by Ryan Graudin
CHAPTER 3
If the conditions are just right—on a clear, cold day, in a flat, treeless terrain—the sound of an average gunshot can travel several kilometers. The sound wave from Yael’s cartridge went much farther. Ripping through cables and airwaves, from Tokyo to Germania/London/Rome/Cairo/anywhere with a working television set, in the span of seconds.
The world heard it. People of all stations, colors, creeds… Aryan mothers and fathers with broods of blond children, a balding shisha merchant in Cairo, an oily-faced adolescent in Rome. Many stared at the screen—mouths slack, stunned eyes—trying to process what had happened. Others who watched understood. This was the signal they’d been waiting for.
One—a frizzy-haired Polish woman by the name of Henryka—even smiled at her television, whispering, “That’s my girl,” before she stood and got to work.
For years Henryka’s beer hall basement had been the nerve center of the resistance—relaying messages between the cells, gauging the readiness of every territory, housing operatives, providing a safe place for General Erwin Reiniger and other mutinous National Socialist officers to brainstorm military operations.
A pair of radios sat between stacks of cracked-spine encyclopedias, waiting to receive messages from all corners of the crumbling Reich. Each set was accompanied by an Enigma machine, meant to protect the resistance’s airwave conversations from prying ears by encrypting outgoing messages and decrypting replies. For years these machines had been silent, gathering dust. Now they were brushed off, switched on. Four resistance operatives sat close by, their eagerness palpable. Brigitte, the only other woman in the room, had laid out not one but two sharpened pencils by her notebook, ready to encode messages. There was a third tucked through her honey-blond bun. Johann was already wearing his radio headset. Reinhard and Kasper stared at the map of the Axis-controlled world on the far wall, making bets on which territory would be first to secede.
There were plenty to choose from. The continents were littered with coded pins of operatives and Wehrmacht regiments, detailing the borders of the Third Reich’s reach in wretched red. The color swallowed Europe, crept into Asia, stained the sands of northern Africa.
The resistance had twenty-four hours to change it.
The putsch—a full-fledged militarized occupation of Germania, including arrests of the Reich’s highest officials and new leadership put into place—had to be quick. The old National Socialist government felled and Reiniger’s new government raised within a single day. Otherwise, the leading minds of the National Socialist Party—Göring, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels—would get over the shock of Hitler’s assassination, declare a new Führer, and crush Reiniger’s attempt to establish martial law.
Such an event would not mean defeat. But it would mean war. War in a way the world had rarely seen before—battles without borders, soldiers without uniforms. War that would ravage the bones of the Reich from within, with chaos like cancer.
Henryka stared at the red map, wrapped in a maelstrom thought pattern of what might/could/would happen when—
“What’s going on?” The girl’s voice would’ve been imperious had it not been muffled by several centimeters of steel. “Did I hear a gunshot?”
Henryka looked over at the doorway. Once, it had led to a supply closet full of filing cabinets, a broom, a lightbulb operated by a pull chain, and a spider or two. Now—with the help of a newly installed, reinforced door—it contained one very real Adele Wolfe (and, perhaps, still a spider or two).
At the beginning of the girl’s captivity, Henryka’s maternal side fought against the idea of keeping her locked up in a windowless room. These sympathies vanished after Adele’s first three escape attempts. Her initial “cell” had been Yael’s old sleeping quarters, but that door was made of mere wood, which took Adele only twenty-four hours to kick down. Henryka caught the girl before she reached the beer hall and relocated her to the closet. The girl’s second break for freedom happened when Henryka tried to slip her some crullers for breakfast and Adele shoved the reinforced steel wide open. The third involved an unscrewed lightbulb smashed into Henryka’s face and a dropped plate of schnitzel. Both attacks had come to nothing. Henryka still had cuts on her cheeks. Adele Wolfe now sat in the dark. Mealtimes were tenuous.
“I demand to know what’s happening!” The next yell was followed by a blunt THUD. And another. And another.
Kasper, who’d been involved in the operation to bring Adele Wolfe in, eyed the shuddering door. “Want me to slip her a sedative?”
