by Ryan Graudin
He stopped. Pencil stabbing so hard into the paper it made a little hole.
The words did not feel like enough.
“Where’s an eraser?” he asked the room.
Yael grabbed the paper, skimming over his writing instead. “This is good!”
She passed the speech to Miriam before Luka could snatch it back.
“Numbers are easy to dismiss. That’s why they marked us the way they did.” Miriam tapped her forearm. “Numbers don’t hurt. Numbers don’t bleed. Choose one of the autopsy reports. Air that on the Reichssender if you want them to face the truth. Show people a child’s picture, give them a name, a birthday. Show them we’re flesh and blood. Not digits.”
Luka spent another half hour rereading the files. Flesh and blood and bone.
Choose one.
How could he choose just one when there were so many?
So many…
It wasn’t just the words blurring together, but the pages themselves. Luka stared at them until his eyes crossed and the stack melted into a blur. There was an ache in his shoulders that trickled all the way down his spine. Who knew paper could be so heavy?
Yael’s chair scraped out. “I think we could all use a bit of fresh air. Miriam? Luka?”
Fresh air. Did that even exist anymore?
Miriam waved the pair off, not even glancing up from her share of the documents. Dedication: legendary. If only there were a way to bottle up that kind of energy and disperse it across the whole of the resistance. Their victory would be won in days.
Their victory. This thought didn’t surprise Luka, only confirmed what he’d felt twisting inside him for so long. As fierce and fiery as the feeling behind Aaron-Klaus’s face that morning in the Grosser Platz. As frantic as that sable.
This was his fight, too.
Yael led him into the cellar. Instead of heading back to the beer hall, she took a second set of steps that wound up to the building’s rooftop. Sometime in the past few hours, the rain had let up. Clouds peeled back to show hints of the morning to come: A soft glow began to play off the rooftop’s many puddles.
It wasn’t a quiet dawn. Below, the city rumbled, not with the normal electric streetcars or delivery trucks, but a not-so-distant firefight.
“I wouldn’t wander too far from the door,” Yael warned Luka as he stepped out. “There could be snipers.”
He stopped just beyond the threshold. She stood next to him. “What a night.”
“What a month,” Luka murmured back.
Yael smiled. She looked more herself than ever in the gentle light. She’d changed into old riding gear, and her fill-in-the-Aryan features had vanished, reclaimed by the face she’d shown him on the farmhouse steps. Jawline resolute. Black eyelashes so thick they might have been kohl. Eyes that made Luka feel as if he were back in the taiga forest running through wolf-patched snow—green so dark it was brown, brown so fresh it was living. Her hair was still in soft curls, but she’d knotted it into a bun. Some wisps had come free, licking her forehead in the poststorm breeze.
One strand tickled the edge of her lips.
Luka wanted to kiss her. Now more than ever. Instead he stood with his back to the doorframe, breathing in air faint with burning.
“I have a feeling this will all be over soon.” Yael stared out across the rooftops. The city was scarce with lights, which made the silhouettes of the buildings that much more stark. Across the Spree, the Volkshalle caused the rest of the skyline to cower. “It’s all about to crumble. One way or another.”
Luka wondered what amount of explosives it would take to raze a mammoth like the Volkshalle to its foundations. Not much. Take away a few key pillars and the weight of the building would bring itself down.
“What will you do, when all this is over?” he asked.
“If I’m alive…” she prefaced. “If I’m alive, then I’ll live. I’ll wear short sleeves. When people ask what my name is, I’ll tell them the truth. I won’t have to check my face every time I step outside.”
What simple things to dream of.
“What about you?” Yael asked. “Still fancying becoming a poet?”
“A poet?”
“At the Rome checkpoint, you told me maybe you’d become a poet after all this.”
“Did I?” All Luka could remember about Rome was how much he wanted to win. To take back from Adele the victory she’d wrenched from him. He’d sat at that dining room table, seething in cigarette smoke while she slurped her noodles.
“You told me we needed each other. That was when I first started seeing you…” Yael’s voice drifted off, but she was watching him.
