With the war only beginning, Zara knew there would be many more to come.
It was Alene’s idea to have a commemoration for the fallen rebels. Late one evening, almost three weeks after the Führer’s assassination, she gathered everyone into the cafeteria to drink to those they had lost. Two hundred people trickled in for the event, nearly all stationed at the Alliance headquarters. They each grabbed a bottle of beer or a cup of cheap wine, and Zara quickly claimed three of the cups: one for her, one for her uncle, and one for Bastian, even though she didn’t see him in the cramped cafeteria. As usual, the infirmary kept him busy around the clock.
Ever since they had arrived at the bunker, Bastian had thrown himself into the infirmary, clocking fourteen- to sixteen-hour days to treat everything from head colds to broken bones to festered bullet wounds. In mere days, his fame had spread throughout the bunker: the son of a Nazi colonel, now an Alliance rebel. Many of them had found reasons to pass by the infirmary to get a good look at him.
But Zara rarely saw Bastian. She caught only glimpses of him in the cafeteria as he assembled a plate of fried potatoes and headed back to his patients — and that made her wonder if he was avoiding her. After everything they had been through at the White House, she hadn’t expected him to treat her like just another recruit. Perhaps he was absorbed in thoughts of his mother. Or perhaps he was regretting his and Zara’s kiss, the thought of which made her whole face burn. Whatever it was, she and Bastian hadn’t spoken in days, aside from a mutual hello if they passed each other in the bunker’s dark halls. And that stung.
Maybe it’s better this way, Zara told herself. Yes, they had survived the White House attack together, but that didn’t change their pasts. She had grown up in his world, the farm girl born to serve his Nazi kin, who would be never more than an Untermensch. And now he was living in her world, an Aryan-blooded golden boy among the Kleinbauern, who would always speak with his German-tinged accent. No matter where they went, one of them would always be considered other — and maybe they could never bridge that gap. As friends, possibly. As something more, though? Zara didn’t know. And she wasn’t even sure if she wanted something more, though the thought of it made her pulse quicken.
In the cafeteria, Alene stood on one of the tables and waited for everyone to quiet down. “I know we’re all busy, so I’ll make this quick, but I wanted to take the time to honor those who aren’t with us anymore.” She raised her bottle of cheap beer. “To the fallen! We will never forget.”
The rebels lifted their drinks in return. A few people murmured, “Hear, hear,” while others said the names of the deceased.
“To Garrison.”
“To my sister.”
Zara added softly, “For Mrs. Talley.”
Next to her, Uncle Red murmured, “For you, Annie.”
Alene raised her glass higher. “Freedom, or death!” she shouted, right before she downed her drink.
That drew a louder “Hear, hear” and the chime of clinking glasses. Zara brought the cup of wine to her lips, but she halted midway when she saw Bastian enter the room. His gaze searched the rebels until it arrived at Zara. She swallowed the contents of her glass and glanced down at the sticky floor. He crisscrossed toward her anyway.
“I thought I might find you here,” he said.
Zara thrust a cup at him. “Thirsty?”
“No, I better not. Not tonight.” He fidgeted with the collar of his white medical jacket, which the Alliance had insisted he wear. It was a tad too big around the shoulders, but it suited him.
A stiff silence bloomed between them. Zara noticed how Bastian kept tucking his curls behind his ears — his hair had grown past the nape of his neck now — and how he didn’t quite meet her eyes for some reason. It reminded her of when he first spoke to her at the academy, when he had wanted to join the Alliance but didn’t know how to ask her about it. She wondered if there was something on his mind, although she had no clue what it might be.
“I recently spoke with Murdock,” Bastian said finally. He had to raise his voice to compete with the drinking crowd.
Murdock? Zara had seen the two of them whispering to one another these last few days, their heads bowed and their voices low. “About anything in particular?”
He jabbed his thumb toward the door. “Would you mind if we went someplace quieter? We could take a walk outside.”
