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

to come down around us, as if in slow motion, the rounded concrete cracking and starting to cave inward.

In front of us, Saul hesitated for a moment. “Go!” Sadie cried, urging him onward. Saul sprinted forward with his father, nearly carrying him. He took a long last look back at Sadie. The ceiling crumbled then and I pulled Sadie toward me, covering both of our heads so we would not be crushed. Concrete and debris and ash rained down upon us, cutting into our skin.

When I looked up, the entire pathway in front of us was blocked by rocks. The tunnel, which had once served as a bridge to connect Sadie’s world with mine, had collapsed. Saul and his father and the entire world on the other side of the grate had all but disappeared, leaving Sadie and me trapped in the sewer, alone.

25

Ella

I wiped the debris from my eyes, trying to get my bearings. “Sadie?” I called. She was lying on the ground a few feet away from me where she had fallen, not moving. Hurriedly, I crawled over to her. “Are you all right?” She sat up, wincing. “Are you hurt?”

She touched her stomach. “Just a small cut.” I reached for her to inspect the wound, but she swatted my hand away. “Saul?” She scrambled to her feet. “Where is he?” Seeing the wall of rock that now separated us from him, her panic rose. “Saul!” she called, louder now.

“Shh,” I hushed. Even now, her cries might be heard on the street. Ignoring me, Sadie began to claw at the rocks that had fallen, separating us from Saul and his father. “I have to find him,” she insisted. “We were leaving together. We are supposed to get married. I can’t lose him, too.” All of the grief and frustration that had been building up inside her these past few months seemed to bubble up and spill over as she dug at the rocks.

“Stop.” I took her bleeding hands in mine to still them. “You’ll never get through. And if you keep tearing at it, you are going to bring the rest of the tunnel down on us as well.”

Her face crumpled. I would have thought that after her parents and her sister, no loss could break Sadie. But Saul was the very last person she had other than me, and the love she had only just found. The idea of losing him was more than she could bear. “We were so close to getting out together. And now he’s gone.”

“No, he made it safely to the other side with his father,” I replied, hoping that was true.

Sadie looked around helplessly. “We’ll never see each other again,” she cried.

“Don’t say that! We’ll get out and find them.”

“But they can’t wait for us on the street. How will they know where to go without us? They could be caught.” Even now, when we were trapped and in peril for our lives, Sadie was thinking about the others.

“Saul will manage. He is strong. And Kara will guide them to safety. All we have to do is find a way out ourselves and we can meet them.” I forced confidence into my voice, making it sound much simpler than it really was.

“How?” Sadie knew the tunnels a thousand times better than me. But she was too overwhelmed to think clearly and was looking to me for answers.

“The other grate,” I said. “The one that opens by the river. Can we get there?”

“I think so, if the explosions didn’t collapse that tunnel as well. It’s much harder to get to, though.”

“We have to try,” I replied firmly. Sadie took a long look at the blocked tunnel, not wanting to leave the last place she had seen Saul. “Come, we must hurry,” I urged, pulling her away. Reluctantly, she led me in the other direction, walking more slowly now. Despite the fact that the explosions had not collapsed the tunnel entirely in this direction, it had still left the path in ruins. Our progress was slow as we navigated around large craters in the floor and climbed over piles of rubble.

“The explosions,” Sadie said as we made our way through the tunnel. “What happened?”

“Some of the mines detonated. But I’m not sure why.”

“Do you think the Germans set them off?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Even if the Germans suspected people were hiding in the tunnel, it seemed unlikely that they would have detonated mines without checking first. “Perhaps one of us stepped in the wrong place, or we set them off with the weight of four people walking,” I suggested. So much we didn’t know. “It doesn’t matter. We just have to find a way out of the sewer so we can get to the others.”

Sadie turned right in the direction of what must have once been a narrow pathway. It was blocked now, though, covered with debris and rock from the caved-in walls. “This was the way we were supposed to go.” She paused, fretting. “Only now it’s gone.”

I wondered with dread if our last and only escape plan had failed. “What now?”

She walked back, retracing our route a few steps. Then she looked down at the wall. “The pipe.” She pointed to an opening in the wall, close to the ground, so small that I had not noticed it when we passed the first time. “I’m not entirely sure, but I think it runs parallel to the tunnel we were supposed to take. We have to lie on our bellies to get through,” Sadie explained matter-of-factly.

I crouched low to peer through the opening, which led to a long, horizontal pipe. “That’s impossible.” The pipe was not more than two feet in diameter. She could not seriously mean for us to go through it.

“It’s not. My whole family had to do it when we came to the sewer. Even my mother, and she was pregnant.” Sadie’s eyes clouded over at the memory. “Trust me. I’ll go first and pull you