by Ryan Graudin
“Quiet.” Finally, the Reichsführer was starting to look unsettled. His tweedy eyebrows knit together. “That’s enough.”
“Anne Lehrer.” Luka raised his voice louder. “David Mandel.”
“I said enough!” Now Himmler was yelling. “ENOUGH!”
Stand your ground. Make the silence heard.
What good was strength, unless it helped Luka do this?
The skinshifter closest to the Reichsführer pulled out his pistol, pointed the barrel at Luka. There was no time to think, no chance to shoot, and still the names kept spilling out: “Esther Reuter. Levi Wexler. Charani Weisz.”
The list was endless, but it ended there. (Not with a whimper, but a BANG.)
Luka didn’t feel a thing. The bullet had missed. He was still standing.…
But then he heard his own name being called: “Luka! Luka! NO!” and Himmler was staring at him, horror molding his doughy face. Both of these things caused Luka to look down at his chest.
A neat little hole had appeared in his undershirt. It was red all around.
Huh.
The feeling came a few seconds later. Luka’s nerve endings caught up to his shock: a rush of pain. Like burning, like burning. The world bowed up to meet him. He fell with his back to the floor, unfired pistol spinning away. Studio lamps glared from above.
Bright white light. What a verdammt cliché.
Yael appeared, pressing her hands to his chest. Her dark hair spilled everywhere: blocking out the lights’ sharpness, flowing with the plea in her lips. “Nononono! You Arschloch! Please! Don’t leave me!”
Luka didn’t want to, but he didn’t think he had a choice. Already he could feel whatever made him himself ebbing. It took all the strength he had to bring his hand to Yael’s face. She was warmth and life beneath his fingertips.
“Y-Yael.”
“Yes?”
His hand slipped. She caught it in her own. Her palm was slick with his blood.
There were so many things he could say to her. (I love you. I’m not afraid anymore. I guess this makes us even. I don’t want to go. Yaelyaelyael.) But Luka’s words were becoming scarce, and he wanted the last of his to make a difference.
“T-too many g-guns,” he whispered, hoping she understood.
Yael stiffened, then nodded, her eyes glowing through tears. Luka fixed his stare on them, staring and staring until he was back in the taiga forest, running through wolf-patched snow—through green so dark it was brown, brown so fresh it was living.
Running…
running…
…
CHAPTER 50
Yael didn’t just see the life leave Luka Löwe’s body. (Indigo eyes shining, dimming, snuffed. Jaw pulled tight, then going still. His final mask stripped away.) She felt it: Luka there. Then not.
How could someone so there be so gone?
It tore her—into yet another piece—with a pain not even the loudest scream could capture. Yael stayed silent, bowing over Luka’s body, letting her dark curls create a mourning veil around them. No one had accounted for the victor’s other guns, which, she supposed, was why he’d used his dying breath to remind her of their existence. Yael’s blood-coated hands found his second Luger, gripped it tight.
Six men was an impossible number to shoot without being shot.
Taking a life takes something from you.
—YOU HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE—
Yael flicked off the safety.
“The blood. I can’t—” Reichsführer Himmler’s voice was oddly warped, as shrill as an out-of-tune violin. “Get this mess cleaned up! All of it! I want all of them gone!”
The skinshifter from the Chancellery Chat chair was the first to approach Yael. Her gun was in his hands, and because of this, he moved with lazy steps. Yael stayed crouched, gauging all the room’s marks through a part in her hair. If she timed her shots just right, she could take at least two, maybe three, of the Saukerls with her. Himmler among them, if she was lucky…
CRASH! The microphone clattered to the floor; the boom operator, fearing for his life, made a dash for the exit. The cameraman wasn’t far behind. Two versions of Hitler ran after them, guns drawn. Shots CRACKed through the studio, and both members of the filming crew fell—backs pierced with lead.
The skinshifter closest to Yael looked up at the wrong time.
