Page 97 of No Man's Land

Their eyes met, Alex’s dark and human in the crisscross of torch beams. Pained. “I’ll be all right,” he said softly. “Don’t worry.”

“I don’t trust them.”

Alex gave a small, heartbreaking smile. “Then for God’s sake, don’t give them a reason to kill you.”

That gave him pause, but of course, Alex was right. Saint wouldn’t think twice before shoving Josef into that tunnel with the fucking gas bombs. Who would know? Another dead prole.

He felt a hand on his arm and jumped, but it was only Violet. She didn’t speak, but her face echoed Alex’s warning. They were outgunned, their position was precarious, and one way or another, Josef was going to lose Alex. If not to death, then to The Society.

Perhaps that had been inevitable from the start.

Reluctantly, with a spear of pain lodged in his breastbone, Josef let Alex go. Let Dutta and one of the other gas-masked men escort him along the tunnel like a prisoner. Alex didn’t look back.

And then, from behind the door, the screaming started.

Chapter Twenty-eight

London, February 1918 – three months later

On the wall of May’s office, behind her desk, she’d hung a framed copy of the front page of theClarion.The one on which she’d printed a photograph, Josef’s photograph of Sykes. The image which had brought the police down on them, closed the paper, and lost them their patron in Countess Sackville.

He stared at it now, as he waited for May to return from her meeting. Even in the black-and-white image, he recognised the faint light of a ghoul in the boy’s dying eyes. The headline readEnd the Slaughter, and beneath it was Josef’s painstaking description of the forward dressing station in Ypres where Sykes had died. Or, rather, not died.

He couldn’t write about that, of course. Hard enough to make people see the truth about the war. Impossible to explain that the horror of the battlefield had followed him home, had crept through the city’s tunnels and sewers. That men destroyedby war and contorted into monsters had been gassed beneath the streets of London.

Even so, he’d been proud of those words and that photograph. Publishing them not in a pamphlet but in theClarionhad felt like a small triumph in the dark days after losing Alex. Not that it had done any good; the war still raged, and men still died. Well, what had he imagined? The country had been sending its men and boys to the slaughter for four long years. People were used to it, now. Maybe it would never end.

The door to May’s office rattled open, and he turned in his seat as she entered. He could tell from the glint in her eye that the meeting had gone well. “So?” he said, smiling.

“Lady Charlotte is a diamond. We’re back in business.”

Josef grinned. He’d known May and Lottie would get on like a house on fire, although he hadn’t been certain Lottie would have the appetite for a radical newspaper.

“The fight isn’t over for women’s suffrage,” May was saying as she took off her hat and dropped into the chair behind her desk. “But now we’ve got a foot in the door it’s even more important that we educate and shape the female vote. And the working-class vote, too.”

It had only been two weeks since the Representation of the People Act had passed, expanding voting rights to working-class men like Josef and to some women—those over 30 who met the property qualification. Wealthy women, in other words. Still, it was a start.

And it was exciting.

Now that the men who were fighting at the front could vote, there was a chance that things could change. He had to believe that; he had to have hope for the future. Even if, on a personal level, the future had felt rather bleak since the day he’d emerged from King William Street station to see Alex loadedinto the back of a black, unmarked ambulance and taken straight to Belgrave Square.

He only knew Alex was still alive because Lottie had told him so. She’d spoken briefly to Dutta, at a society event. That was society with a small ‘s’, not The Society. Lottie was no more welcome there than Josef, and he’d tried—five times—to get in and see Alex.

Apparently, Lord Beaumont was not at home to Mr Shepel.

Maybe it was Saint keeping Josef out, but he feared the choice was Alex’s. He was still haunted by that terrible moment in the tunnels when he’d refused to put a bullet in Alex’s head, when he’d broken his promise and left him alone in the dark.

You fucking coward!

That betrayal, he feared, was the reason Alex refused to see him. Whatever the reason, though, the result was the same—their friendship was over. Realistically, he knew that had been inevitable from the start. Even so, he felt the loss. He felt the ache of it in his chest every day.

It grieved him.

“Well?” May said, and he had the awkward feeling she’d been waiting for an answer. “Are you in, Joe?”

“You know I am,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

She flashed a grin. “All right, then. First off, we need a new title for the paper—something forward-looking. What do you think ofThe People’s Tribune? Or theVoter’s Vanguard…?”

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