by Ryan Graudin
“You can do this!” Yael screamed; her muscles did, too. It was taking all her might to wrest him to the escape-door opening. “For Adele!”
They were at the edge now. Felix Wolfe’s eyes met hers a fourth, final time: stark white, wide black, muddy fear, rage in all its shades.
Yael pushed.
The chaos swallowed Felix, too.
She stood alone on the brink of a hungry night. Dizzying darkness and heights unknown howled beneath her. The parachute straps around her chest felt as flimsy as parcel twine. For a moment, for more than a moment, Yael found herself understanding Felix’s fear.
But the unbearably cold air tore at her fingertips, lashed at her blood-bound hair. Calling…
—JUMP JUMP JUMP LIVE AGAIN—
She threw herself into the night.
CHAPTER 12
Felix was falling. His throat clenched so terror-tight he could not even scream. Shutting his eyes made no difference in his level of fear. There was still darkness and falling, darkness and the cold claws of night against his face. His stomach felt closer to the cabin of the Immelmann IV than to his own body. His heart refused to obey even the most basic laws of survival, starting and stopping and starting again as he fell…
as he fell…
as he fell…
Count out fifteen seconds, then pull the cord.
“One… two…” Felix was moving his mouth, but he couldn’t hear himself. There was the wind roaring past his eardrums, but there were also Baasch’s many instructions. Intricate plan pieces rattling through his head.
Use the Hitler Youth membership badge on your uniform to pick the lock on your cuffs. Then you will free Inmate 121358ΔX. On the wall of the cabin is a red lever. Point it out to the girl, but not too quickly. You’ll want to jump as close to the fourteen-hour mark as possible. Do you have a watch?
So much of what had happened in the past few hours had been staged. From the Immelmann IV’s flight path to their placement in the Führer’s personal cabin to the manageable altitude. It was all part of the SS-Standartenführer’s plan—releasing the rat from the trap.
But Felix’s fear was far from fake. He’d thought he’d do anything for his family. But he knew now—shamefully, without a doubt—that he couldn’t have jumped on his own. If the girl hadn’t pushed him, he’d still be up in the Condor, on his way to Germania and more crushed fingers and the Wolfe family’s gravestoneless fate.
But the girl had pulled Felix to the edge, looked straight into his eyes, and pushed.
For Adele! That was what she’d told him, without even knowing how terribly true it was. How much salvation and damnation there was in her single shove. The Wolfes were safe, but there would be blood. Blood for blood. Blood to pay. An entire world of it.
Salvation, damnation, salvation, damnation.
As he fell…
as he fell…
as he fell…
Count out fifteen seconds. Surely it had been that long! Felix pulled the cord. The parachute released, thin fabric pluming in the night. Its harness cut against Felix’s arms. His world snapped into place.
The moon hung high above, gleaming as bright as Baasch’s Totenkopf. All was silver and dark. Far below he could see the peaked crowns of lush pines. Odd… should there be this many trees?
No. No, no, no… NO!
On the plane, when Felix went to check his watch, he’d found the hands stuck in place. Time stood still, and he’d had no idea when it had stopped. Five hours ago? Eight? Three? They’d already been flying for so long.
That was the moment the Immelmann IV started to tilt back to earth. That was the moment when Felix feared that Germania was only minutes away. Their fourteen hours was up, and it was Now or never!
But Germania—its sparkling collection of monuments, the thunderous curve of the Volkshalle’s dome—was nowhere to be seen. The ground was lightless; velvet dark wilderness rolled out for kilometers. Not a farm or a town in sight. Just trees upon trees upon trees.
They’d jumped too soon.
To the distant right and far left, Felix spied the other escapees’ parachutes. The lives of Luka and the girl hung by threads, just a few centimeters of fiber between them and drop, fall, death.
All of this reminded Felix that he was still falling. Still suspended in a place no man should be.
What would happen when he reached the ground?
