"In times of war, you do what you must, become what you must. Some embrace it, some try to resist it, and others abuse it. I am guilty of all three."
Virginia Carroll has been fighting her whole life, against herself and against what she is drawn to...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
July 25h, 1944
Once again, I found myself in that tower of a room. Not much changed in my probationary period, the faucet still dripped and the voices still echoed in my mind. It was all so familiar and all the more suffocating. Another two weeks of imprisonment would have felt like an eternity if I hadn't been given some kind of freedom. A fraction of release was provided by the daily, escorted walks I was allowed in London. It seemed that while I had been hidden away, just down the hall had been posted a lookout in case I had attempted to escape my rooms. Now, with my wings allowed to stretch for these short weeks of consideration by my superiors, I could see my guard face to face.
His name was something I wasn't cleared to know but I studied every inch of his face out of a desperate attempt for some kind of connection. For any kind of connection other than the wild girl who still lived in my mirror. His face was scarred, his eyes were gaunt, and his accent was deeply Scottish when he dared speak a word. For the most part, he was a silent guard, leaving nothing to connect with. Just me and that wild mirror girl. She had served me well, I supposed.
I tried my hardest to make my guard a more willing companion. On my jaunts around London's dusty streets. I knew that it would never work but I could still try? A new mission. With no name and hardly any hints to go on, I assigned him a new name every morning. David. William. Frank. He never answered to them and I supposed it didn't really matter. Names didn't matter on the streets of London, just destination and journey. You could be anyone here, carving something new out of the rubble.
It was thrilling, that prospect. Any inspiration I might have had for potential fronts, aliases, or characters had been drained from my mind with the probation and the looming prospect of no further assignments. I didn't know that I'd have the chance to be on assignment again.
I tried to feel enthused at the small mission I had set for myself: trying to make my guard show any kind of emotion. It was slow going and eventually, I gave up trying to get him to feed off the excitement I felt at being released from the hotel.
Part of the appeal of the London streets was the past I knew my family had here. My mother had lived here. She didn't speak of her time often-what else was new?- but she had lived here. From the age of ten till after the war. Her service, which I had assumed until Lawson's secret was nursing, had left her scarred and obviously unwelcomed in England. She had come to America, landing in New York in 1920, and had been there ever since. Her accent was the only giveaway: an amalgamation of childhood German, occasional Yiddish, and the years spent in England. No one could tell where she was from, really, and maybe that was the point.
I would have liked to scour the city for any kind of sign of Miriam. Some mark or scar in this city's flesh that might have been made by my mother. If I wasn't to return to the front, I could at least face another kind of war. I could understand the woman my mother was and how she had become the woman I knew. I wanted to but I didn't know where to start. The city was vast and my friend still followed every step. A trip to the Public Records or trying to hunt down a census with my mother's name would be nearly impossible with the time that I had.
