by Ryan Graudin
Pashkov was a hard man to intimidate by looks alone, but Miriam had collected enough badges on her uniform to command his respect. The three guards in the cabin had heard enough mythic tales involving Mnogolikiy to recognize Miriam’s war face and be sufficiently quelled.
Intimidation tactics, doubt, eleven years of searching through nightmares and summer crowds—all these things fell away when Miriam stepped into the cabin. The girl stared at her, and Miriam felt something inside her connect—ending hitting beginning, a circle finally closing.
She knew then. She knew with unshakable certainty.
She’d found Yael.
CHAPTER 20
Yael felt outside of herself as she stared at the other woman’s numbers. Dragged back to another body, an earlier time, a harsher place. She felt the stab of Barrack 7’s straw mattress beneath her knees. She heard Miriam’s breathy encouragements: People don’t walk out of those gates. But you can. You are special, Yael. You can live. The thrilling fear of escape crawled through her changeable skin all over again.
Yael was special. She walked out of those gates, and she lived. All because Miriam told her to. The older girl had been dead for years—living on only as a wolf on Yael’s arm, a reason to fight. There was even a file in Henryka’s office to prove it: the execution orders of Barrack 7, stamped and signed by the Angel of Death himself.
But the proof in front of Yael now was etched in more permanent ink.
121048ΔX.
Her third wolf was alive.
“I’m here, Yael.” Miriam’s numbers disappeared as she wrapped her arms around Yael—the embrace felt just as firm and protective as it had eleven years ago. Yael burst into sobs at the familiarity of it. For once, her tears were not made of pain.
They stayed in the cabin for hours. Exchanging lifetimes. Miriam spoke of her own injections, her escape from the camp, her life among the Soviets. Yael told her friend everything: fourth wolf, fifth wolf, the Axis Tour… all that happened after. The afternoon was long and pale by the time their stories converged.
“Experiment Eighty-Five… Dr. Geyer must have perfected the compound,” Miriam whispered when Yael’s tale came to a close. “The SS is using face-changers.”
“And the real Führer is still alive,” Yael added.
The young woman nodded. “He reappeared on the Reichssender only a few hours after you shot his double at the Victor’s Ball.… He gave a call-to-arms Chancellery Chat. It’s been playing on repeat ever since. There’s hardly a soul in the world who hasn’t seen it.”
“General Reiniger’s putsch… Hitler had to be dead for the plan to work.…”
And now the whole Reich knew otherwise. Valkyrie the Second’s wings had been clipped, its flight for freedom failed. Years of preparation and secrets and countless deaths were now falling into ruin, all because Yael killed the wrong person.
Before she could ask after Germania (Any news? Any at all?), Comrade Commander Pashkov appeared in the cabin doorway. “Comrade Mnogolikiy.”
Miriam leapt to her feet and faced the officer.
“We’ve lingered as long as we can,” he continued. “We’ve just received orders to meet up with units in Molotov. From there, we’re to make the push to Moscow while Germania is distracted.” Pashkov stopped, as if only then remembering that Yael was there and could speak Russian. “I trust your interrogation has been fruitful?”
“Very.” Miriam’s demeanor hardened in Pashkov’s presence. Yael watched her old friend—standing straight, wielding a stare that made men shrink—and could not help but think, I’m not the only one who’s changed.
Her third wolf was alive, and she was a fierce, fierce creature.
“I’ll need more time with the prisoners. Volchitsa is to come with us. The boys as well,” Miriam continued. “Have them ride in my transport.”
Comrade Commander Pashkov remained rigid in the doorway, his eyes clashing with Miriam’s another few seconds before he relented. “If that’s what you think is needed.”
“It is,” Miriam said.
There was a tension in the sharp, spring air that made Yael wonder what the alternative was. She didn’t think she’d like the answer.
“We move out in ten.” Pashkov left the cabin.
Miriam stared out the door, watching the soldiers pack up their tents. Her fingers found the end of her braid, started tugging its silver-dark strands.
“We’re going to have to be careful,” she said, voice low. “If it had been just you and not the boys…”
“Felix and Luka are with me,” Yael said and stood to join her. “They’re not to be harmed.”
Miriam frowned. “Why should you care what happens to them?”
