Breach

by W. L. Goodwater

  Then the old man elbowed his way to the front. The others fell silent as he pointed again at Ehle. When he spoke, it was that same unnatural voice, and yet not the same. It was weaker, strained, aged. It was the voice of the same man—Martin Voelker—but with none of the pride, none of the haughtiness. He sounded broken, weary, and desperate.

  “What did he say?” Karen asked, cursing herself for not picking up more of the language.

  “He . . . he is asking me,” Ehle answered softly, “to help him.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “To help him stop himself.”

  Before Karen could consider what that could possibly mean, the old man crumpled to the floor, his bone-thin legs suddenly turned to water. Facedown in the dust, he looked more like a jumble of dirty clothes than a fallen man. One of the women stood over him, a bloodied brick clutched in a delicate hand.

  The little boy ran over to him and began to kick him. This was not a child at play; the blows fell hard, splintering ribs with each terrible, snapping strike.

  Karen, aghast, reached out and grabbed the boy’s arm. “Stop! How could you?”

  The boy turned slowly to her. Unblinking eyes stared hungrily at her; not the eyes of a child, or even of a human, but dark, seething pools from which no light escaped. The boy was smiling, the slit of his mouth too large for his face, revealing a mouth sharp with fangs. Karen shoved him back as hard as she could and he fell, tripping over the fallen old man. But then the women started toward her. The closest one dropped the brick as she reached out for Karen’s throat with clawed fingers.

  With a shouted word of magic, Karen sent a wave of force out and into the woman’s chest. It should have only been enough to stun her, but instead it picked her up like a discarded toy and sent her body careening across the room. She smacked against the far wall and tumbled down to the ground like a bundle of broken sticks.

  The magic had come so easily. It lit up her veins, loosened her joints. She hadn’t meant to use so much power, but it had been ready for her call, eager. She felt her lips tugging into a grin.

  Then the second woman was suddenly in front of her, less a woman now and more a bony knot of talons and teeth. The little boy was just behind her, his skin now lifeless gray and his eyes wide with black malice. Karen summoned a kinetic shield just as the woman lunged for her; the magic seized up but held back the assault, if only for an instant: long enough. They ran for the far door, slamming it behind them as they passed through into an empty hallway.

  “Hold it shut!” Karen said to Ehle as she scrambled for her chalk. Claws raked the other side of the door, but Ehle’s shoulder held it in place as she quickly traced symbols around the frame.

  “I do not—”

  “There,” Karen said, stepping away. Her magic began expanding quickly, creeping over the door like ethereal vines, sealing it. Ehle moved back. A moment later, the monstrous things inside the room crashed into the door with terrifying force, but the barricade held.

  “See?” Karen said. The magic tingled in her head like too much rum. “You Germans aren’t the only ones who know how to make a good wall.” Inhuman voices raged behind the door, but Karen was smiling. Her skin tingled with energy. They’d almost just died, but she had never felt more alive.

  Ehle did not share her amusement. He pointed down the hallway behind them. Something was moving in the dark. Coming toward them.

  “Run,” Ehle said. “Run!”

  FIFTY-TWO

  He followed. He did not know why, but he followed.

  The earth beneath his feet felt solid, but nothing else did. He didn’t know why he was here, what he was trying to do, or for whom. He wasn’t even sure of his own name anymore. His head hurt, but maybe that was another illusion, another trick. He was limping but couldn’t remember why. Something in his head told him he’d been attacked by a frog (a frog with a gun . . . no, a flying tool chest!), but that thought only left him more convinced than ever that he’d lost his mind.

  But it didn’t matter if he was crazy. Because he had seen her.

  He had stumbled out into the night just as a car pulled away out front. Something in that car mattered (or was it someone?), but he didn’t remember what. He watched it go, head thumping, trying to remember the right emotion: should he be angry? Sad? Lost?

  And then she had appeared.

  She pulled up in a car. She hadn’t gotten out, but he had seen her plain enough. Karen. That name he remembered. That name, and that face. He saw it in a photograph paper-clipped to her file while he (no, they; someone else was with him) waited for her airplane to land. He saw her face smeared with dirt and smiling when they snuck into East Berlin. And he saw it waiting at the end of his gun.

  He’d killed her.

  But she was still alive.

  When she drove off, he hadn’t stopped to think; he just ran. He wasn’t so nuts that he thought he could keep up with an automobile, but that didn’t really matter. He just had to follow. He was sinking under the waves and she was a rope dangling in the water.

  He almost caught up with her when she got hit by another car, but she had run off before he could reach her. He hoped she wasn’t hurt, but if a bullet to the head hadn’t done the trick, what could a little car wreck do to her?

  She was going north, which felt wrong (though not as wrong as west). He needed to go east, but couldn’t do it alone. Memories, orders, desires, and commands piled up in his head, filling his thoughts with twisted metal and broken glass. There was no sense to be made of it, no order left in the chaos.

  So he followed.

  He found her as she and another man prepared something on the ground in front of the Wall. He had enough sense left to wait and watch rather than face the frogs again. He huddled in the shadows until the night erupted in light and she vanished into the broken Wall. She was going east. He followed, through a park, through the broken Wall, and into the silent streets beyond.

