We've numbered the chapters in Part 2 ourselves according to page breaks, and recommend you do the same just to keep track. Maddie's way too cool for chapter numbers, or even dates.
- Time for Mindblowing Revelation #1: Maddie is not dead. She's very much alive, and for the rest of the book, she'll by our guide. And by guide, we mean narrator.
We'd like to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for a brief orientation to Part 2: Maddie's narration is a bit easier to follow than Julie's because the story has caught up to her—and because Julie has already given us the backstory of the their friendship, Maddie can tell us what's happening in more or less linear time.
We do back up from Julie's last entry on November 28 to October 11, though, the day Maddie dropped Julie over France and then crashed the plane.
That's all you need to know to get your bearings on where we are now, Shmoopsters, so without further ado, let's get back to the story.
- Like Julie, Maddie is writing the story down—she's using her fancy new Eterpen and her pilot's notebook.
- Maddie somehow ended up with Julie's fake identity papers, which is a bad deal for Julie since she doesn't have the papers that identify her as Katherina Habicht, which was supposed to be her fake identity in France.
- Maddie doesn't have any identification papers herself because she's not supposed to be in France at all, which is also a bad deal.
- Maddie figures she'll be court-martialed if she writes any of this down, but she doesn't have anything else to do and she figures she'll be court-martialed anyway, plus she'll have to do an accident report, so she gets started on it.
Maddie titles this section "Accident Notes."
- She reports that she crashed in a field called Damask, near Ormaie, France on October 11, 1943.
- She describes what Julie has already told us: the antiaircraft fire, the damage to the plane, getting stuck in the climb, forcing Julie to parachute out before she tried to land.
- Maddie talks about surviving the crash and being met by an SOE reception committee, including a man code-named Paul, whom she ferried once in England.
- At first they think she's Verity, but she corrects them, telling them her name is Kittyhawk. Everyone is super impressed that she was able to land and deliver the explosives she was carrying without setting them off.
- Now we find out why Julie thinks Maddie is dead. The SOE operatives shot a German sentry earlier and need a way to dispose of the body; they also need to make the crash look accidental instead of like someone was trying to land a plane there.
- They take Maddie's clothes (someone thoughtfully loans her a coat and a girl named Mitraillette gives her a pullover) and dress the German sentry in them.
- Then they take everything they need out of the plane, put everything they need to get rid of in the plane, and put the German sentry in the cockpit.
- And then they set fire to the plane, which all explains why Julie thinks Maddie is dead.
- Two days later—October 13, 1943—Maddie is hiding in a tiny little space in the loft of the barn on the farm where this SOE circuit is based.
- She's a great danger to everyone around, and she hasn't told anyone that even though she's not religious, she is Jewish, which could add another wrinkle to the problem, to say the least.
- She has spent most of the past two days sleeping, which she says is just as well because she's exhausted and the place has been crawling with Nazis taking pictures of the crash site.
- She misses Julie.