Zara broke into a run. Uncle Red and Mrs. Talley called out for her, but she didn’t stop until she reached the vehicle, her breaths heavy. She had been forced to watch over a dozen public beatings, but this one had been different. Mr. Kerry wasn’t a nameless face. He was a good man, a good neighbor — but now the Nazis had taken him, just as they had taken Molly, just as they had taken her mother.
Uncle Red reached the truck just behind her and pushed her in before he got into the driver’s seat. “Are you having an episode? Zara, look at me.”
“I’m fine,” she said, irritated that he was treating her like a child again. “I just had to get out of there.”
He leaned back in his seat, relieved. “You scared me.”
“Do you think Mr. Kerry is … ?”
“He’s tough. The chances are good that he’ll live.”
“But he won’t survive long in the camp.”
Uncle Red said nothing. He didn’t have to. The Front Royal labor camp was a nightmare. Her grandfather had been a much younger man than Mr. Kerry when he was sent there, and he hadn’t survived past six months.
“I wish …” Zara started and stopped. She knew that there was nothing they could have done. And yet … “I only wish …”
“I wish we could’ve helped him, too, but there’s nothing we could have done.” He started up the engine.
“If Mom were alive, she might have done something,” Zara said quietly.
Frustration flashed over Uncle Red’s features. “Even Annie wouldn’t have been that reckless.”
Zara hugged her knees to her chest. Maybe her uncle was right; maybe her mother would have done nothing at the square. But then again, Zara could easily see her mom staying up late in the kitchen, diagramming ways to break Mr. Kerry out of the labor camp. Back then, her uncle would have joined in, too — he had once been the best shot in the Shenandoah Valley — but that was before Mission Metzger. Now his actions were always measured, always careful. Zara’s mom wouldn’t have recognized this man.
A marble-thick silence settled inside the car as Uncle Red put the truck in gear. Outside, dozens of farmers and miners filled the sidewalks to get back to work, but Zara didn’t notice them. She only saw Mr. Kerry, getting beaten and thrown into the truck.
“Stop thinking about it,” Uncle Red said. “It’ll only upset you more.”
“Couldn’t we contact the Alliance?”
“There’s nothing they could do, either.” His hands tightened over the steering wheel. “I’m sorry you had to watch that beating, but this is the world we live in. The Nazis make the rules, and we have to follow them. It’s as simple as that.”
Zara hugged herself tighter. When did he become this callous? Uncle Red never would have said these things before Mission Metzger. Being cautious was one thing, but accepting Nazi rules was something else entirely.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he said.
She said nothing.
“Answer me, Zara.” His eyes bored into her, and she knew she had to reply.
“I understand,” she said.
But she didn’t understand at all.
A few mornings later, Zara awoke shivering. A layer of sweat soaked the collar of her nightshirt, pooling into the hollow of her neck. She rubbed her eyes, but the dream still clung to her mind. The beating. The blood. Mr. Kerry crying for his lost sons.
Guilt gnawed at Zara’s chest. She knew deep down that her uncle was right, that there was nothing they could’ve done unless they wanted to get beaten themselves. But what happened at the square had only reminded her that — yet again — she was powerless. She was merely another Kleinbauer, unable to stand up against the Nazi regime.
If only Uncle Red would let her join the Alliance, then she could at least do something to help. Even if she had to sift through the Colonel’s trash, that would be more than what she was doing now. But her uncle wouldn’t even give her that chance.
A muffled cry came from the hallway. Zara’s head snapped toward the door.
Not again.
Scrambling from her covers, she bolted down the narrow hall until she burst into her uncle’s bedroom. Her feet tripped over the rough floorboards and she nearly knocked into his mammoth of a dresser, but she righted herself and knelt beside his bed.
“Uncle Red?” She clutched on to his shoulder while he thrashed in the sheets.
“No,” he groaned, asleep. “No, please. Annie, run!”
“Uncle Red!”
His eyes broke open. His chest heaved. “What happened?”
“You were having that dream again. About Mom.”
