Blood for Blood

by Ryan Graudin

  “What makes you think Luka told them?”

  Miriam’s laugh had no humor in it. “What makes you think he didn’t? How many lies has Herr Löwe told to get his way? Didn’t he betray you before just so he could win the Axis Tour and the Führer’s approval?”

  His revenge against Adele. God, it all seemed so petty now. So stupid and petty.

  “Victor Löwe is the Reich’s hero, and now he has a chance to save it. An opportunity you’ve practically handed him.”

  “I disagree,” Yael said.

  “You can’t just go blindly trusting this boy—”

  “I’m not.”

  “We need answers,” Miriam shot back.

  “We’ll get them, but Luka can’t talk with your knife at his throat.”

  When Miriam pulled back the blade, it was rimmed with red.

  Luka’s throat burned. His investigative fingertips came back crimson. “If I’d wanted a shave…”

  Stupid. Petty. Stop. Miriam needed no extra stabbing incentives.

  Yael stepped between the two and locked her stare into Luka’s. There was no love (or hate?), no ice (or burning?) in her gaze. She was even better at cutting those things off than he was. She reached out to take Luka’s pulse, touch heavier than ever against his wrist as she launched into her control questions.

  “What is your name?”

  “Luka Löwe,” he managed through his traumatized larynx.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Did you tell the SS about our mission?”

  Luka shook his head. “No.”

  “Have you had any contact with Reichsführer Himmler or his men?”

  Again, “No.”

  Yael held his stare another second. She dropped his wrist. “He’s telling the truth.”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “I do,” Yael said. “Look at his eyes.”

  “Tears are easy to fake.” It was only after Miriam said this that Luka realized he was still crying. Full tears now. Too much for even a soft leather sleeve to sop up.

  “His pupils are constricted. If he were lying, they’d be owl wide,” Yael explained. “His pulse is steady. He has none of his traditional tells.”

  “He’s fooled you before.”

  The Kaiten kiss.

  “Yes, well.” Yael cleared her throat. “I was distracted.”

  Luka had lied many times in his life. But not then. Not now.

  Miriam wasn’t convinced. The second skinshifter’s hand was married to the hilt of her knife as she turned back to Luka. “If you’re not here to get information, then why are you here?”

  Luka had nothing left. He’d been bled of blood and defenses and stupid, petty remarks.

  “Because of Yael,” he said.

  Both fräuleins watched his pupils. Both saw the pinprick truth.

  Miriam sheathed her knife. Yael turned away.

  It wasn’t just Luka’s heart that hurt. He could only hold his nausea back long enough to run out of the barn, into the yard. He braced against the weathered wall as the heaves came, and came, and came. Lasting long past the contents of his stomach.

  His face was all tears and bitter beard-bile. Luka smeared this away with his sleeve, gagging on the smell of wet Scheisse leather. Or was it the dog—still buzzing with rot, not ten meters away—he smelled? The scents were the same.

  They were all dead.

  Another heave (dry, full of nothing) overcame Luka as he reached for the dog tag around his neck. Blood of himself. I want to be like you, better/stronger/more. War hero. Loyalist lemming. Murderer. He pulled and kept pulling, until the line of fire on the back of his neck matched the front. Until the links snapped, not so strong after all.

  What good is it?

  For most of Luka’s life, the jacket had been too large. Dragging past his fingertips, rubbing his knuckles, weighing him down. Only in the past year or so had it truly begun to fit. Father’s shape, Father’s form. It felt too small now. Suffocating his skin as he pried it off. He shoved the dog tag in its pocket, took his pistol out and reholstered it in his waistband. He didn’t bother holding his breath as he walked to the still Alsatian. Its stench was everywhere. With two hands he took Kurt Löwe’s jacket and draped it over the carcass. Brown leather covering blood-matted fur.

  Luka couldn’t go back to the barn. Not just yet. Not now that all of him knew—the choice Miriam and Yael and oh so many others never had. The choice he’d made not to ask more questions, find more answers, because he’d seen the cost of true resistance at the Grosser Platz (inferno in the skin, Luger to the skull, BANG).

