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another narrow alley. They were behind an apartment block, with rats darting through ankle-deep trash at their feet.
    Edith had used this route hundreds of times while delivering messages for resistance and knew what came next, but Rosie gagged from the stench as Eugene cut down six concrete steps and opened a rectangular hatch covering a low brick archway.
    He had to sit Edith on a step before crawling through the arch. A stream trickled below as he went down four metal rungs into the base of the brick-built sewer.
    ‘Feels like home,’ Edith joked weakly, as she pushed off a ledge and jumped into Eugene’s arms. Rosie lowered the equipment before closing the hatch and climbing down herself.
    Even with Edith clamped to his back, Eugene could stand up straight. During storms the sewer was flushed by rainwater running over a metre deep into Lorient harbour, but it had been dry for the past few days, allowing the stench of untreated sewage to build up.
    Eugene’s torch lit the way, sending rats sploshing for cover. Rosie felt sick and tried thinking of flowers or the smell of bread cooking, but her imagination broke down every time something unmentionable squelched under her boot.
    ‘It won’t be long,’ Eugene said, when he looked back and caught the nausea on Rosie’s face.
    But it wasn’t long in the same way that dentists tell you something won’t hurt before putting you through an hour of complete agony. They were going gently upwards, against the trickle of sewage. Edith seemed slightly dazed, but also happy. She reminded Eugene that it had been her idea to start using sewers to move around town.
    ‘Not just sewers,’ Eugene said, making conversation to take Rosie’s mind off her nausea. ‘We knocked a few cellars together. The Boche 3 would put up a security barrier and we’d go into someone’s house and emerge six doors down on the other side. Or sometimes even in the next street.’
    ‘We had some scrapes, didn’t we, boss?’ Edith said.
    ‘I’d expect more scrapes before we’re out of this,’ Eugene said.
    There was enough tenderness in the way Edith spoke to Eugene to make Rosie suspect that she had a crush on him. And if the crush wasn’t quite mutual, it was still clear that Eugene was extremely fond of her.
    In several spots the sewer had worrying cracks caused by bombing, and in one place the ceiling had partly collapsed. They had no choice but to squeeze beneath it, wary of bringing the roof down.
    The final two-hundred-metre section was a circular stone pipe. They had to stoop, but it was easier on the nose because no sewage ran into this section of the pipe. At its mouth, the pipe emerged into a steep-sided ditch.
    After clambering up an embankment, they found themselves amidst the rusty rails and overgrown tracks of a railway depot more than two kilometres from where they’d set off.
    It had been a passenger train storage and maintenance yard before the invasion, but passengers weren’t encouraged to travel into the secure zone around Lorient, so there were no trains left, and the only sidings in use were a pair that had been extended half a kilometre to serve a concrete mixing plant built by the Germans.
    The mixing plant was visible over the tops of trees, though dark green camouflage netting had been stretched across to make it hard to see from the air. After a full three-sixty to check that nobody was in sight, Eugene dashed across a dozen rusted and overgrown tracks, before squatting down beside a disused signalling hut.
    ‘What’s the hold-up?’ Rosie asked.
    Eugene sat Edith against the side of the hut. He shook his arms and wriggled his fingers, while simultaneously rubbing his boots on the rough grass to clear the filth trapped in the soles of his boots.
    ‘My hands have gone numb,’ he explained.
    Rosie was straining under the weight of the pack and machine gun. She thought about setting it down, but wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to lift it up again. She