He stared back into the evergreen wilderness of her eyes.
“I lied to you, Luka,” she whispered.
“Which time?” he asked.
Both of them smiled, because the lies they’d exchanged were too many to count.
“In the ballroom.” Yael’s voice was as tumbling as their waltz had been.
That was a moment Luka remembered perfectly; he’d spilled out the true truth straight from the heart: There is no one else. And Adele (who was not-Adele but had always ever been Yael) had yanked his cardiac muscle straight from his chest and shredded it to bits with pointed canines: I do not love you. And I never will.
His heart was in her teeth again. Luka stood frozen, waiting for her truth.
“When you won the Axis Tour, I thought you’d ruined everything. When you followed me to that alley in Tokyo, I thought you’d ruined everything. But you’ve surprised me, Luka Löwe. Again and again, you’ve surprised me in the best of ways.”
Yael Reider drew close. Closer than they’d been in the Tokyo alley or on the deck of the Kaiten or on the train to New Delhi. So near that Luka thought he could feel her heart fluttering beneath her chest, just off sync with his.
“I do love you,” she said, and kissed him.
Him. Her. Lips meeting without lies. It was the purest, strongest, most heart-clenching thing.
He loved her, too.
Scheisse, he loved her. It wasn’t just a feeling, but a knowing, hot inside him. Love like burning.
Luka kissed her back. Until he couldn’t tell where he ended and Yael began. Until her fingers raked through his hair and past his scar, and he did not care because they were both alive, and this was the truest thing he’d ever done. Until the world burst into flames around them.
For a moment, Luka wondered if his emotions had simply taken flight. But when Yael pulled back and gasped, he opened his eyes to see that there was no phoenix, no magical incarnation of the feelings roaring inside his chest.
These flames were very, very real. Below them, the street was on fire.
CHAPTER 45
All thoughts of snipers and life-changing kisses vanished when Yael ran to the building’s edge. The burst of flames that had pulled her out of sheer bliss belonged to a grenade, now only a spot of char on the sidewalk. Fighters (all Reiniger’s, Yael could tell, because they were missing their left sleeves) were falling back, using parked cars and storefronts to protect themselves from the fire of the advancing enemy.
War had come to their doorstep.
SS soldiers rounded the corner, moving with boldness that meant numbers. Their bullets hailed through the street. Shattering glass, wounding stones, flaying flesh. Yael watched, transfixed, from the rooftop—a Valkyrie over battle. Unable to choose: Life or Death?
Death…
Death…
It was all death beneath her. More SS and loyalist Wehrmacht flooded the street. (And more and more and more. Until Yael wondered if there were any double-lightning pins left south of the Spree.) Reiniger’s men didn’t stand a chance. What could so few do against so many? The remaining resistance fighters retreated, but the National Socialists gave no chase. Instead they pushed straight into the entrance of the beer hall.
They knew about the headquarters.
It was the only building they entered, and their jackboots strode toward it wi
th such purpose. There was nothing to stop them. Not even a locked door… She and Luka had left the entrance to the basement unbolted for an easy return.
—MIRIAM HENRYKA KASPER FELIX ADELE JOHANN REINHARD BRIGITTE MOVE MOVE MOVE—
But when Yael turned for the staircase, she found Luka barring her way, hands stretched across the door, frame to frame. When she tried to push past, he wrapped his arms around her, not a hug, but something fiercer.
Yael pushed. Luka held. He was strong, and even her hardest strain didn’t budge the pair a single centimeter.
“If you go down there, you’ll just get captured, too.” Luka’s voice rumbled from his chest to hers. “What good will that do anyone?”
There was a way past the victor—but it involved hurting, really hurting him. Yael might have considered it if Luka hadn’t been so verdammt right. She could not save her friends. Not this time. Even if she flew down those stairs in a Valkyrie fury, how many men could she manage bare-handed? She didn’t even have her gun… Like a dummkopf, she’d left it downstairs on the card table. Next to the files.