  I was afraid.

  Still am.

  Guilt crushed Luka anyway, pressing down with a galaxy’s weight. All those stars. All those hundreds of thousands and millions of stars…

  He made his way through the patchy weeds to the farmhouse steps, where he sat, head in arms. Feeling everything.

  CHAPTER 36

  The pictures couldn’t be real.

  That’s what Felix told himself as he stared at the photographs. Kids laid out on cold tables—white hair first—their stillness seeping through time and ink. Most of them had been… dismantled. Cut open. Insides spilled out. Someone with bent crab-leg handwriting had sorted through these pieces, taken inventory. Bone density, urine samples, blood analysis, all glands and organs measured. Thyroids—there were lots of pictures of those—spread out like fleshy butterflies before being sliced, diced.

  Crustacean writing on the photograph by Felix’s foot told him that particular thyroid belonged to Inmate 125819ΔX. Not a criminal, but a girl. He knew this because the numbers matched a different picture: Anne Weisskopf. 125819ΔX. Preinjection. She looked close to Felix’s own age. She looked scared. Her eyes reached through the camera lens, pleading.

  In Tokyo, he’d wondered how face-changing worked. What made it possible? Now the answers were spread at his feet, and all Felix could do was cover his eyes. It was easier not to look at Anne Weisskopf and her insides, so he sat in the straw, his good hand over his face. All he could feel was the morphine Luka had just given him, glowing through his arteries, veins, capillaries. Taking the iron in his blood and making it shine.

  A scuffle and a yell made Felix peer through his fingers. Miriam was on top of Luka, knee to chest, knife to throat. Yael was trying to intervene. A drama unfolded. Even though the scent of motor grease mixed with golden-sweet horse feed inside Felix’s nostrils, it seemed as if he were watching a show on the Reichssender. Yells, tears, knife-wielding… all of it went through an extra filter of detachment.

  “Who were you talking to on the telephone?” Yael asked Miriam.

  “The Reichsführer. He thought he was ordering Dr. Geyer to destroy all traces of Experiment Eight-Five.…”

  Felix’s phone call to SS-Standartenführer Baasch had made the rounds, all the way back to Miriam. But how had Miriam convinced Reichsführer Himmler he was talking to this Dr. Geyer fellow? Unless…

  Unless ears could lie… Doppelgängers could change their vocal cords to sound like anyone. Yael had shifted her own to sound like Adele. What was to stop one of the SS doppelgängers from impersonating his father?

  Real, wrong, false, right, what was truth, twisting, everything was twisting…

  What if the Gestapo never had his parents at all? What if Mama and Papa really were at Vlad’s safe house, alive and unharmed? What if Felix—not Yael—was the rat, scrambling as frantically as he could toward SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s trap?

  All these realizations hit Felix at once. Slam, slam, slam as he watched Miriam lower her knife from Luka’s throat. As he listened to Yael question the victor. Information had been leaked, and both women were on the hunt. It wouldn’t be long before their attentions turned to Felix.

  Should he run? (Out of the question. Fleeing on morphine legs wouldn’t get him very far.) Should he tell Miriam and Yael the truth, beg for mercy? (But what if Papa’s voice really had bee
n Papa’s voice? What if Felix only had a day and a half, less now, to save him?)

  Already they were walking around the pile of dead paper children. Yael knelt in front of Anne Weisskopf’s file, her skirt flowering over hay and hellish things. She grabbed the inside of his wrist, pressed her fingers to his pulse.

  Good, lesser, evil, lies, death, so many shifting skins… there was so much to focus on. Too much. Felix had to narrow his sights. The one thing he knew for certain was this: He could not, would not risk Papa’s death. Lying was his only option.

  “What is your name?”

  “Felix Burkhard Wolfe.” Felix stared at the powdered bridge of Yael’s nose as he answered. The not real feeling filmed his insides. He clung to it.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Felix, did you tell the SS about our mission?”

