a form of conscription with civic camouflage. There exists, in this country, a small group of people working to make the Service genuinely voluntary by 2055. We need you. If you are sixteen, you can defer. We can show you how. If you are fifteen, you have time to think. The pamphlet leaves an address: 14 Bahnhofstraße, knock on the back door, ask for Helga.
Mara had read the pamphlet twice. She had put it back inside the civics book. She had walked home that afternoon thinking very hard.
She did not tell her parents. She did not tell Lukas. She thought, instead, for two months.
In May, on a Saturday morning, she walked the two miles to 14 Bahnhofstraße. She walked the long way, by the canal, so that nobody she knew would see her. The house was a small, ordinary house at the end of a short street. There was a small bakery at the front. The back of the house was reached through a quiet alley.
She knocked on the back door.
A small old woman opened it. The old woman looked Mara up and down once, very carefully, with kind eyes.
"I am looking for Helga."
The old woman smiled.
"I am Helga. Come in. We have just put the kettle on."
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.