Oh, Scheisse, the files!
—DESCEND AND YOU WILL NOT ASCEND DOWN IS DEATH—
Here was death, too, Yael realized. SS soldiers were already swarming the building’s bottom levels. How long would it take them to find their way up to the roof?
Luka seemed to realize this, too. His arms loosened, so that Yael could lean back and see the fear on his face, tangling with disheveled hair. His eyes stormed the stairwell. “What do we do?”
Miriam, Henryka, Kasper, Felix, Adele, the other operatives…
She didn’t have room for that many more wolves.
“Yael!”
“Do—do you have any weapons?” she asked.
“Aside from my irrepressible wit and charm? No. You?”
“My knife.” It was tucked in her boot, force of habit, but a fight was out of the question. Only one option remained.
The rooftops.
She pulled Luka away from the door, spattering through puddles made molten by the rising sun. They ran to the roof’s edge, where the gap between buildings required a leap. Yael ignored all her pain—the wail of her wolves, the stitches in her side—and jumped. Luka made the mistake of looking down instead of across. He halted at the brink.
“Any chance you saved that parachute?”
Yael didn’t know if the sound leaving her throat was a laugh or a sob. Probably both. Unbelievable, absurd, irrepressible boy. He wasn’t really scared of the fall. (She could see that in the way he loped over the gap, morning gold flaring through his stare as he landed next to her.) He was just trying to keep her afloat. Laugh, sob, while her life got shot to pieces beneath her.
Together they ran, lunging across a block’s worth of buildings before reaching a gap too wide to cross. When they entered the building beneath, it was quiet. The doors to the flats were locked. Yael threw herself at the nearest one.
It was an artless lunge, doing more damage to her than the door. Yael still had hairpins, but her hands shook too hard to pick the lock. She couldn’t stop thinking about what was happening in Henryka’s basement. There was only one way out of the headquarters. No chance of any of them escaping… no chance…
“Yael?”
Her body couldn’t keep up with her need to—BREATHE JUST KEEP BREATHING—and she began choking on her own air.
“Yael? Yael?” Luka’s voice sounded like the train: yah-ell, yah-ell, yah-ell.
Dead. Oh God. They were all dead.
How had this happened? How was she on the floor, on her hands and knees, crying until she retched and still crying? How was Luka next to her, still saying her name as if it would help something?
“Yael, we can’t stay here. We have to go.”
“Go where?” She laughed, sobbed.
North? Where Reiniger’s forces sat hamstringed by the loss of their headquarters?
South? Where the Volkshalle loomed and the immortal Führer lurked, writing a victory speech for the Reichssender cameras?
East? Where Novosibirsk’s army clawed toward Moscow, unaware of the crushing blow the resistance had just been dealt?
West? Assuming the Americans let them in. Their desire for political neutrality left them little tolerance for refugees. Many had fled there in the last war, only to be sent straight back into the fangs of the Reich.
Any of this was assuming they could leave the building. Even if Yael and Luka raided one of these flats for civilian disguises, they wouldn’t get ten steps through the besieged block without being spotted.
“We’re trapped—”
Five stories below, a door crashed open. Luka held a hand to her lips. Hobnails clattered against the stairwell’s polished wood.
The SS were coming.
CHAPTER 46
Felix knew the SS were coming. He’d even made sure the door was unlocked for them, but this didn’t make SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s entrance any less terrifying. The blitzkrieg was loud, for one thing. So many metal-edged boots stomping across the concrete floor. So many bullets biting bookshelves and walls. Miriam grabbed a gun from the card table and used it to take down three of the first advancers before getting shot herself. The radio operators had their own weapons, but instead of using them to remove a few more SS from the earth, they turned their sights on the communications equipment. The girl with the bun full of pencils dispatched her cipher machine, twisting its rotors into a useless combination, before smashing it onto the floor. Henryka ran for the map, managing to rip the Muscovy territories from the wall, all the way down to the Mediterranean before the invaders reached her. The older woman did not go down gently. Her limbs thrashed with wiry precision, breaking one SS-Sturmmann’s nose, crushing the larynx of another. In the end, only a bullet could stop her. Kasper and Johann managed an even higher cartilage-crunch count before being forced to the floor at gunpoint.
