While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) Read Free Page B

hay. The smell is pleasant, but fear enters the boy’s eyes.
    Father’s leather apron! The heavy leather will put the fire out! The boy runs and yanks the apron from the wall, together with its hook. But when he returns with his heavy load to the bale, he finds it burning brightly. Small black fragments leap through the air like fleas.
    He hears hysterical screaming from the entrance. “Felix! What’s going on in there? Open up, now!” Josephine. She just won’t let go.
    “I’ll be there in a minute!” the boy calls back and begins beating frantically at the bale. Then he feels a wave of heat on his back. The other scraps of paper! With all his thrashing about, a couple of them have floated up and landed on the woodpile where he found the sticks. In the blink of an eye, the bone-dry wood is ablaze. The billowing dark-gray smoke obscures the boy’s vision and disorients him. He lurches back, trying to gather his senses in the growing heat.
    “Josephine . . . Help!” The boy beats desperately at the burning wood with the leather apron, but instead of extinguishing the fire, all he does is send the embers flying. Small fires merge into larger fires and the crackling of the burning hay grows louder. The doors have been blocked by the fire. Paralyzed with fear, the boy stares at the flaming inferno, in the heart of which is a solitary black place: his father’s forge, stone clad in steel. If he manages to get in there, he can simply wait until the fire burns itself out. Half-blinded by smoke, the boy feels his way toward the forge. One step. No, not that way! He slaps at his sleeve, which has almost caught fire. Another step. There, he is almost there. The unbearable heat. Don’t think about it. Almost . . . almost . . .
    The boy feels his knees give way. A few feet from the shelter of the stones, he collapses to the floor . . .
    Josephine screamed and sat bolt upright in her bed. She looked around, perplexed. “Felix?”
    “What was it? Bad dream?” someone beside her murmured.
    Josephine blinked in confusion. The red-haired girl. Barnim Road Women’s Prison.
    Sweating and shaking, she sank back on her mattress. From farther back came the sound of snoring and someone moaning softly in her sleep, but otherwise the dormitory was silent. Beyond the barred windows, dawn was breaking. An owl or some other animal let out a shrill cry, reminding Jo of freedom and better days.
    She had always been the first to wake in the morning. “While the world is still asleep . . .” Words she had said so many times! At that hour, the world was hers, and only hers. She was free. She had looked forward to every new day.
    Now, though, she sought desperately to go back to sleep. But she could not push aside her memories of her younger brother.
    In the first weeks after Felix’s death, she had dreamed of him regularly. Strange, obscure dreams in which she sometimes saw the world through her own eyes, sometimes through his, as in the dream she had just woken from. The guilt had followed her into her sleep back then. But eventually, the dreams had grown less frequent and she became absorbed in her own life again.

    Her brother had died in the spring of 1889, on a beautiful and unseasonably warm Sunday. More than two years ago now. After church, her father, known to all as Schmied-the-Smith, told Josephine that he and her mother wanted to pay his sister a visit. Josephine was to keep an eye on Felix at home. She had been furious. When she was Felix’s age, no one had cared a jot about her. She would have liked to go visit her aunt, too!
    She had watched listlessly while her little brother occupied himself with various activities. Then she had gone to visit her friend Clara, four houses down.
    Clara was sick, and Josephine found her propped up among her lily-white embroidered sheets like a queen on her throne. She was surrounded by magazines, a glass of some deep-red juice, and a plate of pastries from the Ratsmann