Henryka shook her head. “Let her kick. She’ll break her toes before she gets through that door.”
And it sounded like she might. THUD after THUD, Adele was giving the steel a noble fight. “What’s going on out there?”
Henryka’s gaze shifted to the static-filled screen and then back to the map. She wished she knew the answer to that question, but it would be some time before any real news started pouring in through Johann’s headset and Brigitte’s pencils. Right now all Henryka could do was record the facts she knew. (One day this would all be history. Someone had to keep documents for the books.)
So she walked over to her Olympia Robust typewriter, placed her fingers on its well-worn keys, and started to write.
Valkyrie the Second Operation Notes
April 2, 1956
1315 hours--The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead.
CHAPTER 4
The Führer Adolf Hitler is not dead. Yael was no longer running, but this single, stunned thought still chased her. Not dead. Not dead.
Her getaway from the Imperial Palace grounds had been clean, though she was still dripping with moat water as she walked down Tokyo’s streets. Despite her damp hair, the people passing Yael on the sidewalk hardly gave her a second glance. Why would they? Her face bore the same bone structure, pale skin, and dark eyes as theirs. She looked nothing like the girl who’d shot Adolf Hitler on live television.
Neither of the dancers on that screen had been what they seemed. Victor Adele Wolfe, blond darling of the National Socialists, had actually been Yael. Jewish daughter. Skinshifter. Adolf Hitler, the ruler of the Third Reich, was not the man she’d danced with and shot in the chest. The disguise had been as convincing as her own. He wore the Führer’s clothes, spoke the Führer’s words, perfected every wrinkle on the Führer’s face, every silvering hair in the Führer’s bristle of a mustache.
Yael did not know who he was. She’d only had enough time before her flight to see the truth—spilling white through his hair, flashing gold, green, blue, gray, black through his eyes. She’d killed a skinshifter. Someone like her.
For so long (so, so long) Yael had thought she was alone in this—changing, never truly owning her own skin. Now she realized she couldn’t be. Experiment 85 was Dr. Geyer’s triumph. Hadn’t she been in the room when she heard Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself say it showed much promise? The doctor would not have stopped administering the injections simply because Yael escaped. Her impersonation of Bernice Vogt had shown the Angel of Death what was possible. He must have gathered new subjects, given them life-threatening fevers, and taken their skin, erasing their old identities needle by needle.
Her whole life Yael had struggled to find what was lost—the her before Dr. Geyer’s syringes. For a moment, between the shout and the shot, she’d claimed it. She’d been fully herself: Yael. Inmate 121358ΔX. The Führer’s death.
I am. I am. I am.
And now?
Now she was a murderer, her hands stained with the wrong man’s blood. Now the real Führer—the one who’d ravaged continents with war and death camps, who’d murdered millions and millions (including Yael’s whole family and people)—was still alive. Yael had no doubt that the world would soon know it.
She crossed the street, to the corner of an intersection. Something caught her eye as she walked. Movement—jerky and quick—about a block back: a hunchbacked silhouette darting through shop shadows.
All of Yael’s in
stincts screamed one thing.
—YOU’RE BEING FOLLOWED—
Not such a clean getaway after all.
Who could have possibly spotted her disguise, trailed her all the way from the Imperial Palace? And why hadn’t this person called for reinforcements?
Yael scanned the shop fronts’ dead neon signs and locked entrances. She needed a nook, some sort of sheltered corner—
There! Between a shuttered tea shop and a modern, glass-walled department store sat an alley, lined with trash bags waiting to be hauled away in the next violet dawn. Several lamp-eyed felines looked disdainfully at Yael as she ducked into the side street and waited.
For a long moment there was no sound but cats clawing through bags and the distant clatter of an electric streetcar. Yael was beginning to wonder if she’d been mistaken when she heard the clip of boots against pavement, too heavy to be female, closing in fast. Whoever this was had obviously seen Yael change, which meant he’d seen her clothes, and possibly her wolves. If she allowed him to get away, he could return to the SS, give them a head start on where to search for her.