Because of blood dreams and broken things. Because Adele’s brother didn’t deserve to be here, in the middle of the wilderness with a dying hand. Because Yael had crossed so many lines. (Tsuda Katsuo. Unknown skinshifter.) Because both Felix and Luka had unlocked things inside her. Terrifying feelings, making her more monstrous, more human in turn.
But how to say any of this? How to untangle the knot inside her chest? Smooth it out into words?
“I owe myself something,” Yael said. “I’ve lost so many people, Miriam. I lost you. I left you to die.”
Her friend’s hand dropped away from her braid, came to rest on Yael’s arm. “Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I feel,” she whispered. “It’s what I’ve felt for years.”
The face her friend wore now was much different from the one Yael remembered, but the sadness beneath it was unmistakably Miriam’s. “You were just a girl. We were both just children. Children faced with impossible choices.”
Life or death. It stretched so far back.
Had she ever known life without it?
“I’m not a girl anymore,” Yael said. The knot over her heart only seemed to grow—thick with blood not hers. “I’m an assassin. I spent so many years learning how to kill, and it’s just made things bloodier.” A few drops plus more plus more… “I thought I could make all this death stop, but—”
“Yael.” Miriam’s fingers tightened. Her sadness turned into something stronger. “Don’t put this on yourself. Facing an evil so large, much less stopping it, it’s too much to ask of a single person. If you hadn’t escaped the camp, Dr. Geyer never would’ve used the girls of Barrack Seven for Experiment Eighty-Five. I never would have gotten out alive. If you hadn’t shot the face-changer in Tokyo, the resistance never would have acted, and Hitler’s reign would be going on uninterrupted.”
That was a new way of looking at it. Yael had little trouble swallowing her friend’s words and taking them to heart because her third wolf knew her.
“You gave me a chance to live,” Miriam said. “You’ve given the world a chance to free itself. That’s nothing to feel ashamed about.”
It wasn’t, was it?
“Now I have to give Felix and Luka a chance,” Yael told her friend. “They’re under my protection.”
“And you’re under mine,” Miriam assured her. “But for now, it’s safer if you act the role of prisoner. Comrade Commander Pashkov has no lost love for National Socialists. Nor do his soldiers. Many of them are refugees from villages like this one, or the old countries. Poland, Austria, Latvia… They’ve lost everything to the Reich. If Herr Wolfe and Germania’s poster boy walked freely among them, it would not end well.”
Yael took a closer look at the fighters filing past, listened a little more carefully to their conversations. Many had accents like Miriam’s—betraying mother tongues from all over the map. They’re also, she noted, too well equipped. None of this matched up with her previous intelligence about the white space on Henryka’s map—Siberian wastelands that housed mere remnants of the Soviet army. A place without infrastructure, reduced to feudal living.
“Comrade Commander Vetrov told me Novosibirsk was planning to reclaim the Muscovy territories… but I wasn’t expecting any of this.” Yael waved out the door. “Ho
w can Novosibirsk have enough momentum to reclaim Moscow? I thought it was a ghost state.”
“We were. Even before the Axis’s Great Victory, Stalin’s regime was crumbling. His government was just as bloody as Hitler’s, and there were many uprisings that led to its collapse. After Moscow fell, there was anarchy.… Refugees from all over Europe and Africa as well as the Middle East kept pouring across the Seventieth Meridian, trying to escape the Reich. Many brilliant minds found their way to Novosibirsk—scientists, musicians, politicians, artists, rabbis. The city became a melting pot. Once things began settling, these men and women had a hand in building a new government. As for the armament… we’ve had some help.”
“The Japanese,” Yael guessed, thinking of the soldiers’ Arisakas.
Miriam nodded. “Not officially. Never officially. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere has grown increasingly uneasy with the Third Reich at its doorstep. The Japanese knew Hitler was preparing for future conquests, so they decided it would be in their best interest to have a buffer state. They offered us rifles, ammunition, tanks, artillery, raw materials.… Many of the original Soviets in Novosibirsk’s government didn’t want to accept, especially after the part the Co-Prosperity Sphere played in the war, but the lure of building an army was greater. We’ve been keeping an ear to the ground in Germania and distracting the Reich with border raids along the Seventieth Meridian while we rearmed in Siberia. We were already mobilizing by the time you warned Vetrov of the events that would take place at the Victor’s Ball.”
