The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  And she wanted to see Daniel smile. She wanted him to believe there was more for them than this. If this gave him hope, if this let him find an end to his dark road—

  The shadows dissipated. In the creases of Liam’s palms, she glimpsed a smear of blood she was sure hadn’t been there before. A promise of greater power—or a curse to damn them all.

  “All right.” Rebeka swallowed. “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PHILLIP

  Phillip Jones had never considered himself impulsive, exactly, but at times he could be both very dumb and very brave. Not that this insight into his character did him much good as he was barreling to the earth at ninety meters a second. Don’t pull the cord until you absolutely have to, the pilot had said, after he cut the engine and dipped them into a slow, silent glide through the ink of night. Don’t wanna give Fritz a chance to aim.

  Small comfort as the dark forest reached up to claim him.

  Several things happened so quickly he couldn’t even be sure of the order: the snick of his chute unfolding, the jab of branches, the jerk as he pulled the cord, the instant between very, very fast and not at all. He bounced, snared high above the ground, and hit the release. Tumbled into dead leaves and loamy earth. Get away from the ’chute, his adrenaline managed to remind him. Gotta be far away when it’s found. So he staggered forward in the darkness for a few hours until his brain caught up with his body and, instantly, he was asleep.

  It started after the disastrous Connolly Surveying, Inc., Christmas party. The engineering school’s colored lab was chilly from more than just the weather as Phillip stumbled toward his seat without lifting his gaze from his shoes. He felt his classmates’ glares strafe across him like suppressing fire as he pulled out his chair with a screech. Then Darius sat down across from him, and Phillip’s stomach wrenched so hard he expected to see his breakfast again.

  “Don’t.” Darius reached for the soldering iron Phillip was holding and yanked it from his grasp. “Don’t you even dare.”

  “Darius, it’s not my fault.” Phillip swallowed. “I didn’t know. I was just trying to help, I swear—”

  “Then you’re a damn fool, Jones. Listen.” Darius looked from Phillip to their professor. “We’ve got finals in just one week, and I’m sure as hell not failing this class, especially not now. I’ll turn our final project in alone if I have to.”

  “But, Darius—please. You’re my best friend.”

  “Was.” He scoffed. “You really wanna take this away from me, too?”

  “Please.” Phillip hated the wheedling in his tone—the tone of a rich boy who rarely heard the word no. “I thought Mr. Connolly just wanted to help your team do your job better. Honest, I did. I wouldn’t have designed it if I’d known.” His mind raced, grasping desperately for something to hold on to. “I’ll have my own funds when we graduate. I can hire you outright. We don’t need his stupid firm, I can come up with my own designs—”

  “The last thing I need is ‘help’ from the likes of you,” Darius spat.

  “Gentlemen,” their professor said. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jones with the United States Army. He’d like to speak with you all for a minute.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Aloysius Jones walked into the lab, hat mangled from being squeezed in his hands, and surveyed them with a face as long as the Arkansas River. The keening oscilloscopes and snapping soldering irons went deathly quiet. But all eyes whipped back to Phillip as the whispers stirred up again.

  “Family of yours, Phillip?”

  “Here comes another Jones to ruin our day . . .”

  Phillip’s eyes locked on Aloysius’s—or Uncle Al, as he knew him. A decorated Harlem Hellfighter from the Great War. Three years ago he’d stormed off to the hills of Spain, rifle at the ready. And just three days ago, Emperor Hirohito had bombed Hawai’i. It was no coincidence that the army had sent him today.

  “I understand you boys are very skilled in the ways of digital computing. Radio waves. Electronic communications.” Like most men in Oklahoma, he drew out the first e in electronic—a slingshot ready to snap. “I’m looking for a volunteer to help his country. To make some history.”

  Darius was already rolling his eyes, but Phillip sat up straighter, something hardening in his spine. All his life he wanted to do more, be more than the relative wealth he’d been born into. His parents had made their mark on Greenwood with money, jobs, connections, but Phillip knew those weren’t his skills. He’d tried to use his talent for science and design. But so far, the only history he’d made was nothing he wanted to claim, thanks to Connolly.