  One of the few useful things SS-Standartenführer Baasch had given Felix was a list of things to avoid when telling a lie. Body language basics: no swallowing, no looking to the left, no hesitating. There wasn’t much he could do about the shape of his pupils or the rate of his pulse.…

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  Miriam loomed nearby, watching his eyes with hawklike intensity. Yael’s face was a blank slate as she read Felix’s own. Could they see? Was his body betraying him, inkblot pupils spreading out? Pulse peppering—lies, lies, all lies—through his skin?

  “Have you had any contact with Reichsführer Himmler or his men?”

  “The last time I saw the SS was when they shoved us in the Immelmann IV to fly us back for our trial,” Felix told them.

  “That didn’t answer her question,” Miriam pointed out.

  “No, I haven’t contacted Reichsführer Himmler, or any of his men. Why would I? All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is to get back to my family. Adele, Mama, Papa, all of them are safe with the resistance.” Were they? Yael seemed to think so, which was all that mattered for this lie. She couldn’t possibly know about the leverage Baasch had on him, because that leverage might not even exist.

  “No pupil dilation. No pulse variation,” Yael declared after a moment.

  Felix blinked and wondered how. Maybe it had something to do with the surrealism of everything.… Even his body couldn’t tell the difference between true and false, pain and drug, Wolfes and doppelgänger ghosts.

  “Someone did it.” Miriam was still suspicious. Still watchful. “Who else, if not these boys?”

  “It could’ve been anyone.” Yael dropped Felix’s wrist. Her fingers migrated to her temples, pressing either side of her head as if she could squeeze a solution out. “It must have been someone from Molotov. Or Germania. Or the National Socialists discovered our Enigma code and managed to listen in.”

  “If that’s the case…” Miriam’s breath was more of a hiss. “What else does the SS know? Yael, if they’re aware of our assassination plans, they could be waiting for us in the Führerbunker. The real Führer could be transferred anywhere. The Kehlsteinhaus. The Wolfsschanze.”

  “We don’t know that,” Yael said.

  “That’s right. We don’t know!” Miriam kicked at a tuft of straw. The woman’s knife was put away, but she still looked ready to stab someone. “We could be walking straight into an ambush, and we’d have no idea!”

  Only then did Felix notice the lump behind Miriam’s foot. It was the syrette Luka had just used, emptied of its morphine. Morphine now soaring like a golden sunrise inside Felix, turning pain into peace, lies into truth.

  The drug! It was the drug that had spared him—calming his heartbeat, tightening his pupils. Yael must’ve thought Felix was still abstaining from the painkiller. If she saw the crumpled syrette, realized how it was affecting him…

  “We do have one advantage.” Yael waved her arm, indicating the files and photos. “Though it’d be better to get these records sorted in Germania. Henryka and Reiniger need to be informed about the leak as soon as possible.”

  Miriam’s foot kept scuffing the barn floor, kicking up enough straw to cover the syrette. Out of sight, out of suspicion.

  “I’m going to find Luka,” Yael said. “As soon as all this is cleaned up, we can depart for Germania. Agreed?”

  Scuff, stamp. Miriam nodded. Yael ducked through the half-open barn door. Felix sat; the drug in his veins climbed higher, shone brighter as Miriam started collecting the Doppelgänger Project documents. He considered the straw mound, wondering if he should try to dig up the empty syrette, pocket it. But no. Felix picked up Anne Weisskopf’s papers instead—brittle hair, brain matter, help me stare—and tucked them back into their manila envelope.

  Some things were better left buried.

  CHAPTER 37

  Luka hadn’t moved. He sat on the farmhouse steps, cradling his face inside his elbows, and kept sitting. The dead dog hadn’t moved either, but its stench was starting to fade. It was amazing what olfactory nerves could adapt to, what levels of denial the human body was capable of.…

  “Luka?”

  Yael. He hadn’t heard her approach. Everything in Luka wanted to look up and greet her. Everything in him dreaded it. But when he tried to move, he found that he couldn’t. The crush of skies remained. Who was he to slough it off?

  Yael settled on the step beside him. Her sweater brushed his bare arm. She said nothing. The silence squirmed inside Luka, twisted, twisted until he could no longer keep it.

