“If Marcie could see me now,” Harry muttered, glancing down at his sopping uniform as they waited for the station commander. “You’re lucky you don’t have a sweetheart, Thomas. There’s no one to see you in this state.”

“Yes, lucky me.” Thomas rolled his eyes at the man who’d become his closest friend at Desford, where they’d survived the harrowing first weeks of make-or-break flight training together. He refrained from mentioning that Harry likely wouldn’t be seeing his love anytime soon anyhow. The world was at war, and there was a rush to get the newest recruits into the skies. Besides, Harry seemed to have a new girl every few weeks. Where did he find the time? And how could he worry about wooing the young ladies who hung around the pub they frequented when there was battle to be waged? Surely that sort of thinking was a distraction they couldn’t afford.

“Attention!” a warrant officer bellowed to the soaked RAF hopefuls. Thomas and Harry sprang to ramrod straightness and turned their eyes toward the door.

A beak-nosed man with close-cropped white hair strode in, fixing them all with a steely gaze. “Welcome to RAF Little Rissington,” he barked after the warrant officer had introduced him as the station commander. “You may have thought that your early training days were easy, but things are about to change. This is where we separate the men from the boys. It’s up to you to decide which you’ll be. Your studies here will be tough, your training relentless. Remember: the planes cost a bloody fortune. You, on the other hand, are easily replaceable. Act accordingly.” He strode off without another word.

“Cheerful chap,” Harry muttered.

“He was just trying to scare us,” Thomas replied. But it had worked. As he and Harry trudged through the downpour toward the mess hall a few minutes later, Thomas’s heart was in his throat, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether he actually belonged here.

Thomas was assigned to bunk with Oliver Smith, who’d also come from Desford, and Harry was four doors down. The next morning, they all made their way to stores to collect their assigned flying kits, parachutes, and huge piles of textbooks.

“Are we meant to read all of these?” Harry asked, feigning distress under the weight of the books.

“The planes cost a bloody fortune, chaps,” Thomas deadpanned. “You are replaceable.”

Harry and Oliver laughed, and soon, they were all choosing lockers in the crew room of Number 2 Hangar. As Thomas extracted his new helmet, his leather gloves, his Sidcot suit, and his pristine flying boots, he felt a surge of pride and trepidation. He was ready to be a man, for there was no room for anything else. He had to do all he could to protect England.

“WHY DID YOU JOIN UP, sir?”

The question came from Jonathan Wilkes, Thomas’s flight sergeant, as they took off from the airfield at Kidlington, just east of Little Rissi, in a Harvard training aircraft. The low-wing monoplane was nothing like the Tiger Moths that Thomas had learned to fly at Desford, and he was still a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of controls on the squat beast.

“It felt like the right thing to do, Flight,” Thomas replied, guiding the trainer up through a sharp gust of wind. The stick shuddered, but Thomas kept his grip steady. “Helping the cause, and such.”

“How so?” Wilkes persisted. His tone wasn’t combative, merely curious. “You could have joined the army and been on the ground already.”

“But I can do more here.”

“Even if it’s dangerous?”

“Danger is a part of war, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” Wilkes replied, and Thomas had the feeling he’d passed some sort of test. “Well, then, I’m going to show you now, sir, what it feels like to stall in this aircraft. You’re going to bring us out of it.”

“Yes, all right.” He’d gotten accustomed to stalls in Tiger Moths, after all. How different could this be? “Ready when you are.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the Harvard choked and whipped nearly to a dead stop in midair. An instant later, they were plummeting nose-first toward the ground.

“Dear God!” Thomas shouted, but the words were lost in the sudden shrieking of the plane’s descent, the air outside biting at the wings.

“Easy on the stick, sir.” Wilkes sounded calm, but his tone didn’t do much to slow Thomas’s racing pulse. The aircraft shuddered and whined, and though Thomas knew the cabin was sealed, he felt as if there were sharp gusts pulling at his flight suit. The air screamed as the barracks on the ground below came into focus. Thomas pulled back sharply, following his instinct to raise the nose of the plane, but it shook and stalled again and continued its plunge toward the earth.