She’d left enough loose ends tonight.
As soon as her tracker’s arm came into view, Yael sprang. Adrenaline surged as she wrenched the man into the alley, flinging him face-first into the pile of trash bags and pinning him there with her knee.
Garbage flew everywhere: gummy rice, limp seaweed, rotting fish, wads of kanji-covered newspaper. Cats howled and scattered. Another (more muffled) howling rose from beneath the man’s jacket, which was draped over his head, as if he himself had been hiding. “Scheisse! All right, all right! I surrender! You don’t have to break my arm.”
Something about the voice made Yael do a double take at the jacket. Old brown leather, soft as butter. There was only one German speaker in Tokyo with outerwear like that.…
Oh no.
Yael let go of his arm and stood. The jacket fell away.
The last time she’d seen Luka Löwe, he’d almost looked like a gentleman: shaggy golden hair pulled back, jacket oiled, uniform starched and pressed. Now his hair stuck out at all angles. Bits of seaweed and rice clung to his face. The whole of him was soaked.
Any other person might have found cause to look self-conscious about these things. Luka Löwe, however, smiled in that half-cocked way of his as he sat up, gave her a once-over.
“Fancy seeing you here, Fräulein. You look good. But something’s changed.… Wait. Don’t tell me.” His eyes cut up and back. “New haircut.”
Unbelievable. This boy was the very definition of the word. Cracking jokes and grinning (grinning!) with seaweed-strung hair in the face of a skinshifting assassin. If his intention was to disarm Yael, it worked. She was without words.…
“Don’t get me wrong. I like it. It’s a verdammt good party trick. But we both know I didn’t just traipse halfway across Tokyo to compliment you on your restyling choices.” The boy rose from the trash bags and shook out his jacket. Some stray droplets dashed into Yael’s face. She blinked them away.
“How did you—”
“Know?” Luka’s dark eyebrows quirked, the way they always did before he launched into a sarcasm-riddled monologue. “I had a front-row seat for the whole shebang. Fräulein shoots Führer. Fräulein runs like the wind, leaving me behind to get questioned and blamed. I wasn’t about to let that happen.”
“So you followed me.”
“Yep.” Luka shouldered his jacket back on. Yael realized that the swastika armband he’d worn on the sleeve throughout the entire Axis Tour was missing, torn off. “Excellent job, by the way. I guarantee you no one in the Third Reich saw this coming. First-class showmanship.”
Excellent? No sympathetic National Socialist would use that word to describe what they’d witnessed in the ballroom.… Luka’s loyalties had never been easy to pin, but there was something about the way the boy stood in front of Yael, soaked to the bone, notably not screaming for any nearby SS, that made her doubt his allegiances lay with the Third Reich.
“It wasn’t a show,” she managed.
“It was a live television broadcast,” Luka pointed out, then relented. “Fine. First-class assassination, if you prefer. Hitler’s been dodging a violent demise for years—”
Yael’s hearing—still flying high on adrenaline—bristled at a new sound. More footsteps. She held up her palm in front of Luka’s face. It was a signal from her shorthand language with her old trainer, Vlad, but the victor understood.
—SILENCE SOMEONE IS COMING DON’T LET THEM SEE—
Yael pushed Luka’s back against the alley wall, shielding him with her own body. Whoever walked by would glimpse her dark hair. Nothing more.
They stood, chest-to-chest, face-to-face, as the footsteps drew closer. Yael couldn’t help but notice how Luka’s jaw clenched, how his skin went a shade paler. It reminded her that his mask of confidence was just that—a mask. The mechanics of defense at its finest.
Was it only this evening she’d last seen it slip? When they were dancing in Emperor Hirohito’s ballroom. When Luka had practically proposed to her. When Yael’s heart had felt something other than anger, pain, hurt. When she knew there could be nothing between them (because of who he was, because of who she was not). When she’d been forced to cut him off with ending words: I do not love you. And I never will.… Good-bye.