She didn’t shoot him, but this wasn’t a merciful action. In his non-Hitler form, the Maskiertekommando officer was a muscley mass of a man—perfect for catching rounds. Yael swung behind him: Luka’s Luger out, exhaling death. The sound was the shattering inside her amplified. Bullets tearing tissue, biting bone. She fired around the skinshifter (who was already crumpling under his cohorts’ shots) at the pair of Hitlers by the stage.
Shot, change.
Shot, change.
They died, turned white, stayed dead.
The two skinshifters by the door turned from the production team’s bodies. Robbed of her human shield, Yael ran for the next closest thing: the Chancellery Chat chair. Within seconds it went from regal to ragged. The wood was heavy enough to take most of the shots. Yael was still alive as she pushed herself up against the shredded velvet, made the remaining ammunition in Luka’s Luger count.
She caught the fourth skinshifter in the chest; he fell.
The fifth and final Hitler dove behind the camera. Yael held her fire, realizing for the first time that she just might survive this, and if she did, she needed the film to be undamaged. She’d have to shoot the skinshifter from a different angle.
Yael lingered behind the chair, hoping he’d whittle away the rest of his cartridges at the splintered throne. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, she scouted the rest of the room. Apart from the chair and the camera, there wasn’t much in the way of cover. The only other shield she might use was sitting among the bodies of the Maskiertekommando, his bespectacled face just as ashen as theirs. The sight of so much blood had undone the Reichsführer.
Blood, of all things. That was why the floors of the medical block had been scoured clean for Himmler’s visits. The man who’d overseen the murder of nations was afraid of blood. Her hands were still covered in Luka’s—and when she reached Himmler, the man gagged. Yael crouched behind the Reichsführer, pushed her own pistol into the base of his neck.
“Get up!” She did not recognize her own voice. It was more than snarl—it was iron, forged by grief upon grief. It brought Heinrich Himmler to his wobbly feet.
She shoved him forward by his silver-threaded collar, scanning the shadows for the fifth skinshifter. She hadn’t heard him move, and he hadn’t managed a shot during her dash from the chair to his commander. Perhaps he’d been wounded.…
“D-don’t shoot!” Himmler ordered in his broken-strings voice. It echoed through the studio. Yael heard a rustling behind the filming equipment.
The skinshifter was still there. Waiting.
She hooked her arm around the Reichsführer’s neck and tilted her gun toward the camera. It was not Hitler who whirled out. It wasn’t even a stranger. It was Luka. Beautiful, dead Luka. His lion-gold hair burst into the light. His lips twisted into a snarl as he fired at Yael, hit her new human shield instead. His eyes were black, black as wrath in their sockets, but it was nothing compared with what Yael felt rising inside her.
The Saukerl had stolen the victor’s face in the hope that it would disarm her, make Yael hesitate long enough for the Maskiertekommando soldier to get a clean shot of his own.
It didn’t.
She knew her ghosts.
Yael pulled the trigger just as the Reichsführer collapsed beneath her. She watched a bullet pierce Luka’s chest a second, heart-splitting time. She watched the white wash him away; the final skinshifter fell to the floor.
Shot, change.
All of Yael’s senses roared. She stood in the center of the room, and the Luger was still in her hand, but there was no need for it. The only sound remaining was her heavy breath. Her noiseless scream.<
br />
The first body Yael checked was the one at her feet. The last enemy’s shot had shattered Heinrich Himmler’s spectacles and skull in turn. His was a quick, indelicate death.
Yael did not turn to where Luka lay, because she knew that if she did, she would not be able to keep going. She’d sink to her knees and sit there in her too-real nightmare until the other SS in the Ordenspalais overrode Himmler’s standing order “not to disturb” the Chancellery Chat filming.
No, Yael had to keep going. These five skinshifters were dead beyond doubt—features frosted, limbs already stiffening—but they only made up a third of the remaining Maskiertekommando. There were still ten men who could wear Hitler’s face and use it any way they pleased.
The Führer could not die. Would not die.
Unless Yael showed the world he already had.
