Chapter 6: What the Wire Could Not Stop

The message came in October, folded so small it fit inside the seam of a laundry bag, and Connie carried it back to the dormitory with a face so carefully arranged that Ruth knew, before a word was said, that something in the camp’s slow balance had shifted.

“There’s a shipment,” Connie said, once the door was shut and the nearest civilian volunteer had moved out of earshot. “Quinine. Sulfa. A guerrilla contact of my uncle’s has a way to get part of it inside the wire, through the vegetable deliveries, if someone in the hospital can make sure it reaches Helen instead of the commandant’s office.”

“How much?”

“Not enough to matter to the whole camp. Enough to matter to whoever Helen decides needs it most.” Connie’s hand, when she finally opened it, held nothing but the memory of the paper she’d already burned. “It isn’t free. Nothing outside this fence is free anymore. He wants information in return—troop movements the commandant’s staff talk about carelessly in front of internees they’ve stopped bothering to consider a threat. Small things. Numbers. Nothing any of us could be blamed for overhearing.”

“And if we’re caught passing it back out?”

“Then it stops mattering whether we were blamed for overhearing it.” Connie sat down heavily on the edge of her cot, the performance of calm finally slipping. “I’ve thought about this longer than I’ve told you, Ruth. I think we do it. I think the alternative is watching people die of something that has a cure sitting three miles from this fence, and telling myself I chose safety over doing anything at all.”

~ ☆ ~

Helen took the news the way she took most things that mattered—without visible reaction, and with a question that cut straight to the arithmetic. “How often? How much, and how often, and what happens the first time the amount doesn’t match what the manifest says it should?”

“I don’t know yet,” Connie admitted. “I know it’s a risk. I know I’m asking you to take it without a guarantee.”

“I’ve been taking that risk every week since Bataan,” Helen said. “The only thing that’s new is having a source instead of a shortage to blame it on.” She was quiet for a moment, turning the ledger she still kept over in her hands without opening it. “Tell your contact yes. Tell him I want as much quinine as he can move and I’ll take the sulfa too, and tell him I don’t much care what it costs the rest of you to get it to me, because I’ve buried three patients this month I shouldn’t have had to, and I’m done doing arithmetic that comes out the same way every time.”