All the Light We Cannot See: Parts Zero–Two

Werner’s favorites are five faded frescoes on the ceilings of the grandest upper rooms, where bees as big as children float against blue backdrops, big lazy drones and workers with diaphanous wings—where, above a hexagonal bathtub, a single nine-foot-long queen, with multiple eyes and a golden-furred abdomen, curls across the ceiling.

There are flame-throwing booby traps, a net of pillboxes with periscopic sights; they have stockpiled enough ordnance to spray shells into the sea all day, every day, for a year.

Water surrounds the city on four sides. Its link to the rest of France is tenuous: a causeway, a bridge, a spit of sand.

A second anti-air battery fires from a distant corner of the city, and then the 88 upstairs goes again, stentorian, deadly, and Werner listens to the shell scream into the sky.

Behind a fourth-floor window on the rue des Patriarches, a miniature version of her father sits at a miniature workbench in their miniature apartment, just as he does in real life, sanding away at some infinitesimal piece of wood; across the room is a miniature girl, skinny quick-witted, an open book in her lap; inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

Each time she asks to accompany him, he demurs.

After a scientific expedition to America, Aronnax ruminates over the true nature of the incidents.

If only they had an impregnable submarine like the Nautilus.

A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates.

It is, verbatim, a sentence he and Jutta heard on Deutschlandsender radio three days before.

In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

Great distending clouds of chalk and earth and granite spout into the sky.

A second shell screeches overhead, and Marie-Laure shrieks, and the chandelier above her head chimes as the shell detonates somewhere across the estuary.

The kitchen is a welter of fallen shelves and pots.

Volkheimer approaches; his big solicitous face presses close.