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in their direction, slipping and sliding. “Xavier. Xavier.” God couldn’t do this to him.
    “Hush, dearie, he’s sleeping.” One of the elderly women patted his shoulder.
    He dropped to his knees by his chum’s side, his face ashen, lips blue, a crimson puddle spreading across the ice. “No. No!”
    Mitch’s throat constricted. He couldn’t breathe. His childhood pal. Always able to get him into scrapes. Always able to get him out.
    Gisela was there then, beside him. She placed her fingers on Xavier’s neck, searching for a pulse, he presumed.
    “One last crazy adventure, chap. I should have talked you out of it. Why didn’t I?” He wiped the moisture from his eyes.
    Perhaps it would’ve been better had they stayed with theirfellow prisoners, marched westward by the SS guards, instead of slipping away that day, burrowing into a snowbank and hiding there until the Germans cleared the area.
    “He’s gone.” Gisela touched his shoulder. Mitch pulled away. What had he done? He shook his fists at the heavens. An ally. An ally took Xavier’s life.
    A fire burned in his gut. If he ever got his hands on a Russian . . .
    “You saved Annelies’s life.” Gisela’s words were little more than a buzz.
    He scanned the scene around them. The family in the wagon ahead of them lay unmoving, their bodies riddled with bullet holes. The women behind them stroked their dead horse’s mane. A wail of grief rose from this frozen grave.
    He added his to theirs. He sat shivering on the ice, wet through to the skin with water and blood.
    Annelies came and touched his wet cheek. “What’s wrong?”
    “Xavier died.”
    Katya, her brown hood askance on her head, kneeled on the ice beside Xavier but did not say a word. Perhaps, even in her senility, she understood.
    But they couldn’t understand. No one could. God should have taken him instead.
    Gisela put her arm around him and helped him stand. “We have to keep moving and get off this ice before more planes come.”
    Herr Holtzmann nodded. “She’s right, son. We can’t linger.”
    Mitch stared at the other bodies strewn over the white bareness of this place. Just leave Xavier here? To sink to the bottom of the Haff when it thawed?
    A physical pain clawed at his chest. Xavier deserved better. “Give me a minute.” Herr Holtzmann and Gisela led the two pairs of sisters away.
    This wasn’t right. None of this was right. If only he could undo what he had done five years ago.
    Tears blurred his vision as he bent and retrieved Xavier’s dog tags, then slipped them over his neck. His parents would want them.
    The stream of refugees swung a wide berth around the little group, but continued unabated.
    Mitch covered Xavier with a green blanket Gisela brought him from her cart. She placed the baby beside his lifelong chum.
    Then they turned away, leaving the bundles on the frozen Haff.
    Like Lot’s wife, Mitch turned back, the sight of Xavier’s body seared into his memory.

    Time blurred for Gisela. How many minutes and hours passed as they struggled across the ice, she had no idea. Night came and they slept in the carts, huddled together under the duvets for warmth. The morning sun did nothing to change their circumstances.
    All she wanted was to get to the Frische Nehrung, the narrow spit of land separating the lagoon from the Baltic Sea and their road to Danzig. And safety. Out here, they were too vulnerable, too exposed.
    Every little bird that flew across the sky caused her shoulders to tense. They fooled her into believing they were tieffliegers.
    The Frische Haff was only twenty kilometers or so wide, yet they continued across the endless stretch of white. Unable to see either shore, it felt like they would never reach land.
    Mitch pulled the Holtzmanns’ cart with his head down, his back rounded, not saying a word. She wanted to comfort him, but the words stuck in her throat. In this situation, they sounded false and hollow. There was no comfort here. Even the