  He tried to think what he would say to her when he finally reached her.

  Karen, who am I?

  Karen, why aren’t you dead?

  Karen, does this mean I can come home?

  Her name was an anchor, a thin thread holding his sanity in check. He had to find her. He had to speak to her. If she knew him, if she could see him, then maybe she was still alive, and if she was still alive, maybe this had all been a terrible dream, and maybe he could still wake.

  The city beyond the Wall was empty. The sky was dark (too dark for this hour) and the streets abandoned. Where was this? He expected to see Soviet soldiers on patrol, or refugees waiting for a chance to escape through the failing Wall, or at least signs of life. But this felt less like East Berlin and more like a graveyard, the gray buildings looming like tombstones, the grimed street signs like forgotten epitaphs.

  And Karen was nowhere to be found.

  Had she been the dream? The vain hope of a doomed fool?

  Did it matter?

  He went east on numb legs. There were tears on his cheeks.

  “Are you lost?” The words crashed violently into his thoughts, stopping him midstep. The echoing solitude of this strange place had enveloped him so fully that another voice almost finished his rapid fall into madness.

  “Sir?” the voice asked again, coming from behind and to the left. “Did you get the summons too?”

  Somehow he turned toward the sound. There was a girl (maybe twelve or thirteen) standing there, in the doorway of a grim- looking house. Her face was white, her hair brown, tied up under a blue shawl. She looked hungry, he thought, and then he realized she was speaking German. This surprised him, but why? Wasn’t this still Berlin? Wasn’t it?

  “I am looking,” he said in halting German, “for a woman.”

  The girl didn’t seem to notice he had never quite mastered the hard-edged language. “I see. She probably got the same summons,
” she said, holding up a scrap of paper. “She is probably at the church.”

  “Church?” He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

  “The soldiers came. They want us all to come to the church,” the girl said. She came closer. “The Reichsleiter has a plan. He is going to save us.”

  He didn’t understand some of her words; she was talking too fast. His mind was stumbling over itself trying to form words in English, so responding in German seemed impossible. But he did not have to respond, as she reached out and took his hand.

  “You look afraid,” she said.

  “I am,” he replied. “I am afraid I have done something that cannot be made right.”

  “My mother told me not to be afraid, that everything will work out.”

  His chest ached; his memories burned. “I hope she was right,” he said.

  “Will you take me? My parents . . . they are gone,” she said. He saw now that her resolve was a facade, a faltering one. Beneath the cracks, he saw sorrow. “We have to go. Everyone will be at the church. The woman you are looking for,” she said, carving a rough smile onto her face with no small effort, “I am sure she will be there.”

  What is this forsaken place, emptied of everything but an orphan? Where have you led me, Karen? Are you here waiting for me on one of these quiet streets? Am I chasing a shadow?

  He squeezed the girl’s hand. It was light to the touch, almost airy. “Lead the way,” he said, and thought her smile looked a little more real.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Karen and Ehle burst out of the building through a back door and ran for an alleyway, death close at their heels. As they scrambled into the narrow passage, Karen stumbled over the words to a spell, then corrected herself just in time. Her magic shot out at the building at the head of the alley and it exploded, burying the nearest creatures in a shower of rock and mortar. More came, and she sent broken shards of brick through the air, cutting them down.

  Something with clacking fangs dropped just in front of her, but the words came easily now, the combat spells she’d learned dutifully but never expected to use outside of a fencing bout: fire and force and power. The creature yowled as Karen’s magic pummeled it. Karen raised her voice louder, summoning even more of the latent magic running through Auttenberg, one hand outstretched, the other clasped white-knuckled around her locus.

  There was a sudden tug at her arm. The magic stopped, dammed up by the distraction, and she gasped at its absence. It was like someone had punched her in the gut. She turned toward the new threat, but it was Ehle.

  “Karen, come,” he said. “You destroyed it. But we must go.”

  He was right; the thing was nothing more than a stain on the cobblestones. She nodded, relaxing her grip on the leather pouch. “Let’s go,” she said, breaking into a run.

  She did not bother to glance back for fear of what she’d see. Ehle reached the alley’s end and rushed out into the road, but just as Karen was about to follow she felt something grab her. Claws knifed into her shoulder and pulled her off her feet and down to the unforgiving ground.

  She twisted and scrambled up. It was the boy, his shape almost unrecognizable. His jaw had unhooked, his mouth opening impossibly wide to show row after row of yellowed teeth. Sinews strained against his skin like trapped snakes. Talons, red with her blood, clicked sharply on the asphalt.

  Words came quickly to her lips, but the boy came quicker. She dove under his mad lunge, rolling away as he crashed into the building with a shuddering thud. He was on her in an instant. She fell back, pushing his claws and fangs away. He snapped at her, but at last she got her feet up into his stomach and heaved. The boy grunted as he lost his grip and went airborne.

  He was on his feet and coming for another assault in an instant. Behind him, more nightmarish things skittered down the alley, howling for blood.

