Fighting through the pain, Michael crawled over and wet the young man’s cracked lips with the last drops of cloudy water from a plastic canteen. For these men—and for the mother waiting back home—he had to survive. At enormous risk, he had managed to find a working phone on a dead enemy soldier and send that one short message to Eleanor.
Back in the city apartment, things were reaching a breaking point. Victor began demanding that Eleanor sign a stack of suspicious legal papers, threatening to use the grenade if she refused. It was clear he intended to transfer the apartment through fake documents and shell names, taking advantage of wartime confusion and her total vulnerability.
When Eleanor broke down and refused to sign, Victor shoved her hard to the floor. Pain shot through her knee, but it was nothing compared with the fear in her eyes. Looming over her, he said that if she didn’t come to her senses by morning, he could always arrange a “gas leak” and call it an accident.
Left alone on the cold floor, Eleanor lay there for a long time, too shaken to get up. Her once-comfortable apartment now felt poisoned by someone else’s presence, as if there were no safe corner left in it. At last she crawled toward her small bedroom, tears running down her face, her hand clenched around the phone in her pocket—the one thing that still felt like hope.
Far to the east, Michael was working out a desperate plan of escape, studying an old map of the factory tunnels. He knew their water would not last another two days, and the wounded men around him were fading fast. Late that night, when enemy patrols shifted positions above ground, he planned to make a dangerous run for antibiotics.
The darkness in the basement felt thick enough to touch, heavy with the smell of powder and human suffering. Michael checked the action on the rifle he had taken and looked over the sleeping men one by one, as if saying goodbye without words. His heart beat steady. He had made himself a promise: he would get back home and hug his mother again, no matter what it took.
Morning in the capital began with a loud, arrogant pounding at the door that made Eleanor jump and spill the tea in her shaking hands. On the landing stood her treacherous relative Alex Coleman, nervously glancing around and avoiding her eyes. Beside him was a slick-looking notary in an expensive suit. They had come to help Victor finish stealing her home…
