City of the Sun by Juliana Maio

Maya most, the reassuring smells of home cooking, even though shewas not a great aficionado of these strange dishes. After their horrendous escape through Europe over the last fifteen months, she grew to appreciate the soothing feeling one gets from living within the protective walls of a family home. She folded her legs underneath her, rolled her head back, and closed her eyes. She wanted to have a home of her own one day. There would be a man there, of course, her one big love, who would cater to her every whim, and on whose shoulder she could rest her head while they talked about the future. She’d be giddy with happiness. It was an impossible dream now.
    “The Luftwaffe dropped seventy-four thousand tons of explosives over England in less than sixty days!” Erik stated as he scribbled some notes on the magazine, breaking the silence. “How is that possible? That would mean about eighteen-thousand bombs.”
    Maya responded with a shrug.
    He looked up and considered her for an instant before putting the magazine down. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t be talking about bombs. Are you still having nightmares about Poitier, sister?”
    “Sometimes,” she said, “but I’m fine.” She wasn’t. He was referring to the bombing that had hit the farm where they were staying after they’d fled Paris. The raid had killed the farmer’s youngest boy, who had stayed in the barn with Erik, tending to the geese, refusing to go to the basement of the main house when the first air-raid siren blasted. When the boy had dashed outside seeking a safer shelter, he’d been killed right in front of Erik. They couldn’t even make sense of the boy’s body afterward. Maya had been haunted by it ever since.
    Erik picked up the guidebook on the coffee table and flipped through the pages. “Why don’t you tour the city?” he said. “I know you’d like that.”
    She shrugged again. This was the only response he deserved or would get from her. Though she was dying to see the pyramids,she’d be damned if she showed him any sign of wanting to visit the city. It was certainly not her idea to come to this part of the world, and he knew her feelings very well. He never took her wishes seriously. When she’d suggested that they travel by land rather than crossing the Mediterranean, he had vetoed her on the spot, not trusting that their visas would hold up under scrutiny when they reached Syria, which was controlled by Vichy France. She had secretly hoped that something bad, but not catastrophic, would happen during their voyage to prove her right. And it did. Three days of wrenching seasickness befell them, and she was its worst victim.
    “You can smile, sister,” Erik teased. “Remember, we’re a team.”
    She made a tiny movement with her shoulder, her eyes still averted. Yeah, they were a team, that’s what he’d been saying since they went on the run after the Nazis arrived in Paris. Erik’s relationships within the scientific community had provided the contacts that enabled them to escape, while her role had been to serve as the family’s link to the outside world—she was basically the courier in the family.
    But she had a brain, too, a good one, and she wished he’d realize that she was no longer the same immature girl who, at thirteen, had been expelled from summer camp for sneaking into the boys’ cabin in the middle of the night. She hadn’t actually done anything bad—she and her friends had just sashayed around the cabin provocatively in their nightgowns during the surprise visit. The camp had promptly sent a telegram to her parents in Düsseldorf, but Erik, alone at home, had intercepted it and driven all the way to Berchtesgaden to pick her up, mercifully hiding the truth from Mutter and Vati.
    Maya’s relationship with her brother was complex, and she had to admit that she was partly to blame for this. Normally outspoken, she was often timid around him. It wasn’t just that he was eightyears older; he