It lasted only thirty seconds—a supernova of bone dust and noise. Half a minute, and the room turned to ruin. Reinhard was slumped over his Enigma machine, dead. Henryka looked smaller than small on the floor—surrounded by scattered thumbtacks—life’s largeness shot out of her. Pink misted her cloud of hair.
Felix stood in the hallway entrance, deafened. His hands trembled above his head and kept trembling as one of the SS soldiers yanked him into the kneeling line of resistance fighters. Felix’s kneecaps cracked against the concrete, not far from where Henryka fell. Her body was facing him. Felix couldn’t tear his eyes away from the violence of color around it.
What had he done?
Technically, SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s boots sounded no different from those of any of the other men clattering around the basement. They were made of the exact same material: heel plates and hobnails of iron. But Felix knew Baasch was coming before he entered the map room. Tap, tap, tap to reveal gray eyes (still dead). The sight sent chills up his not-there fingers.
“This is it?” The officer paused and took in the map room. “Quite simple, for a rats’ nest.”
“There are more rooms in the back, Standartenführer Baasch,” an SS-Sturmmann informed him. “They’re being searched as we speak.”
Baasch removed his hat and tossed it onto the table, over the Doppelgänger Project documents. Felix kept waiting for the SS-Standartenführer to acknowledge him. Instead the officer collapsed into one of the chairs and continued issuing orders to his men. “Check the radios. See if any of them are still working.”
“Unhand me!” They’d found Adele. Felix’s sister was back to the wildcat version of herself as the SS-Sturmmann wrangled her into the map room. “I’m a victor of the Third Reich! Commended by the Führer himself! There’s been a mistake! My brother—”
When Adele caught sight of the kneeling row—Lugers to temples, Felix among them—her words dried up. She stopped twisting. Baasch waved her over to his chair.
“Victor Wolfe, I presume?”
At the officer’s signal, Adele’s left sleeve
was peeled back. No wolves.
“I am myself, thank you very much,” his sister told Baasch coolly. “Now, if you’ll please tell your men to stop bruising my arms—”
Baasch didn’t. “Check the others! She could be passing for anyone!”
One by one they tore back the prisoners’ sleeves. No wolves. No wolves. They paused when they found Miriam’s numbers—braided with blood from her gunshot wound. “How did she get rid of the dogs?”
“It’s not her,” Felix told them. He needed to get the Luger away from his head. He needed the SS to let him and Adele go. Safely. Just like they promised they would.
“But she has an X—”
“Herr Wolfe is right. The numbers don’t match. So where is Inmate 121358ΔX?” Baasch’s stare landed on Felix. Narrowed. It made Felix feel as if he were back in the Imperial Palace. Thirteen days, twenty thousand kilometers ago. Nothing was fixed. Everything was falling to pieces. Salvation, damnation, damnation, damnation.
Felix examined every face in the map room, saw none of Yael’s. Luka was missing, too. “She—she’s not in the sleeping quarters?”
“Only Victor Wolfe was back there,” explained the soldier who still vised Adele’s arm. “We can check again.”
“No.” The SS-Standartenführer waved at his sister. “Put Victor Wolfe with the others.”
And so Adele was shoved to her knees, held there by another gun. As soon as the hammer clicked back, Felix knew there was no deal. SS-Standartenführer Baasch had never intended to let them go. His sister was a scapegoat, and Felix was a fool. A treacherous fool with a Luger to his head.
What had he done?
“You said Adele would be pardoned,” Felix croaked at Baasch. “You gave me your word.”
The SS officer stayed silent as he pulled out his handkerchief—spotless again, freshly pressed into eighths—and began unfolding it.
“You snitch! You przeklęty coward!” Felix felt Kasper’s snarl. The curses were mixed with actual spit, sticking to the side of the mechanic’s face.