  The creature that had once been a little boy threw himself at her, mouth open wide enough to swallow her whole.

  And then he evaporated in a torrent of fire that erupted from Karen’s outstretched hand.

  The horrible black shapes behind him were soon consumed as well, leaving nothing behind but ash on charred brick. The fire did not stop; it tore through the alley and spouted out the far end like an incinerating tidal wave. It scorched the street, the buildings, the air.

  All her life Karen had dreamed of power like this. When the examiners first came to her school and tested all the students for magical aptitude, she’d been afraid. Magic wasn’t natural. Magic was dangerous. What if she passed their tests and they came and took her away from her family and her friends?

  But then she had passed. The examiners had been kind and complimentary. She was selected, not to be stolen from her bedroom in the middle of the night, but to take extra classes, to read interesting books, to prepare for college and beyond. Magic wasn’t something to fear; it was who she was, and it was who she was going to become.

  Even from the start, the rules had seemed so arbitrary. When her instructors described the purpose of a locus, she assumed it was a training aid, not a requirement for even the most skilled magicians. When they were taught to memorize spells that had been written in the 1400s, she had asked when they would learn to write their own.

  Magic was supposed to be freedom, but all she was taught was conformity.

  But now that freedom filled every cell in her body with a fire hotter than the one that had burned away their pursuers. This was how magic was always supposed to feel: untamed and wild. Feral. Man had tried to domesticate it, but now it was showing its teeth. With this fire, she could cleanse all of Auttenberg, all of Berlin. What could stop her now? Who would dare? She was grinning like a fool, laughing like a drunk fool, before she realized that she had just killed dozens of people.

  The fire stopped.

  Its absence threatened to drown her. Her head buzzed; her ears roared with silence. The power was gone and without it, she felt hollow, like a brittle china doll.

  What was this place? What had it done to those women, that boy? And what was it doing to her? A small taste of some untapped strength and suddenly she goes mad? That wasn’t her. She suddenly felt very cold.

  Ehle was gone. He probably was still running, probably thought she was right behind him. She looked around; there were probably more of those things lurking. Worse, the man behind that terrible voice was out there. Voelker, Ehle had called him. The chief Nazi magician. The one with the book.

  She was on her knees. Get up. Move. Her body didn’t obey. Her limbs felt like concrete.

  Somehow she found her way to her feet. Her legs trembled; her muscles ached. She felt like she was going to throw up. But there was no road back, only forward. She might be hurt, tired, and afraid, but she had to see this through. If I can stand, then I can walk. She shuffled her feet and took a step. And another.

  Whatever this place was, it wasn’t going to stop her. Not when there was work to do. The world wasn’t going to save itself.

  She did not know which way to go or what she was looking for, but she knew she had to keep moving. So she went east, watching for anything moving in the dim twilight. She saw nothing and no one, until she turned a corner and walked right into an oncoming patrol of Soviet soldiers.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Ehle did not know how long he had been running before he realized Karen was not with him. It was only the sound of his own feet he heard echoing, mocking. His hands hardened into fists. Another failure paid for by someone else’s sacrifice. He reached in vain for his lost locus, hoping to draw on its refining power to tear this whole city down and salt the damn earth.

  But it was gone, of course. He had no magic with which to sate his fury, just memories and regrets.

  I am sorry, he thought. I am sorry.

  If only anyone was left to hear it.

  He looked up at the old night sky. Somehow it was still the same day V
oelker used the forbidden book. It was an impossible thought, but a helpful one. That meant he knew where Voelker was: the headquarters for the Reich Office of Magic. In a perfect expression of Nazi hubris, Voelker had converted a seventeenth-century Lutheran church to house the Reich’s magicians. Ehle had been there more than once, even then marveling at the Reichsleiter’s gall. They had been the princes of the world then, fated to rule it by divine fiat. Victory had been more than a certainty; it was theology.

  But then the world had thrown down their would-be Aryan gods, smashed their idols, and laid waste to their temples. Except for Auttenberg.

  The memory of Voelker’s words spoken through the old man left an icy touch on his skin: Please, Erwin. Please. It is becoming too much for me. I can only hold it back for so long. Help me. That too had been Voelker, somehow; some splinter of that great, doomed man awash with panic and regret.

  Whispers and madness, that was all Auttenberg held now.

  But those were not the most chilling words he had heard from his former leader. No, those had come from the strong, assertive voice that rang with an arrogance unchecked by the last ten years of defeat.

  Thank you, the alien voice had said. This could never have been possible without you. It is right that you see how it ends.

  Yes, it was right that he be here. And it needed to end.

  The church was not far. It would not be long now.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The strange, stale Auttenberg air suddenly shimmered with spent magic. The colonel felt it hot in his lungs, like the acrid smoke from a cheap cigar. It came from the next block of houses, where he had sent Kirill to lead a scouting party. He locked eyes with Leonid and together they ran toward the sounds of shouting.

  Kirill was down, dazed and leaning against a building. His assailant was on her feet, surrounded by soldiers. She started to speak, but the colonel’s men were not inexperienced with magicians; the butt of a rifle to her stomach stopped her spellcasting cold. The magic slipped away.