  Maybe, though, the fault hadn’t been in Phillip’s skills at all—maybe he could use them for something good, something he wouldn’t be ashamed of.

  “What’s the matter, sir?” another student, Patrick, called from the front of the lab. “All the white boys upstairs already turn you down?”

  “Didn’t ask them,” Jones answered, surveying the lab. “I know your class has better grades anyhow.”

  Everyone mumbled their assent; no lie there. Darius raised his hand until Jones nodded to him. “What’s in it for us?”

  “Full tuition and GI benefits,” Jones replied. “Pay commensurate with your level of expertise. And the warm satisfaction of knowing you’re beating back the forces of tyranny and hate.”

  That earned him a few snorts. Tyranny was this classroom, the basement graciously segregated so they wouldn’t “distract” the rest of the university. Hate was the smoke that had smothered Greenwood not two decades before when the white men stormed it, the blood, the firebombs and broken glass. Whether it was Hawai’i or Poland or Paris or London, those wars weren’t theirs. Their hands were full with the hard work of building and rebuilding at home. Phillip’s father had said as much over breakfast that morning, turning the pages of the Tulsa World with a sigh as the cook brought them freshly scrambled eggs.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Lieutenant Jones continued. “This isn’t our fight.”

  The classroom went quiet.

  “But I know another truth, and it’s that sooner or later, these fights find you. Fascism is the enemy of all Black aspirations, and Germany’s brand of fascism is one we can ill afford on our shores. If we can’t smother it in its cradle, then I don’t want to think what kind of monster it’ll become by the time it reaches home.”

  Phillip had been gripping his pencil so hard his knuckles blanched. The enemy was already here. Maybe not true Nazis like Uncle Al was talking about, but men all too happy to take advantage of him, to smile and praise his work from their mouths while their hands used it to harm. And he hadn’t even known. He hadn’t known.

  All his life, his folks had tried to teach him that their way was the only way. Money had been their instrument of choice—and it had done its good. But Phillip just wasn’t wired that way. He only knew how to act—to create. And right now, he needed to create something big. Something that put more good into the world than bad.

  Now Phillip felt the pencil snap in his hands. “I’ll go.”

  Darius whipped around in his chair, glaring. “Are you out of your damn mind? This joker’s just going to send you to your death.”

  “Thought you didn’t care what happened to me.”

  “What would Mr. Connolly have to say?” Darius laughed cruelly. “Don’t think he’s ready to give up the golden goose just yet.”

  Phillip’s body tingled, the full realization of what he’d just signed up for rushing through him—some highly secretive mission for the US Army, one sure to call on his engineering skills. Was that why he was doing this? To prove he wasn’t who his classmates thought? That he wasn’t so swaddled up in the success of his inventions that he was blind to the rest of the world, its problems, even if he’d made problems of his own?

  “Phillip,” Darius said. “Phillip, what in the hell? You need this least
of any of us.”

  No. Darius of anyone should know how desperately he wanted to prove he could do good deeds—that he didn’t just make things worse. He wanted to laugh. Electrical engineering he loved—he loved the binary nature of circuits and how easy it was to chart their course, no matter how complex the system. People, though? He was finding them way harder to handle. An electrical system couldn’t lie about its function.

  No, it was more than that. He wanted—needed—to do something good. He needed to know he could use his skills for more than what that stupid company decreed. His family’s money had protected him from a lot, but he hadn’t earned that comfort for himself yet. There had to be some reason he had this talent for inventing—a good reason, not a poisoned one. That need was alive under his skin, an itch he couldn’t reach.

  “You sure about this, son?” Uncle Al asked under his breath. “If you’re worried about finals, or—”

  “No.” Phillip sucked in his breath and locked eyes with him. “I’m in.”

  Uncle Al set his jaw. “I’ll never hear the end of this, you know. This kind of mission . . . It’s what you might call a leap of faith.”

  “Then imagine how good it’ll be when I pull it off.”

  He tried to smile, but it came off strained. Because it was why Uncle Al fought, wasn’t it? Where Phillip’s parents worked their magic with money and with words, Uncle Al and Phillip worked better with their hands. Phillip wanted to use his hands, his skills, for good. He wanted to do good.

  “Well. I know better than to talk you out of something when your mind’s set.” Uncle Al shook his head, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Let’s step outside.”

  “They’re just sending you to die in some white boy’s place,” Darius whispered. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “This isn’t our war,” Patrick said.

  Phillip stood, the room swimming around him. Was he being sent to a certain death? Maybe so.

  But it was better than dying in a soft bed while the world burned outside his gates.

  Phillip couldn’t recall the specifics of Uncle Al’s brief that morning, but it hardly mattered. Once he arrived at Camp Davis, he learned it was mostly bullshit, anyway. He was rushed through the most basic of basic training; he scored high enough to qualify for Officer Candidate School, but Al assured him there were more important things ahead. Al juggled phrases like “suicide mission” and “adverse conditions” and “of great strategic importance and tactical significance” as if they were ticking grenades. When the rest of Phillip’s fellow trainees got shipped out, Phillip was put on a plane that landed nowhere he recognized, then driven to a concrete windowless bunker where he was trained on radio sets and cryptographic machines. They drilled him on Morse code until he dreamed in dits and dahs.

  In the scant few hours between the end of the day’s training and sleep, he kept his hands busy with transistors and wires, with diagrams and switches, but when the instructor peered over his shoulder to ask what he was making, Phillip shrugged it off and told himself, Not yet.

  And so he trained, and trained. Time blurred together; the days became a series of electrical impulses: on, off, on, on, on.

  On and on and on.

  And then, after eight months of never eating or sleeping or shitting alone, of constant orders and drills and briefings and practice runs, he awoke in the utter silence of the woods with a single code name running through his head: Magpie.

  It was the kind of quiet that drove other people mad. Three days of a silence so deep it made his ears ache. He stuck to the forest when he could, where at least there was the steady crunch of leaves underfoot, the occasional birdsong threading through the September damp and chill. At night, he risked traveling the roads. He hugged the forest’s edge and dove into the underbrush the moment he heard the distant growl of diesel motors or the drone of Luftwaffe overhead. His head hurt from squinting into the distance, and he could’ve killed for a slice of lemon chiffon pie. Sometimes he’d catch himself muttering, saying his stream of thoughts out loud just to have something to say, something to hear. But he needed to keep listening to the silence. Any sound could spell his death.

  Nazi Germany didn’t look how he’d expected: no bombs, no columns of goose-stepping soldiers, no dictators screaming into scratchy mikes. It looked no different from the land his folks owned north of Tulsa, their wooded enclave by the lake. But just like in Tulsa, it took only one person to decide he didn’t belong.

  Phillip stopped every few miles to make sure the compartments hidden in the soles of his boots hadn’t worked loose. He’d check his compass and the tissue-paper map he was supposed to eat if he got caught. He should be coming across the farmhouse any minute now. Any minute now, and then the hard part of his mission would truly begin.

  He wove his way through the final stretch of trees. The early autumn sunset cast the same grim splash across the cloudy sky as it did in Tulsa, an unsettling similarity. But nightfall would be worse. As soon as the sun went down, the Nazis would come to life like the roaches they were, Uncle Al warned: moving troops and munitions, patrolling villages, sending their planes east to bomb the Russkies, or west to make sure France wasn’t getting any bright ideas. He had to make it soon.

  There—down the sloping hill. An empty field carved out of the trees, the empty husks of harvest season scattered across it. Phillip hastened his pace.

