Our shepherd, Herr Grossman, clears his throat. “Mein Sturmbannführer, if you wish to speak to any of my men, you may do so in my presence.”
“Ah, but I’m afraid that there you are mistaken. This is a delicate matter, and I cannot allow you to intrude.”
In an instant, Herr Grossman’s face transforms, and he steps back to allow us to pass.
As Rostov leads Herr Trammel back into the main corridor, I glance over my shoulder, wondering why, if he’s so capable of twisting everyone’s mind around, he is trying to separate him from the herd, as it were, before making his pitch. Maybe there is a limit to his power, then—he can only maintain the illusion on so many people at once. The thought gives me sick comfort for a moment before I recall that Rostov is on my side. That my scientific career is built around enabling people like him to serve the Motherland.
We crowd into an empty office and Lyubov latches the doors behind us. Rostov flings Trammel into the chair and seizes him by the throat. “You will tell us where they keep the schematics.” His voice is as rough as uncut stone. “All of them.”
Herr Trammel’s glasses are buckled up to one side of his face, and his pink cheeks are flushed with crimson, but still he laughs in Rostov’s face. “I know what you are. All of you. You’ll never be able to reproduce our work. You Russian swine will—”
He cuts off with an agonizing yelp; the room swirls with static that grinds against my skin like broken glass. A drop of blood leaks from Trammel’s nostril. Andrei and I share a look.
“The archive room. It’s in cabinet K, shelf 12—but the real schematics are the ones drawn in blue, not black.”
Rostov glances up. “Olga. Andrei. Antonina. Fetch the schematics and return to me.” The static hisses and snaps. “Let us verify that he’s telling the truth.”
“You’re too late,” Trammel says, blood painting a vulgar mustache across his upper lip. “The Americans are coming for me in Berlin. I’ll never go with you Communist rats. You think you’re better than the Reich? You think you wouldn’t do the same in our place? Yeargh!” Trammel’s face wrenches upward like a piece of clay, smeared by a dissatisfied potter.
“Gently,” Lyubov says to Rostov, though her expression is none too concerned. “We don’t want to damage the valuable knowledge he possesses.”
Rostov grunts, then relents, releasing whatever psychic hold he has on Trammel to turn toward us. “You studied the maps. What are you waiting for?” Rostov asks us. His expression is calm, calmer even than when he’d issued orders on the plane. The soft tilt to his lips makes him look bored. “Go.”
Andrei and I clamber out of the office, Olga right behind us.
“Monster,” Andrei mutters under his breath, once we’re far enough down the corridor not to hear Trammel’s screams.
Olga shrugs. “Trammel’s a monster, too. Another all-too-willing Nazi collaborator. I’ll save my sympathy for another day.”
I wonder whether I’d also fit that description. I willingly agreed to work with Stalin and his secret police, after all, because of the research opportunities it afforded me and the doors it opened. But now that I’m seeing for myself what true believers like Rostov can do …
We find the doorway labeled DAS ARCHIV, and I reach for the handle, eager to be out of the hall, with its stench of death and sounds of agony. The lock clicks, seemingly on its own, as Olga unlatches it.
“Wait.” Andrei places a hand on my wrist. “There might be guards inside.”
Andrei flattens against the wall, eyes scrunching shut, lips going slack. He’d looked the part of an SS officer so flawlessly, I realize, that I’d almost forgotten he was just playing a role, until this moment when he’s let the mask fall away. He has a bad habit of that—of blending into the scenery, of melting into a crowd, of camouflaging himself with whoever he’s around. It isn’t until he ceases to do so that I notice him, really notice him. His youthful lilt and unsettled limbs and a face that I can’t believe I’d not noticed before.
Then he opens his eyes and the façade goes back up. He is scenery once more.
“Are we safe to—” I ask, but Andrei shushes me by pressing his index finger against his lips.