Uncle Red sat up straight and threw his robe over his shoulders. His gaze slid away from hers. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“Don’t apologize,” Zara said softly. Her mother had been gone for years now, but her uncle still dreamed about that terrible night when she was killed. He and Zara’s mom had been very close — the protective older brother and the little sister who followed him everywhere, even into the Alliance. “Are you okay?”
He waved off the question. “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty.”
Uncle Red swore. He typically woke at five each morning to get started on the crops. The Nazis assigned quotas that every farmer had to meet, and Zara and her uncle were always struggling to reach theirs. Shuffling to his dresser, he turned on his decade-old television for the morning news update. “You should get going. I don’t want you to be late.”
Zara didn’t budge. “This is the second nightmare you’ve had this month.”
“I’m fine now. Go on and get dressed. You have to leave for school.”
“For work, you mean,” Zara muttered. Kleinbauern like them only attended school until age eight. After that, they were assigned to a farm or a factory or another form of menial labor. Zara had been given the job of a Hausmeisterin, a cleaning girl at the German military academy. A custodian, to put it plainly.
And it was a plain job indeed: the dust, the mops, the constant stench of bleach. Most girls would be grateful for a career indoors, but Zara could barely stand it. She’d much rather stay at the farm with her uncle, but the Nazis had assigned her this job because she was deemed too small — too weak — for laboring as a farmhand. She was given a mop and broom instead, although the strict crop quota required her to help out with the farmwork anyway.
Uncle Red threw open the moth-eaten curtains, sewn by his grandmother so many years before. “I ironed your uniform last night. It’s hanging in your closet.”
Zara thanked him but didn’t leave the room. Instead, she fidgeted with the fraying seams of her cotton shorts. “Are you going on your mission tonight?”
He tensed. “Why do you ask?” Every couple of months, he and Mrs. Talley would sneak into Fort Goering to steal medical supplies for her midwifery practice. It was the only type of mission he would agree to now, ever since Mission Metzger had killed off most of the Greenfield Alliance. No more ambushes. No more recruiting. Only supply runs.
It hadn’t always been this way, of course. Years ago, Uncle Red and Zara’s mother had planned missions every week, from tainting the Nazis’ water supply to recruiting new members across the Shenandoah. Zara had begged them to let her come, too, but her mother would only smile and her uncle would ruffle her hair, telling her to wait until she was older.
But now she was older, wasn’t she?
Zara cleared her throat. “I thought you and Mrs. Talley could use an extra lookout, especially after the announcement yesterday.”
“No.”
“Will you just —”
“I’ve canceled the supply run. It’s too risky right now.”
Zara’s jaw fell ajar. “What about Mrs. Talley? She told us last week that she was almost out of antibiotics.”
“She can make do until our next run.”
“That won’t be for another month!” Sneaking into Fort Goering was no easy task, but Mrs. Talley had learned from a patient of hers t
hat one of the security rotations spent their shift playing poker and drinking beer instead of patrolling the fort. The one catch was that they only worked nights once or twice a month, which severely limited the supply runs.
Uncle Red let out a battered sigh. “Do you want me to jeopardize Mrs. Talley’s life over this? Or my own?”
“Of course not, but there are families depending on that medicine! The Spotswoods’ daughter has been sick for weeks. Let me go with you. I can be another pair of eyes.”
“Absolutely not.” Uncle Red’s face had turned to steel, wiped clean of his nightmares. He nodded at the door. “Get ready for work.”
Zara marched back into her bedroom, her breaths turning sharp. She threw on her work uniform, buttoning the yellowing blouse and tucking the patched fabric into her knee-length pleated skirt. Why couldn’t Uncle Red give her this one shot? She could help him, help the Alliance.
But he wouldn’t budge.
After buckling her loafers, the nicest shoes she owned, Zara burst out the front door and onto the gravel driveway. She wished she could contact the Alliance, but Celia Farragut, the head of the resistance, deferred to local Alliance leaders when it came to recruitment. And unfortunately for her, Uncle Red was the leader of the Greenfield chapter.
