boy always came around to crater it. The sappers would never speak with hushed reverence about the miracles Reggie Brooks had performed; only the son he’d abandoned. But staying with Sybil meant years of misery. Meant becoming something worse than an absent father.

Every single path led to a life he hated. He couldn’t escape it. But there was a solution. Reg could feel it.

Almost. But not quite. Unless:

Yes. That one worked.

He put his arms around Sybil. He held her tight, kissed her cold lips.

“I love you, Syb.” He didn’t, but it was the right thing to say. Tears traced rivulets of joy down her cheeks. He kissed the salt away. “I’m making plans for the future,” he said, and it was true.

Reg couldn’t marry her. There wasn’t time, not while a Piaf lurked nearby. But he could propose.

And Holly really would owe him, if he went down hole one last time. Reg would extract a bloody great promise in return. He’d have Peter and Gil witness it. Reg had a feeling nobody broke his word to Gil.

Captain Hollister and the other sappers could jigger things so that Sybil got her widow’s pension.

Eight weeks and four days was a damn good run. Almost legendary.