At first, Zara wanted to stay planted in the cafeteria. Now he wanted to talk to her? After avoiding her for days? But another part of her — the part that won out — didn’t want to say no.
So they slipped out of the cafeteria, Zara following Bastian, and crept up the metal ladder that led from the bunker to the hotel aboveground. Bastian guided her outside into the quiet symphony of the Shenandoah night. Crickets chirped and an owl hooted. The first fireflies of the season flashed on and off, on and off, like Christmas lights.
A shiver breathed across Zara’s arms. She shouldn’t be out here. They shouldn’t be out here. Technically, they weren’t supposed to go outside without authorization, but with everyone drinking at the commemoration, there was nobody to stop them.
As they walked over the hotel’s overgrown lawn, Bastian turned to Zara, his hair almost silver in the moonlight. The pale light softened the circles underneath his eyes and the hollowness that had worn into his cheekbones. Guilt wormed through Zara’s heart at the sight of his gauntness. It couldn’t have been easy for Bastian to adjust to his new life here. The food rations. The meager quarters. The constant fear the Nazis had discovered them. Maybe Bastian wasn’t avoiding her after all. Maybe he was simply trying to scrape by.
Bastian shoved his hands into his pockets, rocking back and forth on his feet. “My father has been promoted. Murdock told me tonight.”
“He’s a general now?” Zara exclaimed.
“Apparently. I thought the Nazis would have stripped him of rank after the Fort Goering attack, but they rewarded him for attempting to protect the Führer.” A bitter note crept into his voice.
Zara wasn’t sure why he had brought her outside to talk about this, but she didn’t want to go back to the bunker just yet. She hadn’t seen the sky or stars in days, and the fresh air tasted sweet on her tongue. “So I guess it’s General Eckhart now?”
“I suppose so. Murdock said that he’ll be going back to Germany. The Nazis want him to prepare more troops for the Soviet advance.”
Good riddance, Zara wanted to say, although she wished Colonel Eckhart had been stripped of his rank completely. “What will happen to your mom? Will she go with him?”
“Murdock and I have been discussing that, too.” He retucked a curl of his that had sprung free from behind his ear. “We’re going to go get her. My father put her in a mental facility in Neuberlin, and that’s no better than a death sentence.”
“A mission?” Now the puzzle pieces locked into place in Zara’s head. Bastian must have wanted to talk to her about breaking his mother out of the hospital. The Nazis didn’t euthanize the Aryan mentally ill, but the patients of these facilities were usually neglected and mistreated until they withered away. Which didn’t seem to bother Bastian’s father. “I’ll go with you. I’m sure we can find a place for her here at the bunker.”
“Murdock already sent out a team.” Bastian stared down at his worn boots, a pair he never could have worn back at the academy. Too old and too scuffed. “And my mother won’t be coming to the bunker. She’ll be going somewhere safe, away from the fighting.”
“Where?”
“Iceland, we hope. To a safe house there.” He kept his gaze glued to his boots. “The team should be arriving tonight with my mother. Then I’ll be accompanying them to Iceland to make sure my mother gets settled. There’s a freight ship that will take us there.”
Zara wondered why he hadn’t mentioned any of this to her. “How long will you be gone? A few weeks?”
“Longer than that.” He still wouldn’t look at her, and that made Zara’s stomach fill with dread. �
�After my mother makes it to the safe house, I’ll be heading for Brussels.”
“Brussels?” Zara said, not sure if she had heard him correctly. He couldn’t have meant Brussels in Nazi-controlled Belgium.
Finally, their gazes met. “I’m joining the Widerstand, Zara.”
Seconds passed before the words sunk into her. Her lips parted, but she didn’t know what to say. This had to be a joke. The Widerstand?
“Everything happened so quickly,” Bastian stammered out. “Murdock asked me last week to act as a liaison to the Widerstand, so I’ve been talking with one of their leaders. We spoke for a while about my Opa and how I had joined the Alliance, and then they sent me a telegram three nights ago. They asked me to join them. And I’ve … I’ve accepted. I’ll be leaving tonight.”