“You increased the wing load too severely.” Wilkes’s tone was only slightly panicked. “Slow and steady, bring us out of it. Do it now.”

Thomas took a deep breath and eased back on the stick, finally guiding the nose upward until they were once again parallel to the ground. “Christ, Flight! Are you trying to kill me before the Germans get around to it?”

The hint of a smile crossed Wilkes’s lips. “Now we’re going to climb back up and do it again, because you’re going to need to be able to do that in an instant. The skies are unforgiving, and your sharp reactions will mean the difference between life and death.” He paused and waited for Thomas to catch his breath. “The fate of England is in your hands, sir. You must proceed as if it is your destiny to save us all.”

CHAPTER FIVE

June 1940

The exodus had begun in earnest by the time June arrived.

Paris was in bloom, the chestnut trees lush and fragrant. Flowers in blue, pale green, and deep red spilled from window boxes and inched across the public gardens, painting the silent streets. But to Ruby, it felt as if nature itself was taunting the city. Soon, the world she knew would be swallowed by the coming Nazi invasion.

Ruby could feel their approach like a storm on the horizon, the air pregnant with something sinister. Though the French had collectively closed their eyes to the truth for months, ignoring German aggressions near the border, the jig was up. The Germans had simply gone around the Maginot Line, steamrolling their way through the forests and into France. They would be here any day now with their stiff marching, their too-polished uniforms, their strange Nazi emblem, a colorless pinwheel warped by the wind.

French generals were already declaring the Battle of France finished as bedraggled troops retreated hastily south. Air raid sirens pierced the nights. Cars moved in stealthy darkness, their headlights painted dark blue. Shops closed, apartments were shuttered, and Parisians fled in droves, clogging the roads as German bombs splintered the countryside. Paris was deserted, and without the laughter of the neighborhood children, a curtain of quiet had descended. Even the Eiffel Tower, a dagger against the crisp sky, seemed preternaturally still, as if it, too, was holding its breath.

“For God’s sake,” Marcel said to Ruby as they huddled alone in the abri beneath their building, taking shelter as bombs fell somewhere to the southwest—the Renault and Citro?n factories on the edge of the city, Ruby guessed. The Germans were pounding Paris, which had seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. “You’re being foolish.”

The circles under his eyes were pronounced, his shoulders stiff, reminding Ruby of a tightly wound children’s toy.

“I knew what I was getting into,” she replied, not meeting his gaze. It wasn’t quite true; she’d been lulled into a false sense of security at first. But then she had chosen to stay because he had. “I’m here with you.”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it, darling?” The endearment was sarcastic, not loving, and they both knew it. He was different lately, a far cry from the man she’d followed across the Atlantic the year before. His rejection from the French army—due to the marked limp in his right leg from the polio he’d battled as a child—now seemed to define his every waking moment.

“How so?” She fought to keep her tone even.

“You seem to believe you’re invulnerable. I didn’t ask you to stay.”

“I’m well aware.” In fact, he had tried to force her to leave, even writing to her parents to request their support in changing her mind. But she wouldn’t run at the first sign of trouble. She wouldn’t leave Marcel to face the invasion alone. She had cast her lot with him, for better or worse—and when he’d begun to try to get rid of her, it had only made her dig her heels in. “I still believe that we’re safe here for now.”

“Yes, well, it’s very American to go around believing in pipe dreams, isn’t it?”

She turned away as another blast rattled the building. Somewhere along the line, being American had become something to be ashamed of, in Marcel’s eyes anyhow. He resented President Roosevelt for staying out of Europe’s war, and as the months ticked by, and the Americans refused to engage, Marcel seemed more and more apt to hold Ruby herself responsible for the policies of her government.