But here they were—covered in trash, soaked in moat water, hiding for their lives—and what did Yael find herself staring at?
Luka’s lips.
They weren’t chapped, the way they had been on the train to New Delhi, when he’d leaned in and kissed Yael like the world was ending. They weren’t smooth with soporifics, the way they had been on the Kaiten, when Japan’s mountainous shores had loomed on the horizon and Luka had kissed her a second time, knocking her out and winning the race.
In this moment they were tight, pulled back with something like fear.
The footsteps came—from the sound of their tread and the quiet conversation tickling her ears, Yael suspected they belonged to a middle-aged couple, harmless—and went. But Yael kept staring at Luka.
Luka stared back.
“What now?” he whispered.
It was a simple enough question. Two short words that led to a vast, answerless chasm. All of Yael’s life had been leading up to this mission. She’d given everything to it: her years, her grief, her soul.
What now?
Now the wrong man was dead. Now she was standing in an alley with the boy she’d wanted so terribly to hate but didn’t. Now she had no mission or orders. Now she was supposed to be free, but instead she felt… lost.
“I—I have to go.” Yael backed toward the alley’s entrance.
Luka stepped forward. The distance between them hadn’t changed at all.
“Not so fast.” He hopped around so that his squared shoulders blocked the way to the street. “Don’t you know it’s rude to run out on your date? This would make twice in one night.”
“You were Adele’s date. Not mine,” Yael told him. “If you don’t get out of my way, I will break your arm.”
Luka’s lips pulled tighter (from frightened to terrified), but he didn’t move. “You can’t just abandon me, Fräulein. My Japanese begins at konnichiwa and ends about there, too. My hair stands out like a one-thousand-watt lightbulb. And my face is… well… my face!”
—GET OUT LEAVE HIM—
Yael didn’t owe this boy anything. It would be simple, easy even, to snap Luka’s radial bone and slip off into Tokyo’s ripening night.
“You leave me here, and it’s only a matter of time before the SS snag me for questioning. We both know that when that happens, I’m as good as dead. And if you’re the girl I think you are, that wouldn’t sit too well with you.”
“You know nothing about me,” Yael snarled.
“Do I not?” The victor held his hands up. “Don’t get me wrong. You were a verdammt good Adele, Fräulein, but you lived by a code she never did. You went ba
ck for Yamato and me when the commies caught us. And don’t even get me started on Katsuo—”
Katsuo. The Japanese racer who’d died in a wreck Yael had caused trying to get ahead. Technically speaking, the death had been an accident, but this had done nothing to salve Yael’s guilt. Tsuda Katsuo was dead because of her. The first name on a growing list: Tsuda Katsuo, unknown skinshifter…
Yael had started off her mission with a nameless list, bloodless hands. She had grown up in the shadow of death—death, so much death, and all for what? She’d watched so many fall into its jaws—Babushka, her mother, Aaron-Klaus—and she’d wanted, so desperately, so helplessly, to stop it.
For a while, she thought she could.
Yael wanted to be like the Valkyrie maidens in the old Norse lore. Winged women who rode to war on the backs of wolves, choosing which soldiers lived and died. She’d thought she could make death mean something, if she wielded it right. (A death to end this death.) So she’d aimed her gun at that man in the ballroom and made her choice.
“Point is,” Luka kept talking, “you’ve got a heart. And right now, I’m wagering my life on that.”
Life or death?
Yael was getting sick of choices.
“How do I know you won’t contact the authorities as soon as my back is turned?” she asked.
“I considered it,” Luka said with a shamelessness only he could pull off. “But your face is… well… not your face. If I dragged you back there looking like that, who’d believe me?”
Life? Or death?
Death? Or life?
There were enough names on the list without Luka Löwe’s at the end.
“Take off your clothes,” she told him.
Luka burst into a grin as he threw off his jacket and started unbuttoning his uniform to reveal his damp white undershirt.
“Not all of them,” Yael said before he could peel that off, too. “Just the big tells. Swastikas, Iron Crosses, anything that will make you stand out.”