INTERLUDE
THREE PORTRAITS OF MAY 16, 1952
BEFORE
Emptiness dwarfed the Wolfes as they gathered around their television. This feeling was crammed into all corners of the family room—withering the wildflowers in the coffee-table vase, livering the silver picture frames with black tarnish spots. Everywhere Felix looked, he was reminded of the absence, but it was the chair that haunted him the most. Its sagging mustard-colored upholstery had been Martin’s favorite place to read. How many evenings had his older brother sat there, leafing through an abridged version of Mein Kampf, trying to pretend he understood it?
Now it was a shrine. Empty for a reason none of the Wolfes talked about. The wool throw Martin had left crumpled there on the morning of the twins’ twelfth birthday was unmoved. Two years’ worth of dust fuzzed its sterling yarn.
There was a lot of dust in the Wolfe house these days. Drifts of it built up on shelves, settled on the pages of unopened books. Felix’s mother seemed not to see it. Then again, she wasn’t really looking. Most of her time was spent inside her bedroom, shades drawn. It was a rare morning that she got out of bed.
This was one of those rare mornings. Felix and Adele had both been excused from school to watch the New Germania rally. (A chance to watch the Führer speak, their headmaster explained, was far more important than class. It promoted national unity and raised morale.) Adele had wanted to use the free time to sneak off to the racetrack, but Felix decided that the Wolfe family could use a dose of unity and raised morale, so he persuaded his sister to watch the speech. He’d also urged his parents to join so they could watch as a family.
But even when they were all together, it wasn’t the same. His parents sat on the sofa, one cushion between them. His mother’s stare was on the television: glass meeting glass. His father’s skin was scarred with days’ worth of engine grease—over his knuckles, under his fingernails. Adele sat on the rug, her expression screwed tight in a way that meant she wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Felix couldn’t blame her.
He didn’t quite know where to sit. Martin’s chair was off-limits, and the cushion between his parents held the same untouchable aura. In the end, he settled on the rug behind his twin sister, in front of the couch.
None of them spoke as they watched the screen. The Führer had not yet appeared. A band was playing; the cameras switched back and forth between the musicians and the crowd. Frankfurt’s morning was drizzly outside the Wolfes’ windows, but Germania’s skies spread cloudless against the Reichssender lenses. Rows and rows of rally attendees were singing party anthems, faces lit with sunlight and fervor.
His mother’s foot started to move in time with the music, tapping Felix’s back. She began to hum, giving the song a skeleton frame. Papa started singing. He knew all the lyrics. His husky voice shifted through the dust, fleshing out his wife’s tune. Even Adele joined in after a few stanzas.
It wasn’t enough just to listen to his family’s chorus. Felix opened his mouth and did his part. The song took shape.
For the last time, the call to arms is sounded!
For the fight, we all stand prepared!
Already Hitler’s banners fly over all streets.
The time of bondage will last but a little while now!
There was still a space. But for a moment, Felix could make himself forget the silence of Martin’s full baritone, never again to join theirs. For a moment, he could stare at the screen’s light—at Germania’s new stones and smiling faces, at the brass band and banners—and feel no distance at all.
&nb
sp; DURING
Luka Löwe was lost in the forest of salutes and uniforms planted in the Grosser Platz. His boots were just one pair of the hundreds standing on the plaza’s stones. There was other footwear as well—saddle shoes and wing tips, heels and flat-strapped Mary Janes—belonging to the myriad of press and civilians. Many of them were Germanians (though some, unused to the capital’s new name, still slipped and called themselves Berliners), but others had traveled from all corners of the Reich to attend this assembly. The rally—meant to celebrate the Führer’s immense architectural overhaul of Germania—was being held in front of the old, torched Reichstag building. The amount of humanity in the Grosser Platz felt impossible: thousands upon packed thousands. All of them eager for a chance to see Adolf Hitler speak.
