The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

her voice sounded far away now as I began to slip beneath the surface. I struggled, gasping for air, then slid under once more. Water filled my mouth and nose, causing me to cough and gag. My eyelids were heavy now, as though I was going to sleep at night. The chamber went dark around me and I knew no more.

I awoke sometime later on the ground a short distance from the wall where I had clung. “What happened?” The waters were gone; they had receded even more quickly than they came, leaving the black silt floor sodden and strewn with our wet belongings. But the last thing I remembered was the chamber filled with water, me gasping for a few last gasps of air.

“Sadele!” Mama sat on the ground beside me. “Thank heavens you’re all right. When the water rose too high, you passed out. I tried to keep you afloat myself, but I couldn’t manage it. Saul held you up until the waters receded.”

Saul. I looked across the chamber to where his father and grandmother sat trying to recover from the flood. But I did not see him. “I’m right here.” I turned to find him crouching just inches from where I lay. Our eyes met. Knowing that he had saved me seemed to bring us closer.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m glad you are all right.” His hand reached in the direction of mine and I wondered for a second if he might touch me. But with the others here, he could not. He stood and started back across the chamber to his family.

“He wouldn’t leave your side until he knew you were safe,” Mama said in a low voice. I felt myself grow warm inside. “Now let’s find a way to dry ourselves.” I tried to stand, but my clothes, heavy and soaked with icy sewer water, seemed to weigh me down. “Come,” Mama said, making it to her feet before me despite the bulk of her stomach. She held a hand out to help me. There was a steely look of determination in her eyes. She was not going to let this beat us either. Slowly we began to put the chamber back together.

As we worked, I thought about all that had happened the previous night. The flood had come suddenly, without warning. If the waters hadn’t receded, we would have all drowned. And that was not the only danger; as long as we stayed in the chamber, without another hiding place or way out, we were vulnerable, trapped. I remembered the night we came to the sewer, the labyrinth of tunnels Pawel had led us past or through. There had to be other places we could hide if things got bad—or perhaps even a way out.

I looked over at Saul, wanting to share my thoughts with him. He had walked the tunnels more than I and perhaps he had seen other places that might be useful. But there was little chance to be together during the day with our families constantly around.

That night as the others prepared to sleep in their still-damp beds, Saul gestured to me and nodded toward the tunnel. After Mama was asleep, I slipped out of the chamber to find him waiting for me. We started down the tunnel in silence.

“Saul, I wanted to talk to you about something.” I hesitated, unsure how to introduce the subject. “The floodwaters...they almost killed us.”

“It was terrifying,” he agreed.

“It’s more than that. We have to find a way out of the sewer in case we ever need to escape.”

“Out?” He looked at me as though I was out of my mind. “But here in the sewer we are safe.” His jaw set stubbornly. He had been so scarred by the loss of his brother and fiancée that he could not imagine surviving anywhere but here.

“For the moment, yes. But what if the rains come again? Next time, they might not stop. Or if the Germans search the tunnels.” He did not answer. “We are trapped here, sitting ducks. Things are only getting worse. We aren’t going to be able to stay here forever.”

“You want us to leave?”

“No,” I relented. In truth, I was not ready to leave the sewer yet either—mostly because I could not envision anywhere safe that we could go. “Not exactly. Not right now. But we need to know how to get out, where to go if something worse happens.” We were fighting a war of hunger and flooding and a battle against time and being detected—and the sewer was winning. “There has to be a way out. We should know so that if we ever need to flee we can find our way.”

“Maybe if we ask Pawel...” Saul offered.

I shook my head. “Pawel is doing enough for us already. He isn’t going to help us leave.” Pawel had given almost everything just to get us here and keep us hidden. He believed the sewer was the only way to keep us safe, that if we tried to leave we would bungle it and get caught like that family who had fled the first night we came here. He wasn’t going to start showing us ways to leave and risk our own lives—and his. “And what if Pawel can’t get to us, like he couldn’t yesterday in the flood? We need to know what our options are just in case and we need to find out ourselves.”

“Where would we go if we did get out?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I admitted finally. “We should at least look. So that we know a way if it comes to that. If the worst happens...” I tried to imagine what the worst might be, but found that I could not. “Saul, we can do this, but I need your help.”

I expected him to argue further with me, but he did not. “Fine,” he relented.

“You’re going to help me?” I asked.

He nodded reluctantly, not meeting my eyes. “I will go with you tomorrow night and we