The wine turned in Zara’s stomach, and her head fogged at this rush of information. So this wasn’t a joke. Bastian really was joining the Widerstand, and he really was going to Brussels. He was going to leave the Territories behind.
He was going to leave her behind.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she burst out. She wanted to shove him but forced her arms to remain at her sides. “You’ve known for days and you didn’t say a word?”
“I never meant to keep it from you intentionally,” he said. “The Widerstand discovered that my father is a general in the Nazi army, and all of a sudden they were offering me passage aboard a transport ship. I told them no at first. I couldn’t leave my mother in the Territories. But then they offered her a place at one of their safe houses in Iceland if I agreed to what they asked.”
“Agreed to what?” Zara demanded. Hurt burst through her, wave after wave.
“They want me to give radio shows, maybe appear in broadcasts. I’m a general’s son, turned defector. They want to use my name.”
“Do you know how much danger you’re putting yourself in?” Fear clutched at Zara’s throat, now mingled with fury. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. “The Nazis are already hunting you down, and now you’re giving them another reason to find you!”
“I know that, but I have to do this. I have to get my mother out of Neuberlin. If the Nazis take her, they can use her as a pawn to get to me. They could torture her….” He grimaced saying those words. “The Widerstand can offer her safety on neutral ground. I couldn’t refuse that. Wouldn’t you do the same if it were your uncle?”
Zara hated his answer because it made too much sense. Of course she would do the same thing if her uncle were in danger — but that didn’t excuse him from keeping all of this from her. “What about the Alliance? You begged me for weeks about joining and now — finally — you’re a part of us, and you’re just going to leave?”
“The Alliance will get along without me.” He added softly, “And they have you.”
He was trying to be nice, but Zara didn’t want to hear it. “You should’ve told me sooner.”
“I — I didn’t want to disappoint you.” His face reddened with each word he spoke. “I was afraid you’d think less of me. That you’d think I was giving up.”
He was giving up in a way, but deep down Zara understood why he had decided to join the Widerstand, even though it cut her in half to admit it. They had gone through so much together, and now he was leaving. She was so tired of getting left behind.
“If the Nazis found you … If they arrested you …” She couldn’t say the rest. She couldn’t even think about it. Her anger shattered apart, leaving only sadness and the knowledge that this might be the last time she ever saw him.
“I know the risks. They’re the same that you take every day,” Bastian said, his voice gentle. He tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “You’re the bravest person I know, Zara.”
“I’m not the one who will be the Widerstand’s poster child.”
A slow smile spread across his lips. “Says the girl who’s the Alliance’s poster child.” He ran his fingers through his curls. “I hope — I hope you can understand my decision. Maybe not today, but someday.”
“I do understand,” she whispered, even though his decision made her chest ache.
Bastian pulled her into his arms, and she smelled soap and earth and a tinge of ammonia. “One day, when all of the fighting is over, I hope to see you again,” he said into her ear.
Zara didn’t know how long that would be. Months? Years? There was a chance that the Nazis could win this war; then that “someday” would never come. She had nearly lost Uncle Red in this revolution — what if she lost Bastian, too? The seams of her heart split inside her. She didn’t want him to leave, but she couldn’t ask him to stay, either. This was the world they lived in now — a world pushing them an ocean apart.
“You’re really going, huh?” she said, leaning away from him to stare upward, trying to memorize the lines of his face, the flecks of gold in his eyes.
In response, he pulled her in tighter and she wrapped her arms around his broad back. Zara wasn’t sure how long they remained like this. The only thing she could think about was how he was safe with her right now, safe from the bombs and the bullets that would chase him until the Nazis or the resistance claimed victory. But victory loomed so far ahead of them. Finally, Zara’s arms fell painfully against her sides.
“When do you have to leave?” she asked.
“In a few hours.” He reached for her hand, curling his fingers around hers. “What will I do without you?”