CHAPTER 51
The film wasn’t difficult to remove. Yael had watched the Reichssender crew do it plenty of times after her on-the-road interviews as Adele Wolfe. She tucked the reel under her arm and started for the door. Her steps shook, from the very marrow out, not because she’d been wounded, but because the room around her felt less than real. She felt less than real, a hollow girl among corpses.
White men smeared in so much red. The truth spooled tight under her arm.
Was this enough to change things?
Adolf Hitler was long, long dead and Aaron-Klaus had made a difference. Not such a useless death after all. But what about all of this? What about Luka? What was the use? Why did he have to die?
Why was she always the only one left?
The film crew had almost made it to the door before being shot down. The boom operator had been hit in the neck. Instantaneous. The cameraman was… not dead. The man stared at her. A low groan left his lips: pain.
Pain meant life.
Yael stopped and knelt down, turning the man over to appraise his injuries. He’d been shot—once—in the back. The bullet had passed through, leaving an exit hole in the cameraman’s right shoulder. Bleeding was a problem, but if Yael helped stanch the flow, he just might make it.
“Do you want to live?” Again, her voice felt apart from her. As if another being were forming the words just above Yael.
The man nodded.
“The only way that might happen is if we air this on the Reichssender. If I patch you up, can you help me?”
He nodded again.
Life. Yael needed it now. Life and the truth out there. Which was why she tore off a portion of the dead boom operator’s undershirt, wadded it into a ball, and pressed it to the cameraman’s wound.
His name was Dietrich. Dietrich Krauch. He’d been a cameraman since the war, one of the Reichssender’s first employees, which was why he’d been chosen as one of the select few to record the reclusive Führer’s Chancellery Chats. It was the highest of honors, veiled in unusual amounts of confidentiality.
“We never actually filmed in the Ch-ch-chancellery,” he explained through chattering teeth (shock setting in). “The lighting is n-no good there, can’t get the same picture q-quality. But the Führer encouraged the rumor that he was a recluse, s-said it was safer if no one knew he came to the Ordenspalais to film. Hitler always had his SS guards clear extra personnel out of this wing for productions. Didn’t even want Goebbels p-present.”
So that was why they were still alone. Ever since the last shot, Yael had been listening for the footfall of SS, but reinforcements never came. Himmler had cleared this area of the building so thoroughly that no one had heard the firefight. The Reichsführer had buried himself in his own crypt of secrecy.
And he was about to take the Third Reich with him.
“Now you know why.” Yael crammed the cloth against Dietrich’s shoulder. “Himmler and the Maskiertekommando wanted as few witnesses as possible in case they were exposed. The Reich needs to know this, too. We need to get Himmler’s secret on the air.”
“Werner and I were supposed to deliver the film to the master control room once everything wrapped,” the cameraman explained. “It was to air immediately.”
“How many men are in the control room?”
“There’s just one operator. His name is Bernhard. But the control room is on the other side of the annex.” Dietrich frowned. It was clear even to the cameraman that he was in no condition to walk that far. “Bernhard won’t recognize you.…”
“That won’t be a problem.” Yael surveyed the boom operator’s face: chicken pox scars, a dash of gray on the eyebrow, lips of average plumpness. Through the glaze of death, his eyes shone blue.
Dietrich’s shock grew twofold as he watched Yael adopt his dead cohort’s features. She stripped the boom operator, trading in her SS-Oberschütze uniform for his outer garments. There was a bloodstain on the back of Werner’s collar. Still wet. It stuck to Yael’s neck as she bent down to retrieve the film reel.
“Keep pressure on the wound,” she instructed the cameraman. “Don’t let up, or you’ll bleed out.”
Once the Chancellery Chat aired, the studio would be swarming: Dietrich’s help, her doom.
The halls were empty, empty, echoing. In order to reach the master control room, she had to go back the way she came, pushing past Luka’s 1953 poster. The boy he never was. The boy she’d never speak with, laugh with, cry with, see again.
But why, why, why?
So much loss demanded an answer. All of Yael’s insides ached for it. Her fingers went white against the film casing, and she kept walking, past the service entrance, all the way to the master control room. She found Bernhard in a rolling chair, legs propped on the control console, nose deep in a book. He leapt to his feet when he saw Werner, reading material flying. “Scheisse! Sorry, Werner. Didn’t hear you come in.”