The door handle clicks open and the door swings wide under Olga’s power. I fly against the wall beside Andrei, but Olga’s weight is shifted to her prosthetic leg and is in no position to move quickly. My heart pulses into my throat. We’re not supposed to be here, even if we could pull off flawless German accents (which we can’t) and intimate knowledge of SS protocol (also out of the question). Without Rostov here to alter thoughts, we’re twisting in the wind.
A guard saunters out into the hallway, unlit cigarette clenched between his lips. His eyes scud across me, as uninterested as a gust of wind, and he continues on down the hall with a heavy thud of his boots.
How could the guard not notice us? Not care? “But how—why—”
Andrei’s jaw shifts left, right, tectonic. “I thought I’d—I’d just give him a push. He was standing right there, so close to the door, and if I just nudged him along, encouraged him to step through…”
“Like Rostov did to us. Intruding in our thoughts.” The needling feeling is back, scratchy as raw wool. “But you—you’re not—”
“It was only a suggestion, all right?” Andrei turns away from me and yanks the door open, hard. “I didn’t make him do anything. Would you rather we be caught?”
The archives are deceptively plain in appearance—rows and rows of file cabinets, powdered with cement dust from the uneven ceiling overhead. Each cabinet bears multiple combination locks, but Olga looks almost bored as she sets to work spinning the dials this way and that on the cabinet K Trammel mentioned. “Shouldn’t we check the other cabinets, just to be sure?” she asks.
“Yes, but remember we can only bring what we can carry out of here with us.” I scan the labels on the cabinets: propulsion schematics, work records, inventory. The blue-ink plans look authentic enough to my untrained eye, but I grab all of them to be safe and roll them up tightly into a narrow cylinder. “We still don’t have a plan. And who knows how long Rostov means to keep up his—”
The sirens start churning, cutting me off. At first I think they’re in my head, in the future. The wail nudges forward with each churn, then fades off. Someone’s cranking them by hand to make them sound that way—they can’t spare electricity this deep in the caverns. But Andrei and Olga look up, then at each other and me, and I know this is no vision but is happening right now.
“Air raid,” Andrei says, but with that hopeful twist to it. I wonder what world we live in where an air raid is the ideal outcome.
“No. They’ve found Rostov.” Olga charges for the door with her uneven gait. She’s got schematics rolled up and tucked under one arm, but she stops herself at the door. “Antonina, can you help me…?”
At first I’m not sure what she’s asking, but she tugs the left leg of her trousers out of the boots and jabs the prosthetic leg toward me. I help her ease the boot off, then we roll the trousers up higher. There’s a little compartment cut into the calf of the prosthesis. Olga uses her power to pop it open, then I slide the rolled-up documents inside.
“Thanks,” she says. “Sometimes, the old-fashioned way is less of a hassle.”
Andrei uses his remote viewing to scout out the hallway for us, but it’s sheer chaos, he reports—we’ve little to fear from our “fellow” Nazis. We hurry out into the stream of administrative workers, shouting and shoving toward the exits. The electric lights strung overhead dim a little each time the sirens sound, as if the siren’s drawing too much power; my confidence in the tunnels’ structural integrity is none too high right now. But we push ahead.
“There—that’s the tunnel we came from.” Andrei points to the left when we reach a T junction.
I gesture to the German signage before us. “This says there are exits in both directions.”
Andrei looks at me, chewing his lower lip, as he bears the f
ull weight of what I’ve said. That we do not have to return to that office, with Rostov and blood and static noise. That I needn’t forever make myself Stalin’s pawn in the name of science. That even Antonina Vasilievna, model Party labrador, is willing to shed her leash.
The lights dance, sputtering and flickering, as something rumbles deep in the tunnels’ bowels. The Allies are bombing us—bombing the Germans, rather, with us inside. For the first time since I’ve met her, Olga looks afraid. Andrei, however, has thrust his chest forward in his black slimy officer’s uniform and clenches his fists like he wants to punch something but hasn’t decided what.
“No.” Olga takes a step back, weight sliding to her good leg. “No. You saw what he can do. If we—if we were to—”
The next explosion is on top of us, concrete splitting open like a wound, rubble cascading before us. Only twenty feet ahead of us. Down the hallway to the left.
Cutting us off from Rostov and Lyubov.
None of us says a word, but Andrei reaches for my hand with his left and Olga’s with his right, and we follow his lead.
Chapter Four
“Quickly. What’s our safest path?” Andrei asks me, speaking from the corner of his mouth in Russian. The corridor is emptying quickly now, as the Nazi workers dive into offices and vaults to hunt for something sturdy to cower under. But Rostov’s map of the compound didn’t extend to this hall; we’ve no idea if there’s even a way out of the mountain down here.
I fling myself into the visions—searching for any signs of devastation in our immediate future.
That way, up ahead, another cave-in of rubble is coming for us, in less than a minute’s time. I reach for the metal door nearest to me without glancing at its lettering—there’s no time, because the moment I touch the cool handle, another vision envelops me. A man, frazzle-haired and thin as a shadow in his lab coat, his face blunted by too many horrors and his eyes guarded. The vision grows fingers, spreading away—in one, he runs down a cobblestone alley while sirens scream overhead. In another, he sits in a classroom, older now, guiding a dark-haired girl through her work. But another, down a different path from those—a red bullet hole sprouts from his forehead.
The lock clicks as Olga unlatches it and the door falls open from my hand.
The man from my visions is wedged under a metal desk in the room that reeks of chemicals and cold. “How did you—” He stops himself. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Quickly, come inside and lock the door.”
We do as he asks. As soon as the door latches, another explosion rocks the tunnels—the next cave-in I’d foreseen. Andrei looks to me, lips cupping to ask a question, but his gaze is snared by something in the room around us.
As the bulbs overhead cease their flickering and shine bright again, I see what.
Bodies, spread out across the medical examination tables before us—so withered and slender they could be made of sticks, the papery skin barely stretching from joint to joint. Each body has been autopsied in a different fashion, with parts missing—a limb here, the heart there, or a pair of pliers teasing open a ribcage.
I’ve always prided myself on my strong stomach; I think it makes me a better biologist, able to look upon any grisly scene dispassionately, my eye only toward the knowledge it offers up. But these bodies tell a story of starvation, abuse, pain. A lengthy, agonizing story—dried brown blood crusts their fingernails and stains their shriveled lips. Lacerations line their arms and legs; an endless hunger peels the skin back from their faces until they are nothing but teeth, desperate to sink into something, anything.
Andrei erupts beside me—one minute he is a perfectly camouflaged SS officer and the next he is a knot of electricity, crackling as he seizes the doctor by the throat. “What have you done?” he snarls as he slams the man against the nearest wall. “What did you do to them?”
To my horror, the man smiles.
“Yes.” His voice is only smoke, dissipating in the air. “Kill me. Please.”
Andrei’s eyes widen and he loosens his grip. “What—what are you—”
The man sags in Andrei’s chokehold, face turned skyward like an old Russian icon of the saints. “It would be a mercy. What I’ve had to do…”
I look between the man and the corpses. Another explosion sounds, but farther away now; it could be blocking our only path out of the mountain, or it could be tearing open a new escape route. “Andrei. We need to go.”
Andrei renews his grip on the man, but some of the rage has leached out of him. He’s not like Rostov—he doesn’t let it build and build like an oily ball of hatred that festers in his belly. “How do we get out of here?”
“You’re Russians.” The doctor’s demeanor shifts, his smile retreating. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Olga steps forward. “Look, doc, we don’t have time for chit-chat. Show us the way out of Mittelbau. Now.”
“Or you’ll kill me?” He snorts. “Fear of death—look what it’s gotten me. Transfer from the Polish camp to the political prisoners. From the rocket assembly line to the morgue. From cremation to dissection, experimentation, barbaric research to fuel an even more barbaric eugenics program. I don’t fear death anymore.”
“You’re one of the camp’s laborers?” I ask.
“Oh, yes. One of the lucky ones.” His face suggests his luck is anything but. “Rather than working me to literal death on the factory floor, I get to use my medical training to desecrate those who did.” He slumps back against the wall. “So much for the Hippocratic Oath.”
“Sorry for you, pal.” Olga rolls her eyes. “But if you haven’t noticed, this mountain’s about to come crashing down around us, and…”
The doctor lowers his gaze. “There’s … there’s a bay of trucks down the G corridor. But it’s heavily guarded.”
Andrei closes his eyes for a few seconds. When they pop back open, he says, “Not anymore, it’s not. Let’s go.”
No one bothers to stop us, to question us, to even notice us in our uniforms amidst the screaming, writhing madness. We have to cut through several criss-crossing hallways, avoiding cave-ins and makeshift barricades and the smell of burning meat, before at last the truck bay stretches before us. No signs of Rostov and Lyubov—somehow that knowledge, alone, gives me courage to endure whatever comes next.
Surprisingly few of the Nazis have come to the truck bay, presumably because they have no access to the keys, but between Andrei’s ability and mine, we’re able to dart around their field of vision. “It’s still daylight,” Olga points out as she uses her power to jump-start a truck without the keys. “There’s a chance they’ll bomb us on the road.”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Andrei says, as the truck roars to life.
We follow the trail of trucks toward the main road. Above ground, the aerial bombing looks even worse than it sounded down in Mittelwerk; Allied planes by the dozens fly overhead in flawless formation, dropping their bombs on the hilly forests with all the regularity of a farmer scattering seed. Each bomb sends a gout of dirt and wood and stone geysering into the air around us, and the trucks on the road swerve and juke to avoid the explosions, though many take a direct hit. The lucky ones catch fire; more explode into a fireball of diesel and hot metal and flesh.
“Hang tight,” Andrei says, through clenched teeth. “I learned a few tricks this morning.”
“Hopefully about what not to do,” Olga says, but even her expression is looking tighter than usual.
The truck swings wide to the right, slamming us all against the left side as an explosion sets us bouncing on too-tight suspensions. Gouts of dirt fly into the air; the sound of trees and rocks splitting apart fills the air. But Andrei stays focused; he keeps us safe. Finally, after a frantic half hour of steering through the chaos, we can no longer hear the roar of engines overhead.
Olga is the first to puncture the silence that’s pulled tight as a blanket around our truck as we wind through the tree-lined road. “So.” Her mouth twi
tches. “What’s our new plan?”
I rub the silk lining of my purse where the radio crystal is concealed. “I suppose we ought to check the shortwave … see if there’s a message waiting for us…”
But Andrei keeps white-knuckling the steering wheel; no one seems too eager, myself included, to take me up on that suggestion.
“Okay. Really, though.” Olga twists around so she can face Andrei and me, ignoring the doctor curled up in the back. “There is no default plan here. We have to do something.”
The possibility hangs in the air like a threat of rain, tangy and lush. The option no one wants to voice. Am I only imagining it, or are they thinking it, too? The way we all took the first chance to get away from Rostov that we could. I can’t be the only one.
Maybe it’s not just Rostov I’m running from. I’ve seen what obeying the Motherland does to me, the way its choices wind around my future like a tourniquet. How it’s forever a choice between staying alive and staying myself, that the two options will never coexist. Oil and water. Rostov isn’t the first to rub my nose in the spineless, soulless choices I’ve made to stay alive, to pursue my research, but he can be the last. I can end it.
For a moment, I let myself consider it—a future away from the Soviet Union and the ever more restrictive projects passed down to me by Moscow State and the NKVD, where I can study the secret code of my genes without being forced to weaponize that code—turn it into something to threaten and bargain and bribe others with. Does such a future await me, at the end of some unknown choice?
I’m searching, searching, but the only thing I can see right now is a swirl of colors and noise, nothing coming into focus. At least it’s not darkness. At least there’s something there.
My voice cuts through the silence. “We don’t have to go back.”
Now I’ve gone and said it: taken the idea from my mind and given it form, weight. It exists, now.
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