“Win,” she replied simply.
Bastian smiled, his dimples deepening. “Win. I plan on it.” His head tilted to one side. “Then I’ll come back.”
Despite the hurt, Zara returned his smile. “I’ll hold you to it, Eckhart.”
“You promise?”
A spark of hope entered her eyes. “Promise.”
The days passed, blurring into a week and then another, until the spring stretched into the hot haze of summer. Every morning, Zara awoke to the tap-tap of footsteps from the new recruits, who filled the hallways with their chatter. Inspired by the assassination — and especially by Zara — they streamed into the bunker every night. Most of them had spent their lives in hard labor, toiling on tobacco plantations or sweating in cramped factories, and they had never held a gun before, much less fired one. But they were determined, and that determination paid off. After a few weeks’ training, they were ready for deployment into the big cities — New York, Heidelberg, Neuberlin — where the fighting surged the strongest. Hundreds of rebels fell to Nazi ammunition every day, but that was the one resource the Alliance now had plenty of: manpower.
The revolution had marched into a full-out war.
While the fighting raged on, Zara hardly slept at night, not when the radio messages surged into headquarters every hour. As the video of the Führer’s assassination spread from town to town and from home to home, thousands of laborers had taken to the streets. In larger cities, the Kleinbauern snatched any weapon they could find — axes, shovels, illegal guns — and clashed with the Empire en masse, overturning cars and setting fire to Nazi buildings. The war had spread to the smaller townships as well, where farmers and workhands banded together to raid German homes and pilfer German businesses. For the first time since the war, the Alliance had ignited a fire that wouldn’t stop spreading.
“We need more weapons,” Murdock said at one of the Alliance’s nightly meetings. He was a serious man, around the same age as Uncle Red, who had spent his life building railroads before joining the Alliance. “Redmond, what’s the report on our munitions campaign?”
“We’ve launched a raid on Camp Zimmermann for rifles and pistols, and another on Fort Hauser for heavy artillery and tanks,” Uncle Red replied. They were sitting around a round oak table nestled in the bunker’s main meeting room. Twelve chairs circled the table, with Murdock and Alene sitting at the head and ten other rebels fanned around them, including Uncle Red in his new role, the weapons coordinator. “I’m waiting to hear back about the Zimmermann mission, but Fort Hauser
was another success.”
“Make sure those weapons get up to New York. The rebels need everything we can give them.”
“Yes, sir,” said Uncle Red. From across the table, Zara flashed him a smile. Maybe it was unprofessional to smile at a serious meeting like this one, but her uncle had done a bang-up job so far. For weeks, he had been organizing weapons raids and hiding the goods in fruit crates and livestock trucks before dispersing them to where they needed to go. She was proud of him.
Murdock moved on to tactical strategies next before he hit the heaviest topic on the agenda: the Alliance’s next big strike. So far, they had organized fifty new chapters and orchestrated the death of Reichsmarschall Baldur, slowly chipping away at the Nazis’ foothold in the Territories, but they needed to strike even harder, broader, to crush the Germans to dust.
“We’re in a lucky situation right now,” Murdock continued. “With the Soviets now occupying the borderlands and moving closer toward Germany each week, the Nazis are facing a war on two fronts without any help from their allies. The Japanese are facing a mass rebellion in China, while the Italians are stuck in their own muck. The great Nazi Empire is at its weakest point right now, and that’s why we need to set our sights on Heidelberg.”
Murmurs rippled across the table, followed by nods. After the Führer had fallen, most senior Nazi officials had fled to Heidelberg, hoping to regroup and rebuild their regime. The Alliance would have to stamp them out if they wanted to scatter the German leadership even further.
“Will your forces be ready in two weeks?” Murdock said, directing his question straight at Zara.
Zara steadied the wobble in her voice. From the corner of her eye, she saw her uncle giving her an encouraging nod. “We’ll be training day and night until then, sir.”
The Only Thing to Fear Page 24