That didn’t seem very fair to Zara. The Alliance needed all of the recruits they could get if they wanted to drive out the Nazis. Since the German takeover after the war, the rebel numbers had dwindled steadily as the Anomaly Division spread from state to state, using their powers to root out the Alliance. These days, Farragut and her team stayed hidden in a West Virginian war bunker that was built decades ago by the American government. From their hideout, they monitored local Alliance chapters and encouraged rebel activities, launching guerilla attacks and stealing weapons, but that was hardly enough to overthrow an empire.
The setbacks the Alliance had faced hadn’t deterred Zara’s mother from joining them — and they wouldn’t deter Zara, either. The Nazis had taken far too much from their family already. What else would the Germans take if she let them? Her home? Her uncle? Herself? If she didn’t fight back, they could snatch away everything she loved. Zara glanced back at the house, iron in her narrowed eyes. Somehow, some way, she would convince her uncle to let her join the Alliance.
Four miles down the road, Zara entered the Greenfield town limits, where a slew of shops cropped up on the clean street. She passed the grocer, the post office, and the tiny movie theater that boasted the newest films from the Third Reich’s production department, but her pace slowed once she reached the bakery. The smell of hot buttery bread made her stomach groan, and she realized she hadn’t eaten a thing since last night’s potato-peel soup. Zara peeked through the storefront, her mouth watering at the sight of the golden loaves, still steaming. But then the baker caught her staring.
“Out, out!” he yelled, waving her off with his floured hands. “Your kind isn’t served here!”
Zara’s appetite dried like a prune. She bolted down the sidewalk, wishing she had avoided this street altogether, with its Nazi-owned shops and snooty German patrons. Most cities in the Territories were built this way nowadays: a rich, bourgeois center filled with the descendants of Germany’s postwar baby boom. Nearly a quarter of the population consisted of Germans who formed an upper crust of society that staffed the military, owned the stores, and oversaw the factories that fueled the great Nazi economy.
And below that crust, the rest of us grasp for crumbs, Zara thought, but what choice did they have? The Germans possessed an arsenal of missiles along with their troops of Anomalies. So far, no other nation had dared to fight against the German Anomaly Division, even though the division itself had diminished in number since the 1960s.
In the years following the Axis victory, thousands of the Anomalies continued to perish as their bodies rejected the genetic altering that they’d received during the war. The Nazi scientists had tried to cure their former test subjects, but they soon hit a wall. Some soldiers had simply adapted to the genetic altering, and others didn’t. But the scientists did find a silver lining: these “adapted” soldiers often passed their Anomaly gene onto their daughters and sons, who would then manifest new and different powers within the first ten years of life. It wasn’t long before these German children were scrutinized and studied, and the Anomalies among them became the second generation of the division. But under the Nuremberg Laws, which were now instituted in the Territories as well, only Aryans and honorary Aryans were admitted to the division. If any of the Anomaly soldiers conceived a super-powered child with an Untermensch, the offspring would be killed or sent to a laboratory for live dissection. Which was why non-German Anomalies were so rare.
Hurrying over the cobblestones, Zara took three side streets until she reached the gates of the Heinrich Himmler Military Academy, an elite training school for future Nazi officers. The campus consisted of a cluster of redbrick buildings surrounded by sprawling training fields where the cadets ran laps and honed their shooting skills. Zara dashed up to the main building to find two other cleaning girls sweeping the sidewalk and a group of cadets loitering by the entrance. One of the boys showed off a handheld radio-vision screen that could play music and local TV channels. Most likely he had bought it in Neuberlin, the marble-paved capital of the Territories, formerly known as Washington, DC.
Zara reached for the front door, only to have someone jog up behind her and swing it open.
“After you,” said a voice in a clipped German accent.
