The Shadow War by Lindsay Smith

Author:Lindsay Smith [Smith, Lindsay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593116494
Google: vLrQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SIMONE

Sniper work was one part blood rush—calculations whirling through her head faster than she could examine them, sights lining up perfectly—and nine parts insufferable dullness. Not the dullness of having nothing to do, but of knowing she had something to do yet being unable to do it until some unknown time at which she would have to move too fast—but not now, not yet, not close enough that she could be ready, not far enough she could look away.

Simone hated and loved it. She hated the wait that was a constant itch between her shoulder blades and loved the moment that itch went away. She loved the bloom of red from a Nazi’s skull, those flowers she so carefully planted blossoming over and over. She hated being kept from that joy.

And most of all, she hated sharing the waiting with someone else.

“We should check on them,” Phillip said, for the thousandth time. “No one’s gone in or out for a while now. If they found anyone, they’d be hauling them off already—”

“But they aren’t, which means they are still in there.” Simone twisted her neck from side to side, earning a satisfying crack. She was stomach-down on the roof of the furniture shop, rifle propped on the roof’s lip, aimed toward the church. A handful of military trucks and a single officer’s Mercedes were parked on the town square. “Do you want to walk into a Kino full of Nazis? I’m not so sure you could avoid notice as convincingly as Liam.”

Phillip scowled at her, but they both knew she had a point. Not that she would fare much better. Sometimes she wanted to laugh with how mad this whole journey was, traveling hundreds of kilometers into the heart of Nazi Germany to find a boy who’d dropped out of the sky. And get them both safely back out again—not that Georges-Yves or the US Army had been too forthcoming about how they’d manage that. A frequency, a preassigned code. That was her only hope of ever escaping this nightmare land.

Part of her didn’t care about escaping. Part of her wanted to cling to the feeling of the rifle firing in her hands, deafening her frantic thoughts and puncturing the pain she kept bottled inside of her. She hated Evangeline, hated her for her cowardice. She hated France and the narrowed stares other Parisians gave her, their muttering about immigrants, as if they weren’t the ones who’d claimed Algeria for their own. But she loved Evangeline, too; her ambition barreled through nearly every no that stood in her way. Loved that it was almost too plausible to believe that maybe, despite everything, she just might really be aiding the Magpie.

She loved France and its colors and chaos and opportunity, woven loosely and brightly like a Berber rug. She missed her mother holding fast to the deen, reciting a du’a into silence, into nighttime, into the ear of a god who knew what lay before them and behind. She missed

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