Before the child had woken from her mid-day slumber, a decision had been reached as to the fate of her arm, and it was not one about which Marinette felt comfortable.
The doctors had very quickly deemed amputation to be the most reasonable pathway, and had sent the girl to the proper team almost immediately upon arriving at the conclusion.
Marinette did not think the decision itself was necessarily the wrong one given the present circumstances—after all, the child couldn't feel the arm, couldn't move the arm, and already had a sickly yellow pooling at the end of her fingertips which could only mean that blood wasn't circulating either—but she was perturbed by the fact that she would not be allowed to assist.
Although most of the doctors at the base were more than willing to take her on as an aide for her skills alone, there were those who refused to work with a nurse whose linguistic abilities were not up to par. In the case of an amputation—and one involving a child no less—Marinette had been instructed to stay away.
She tried her best to bide her time. She knew, of course, that such a surgery would not be completed quickly, but an infinite number of possible complications meant that the wait was agonizing. She roamed from room to room, theatre to theatre, hoping to find something to take her mind off of her worries. She even opted out of her breaks and lunches after discovering that her idle mind contained flashes of only the absolute worst outcomes that could possibly befall such an undeserving recipient.
When, shortly before dinnertime, she heard her named being called frantically from the next room, her heart jumped into her throat and threatened to escape out her mouth. She dashed over, fearing the absolute worst, only to be met with a trio of truly frazzled nurses, who seemed to be too exasperated to be bringing news of the child's surgery.
"She won't stop speaking French!" the nurse cried, "We can't understand a word she's saying!"
"Won't you please talk to her?" asked another.
"Get her to calm down!" griped a third.
It took Marinette only a second to assess the situation. Inside of the room was a small, ill-mannered woman—or perhaps only a girl—no older than she, with mousey-brown hair that was more a mess than even the most overworked nurses and factory women would have thought proper to keep. She lay on a cot in the middle of the room, covered head to toe in all manner of injuries—some still only half-bandaged—and screamed and beat her mattress in a self-flagellating fury. The other patients cowered in fear of her, although it was obvious from her flailing that she was unable to rise up and attack them.
"Please calm down!" Marinette cried out as she entered the room.
Perhaps it was the sudden loud noise, or perhaps it was the fact that she had found another body speaking her native tongue, but the thrashing stopped suddenly, and the girl blinked at her in wide-eyed confusion, as though she had only just realized what a racket she was making.
"Now," Marinette continued calmly, as though she were hoping to impress upon the other that she was quite certain she was speaking to a sane individual, when in reality she had no idea if that was the case, "can you tell me what's wrong?"
"We're at war, dimwit," the girl spat.
Marinette was taken aback by this response, but she pressed on: "I… was hoping you could tell me about your injuries."
"Gee, sure, ma'am. I'd love to!" the girl smiled sarcastically, "This one here is from where they beat me. And this one is where I got slapped across the face. Like the blood? It's from the officer's stupid wedding ring—the cheating bastard. Oh! And this one here's from his boots when he was trying to crush my lungs. You ever had a punctured lung?"
Marinette couldn't say that she had. The girl kept going.
"I've got scratches from the forest, blisters from my shoes, bruises from being dumped in a trash-bin, a black eye and bleeding lip, and this lovely little lady right here."
The girl lifted up the tattered edge of her shirt to reveal a bullet wound that covered more than half her abdomen, nearly a week old and completely untreated.
"We need to take a look at that," Marinette tried to say calmly, but the panic of seeing such a large and grotesque wound on such a tiny person—especially one who seemed to care so little—threatened to creep into her voice with every syllable.
"What's the point?" the girl asked, her angry sarcasm melting into a defeated tone. "I'm no good to anybody now. Never was."
"I'm certain that's not—" Marinette began.
"Look around!" the girl cried, "I could have prevented this! I could have prevented all of this!"