Luka hated being there, though he’d had little choice in the matter. Every one of the Führer’s public speeches was attended by a handful of carefully selected Hitler Youth. They always stood in a line—pressed uniforms, painfully identical—providing a gold mine of shots for Goebbels’s propaganda films.
One of the rally organizers had arranged the boys’ formation three hours earlier. Lining them up just so, angling their faces in view of the third Reichssender camera, instructing them to “look to the Führer and nowhere else.”
But the Führer wasn’t at the podium yet. A brass band had played “Horst-Wessel-Lied” beneath fluttering swastika banners, and some man named Albert Speer spoke at length about the grandeur and symbolism of the newly completed Volkshalle. (The dome of the monstrous building beside them was so high that the statue at the top—a Roman eagle clutching a globe in its talons—nearly touched the noon sun.)
Luka’s neck was starting to ache. His legs tingled with a hot-pin sensation. The boys next to him must have been just as uncomfortable, yet no one dared to break formation.
When Adolf Hitler finally stepped onto the stage, it was to an almighty roar of heils. Heil to Hitler. Heil to victory. Heils rang throughout the Grosser Platz; the power of them buzzed through Luka’s eardrums, made him cringe.
Eventually, the welcoming cries faded. Adolf Hitler started talking about communists and Aryans, building empires and destroying them. He’d gotten no more than a few words into what promised to be a long, spittle-flying, fist-pounding speech when Luka stopped listening. It wasn’t just Hitler’s yelling that bothered him, but the way the crowd yelled back during the speech’s planned pauses—so eager to be heard by this man, so willing to take Hitler’s words and make them their own.
Luka wanted no part in it, though he knew if he was caught withholding a salute, the consequences would be crushing. He realized at the next break in the monologue that he could swing his arm and move his lips without saying a word. No one would notice the difference.… The boys next to him were too busy shouting their own heils, and the cameras couldn’t pick apart Luka’s voicelessness from all the other moving mouths.
No one could hear his silence.
The pause ended. Hitler’s speech flowed on and a thirsty crowd listened. Luka’s thoughts began steering back to all the Axis Tour training he was missing when something—no, someone—caught his attention. The man was in uniform. Brown shirt and boots the same as Luka’s and those of hundreds of other rally-goers. His hair was an off sort of yellow, covered mostly by his cap. He would’ve been impossible to pick out from the rest of the crowd, except for one very simple fact: He was moving.
Every other brownshirt stood straight, eyes rapt on the Führer, as they’d been instructed. Luka couldn’t help but watch this man inching forward, shifting from line to line in a slow, subtle way.
No one else seemed to notice.
The Führer’s speech had reached the point of frenzy: red face, quivering mustache. “We’ve left the ruins of old Berlin behind, embraced the monumental splendor of Germania by building structures grander than any other in history! The Volkshalle shall be the shrine to which the world’s eyes turn! The great witness for the progress of the Aryan race!”
The uniformed man was making progress of his own, slipping closer to the rally stage. He was only two rows away, and a few more Hitler Youth boys had started to notice. Like Luka, they all watched as he removed his cap. They all had mere seconds to register the dark roots along his hairline before something much more shocking claimed their attention: the pistol hidden in his hat.
Luka expected the man to shout, but he didn’t say a word. He raised his gun, let his bullets scream for him.
One.
Two.
Three.
A trio of shots. Far more powerful, far more deafening than any of the crowd’s heils had been. Every shot hit its mark: Adolf Hitler’s chest.
The Führer choked on his own blood and words, collapsing down to some place that Luka—as close as he was to the stage—could not see. His eyes fell back to the marksman. There was a fire behind the man’s face. He wasn’t trying to run. It was almost as if, in his stillness, the marksman had forced everyone else to move. No other soul in the shadow of the Volkshalle was still. Brownshirts twisted and turned. Black streaks of SS uniforms tore to the base of the stage, Lugers drawn.
The flames behind the marksman’s face roared. Strength like burning. He raised his gun again, all the way to his head.
