“I meant to go.” Eve had got as far as Cologne, where Lili’s original grave was to be opened so her body could be repatriated back to her homeland, but never made it out of the hotel room. She’d ended up getting drunk instead, and nearly shooting the maid who came with her supper—the girl was squat, square faced, and for a horrific moment Eve had thought she was the Frog, that horrible woman in Lille who had strip-searched Eve and Lili. The memory dizzied Eve now, momentarily, and she gulped a deep breath of sea air.

Cameron’s voice was low. “Why didn’t you come?”

“C-C-Couldn’t face it.” She’d said her good-bye to Lili in a corridor that stank of typhus and blood. She didn’t need a graveside with droning plaudits and French generals. But she didn’t say that to Cameron, just quickened her steps, suddenly needing to be away from him.

Cameron’s long legs kept up. “Do you have anyone to meet you? A place to stay?”

“I’ll find something.”

His hand caught her elbow. “Eve. Stop. Let me help you, for God’s sake.”

She wrenched free. He didn’t mean any harm, but she couldn’t bear to be touched. There were a lot of things she was finding she couldn’t bear, now that she was out of prison. Open windows. Crowds. Wide spaces without corners to set her back against. Sleep . . .

“Keep it Miss Gardiner, Cameron. Far better that way.” She looked out at the ocean rather than meet his gaze. His soft eyes might swallow her whole, and Eve couldn’t be soft. Not now. “Tell me,” she said instead. “We d-d-didn’t get much news about the war, inside p-prison, and now no one wants to go over old battles. Lili’s last message, the one about the Verdun assault.” Over and over, Eve had wondered how that assault went. What they changed by getting that message through. “How did things go down?”

“The French commander received your information.” Cameron looked as if he wanted to stop there, but Eve’s gaze pierced him, and he continued reluctantly. “The report about the coming assault was given, but it wasn’t believed. Losses were—well. Very bad.”

Eve squeezed her eyes shut, feeling something rise in her throat. It was either a laugh or a scream. “So it was all worth nothing.” Lili giving up her freedom so that report could get through. Eve leaving Cameron’s sleeping arms and walking back into mortal danger because such reports were worth risking her life for. All of it rendered useless. Nothing Eve or Lili or Violette had done had avoided the bloodbath. “Nothing I did in France ever amounted to anything.”

His voice was fierce. “No. Do not think that.” He would have seized her shoulders but he sensed her recoil. “The Alice Network saved hundreds, Eve. Perhaps thousands. You were the best network in the war. None of the others in France or Belgium ever equaled it.”

Eve smiled, mirthless. Who cared about praise when the failures were so much bigger than the victories? That miracle chance in ’15 to kill the kaiser—failed. Stopping the assault on Verdun—failed. Keeping the network together after Lili’s arrest—failed.

Cameron had gone on. “I don’t know if you’ve read Major Allenton’s communications. He says you never responded. But you’ve been awarded these. He meant to award them to you at Louise’s funeral. She received the same, posthumously.”

Eve refused to take the case, so after an awkward pause, Cameron opened it for her. Four medals glittered in Eve’s blurring vision.

“The Medaille de Guerre. The Croix de Guerre, with palm. The Croix de la Legion d’Honneur. And the Order of the British Empire. Awarded in honor of your war efforts.”

Tin toys. Eve took a hand from her pocket at last and knocked them to the ground, trembling. “I don’t want any medals.”

“Then Major Allenton will hold them for you—”

“Cram them up his arse!”

Cameron gathered up Eve’s medals and dropped them back into the case. “I didn’t want mine either, believe me.”

“But you had to take them, because you’re still in the army.” Eve gave a one-note bark of a laugh. “The army doesn’t want me anymore. I did my part and the war’s over, so now they’ll pin some b-bits of tin on me and tell me to bugger off back to the file room. Well, they can keep their damned tin scraps.”

Cameron flinched this time at her language. His eyes dropped, and Eve realized she hadn’t put her hand back in her pocket. His eyes went from her fingers to her face and back, as though he were seeing the demure quiet-voiced girl he’d sent away to France with her carpetbag and her soft hands and her innocence. War and torture and prison and René Bordelon had happened, and now she was nothing like that girl. She was a damaged wreck of a woman with a foul mouth and destroyed hands and no innocence at all. Not your fault, Eve wanted to say to the guilty sorrow in his eyes, but he wouldn’t believe her. She sighed, flexing her ruined fingers.

“You had to kn-kn-kn—to know about these,” she said. “There was a report.”

“Knowing’s not the same as seeing.” He reached out for the crippled hand, but stopped himself. She was glad. She didn’t want to keep shoving him away; he hadn’t earned that. He gave a sigh of his own instead. “Let’s get a drink.”

It was a horrible pub on the docks, the kind of place where gravel-voiced women slopped gin into grimy glasses for men who were already drunk at ten in the morning, but it was just what Eve needed: anonymous, cheap, windowless so she didn’t worry about people sneaking up behind her. Two shots of gin followed by a pint of bitter steadied her jumping pulse. She used to be proud of that slow pulse that got her through danger, but it had been a long time since she’d held up that coolly under pressure. Maybe the last time was in René Bordelon’s green-walled study.

René. She took another draught of beer, tasting hatred along with it. In Siegburg her hate had tasted bitter; now it was a sweet thing. Because now, she could do something about it. The satchel at her feet held a Luger. Not her old Luger with the scratch on the barrel, the one René had taken from her—but it would do.

Cameron, for all his gentlemanly air, knocked the gin back as fast as Eve, giving a murmured toast of “Gabrielle.” When Eve raised her eyebrows, he explained, “Another of my recruits. Shot in April of ’16. I rotate them, the ones I lost.” He raised his beer and said “Léon” before downing a swallow.

“Was I in your rotation?”

“No, only those confirmed dead.” Cameron’s eyes had that terrible drowning softness again. “Every week following your trial, I expected to get the news you’d died in Siegburg.”

“After Lili, I almost did.”

They looked at each other a long time, and then they ordered another round of gin. “Lili.”

They were both silent, until Cameron abruptly started saying something about a pension for Eve. “You’ll find it more useful than the medals. I knew you didn’t have any family, so I pushed a pension for you through the War Office. It’s not much, but it’ll keep you afloat. Maybe help you buy a house somewhere in London.”

“Thank you.” Eve didn’t want the medals, but she’d take the pension. It wasn’t like she’d be going back to typewriting with hands like hers; she needed something to live on.

Cameron studied her. “Your stammer’s better.”

“Go to prison, and you find there are worse things than a halting tongue.” She took another draught of beer. “And this helps.”