Authors: Laura Z. Hobson

The Trespassers (57 page)

Now the children sat together, waiting for the end of this voyage they would neither of them ever forget. Franz came on deck and went to them. His voice drifting toward her on the moving air was firm.

Then he came toward her and leaned on the rail beside her. Each word that came to her mind was wrong and stayed unsaid. He, too, after his first greeting, stared silently into the gray distance that had as yet no shape.

In a short while it would come, Vee thought, so vague at first that it would seem only a firmer block of fog. But any moment now the city would emerge, tone by tone, until it achieved its great reality. For all those long and maddening months, he must have dreamed toward this very moment; now it could hold for him only a bitterness that it should have turned into what it was.

A sudden rage seethed through her, at precisely what she did not know. Something had happened that needn’t have happened; she felt that now with a sharp, flinging sureness. The newspapers, magazines, and books were full of reports of the lashes and whips. Of the New Order’s concentration camps and secret chambers. But they did not tell of the lashes and whips of the world outside, under which a spirit could falter and a courage fail.

At her side, Franz leaned farther forward. The moment had come. There it was, taking shape through the mist, thrusting and reaching upward. Soon he would say something; everyone had to say something about this when he saw it before him for the first time.

“You know, Vee,” he said slowly at last, “here you are, going home to your own country—and yet in a way you are an exile, too.

Now, with the war begun, we are all of us exiles together, from all the ways and life of the past. We are all, everywhere in every land now, migrants to some new world of a more real freedom.”

She heard him draw a long breath. She felt his hand on her arm, and her heart spun with what he had said. It was true, it was like him to say it. She looked up and saw his eyes leave the towering scene before him and look back briefly to the open sea. Then once more they turned toward the city.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4532-3873-8

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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