A shiver slid down her back. The cadets rarely spoke to the cleaning girls unless they needed to report a clogged toilet or complain about the cafeteria food. Her eyes climbed upward inch by inch to find Bastian Eckhart standing next to her in his tall and lithe frame, one hand propping the door open. Aside from his amber eyes, he could have stepped out of an Aryan race handbook, with his pale skin, sun-colored hair, and square jaw. The academy’s female cadets often giggled and grinned during Bastian’s track meets, but Zara had never thought much about his looks. He was a Nazi, after all, and that straight nose of his just made her think of his father.
“Thank you, Herr Eckhart.” Zara’s gaze skittered away from his, landing on the pair of dog tags that lay gleaming on his pressed shirt. She had worked at the school long enough to know that the cadets didn’t appreciate direct eye contact, not from an Untermensch like her. But strangely enough, for the last few months Zara had caught Bastian glancing her way whenever she mopped the halls or wiped the mustard spills off the lunch tables. He always looked away when she caught him staring, and that had puzzled her even more. But Bastian had never said a word to her. Until now.
“Fräulein.” Bastian nodded at the door.
Zara had no idea why he was being so polite, or why he was back at school, for that matter. A couple of days before, Bastian had taken a leave of absence due to a death in the family. Apparently, his great-uncle had passed away. Or maybe it was his great-aunt.
Zara was about to head inside when Bastian leaned in closer, his dog tags clanking together. “May I speak to you for a moment?”
She bit back a sigh. She was already running late and didn’t want to get docked pay for fraternizing with the cadet, but she couldn’t refuse a Nazi, least of all an Eckhart. “Can I assist you with something? I don’t have my cart with me, but —”
“There’s no need to get your cart. I was wondering if we could speak in private?”
“Eh, what do you have there, Bastian?” one of the cadets called out. “Flirting with the help? How much does she cost?”
Zara’s face turned a shade of bright radish. She wasn’t one of those girls, the sort who would trade her body for a handful of reichsmarks. Is that what Bastian was hoping to “discuss”?
“I didn’t mean —” Bastian said, then stopped suddenly. He looked like he wanted to say more, but he only added an abrupt, “Good day, Fräulein.”
The cadets crowed louder, goading him to tell them how much Zara w
as charging him. Her face burning, Zara knew she should bow her head and wish Bastian a good day, but her lips wouldn’t move. She bolted through the door instead, away from the cadets, away from their laughter, and away from Bastian Eckhart.
With Bastian behind her, Zara ducked into the cramped utility room where she and the other cleaning girls stowed their belongings. She heaved a sigh once she shut the door behind her. The cadets wouldn’t follow her here, even if their cackling still roared in her ears.
Two of the other cleaning girls chattered inside the dark space, readying their carts with rags and bottles of bleach. Zara glanced at them, but they ignored her like always. A slow ache wove through her heart, and she wished that Molly were here. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to, especially after her run-in with Bastian. What exactly did he want to talk to her about?
“You’re late,” one of the girls sniffed at Zara. “I had to pick up the dormitory sheets for you.”
Zara reached for a pile of rags from a metal table. “Thanks. It won’t happen again.”
“Make sure that it doesn’t.”
The girls pushed their carts out the door, leaving Zara alone in the mildewed room. She twisted the rags in her hands until her knuckles hurt. Decades may have passed since the war, but most Eastern Americans still shook their heads at Zara’s lineage. They had never forgotten — and had never forgiven — the cruelty the Japanese had dealt during and after the war: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the internment camps for captured rebels, the death marches along the American West Coast. Even today, the Empire of Japan ruled the Western American Territories as the Nazis ruled the East — with a harsh and oppressive fist. This was why the Kleinbauern shunned Zara just as they had her mother, once they learned she had given birth to a half-Japanese child.
It made Zara’s blood boil when she overheard the farmers warning their daughters not to become like Annie St. James. Her mother had been a lonely eighteen-year-old when she met a young Japanese soldier while cleaning the cafeteria at Fort Goering. Annie’s own mother was sick with tuberculosis and her father had recently been jailed, leaving her and her brother, Redmond, to care for the farm. With so many burdens pressing in on her, Annie had lost herself in the fling, but she broke it off after her brother discovered it. But by then, she was already pregnant.
The Only Thing to Fear Page 3