Page 92 of The Unknown Birds

All Ash could do was shake her head. She’d come to war to prevent the tenth and final plague from touching her own family, but without any word from Charles she had no idea if she’d succeeded.

The night before the big push was the same as any other, and yet somehow it felt so much more extreme. Ash was practically vibrating with pent up nerves and agitation, the usually unflappable Rook as on edge as she. Captain Hawkins kept him at the fire step all through the night, and Ash refused to leave his side, not to change her socks or so much as take a piss.

Before dawn they were ordered to assemble, and Ashley felt her stomach drop.

“It’s time,” Rook whispered, pulling her to her feet.

A frisson of electricity ran between their two clasped hands, and Ash looked into his weary, glistening eyes.

“Fly safe, Little Bird,” he begged her.

“Fly true,” she murmured in reply.

Then he licked his lips, as though he were going to say true as steel but was unable, and it unnerved her that he couldn’t muster the words just one more time.

Everything about the push felt more perilous than before, and Ash began to spiral into the same terrified girl who fell apart on her first day, overcome by the same terrible need for one last confession.

“Rook—” she began, her voice breaking along with her heart. She had to tell him. It was now or never.

“I’ll find you on the other side.”

“Do you promise?” she asked.

He nodded, and then glancing quickly down the trench, he pressed his lips to hers, firm and full of life and full of everything. He pushed her back against the damp trench wall, his tongue all warmth and honey as he kissed her, and she clutched at his shirt until just as suddenly he pulled himself back, staring at her with wide, panic-stricken eyes, casting about to make sure no one had seen them.

He spun away, taking up his rifle and his kit, and fell into line, while Ash stared after him, one hand to her lips, the other holding tight to his red identity disc which had come away in her grasping fist.

She thought he’d known. For one perfect moment, she thought he must have known she was a girl, and that he loved her. But from the look on his face, it seemed she was mistaken. He might well love Ash the soldier, but he thought he’d kiss a lad right there in the middle of the trench.

Scarcely breathing, Ashley stood up straight and tall and followed him into line full of too many painful questions. Moments before the whistle blew was no time to try and sort out such questions. Stiff upper lip, she reminded herself. And so she donned her gas mask and turned to see that he had done the same.

Even wearing the ghoulish hood, she knew him. Her heart knew his, as it thudded so loudly it felt like it might crack her ribs, might just burst right through its cage and splat down in the mud still beating.

Hawkins blew his whistle, and they scrambled up the ladders, out of the trench, and into the smoky fog to run like hell, determined they would see the morning through.

Ashley didn’t know when she lost Rook in all the chaos. She had no memory of being hit. One moment she was charging across No Man’s Land, vibrating with vinegar and mettle, and the next she was gasping awake on an operating table where a nurse who thought her undercarriage had been blown off discovered she was, in fact, a girl.

“Rook?” she gasped as they removed shrapnel from her shoulder and her thigh. “Lance Corporal Alex Rook?”

“It’s all right, Miss Rook,” the nurse told her. “The Germans are retreating, and the war’s over for you now. You’ve had your fun.”

“I’m not Rook, I’m Private Ashley. Hasn’t anyone seen Lance Corporal Rook?” she screamed through the blinding pain.

“Quiet now. You’re going to be fine. Most of them weren’t so lucky. There’s a good girl,” the doctor said when the laudanum finally settled her. “If you were a man, we’d patch you up and send you right back out again. But aren’t you lucky? You’ve got a ticket home. And since you were wounded in the line of duty we shan’t report you.”

She tried to tell them London wasn’t home anymore. That her place was there in France, right alongside the sniper Alex Rook. But it was as though the exposure of her gender turned her into nothing and no one. They couldn’t even hear her whimpered screams. No longer Ash the Flash, runner of the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment—she was just Red Riding Hood in soldier’s clothing, with Rook’s name tag still clenched so tightly in her fist that his name had been imprinted on her skin.

Chapter 27

Midlands, June 1939

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow

And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:

Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair

Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear