The girl tried to pull away from his touch, but her wrists and ankles had been anchored with metal restraints. A large leather belt ran across her stomach, too, securing her in place, but the girl fought against it anyway.
“Relax!” the doctor commanded.
A strange breeze suddenly whipped through the cell and scratched Ren’s forehead with ice-cold fingers. He touched his cheek. That breeze had come out of nowhere.
When the girl kept thrashing, the doctor sank a syringe into her IV. The bag’s clear liquid soon swirled with black tendrils, as dark as octopus ink. The girl whimpered. Her hands fell slack and her legs went still. The doctor scribbled notes onto a pad from his pocket, mumbling to himself before he left the room and turned the locks on the door one by one.
At last, the girl’s head lolled back. Her eyes were closed and her hair covered half her face, but Ren didn’t need to see any more to realize who was lying on that bed.
His breath abandoned him.
“Is that … is that her?” whispered Plank.
Ren could only nod. There lay the one person more famous than even the Viper.
The Empire had captured Zara St. James.
Ren tilted his head toward Plank. “Zara St. James?” he mouthed.
She nodded shakily, without speaking. Ren had never seen her look so startled. “How did they find her?”
Ren didn’t know. Deputy Führer Forst had told the crown prince that the Nazis were tracking Zara’s movements along the border, but Ren never thought that Zara would get caught. Let alone by Imperial Japan.
Staring through the grate again, Ren flinched at how helpless Zara looked, strapped down and unconscious. He grimly considered what the Empire had planned for her. Zara was one of the most powerful Anomalies in both territories, possessing two terrifying powers — the ability to manipulate the air and create lighting bolts in her hands. So it was strange that Crown Prince Katsura had kept Zara at the Fortress instead of locking her up in Alcatraz or turning her over to the Nazis. The Empire knew how desperate the Nazis were to find her, but the crown prince might have kept her as a political pawn. After all, he had bargained off his daughter to seal the V2 deal with the Germans and he needed a new piece of leverage — and maybe that was Zara.
A sick feeling roiled in Ren’s stomach. Did Crown Prince Katsura plan on experimenting on her, too?
Plank bumped shoulders with Ren. “We have to go. We can’t get caught here.”
“What about Zara, though?”
“We can’t exactly take her with us.”
Ren didn’t move. How could they leave her like this? “We need to talk.”
Plank pursed her lips into a flat line. “Fine, but not here.”
Together, they wound their way back the way they came, with their lone flashlight leading every move. They climbed the staircase to the main floor and slipped back into the storage closet. Once Ren pushed the bookshelf back into place, he sat down on a pile of textbooks, right there in the closet. He didn’t want to wait any longer to discuss what they had seen.
“What are we going to do about Zara St. James?” he said.
Shutting the closet door, Plank hushed him even though he had whispered. “It isn’t our job to save her. Our mission is to kidnap Aiko. Period.” She refused to sit down next to him, opting to use the time to straighten her blouse and reposition the bobby pins in her hair, repairing her professional armor.
“Who says we can’t do both — kidnap Aiko and rescue Zara? We can’t leave her in that room to rot, and we don’t know if the Empire will move her to another facility. This could be our only chance.”
Plank tackled her glasses next, wiping the lenses with a handkerchief from her pocket. “Think about what you’re proposing. There are only two of us embedded inside the Fortress, and even if Jay were alive, our chances of kidnapping Aiko and making it out of the hotel have always been middling. And I can guarantee you that our chances will go down to nothing if we decide to break out Zara, too. It’ll be suicide.” She slipped her glasses back on and a sanctimonious tone to go with it. “Look, Cabot. We have a job to do. I can relay what we saw tonight to your cousin, and she can alert the Revolutionary Alliance that we know Zara’s whereabouts. We have to leave it up to the Alliance to free her.”
“It could take weeks for them to put a plan together. Probably months,” said Ren, wishing she would at least see his point.
Plank rolled her eyes. “You’re welcome to have a go at saving Zara — but only after you help me get the princess to the getaway car. You can do whatever you want after that.”
“You could be sentencing Zara to death.”
“And you’re forgetting why we’re here. Do you want to help the Resistance to break into Alcatraz or not?” Before he could protest, she held up a hand. “I’m not picking a fight with you. Think about the lives on the line.”
Her words felt like a slap, but she was right, even though he wasn’t ready to say that out loud. They didn’t have the manpower or resources to break Zara out from her cell — and they definitely couldn’t jeopardize their mission to kidnap Aiko. The princess was the key to infiltrating Alcatraz, freeing the prisoners, and finding out about Ren’s mom. Zara may have ignited a revolution, but in this moment, it was her life weighed against a hundred others.
“Fine,” Ren said at last. Plank raised her chin in a very I-told-you-so way, but he pressed on. “But you have to tell Marty what we saw here tonight.”
“I’ll try to meet with her tomorrow when I’m out running errands,” Plank conceded. “It’s getting late. We’d better go.” With that, she rolled her neck back and forth and opened the door, clearly ready for bed.
Ren was a step behind her, but distracted. He could only hope that Zara was strong enough to survive until her Alliance could arrive. She was one of the most powerful Anomalies in the territories, but she was up against the Empire.
They were halfway across the room when Plank froze in front of him. “Get down!” she whispered.
It was too late.
The classroom door swung open, and Ren’s pulse took off running. The beam of a flashlight blinded both of their eyes.
“Arms up!” ordered a male voice in Japanese.
Panic choked Ren as his arms flew up over his head. He tried to map out an escape plan — knock the soldier down, make a run for the closest exit — but his gut told him that they’d never get far. They wouldn’t get past the first checkpoint.
Plank placed herself between Ren and the flashlight, her own hands lifted high in the air. “Sasaki-sama! It’s me. Greta.”
Ren’s face went white. Of all the soldiers who could have discovered them, it had to be Sasaki.
Sasaki lowered his flashlight but didn’t turn it off. “Fräulein Plank? What are you doing here after hours?” His lips curled when he noticed Ren. “And with him?”
“We were discussing the cadet uniforms in my office, and on our way out I thought I heard something in this classroom,” Plank said with a nervous laugh. “It must’ve been some old pipes.”
Sasaki regarded her doubtfully. “Why didn’t you turn on a light?”
“I — I,” Plank stammered. “We were about to leave when you came in. I know it’s a little after curfew, so we’ll be on our way.” She straightened and smiled. “Thank you for your concern, though. I’m grateful that we have such excellent security at the fort, and I’ll be sure to let your superior know.”
For a second, Sasaki’s chest puffed with pride, and Ren thought that he might let them go. But then Sasaki frowned. “I have to bring you both in for questioning, especially him. His mother was a Chinese traitor.”
“Sasaki-sama, please. This was all a misunderstanding,” Plank said, even though Ren figured this was a lost cause. “Look at me. There’s no need to bring us in. This was all an innocent mistake.”
“It’s protocol —”
She stepped forward again, never breaking eye contact with the soldier. “Let us go. You don’t
want to trouble your commanding officer with such a trivial thing. Don’t you agree?” Sasaki tried to look away, but Plank matched his movement to keep their eyes level. “Go back the way you came and forget all of this happened.”
Ren’s pulse pedaled faster and faster. He wasn’t sure what Plank was playing at, and he was pretty sure that she was only making things worse. But then something strange happened.
Sasaki’s voice went monotone. “Go back … forget this happened …”
“You won’t mention this to your commanding officer.”
“I won’t mention this to Sergeant Abe,” Sasaki repeated in the same deadened voice.
Plank gave an encouraging smile. “You’d better finish your rounds.”
Sasaki blinked sleepily and murmured, “Yes, that sounds right. Good-bye, Fräulein.” He broke eye contact and turned, swinging his flashlight around and shuffling out the door.
As soon as Sasaki was gone, Ren pulled his arms down slowly, completely unsure of what had happened. All he knew was that what he had seen wasn’t natural. It was almost as if …
Ren stared at Plank’s back. “What did you do to Sasaki?”
“I got him to leave us alone.” She didn’t turn around to look at him. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
Ren tried to mutter a thanks, but he was confused.
“His mom is Chinese, too, you know,” Plank added, her voice weak. “That’s why he has it out for you.”
Ren nodded slowly. So that was why Sasaki had taken such an interest in Ren. If Sasaki was half Japanese and half Chinese, then he had probably been taunted ever since he was a kid. Sasaki had probably tried to prove over and over that he was just as Japanese as his schoolmates and his fellow soldiers, but his mother’s heritage had dogged him wherever he went.
“But wait, how did you get him to back off? It was like —” Ren didn’t even know how to formulate what to say next, but before he could try, Fräulein Plank stumbled backward and slumped against him. He grunted as he caught her. “What’s wrong?”
“We can’t talk here. Let’s go” — she was panting now — “to my office. It’s down the hall. Fifth door on the right.”
Ren struggled to keep her standing. “You should lie down.”
“No! What if Sasaki comes back? I can’t … I can’t convince him to leave us alone again when I’m like this.”
“Like what? What happened —”
“I said that we can’t talk here!” she repeated, sounding desperate. “We have to go to my office. Right now.”
Her words came out in staccato, and Ren thought that she might actually faint, but she refused to lie down. Using Ren as a crutch, she pointed him toward her office, unlocked the door, and sank into her desk chair, as if she had run for miles in the searing summer heat.
“Water,” she whispered.
Ren unscrewed the glass bottle of water on her desk and held it up to her lips while she gulped down a couple of sips. He had never seen her so vulnerable. The Greta Plank he had come to know always had her hair perfectly pinned into place, could never tolerate a wrinkle in her shirt, and spat out orders as easily as breathing air. But now her bun had unraveled and her makeup had smudged. Her armor had been stripped down, and she was laid bare.
Having no place else to sit, Ren leaned against the desk. There was nothing for him to clear off from the surface — the tabletop was empty aside from a day planner and a pen. Plank obviously kept her workspace impeccably neat and devoid of anything personal. It struck Ren that he knew next to nothing about her — and that was made even more apparent tonight.
“What happened back there?” he said softly.
She swallowed another sip of water and shut her eyes.
“Did you hear me?” Ren pressed.
Her eyes fluttered open, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“You need to tell me what’s going on.” When she still said nothing, Ren bent down toward her. “Are you okay? Plank?”
Finally, she met his gaze. She whispered, “My name isn’t Greta Plank.”
Ren launched to his feet. Out of all the things she could have said, he had never expected that. “If you aren’t Greta Plank, then who are you?”
Plank rubbed her temples and rummaged through her desk drawer for a bottle of aspirin. “We’ve actually met before.”
“When? I think I’d remember something like that.” But a thought niggled at the back of Ren’s mind. He remembered thinking that Plank looked familiar during his first job interview, but he had figured he was mixing her up with someone else.
“We were in school at the same time.” She tapped out two pills from the aspirin bottle and swallowed them. “You and my little sister, Hannah, sometimes played together at recess.”
Neurons fired in Ren’s head, connecting dot to dot until it formed a memory. Then the air abandoned his lungs. “Hannah Quirk,” he whispered. The family had had three daughters — the youngest was Hannah and the oldest was Sophie. Which left the middle sister. “Tessa?”
She gave a slight nod.
Ren studied her face, and now he remembered. Her nose, her sharp chin — like her father’s. The set of her eyes, like her sisters’. But a lot had changed about Tessa, too. The girl that he had known had dark hair instead of blond. She giggled a lot, too, so often that the teachers would paddle her for it. Fräulein Plank, however, had never laughed in front of Ren.
“How … what …” Ren didn’t even know where to start.
So Tessa did it for him. “How did I end up here? What happened to my sisters and me?”
“And —”
“And how did I get Sasaki to back off?” she added bluntly, sounding so much like Tessa.
Ren had to wonder about where Tessa ended and Plank began. It had been years since he and Tessa crossed paths, and somewhere along the line she had gone undercover as a Nazi to work for the Resistance. There was a lot she needed to tell him.
“After our dad was killed and our mom died inside Alcatraz, my sisters and I were sent off to an orphanage on the Oregon coast.” Her tone flatlined as she mentioned the execution and she stared at her water bottle, watching a bead drip from the lip. “Sophie didn’t survive the trip.”
“The fever?” asked Ren. The same one that had nearly killed him.
“Hannah and I gave her our rations, but it wasn’t enough. We needed medicine.” She laced her fingers together around the bottle, clutching it tight. “When we got to the orphanage, Sophie’s lips were blue. The soldiers took her out of the bus, and that was the last time we saw her.”
Ren leaned back against the wall with his shoulders slumped. He hadn’t known Sophie well, but she had always been kind to him, the sort of girl who would share her lunch with you even if she was starving. “I’m sorry.”
“It was years ago now. I’m fine,” Plank replied. But she didn’t sound like it.
“How long were you at the orphanage?”
“Not long. We were old enough to work, so they farmed us out for work in a hotel on the coast. We did housekeeping there for years. The pay was next to nothing, but Hannah and I pooled our money together.” Pain threaded through her words. “We were planning on running away to the colonies in South America. Start over fresh.”
That made sense to Ren. Decades prior, the Axis powers had invaded, defeated, and divided the southern continent among themselves to exploit the resources there, like lumber and gold and the fertile fields that grew coffee and cocoa. But the colonies weren’t well policed, making them places where you could shed your old identity and slip on a new one.
Tessa’s gaze moved from her bottle to a water stain on the wall, a large brown spot opposite her desk, which marred the surrounding white paint. “But after Hannah turned thirteen, she started sneaking out at night after I was asleep. She wouldn’t tell me what she was up to, either, which drove me crazy. I thought she had a secret boyfriend or something.” She paused. “I wish that had been the case.”
“Where was she going?�
� asked Ren, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“To Resistance meetings. I followed her one night. There was a new cell getting organized, and they were recruiting members. We got into a huge fight after that, but she kept going.” Tessa’s voice grew thick with emotion. “One night, the soldiers raided the Resistance meeting. Hannah was arrested and sent to an internment camp.” She laughed bitterly. “Or a ‘reeducation center,’ according to the crown prince.’”
“Is she still at the camp?” Ren said grimly.
Tessa shook her head quickly. “She didn’t last a month. She tried to make a run for the fence, and you know what happens to people like that. I didn’t find out until six weeks later.” Anger sliced through her words and she said nothing for a minute. Then she sighed. “A few days after that, I manifested my ability.”
Ren could only stare. Tessa Quirk was an Anomaly? He had a hunch that this was coming, but hearing her say it, hearing her admit it, still knocked the air out of his lungs. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“That’s how you flew under the Empire’s radar,” Ren murmured. “So what exactly is your power? Persuasion?”
“Yes, but it’s not that simple —”
“Does Marty know what you can do?” The questions were crammed inside Ren’s mouth, fighting to be uttered next. “If you can talk people into doing what you want, then can you talk Aiko into coming with us willingly? We could be done with the mission tonight.”
“It doesn’t work like that!” Tessa blurted as she rubbed her temples harder. She eyed the aspirin bottle and took one more pill. “If I could make the Empire do whatever I wanted, do you really think that we’d be sitting here? I could be talking my way into the royal apartment and telling Crown Prince Katsura to slit his own throat.”
“But you told Sasaki to leave us alone and forget what he saw. That’s not nothing.”
“And you see what it took out of me.” She shot him a glare. “I don’t have any formal training, remember? If I had teachers like the Ronin cadets, then I could probably do a lot more with my power. But because I’ve had to learn on my own, my abilities are limited.
Live in Infamy Page 14