There was a fourth shot.
The Grosser Platz writhed with the screams of the living. Panic, fear, agony, emotion, too much emotion. The boys who’d stood so calmly beside Luka for hours on end were now running with nowhere to go, threatening to trample one another with their own hobnailed boots in their herdlike panic. Luka stood his ground, soles planted in the Grosser Platz’s stones. His mouth had fallen open, but no scream came.
For him, there was only silence.
AFTER
Yael saw things differently.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
She sat in front of Henryka’s television screen, pencil in her mouth, homework forgotten, as she watched Aaron-Klaus—friend, survivor, the boy who ruffled Yael’s hair and teased her about being too smart and helped her pretend she was somehow normal—do the unimaginable.
Pop.
Yael’s pencil shattered at the sound of the fourth shot. Moon-gray graphite powdered across her tongue. A taste as acrid as ash.
No. Not him. Not him, too.
She’d known it was coming. Death always did. And Aaron-Klaus had been hungry to meet it—to stand face-to-face with the Führer, gun in hand. Wasn’t it just yesterday that they’d talked about stepping up, killing the bastard, changing the world?
The rally’s order was as smashed as Yael’s pencil: Screams and SS men and civilians and brownshirts all blended together. The Reichssender channel fell into chaos, fuzzed into static.
Henryka walked into the office, squinted at the screen. She’d missed it all. “What’s wrong? Did it break?”
Blond frizz tumbled over the older woman’s forehead as she leaned toward the television, twisted its power knob off. Static to silence.
“Aaron-Klaus.” His name felt different this time, when Yael said it. As if all of its letters were edged with lead. It was the way every one of their names felt, whenever Yael let herself think of them: Babushka, Mama, Miriam. Heavy, heavier, heaviest. All an equal weight of gone.
“Klaus,” Henryka corrected her. “You mustn’t let anyone hear you say his real name. He could get arrested and questioned.”
Yael stared at the blank screen’s glass. It was her own reflection inside the television now: twiggy teenage girl, blond pigtails, lichen eyes, the face she’d chosen for herself, so many years ago, when Aaron-Klaus found Yael by the river. She had not changed it since.
But it looked like someone else’s. It was someone else’s (she’d stolen most of the features from a League of German Girls recruiting poster). Yael watched as the strange girl inside the television started moving her mouth. “Aaron-Klaus just shot the Führer. Aaron-Klaus just shot himself.”
Unreal words. True in the worst of ways.
Yae
l knelt in the middle of the cinder-block office. The television screen was still dark, dead, dark. There was a candle by her knees, a match in her hand, and a memory in her heart.
You must never forget the dead.
This had been Miriam’s commandment to her after Yael’s mother passed. The older girl had taken pieces of straw from the mattress and woven them together into a memorial candle. It had been waxless and wickless, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d had nothing to light it with anyway.
There was a flame this time. Yael dragged the match across the floor—red chemicals at its end shivered to life. Life, life, something was alive and burning. It danced hot against her fingertips as she guided it to the wick, where it caught. Kept.
Religion was one of the many things she’d left behind in the camp. Mama’s healing prayer, Miriam’s candle, faint memories of a Passover feast… these were the only pieces of her people’s faith Yael could remember. She did not even know the mourning Kaddish prayers. Aaron-Klaus might have: He was the only person Yael knew who shared her numbers, her blood. Who might have known how to say good-bye to himself…
But lighting a memorial candle was something Yael knew how to do. She sat with crossed legs, watching the flame dance through the dark. It was a small and humble burning, but it made a difference.
He made a difference.
It was this thought alone that kept Yael feeling real. Through the sounds of Henryka’s tears and Reiniger’s curses. Through the unforgiving silence of the television. Aaron-Klaus was gone, but his death had meant something. He’d done exactly what he’d promised Yael he would do: Step up, change things, kill the bastard.
And that was something… something to hold on to.