  All at once, the forest went silent. He’d thought it was silent before, but this sudden quiet made him painfully aware how much it hadn’t been. This was a suffocating silence, like someone sucking all the air from the room. He froze midstep and pressed his palm to the nearest tree trunk for balance, then carefully lowered his raised foot so it made little more than a whisper in the dead leaves. He glanced up—made sure he was positioned under the densest part of the tree’s canopy. Waited for the drone of airplanes overhead.

  Nothing came. No cars, no humans, nothing to disturb the abject silence that felt dense as lead.

  Phillip breathed shallowly, getting dizzy as he waited. He gave the forest one more scan, but he needed to move on—

  Then, a crack—like peanut brittle. Like his arm when he’d jumped from the playground swing.

  Phillip flinched. Al said the thing about sniper bullets was that at first, you might not even feel the pain. It hadn’t sounded like rifle fire, but then, he only had basic training for reference. Well, if it was, at least they were a bad shot—

  The crack sounded again, chased by a staticky hiss.

  Oh, Jesus. A few hundred yards up ahead, what looked like a lightning fork tore between the trees. But unlike lightning, it lingered, crackling, wavering in the air: a thin scar of bright energy. The scar stretched taller, until a thick soup of darkness spilled from its heart.

  Phillip thanked the US Army for issuing him rubber-soled boots and stayed rooted to the spot.

  The darkness kept pouring out, tendrils of black smoke stretching—like arms clawing out of a womb. The limbs reached down toward the ground. Scrabbling. Dead leaves raked between its talons. A third tendril swelled and unfurled like an elegant, headless neck. The thick scent of decay filled the air. The first two limbs buckled—jointed now—and bent to yank free a torso with a knobby spine.

  Phillip didn’t believe in devils or ghouls or angels or anything he couldn’t draw with a circuitry schematic, test with his oscilloscope. But he acknowledged there were limits to the known world, that the universe was infinite, and the observed portion of it was very small. So whatever the thing was slithering out of the tear in the air before him—he was all right with leaving it unobserved. Unobserved, and at a very great distance.

  Phillip sprinted—wide to the right, then ahead, zigzagging through the trees. His footfalls were punishingly loud, but he couldn’t stop to check if the creature was following him. He could only charge on.

  And finally he saw it, the whitewa
shed farmhouse at the far edge of the field, glowing like a beacon in the twilight.

  Phillip leapt over the low garden fence and flung himself at the side door. He didn’t have time for subtlety—making a sweep of the perimeter and checking the windows for Nazi guests. He pounded flat-palmed against the wooden door, and only the rasp of panicked breath in his throat kept him from screaming—but the door easily gave way.

  Unlocked. No one was on the other side.

  Phillip plunged inside and slammed the door shut, then leaned against it to catch his breath.

  No footsteps, no one calling out to see what all the commotion was about. His pulse buzzed in his ears, but he heard no other sounds. No shuffling chairs or scraping plates or Nazi boots pacing the halls. The farmhouse was supposed to be occupied—Al had assured him of that. They would let him in and show him to the root cellar, and there he would wait until his contact from the Magpie’s network arrived.

  Phillip sniffed the air. It smelled faintly rotten, like someone had left food out.

  The vestibule branched off toward a modest kitchen and breakfast nook. He stepped through the archway; sure enough, a half-eaten meal was scattered across the table. Toast with bite marks. A breakfast sausage, sliced and swirled through wilted sauerkraut. A few flies lurched up and scattered as he approached, but otherwise, the house was dead.

  Phillip swallowed the fear balled up in his throat and continued toward the foyer. There, the front door stood open, frosty air drifting in. He checked his corners, then approached the door. Were those—claw marks along its edge?

  In the front parlor, the last gasps of a fire sputtered and coughed in the fireplace. Phillip grabbed the iron poker to prod the embers—somehow, it seemed even colder in here than outside—then hefted the poker. The army had issued him a sidearm, but he liked the weight of the poker in his hand. It felt more immediate in the narrow farmhouse. Poker first, he continued his slow tour of the lower floor.