"There's no way you could have—"
Although it had been many months since she'd had the opportunity to practice her skills, it seemed that Marinette's presence alone was enough to induce candor in even the most guarded individuals.
"I could've and I should've," the girl said with an air of finality, but she continued anyways. "See, I was a spy for the—"
"Should you really be saying that so loudly?" Marinette asked in a whisper, as though the walls had ears.
"They don't understand a word we're saying," the girl almost laughed, "Dumb Brits. Only speak English. Est-ce que tu me comprends?" she shouted at a terrified looking woman who showed absolutely no sign of understanding.
"At least let me examine your cuts," Marinette muttered as the girl continued with her story.
"I was a spy, see. For the French first, and then the British when we damn near lost it all, but pretending I was working for the Germans. I spent near eight months working for the bloody Nazis. Bringin' em tea. Pretendin' I respect 'em. 'Ah, Herr Goebbels, möchten Sie etwas Tee?' "Wie schön Sie sind, Herr Göring!" Bastards."
As the girl engaged more and more passionately in her narrative, Marinette had the opportunity to examine more of her wounds. She motioned to one of the other nurses, who was still hovering in the doorway to bring some antiseptic and bandages and got to work on the tiny, stinging cuts on her legs and arms.
"I heard everything. Every meeting, every conversation, every plan. They thought I was a regular German citizen. Sometimes I'm glad my father was so insistent we learn to speak it right, because I wouldn'ta lasted a day if they knew I was the 'enemy.'"
She paused and chuckled… "Well… they sure found out alright. Stupid."
The other nurse had returned with the requested supplies, plus a small pair of tweezers, and Marinette had begun the arduous effort of cleaning every individual wound on the girl's body.
"I heard about the errant bombers back in August. I knew they were errant, but by the time I'd managed to phone base, they'd already sent retaliation to Berlin. I knew I could have called earlier, but I was scared of bein' caught. Scared in September too, but I had to risk it. I knew where the planes were headed. I knew WHEN the planes were headed."
Marinette tried not to look it, but she was absolutely enthralled by the girl's story. She almost hoped it was true, although it was just as likely that her patient was absolutely loony and she was audience to little more than a delusion. Still, her effortless German and knowledge of specific occurrences gave credence to her tale.
"I thought maybe I could sneak into the marshal's office late past midnight and use his private radio insteada meeting up with my usual contact. Only… he wasn't sleepin' too well that night, and he caught me speakin' French into the microphone."
"So he did this to you?" Marinette asked.
"All 'cept what the branches added," she shrugged, "Say, you done pretty good on those scratches. Why didn't I notice you doin' that?"
"A nurse's touch, I suppose," Marinette replied nonchalantly. In truth, recounting her tale seemed to be acting as its own sort of anesthetic for the girl, who hadn't once noticed the stinging antiseptic solution which had touched her open wounds no less than a dozen times already.
"Right," she continued, "and I got a high paint tolerance. Always have. If I didn't, we probably wouldn't be talking. You ever have a broken rib? No, I asked that already…. You ever play dead after someone shoots you?"
Marinette couldn't say she'd done this either.
"Could I take a look at that?" she asked instead.
"What do you care what I give you permission to do?" she griped, but in-genuinely enough that Marinette took it as consent. "You already patched up the little stuff I told you not to. Why don't we just fix everything? Gimme a new set of organs while you're at it. I'm sure you got plenty layin' around these days."
Obviously, she was used to the dark sarcasm and gallows humor that the girl seemed to be using to cope, but it was true that the hospital had lost its fair share of patients this morning, and there were undoubtedly many more innocent bodies in the streets and morgues that had not made it to their doors.
"Anyways… The Marshall—after he's pretty sure I'm dead—has his officer thugs toss me in the dumpster, like I'm human garbage. Probably didn't want his fellow assholes to know he'd personally hired a spy to be his damn maid. I wait until it's quiet and then work my way outa the bag and try to meet up with my contact, but he's nowhere to be found. Maybe he split. Maybe his passport went through and he moved outa this hell hole of a continent. Maybe the Nazis found him first. I don't know. Either way, I'd lost my damn contact, and I couldn't just use any ol' radio."