Yael grunted. She kept her back to the door, hiding the dark splotch left by the boom operator’s death. Bernhard was too flustered to notice. He held his hand out for the reel. “Finished, already? That was fast.”
—ALL READY TO FINISH—
She passed him the film.
CHAPTER 52
The warning of rotten bones had been sent.
Felix knelt on the floor, kneecaps slowly breaking against concrete as he listened to Miriam imitate Kasper’s voice. The mimicry sounded so close to the truth, it filled Felix with agonizing doubt. It would’ve been simple for SS-Standartenführer Baasch to put a doppelgänger on the phone. Had Felix ever talked to his father?
He would’ve asked, except he’d been gagged again. Tongue-tied to keep the resistance from finding out what they already knew: Their map room was compromised. Baasch’s men seemed determined to strip the place, but the task proved arduous. The number of papers they found stuffed in filing cabinets and wedged in gaps between bookshelves seemed miraculous. Pages multiplied before their very eyes. Rosters, blueprints, notes on operations, forged passbooks, transcripts of the 1955 Axis Tour, maps… it was a fire-hazard collection of information—enough to burn the resistance down to the roots.
SS-Standartenführer Baasch took all of it in with a strange sort of glee. No doubt the officer was envisioning the promotion he’d garner from this: SS-Oberführer Baasch. Gorget patches on his collar threaded with not one but two silver oak leaves each.
Whenever Baasch’s men showed him a new document with a new name, the SS-Standartenführer’s eyes glinted brighter: steel, sterling, titanium. “Excellent. Set it aside to present at the People’s Court.”
The pile grew. Miriam continued the radio exchange. Felix’s knees kept aching, breaking. Henryka’s hair had faded from pink to rust, stiffened curls clawing at him. So many had died, were dying, because of Felix’s words, and he couldn’t undo it. He wondered if his yes, yes lie would make a difference at all. Maybe now General Reiniger wouldn’t walk into the rattrap. Maybe—
“What’s that?” One of the men raiding Henryka’s desk paused, caught by the glow of the television. The Führer sat on-screen, and this time he wasn’t alone.
Yael hadn�
��t just escaped… she’d made it to the Reichssender studios! Felix couldn’t see her wolves, but he could place the face as hers. The anger was hers, too—blazing alongside her gun as she pressed it to Adolf Hitler’s temple. The pistol that edged Felix’s own skull slackened, his guard transfixed. The man by the desk twisted the volume knob, and the entire map room froze: eyes open, ears listening, unable to pull away as the truth unfolded from the speakers. A drama that was so very obviously not scripted. Yael, Reichsführer Himmler, Luka, whoever the man in the chair was… all of them were made of emotion so real it seeped through the Reichssender, cramped the map room.
Confusion: “Wait, the Führer’s dead?”
Fear: “Is this true, Standartenführer? Did you know?”
Anyone staring at the SS-Standartenführer would realize he hadn’t. Baasch’s skin had gone waxy—glistening pale. His handkerchief hung limp at his side, stained with Luger oil.
Luka was listing the victims: flesh and memory versions of the paper under Baasch’s hat. Felix waited for Anne Weisskopf’s name to be spoken. The loss inside him kept piling—vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls, all those names and still not Anne’s—higher and higher, turning into something HOT.
The room exploded.
Sometime during the broadcast, Miriam had unplugged the radio headset, wrapped its cord around her hands in the style of a garrote. She drew this around her guard’s throat, lining the life out of him.
The resistance operatives moved as one. Brigitte snatched a pencil from her hair—bun tumbling free as she lodged the writing utensil into the nearest SS leg. Kasper grabbed the gun near his head, diverted its shot at the guard who loomed over Adele. Johann’s move mirrored this—just as fast, just as fluid.
All this happened before most of Baasch’s men could tear their eyes from the television. The operatives were outnumbered, three to one, but their willingness to die, their need to live, was equal to the SS’s confusion.
