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at him grimly. He started shaking, and finally Greta
     hushed him and took
     him in her arms.
    “His family was killed in Dresden,” she said.
     “Parents,
     grandparents, two sisters. A cousin, who was holding his hand in
     the bomb
     shelter. They were down below and the bombs kept falling and
     everything was
     shaking. He is very sorry he screamed, but the bomb scared him.”
    “Hey, kid. It’s okay.”
    “I did not understand that last part,
     though,” Greta said.
     “The water was on fire. It was burning.”
    She asked him another question. He answered
     in a few
     sentences this time, and then fell silent.
    “Water was pouring down the stairs into the
     bomb shelter,
     only it was on fire. What do you suppose that means? He says the
     adults went
     crazy when they saw it.”
    “Dresden was firebombed,” Cal said.
    “I know it was firebombed. Every German knows
     what the
     Allied bombers did. But what does Karl mean about burning
     water?”
    “Phosphorous, that’s what he’s talking about.
     Not water. It
     will flow down into anything to help spread the fire.”
    “He said when the burning water came down,
     the adults threw
     open the doors to get away. They jumped out into the fire. His
     mother, his
     father, his grandparents, his sisters. Aunts and uncles and
     neighbors. Didn’t
     climb out, they jumped. What does that mean?”
    Cal’s mouth felt dry. “The firestorm did it.
     It burns so hot
     the center is almost like a vacuum, because it needs to pull in
     all that air to
     keep the flames going. They didn’t jump, they were sucked into
     the fire.”
    Greta asked Karl another question, and nodded
     at his answer.
     “He said someone dragged him deeper into the bomb shelter, and
     then someone
     else passed him through a hole in a wall, and he joined a group
     of people in
     the sewers. When they came out the next morning, the first thing
     he saw were
     charred bodies being stacked into a huge pile.”
    The boy shook and buried his head in Greta’s
     arms.
    “ Mein Gott ,” she said. “Why would you
     people do that?
     What good would that do to kill so many innocent civilians?”
    “I didn’t make the decision, and I don’t
     agree with it,” he
     said.
    The excuse sounded all wrong when it came out
     of his mouth,
     like the sort of thing a German would say. We’re not
     responsible, we only
     follow orders.

10.
    The bulkhead doors swung open, and Cal blinked
     against the
     light that flooded into the cellar. After five minutes in the
     dark, the
     exhaustion of the past two days had caught up with him and he’d
     begun to drift
     off. The light snapped him to attention. A man’s voice spoke. It
     was loud,
     high-pitched, and nervous sounding. Multiple faces came into
     focus in the
     blinding light. Cal threw up his hands.
    “Don’t shoot! Americanski. Americanski!”
    More shouts.
    Too late, Cal realized that it wasn’t Russian
     the man was
     yelling down at him, but German. Two men clomped down the
     stairs, and he
     reached for his Colt.
    Greta threw herself on his arm. “No! Cal,
     no!”
    He struggled to free himself, almost got the
     gun out, but
     Helgard grabbed his arm, too, and he couldn’t fight them both
     off before the
     Germans reached him. The treachery hurt the most, that after
     throwing
     themselves on his protection, they had turned against him
     without a second
     thought the instant some of their own uniforms popped into view.
     He almost had
     the gun out, if only—
    He flinched as the first German reached him,
     hands out.
    And then both men sank to their knees, arms
     lifted overhead,
     crying out in German.
    “You cannot shoot men who are surrendering,”
     Greta pleaded.
     “Please, I beg you.”
    Cal snorted in surprise and disbelief. The
     two young men in
     dirty, tattered Wehrmacht uniforms were begging him to
     show mercy. They
     stank of sweat and grease and powder, so strong it overpowered
     the charred
     smell of the house