"So what did you do?" Marinette asked, genuinely curious. She'd now fully accepted the story as being true.
"I walked, of course."
"But… the channel-"
"I walked and hitched rides, and then I took a boat. Stowed away on a cargo ship, thank goodness, and ended up arriving while the bombs were falling. I walked all the way from Berlin, and the sky was already on fire."
"You did everything you could."
"I could have waited, like a goddamn intelligent person, until I'd got a hold of a secure line. I coulda found a radio instead of tryin' to get to headquarters myself. I coulda called in back in August. Maybe I'da died then, but if Churchill hadn'ta sent those stupid planes to Berlin, maybe we coulda avoided this whole mess."
Marinette gulped. She wasn't sure, but she would bet her salary that those were the very planes she'd discussed with Private Lahiffe—one of which, she was quite certain, contained the soldier who continued to consume her thoughts even to this day, Private Agreste.
Still, Private Agreste was not at fault for this. This girl was not at fault for this. Even the politicians and generals who had ordered the attack couldn't have expected this level of retaliation for what she assumed had been a fairly small number of bombers. Destruction aside, the whole thing just felt so inevitable. So childish. So… stupid, as the girl had said.
"Sometimes things just… happen," Marinette said in a way that was meant to be comforting, but felt more foreboding than anything else.
"It's just wretched. All over a steaming pile of crap... And now I've blown my cover at the Reichstag, so I can't even work there again. If Kim gets a punch in on ol' Adolph, I won't be around to see it."
Marinette let the comment pass. It was common to hear talk of personally assaulting the Füher, but something about the way the girl said it felt familiar. Perhaps Kim was a fellow spy. She wasn't sure.
"Let's talk about your wound."
"What's to talk about?" the girl asked.
"First of all, the bad news. The bullet's still in there, and I don't think it makes sense to take it out at this point. You said you got shot several days ago, right?"
"Yeah. I'm only here today because someone shoved me too hard in the panic. Made me black out, and next thing I know I'm in a damn hospital bed."
Marinette continued: "The good news, though, is that it's healing cleanly. You'll always have a scar, but you can cover it easily with clothes and it shouldn't cause you any pain. Everything on your arms and legs should heal too."
"Gee, thanks ma'am. I lost my job, but at least I'll always have my looks," she replied mockingly.
"Perhaps you could enlist, or work as a nurse?"
"Like you? No thank you," the girl snorted, "Not that I don't appreciate what you're doing, but I don't take orders so good. Thought about joinin' the army once I realized I could, but I wouldn'ta made it through training. Too spirited, my dad says. Too independent, I say. I think Kim liked to call me a brat for it, but he's dumb as a box of rocks anyways."
"Can I ask what your name is?" Marinette asked, suddenly realizing she'd never asked.
"It's Alix, ma'am. Alix Kubdell."
"You're joking," Marinette gawked.
"Yeah, that's the kinda thing I'd joke about," Alix said, wrinkling up her nose.
"I served with your brother back in France. Jalil, right?"
"No kidding?" This time it was Alix's turn to be shocked. "It's the smallest world, I swear. How's the idiot doing?"
"I'm not sure…" Marinette confessed, "I know his unit is in Narvik. My friend Alya sends me letters, and she says things are going well. I can give you the address if you want to write to him."
"Damn, maybe I'll go to Narvik. I bet they don't know me in… Sweden?"
"Norway."
"Nah, can't do Norway. Too cold. I'll find somethin' south-side to do once I'm all healed up. Italy, maybe. I really screwed this one up, but we still have a war to win. I've got money on it."
She gave a sudden start, as though she'd remembered something important.
"Actually, I've got money against it… but some bets you just gotta lose."