  “I’m sorry, Yael. I didn’t know about the experiments. I thought the camps were for labor. I thought…” Luka stopped. He couldn’t imagine what he’d thought now: away and all. There was no excuse. Not for murder this massive. Not for all the suffering that had happened while he was off smoking cigarettes.

  He lifted his head. Most of the moon had decided to take the night off; what little remained hung as thin and useless as a fingernail clipping. Yael was but a sketch beneath its light—hair dripping silver down her shoulders, washed-out face. Her eyes were the focal point: dark as danger, whet by emotion.

  “You didn’t know. Is that the truth?” she asked finally.

  The truth. That’s what sat between them now. Not a wall of unknowns, but a chasm, bottomless, without end.

  How could things ever be even between them?

  “Yes. And no. I never knew, but I was too scared to know. But fear isn’t an excuse, and I—I don’t want to be a coward anymore.” Luka rubbed his hand through his hair—over the pearly scar (which felt like nothing now), down to the base of his neck (so empty without the dog tag links). “Is it too late to join?”

  “What?”

  “The resistance. Can I still join? Is there some list I add my name to? A blood oath? Or something?”

  Yael watched him for another moment. Her stare could not be more different from Miriam’s, but Luka still got the distinct feeling he was being judged. Every word weighed, every flicker of his pupil noted.

  “Consider yourself a member,” she said.

  “That’s all?” It didn’t feel like enough. (Why did it never feel like enough?)

  “I already did your background check. Luka Wotan Löwe. Born February 10, 1939, in Hamburg to Kurt and Nina Löwe.”

  Wotan. The wince-worthy name belonged to Luka’s grandfather. Antiquated even then. “You certainly were thorough.”

  “I had to know what I was getting into.”

  “So what am I getting into?”

  Yael’s arm drew away from his and pulled something from her sweater. She placed it in Luka’s palm. It was paper, he realized. Another photograph. He had to tilt it toward the distant barn light to see what he already knew was there: another young girl. Her portrait was made of opposites. Dark hair. Light skin. Terrified lips. Eyes that looked ready to make something flint, catch, explode. These held a different kind of strength. Something far deeper, far truer than the blitzkrieg brutality his father upheld.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” The picture felt so very rippable against Luka’s palm as he turned it over to
read the faint words on the back. “Yael Reider.”

  “I found it in the Doppelgänger Project files with all the others. I’d forgotten what I looked like. Until today.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Luka whispered. There were so many things he couldn’t imagine.

  “For years I just kept drifting. Face to face. Name to name.” Yael rolled up her left sleeve until her arm was bare next to his. “These tattoos were all I had to hold on to who I was.”

  Luka’s eyes struggled to adjust with the view, just as they had with the photograph. They focused first on the light parts: spots of star-kissed skin. It was only after a few seconds that the black lines seized his focus and would not let go. Wolves he couldn’t unsee. Marks that meant something.

  Luka was still afraid, but what good was it? His jacket was gone, and the truth was already between them, and he wanted to know who the hell this girl was and what made her so strong.

  “What do they mean?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 38

  Telling truth from lies was simple, once you learned the science behind it. Yael was having visions of veritas everywhere tonight.

  Truth: Luka wanted to join the resistance.

  Truth: Luka was afraid.

  Truth: So was she, still.

  Knowing when to trust someone wasn’t so cut-and-dried. It was a mysterious equation, made of heartstrings and gut feelings. So when Luka’s stare fell to her wolves and he asked “What do they mean?” Yael could not rely on a pulse or a pupil. There was only her iron voice:

  —TELL HIM WHO YOU ARE—

  Beginning to now. It was a long story, and at times hard to convey. Yael tried her best to do each wolf justice. The Babushka’s magical, miracle words. Mama’s fever-soothing fingers. Miriam’s bravery. (At this point in the narrative, Luka interrupted. “That Miriam?” he asked, rubbing the swollen knife memory on his throat.) Aaron-Klaus’s assassination attempt. (A second interruption: “I remember him. His face was on fire. I mean—not actually on fire. More like… lit.” Yael knew exactly what he meant.) Vlad’s training.