“But Vetrov… he told me we were being kidnapped for political leverage. To use as bargaining chips to reclaim the Muscovy territories. Why bother doing that if you had an army ready all along?” Yael thought aloud. “And why kidnap Japanese racers?”
“Novosibirsk thought that the public’s love of the Axis Tour racers would put Germania under enough pressure to bow to our demands and let us regain territory without casualties. The Japanese actually encouraged it, so they could plausibly deny involvement,” Miriam explained.
Plausible deniability. This also explained why the Arisaka models were older, yet new. Type 30 and Type 38 rifles had been floating around Asia and Europe ever since the Russo-Japanese War half a century earlier. If pressed, the Japanese could dust off their hands and claim that the Soviets salvaged the rifles from previous conflicts.
An entire army of refugees, with Soviet uniforms and Japanese guns, marching through the Muscovy territories. Had Reiniger known about this? He’d been in contact with Novosibirsk, but the intelligence they’d shared had been limited. Comrade Commander Vetrov hadn’t even known the details of Yael’s mission. All they’d known was that a putsch was on the horizon.
Adding a full-blown, unaccounted-for army to the mix changed the equation almost as much as the undead Führer had.
“Is the army strong enough to hold Moscow once they take it?” Yael asked.
“So far it’s been simple.” Miriam smiled, but the expression was guarded. “This portion of Lebensraum is a wasteland.… Most of the frontier farmers have been scared off by years of border raids, and the Reichskommissariat’s military outposts aren’t equipped to resist this kind of blitzkrieg. The farther west we push, the more that will change, especially as we close in on Moscow. We may have relied too heavily on the promise of the putsch to weaken the National Socialist forces. Until we have a better idea of what’s going on in the central Reich, we’re all shooting in the dark.”
“No news from Germania, then?” Yael asked, trying to hold off the heavy-cloud feeling in her stomach.
Reiniger and Henryka were still alive. Still fighting. They had to be. But there was no way of knowing. Attempting to contact her friends with one of Pashkov’s field radios would be futile. She needed an Enigma machine and the preassigned rotor combinations if she wanted to make any sense of the transmissions coming in and out of the beer hall’s basement.
“Nothing, apart from the Chancellery Chat. There’s little doubt that Hitler’s survival changes things.” Gone was Miriam’s smile, stark determination in its place. “But there’s no turning back now. We do the only thing we can.”
“What’s that?” Thousands of kilometers away, with no way of knowing if her friends were alive or dead, Yael was at a loss. She’d already done so much. She hadn’t done enough. Things were changing, changing, changing, out of her control.
But when Miriam’s eyes met hers, burning gold and purposeful, Yael began to believe anything was possible. Her third wolf was alive! An army was on the move!
“We hope,” Miriam told her. “We hope and we fight.”
CHAPTER 21
The fever nightmares kept sprouting—mold-dark and webbing. Felix dreamed he was standing by the hatch of the Immelmann IV, gripping his parachute cord, only to realize it was just a mustard-colored thread from Martin’s old chair, unraveling longer and longer the more he pulled it. A pack of dogs tore out of the dark, hurtling with Felix through the hatch and into the sky. They howled, Felix screamed.
He fell! He fell! For Adele!
Suddenly, the parachute opened, lifting around him, drifting down. It landed at the feet of an old woman, who stared at Felix the way his mother used to—eyes flashing love and fear in the same instant. The expression of a person prepared for loss, terrified of it. Felix wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay. He was going back to Germania. He was fixing things.
But then the crone’s wrinkles began peeling—her face curled back like poorly pasted wallpaper, shredding into the girl’s features. The parachute swallowed Felix again, lifted, drifted, whiteness and blood. This time, it fell at the foot of a half beast. Fur sprouted from the man’s head and ears; his words were bear-growly, making no sense. There was a red cross around his arm; his hands were sharp with silver claws. The air was thick with an awful smell: spoiled apple, all its juices leaking out. No—not apple rot. Meat…
Felix knew—suddenly, frantically—that he had to get away. HE HAD TO GET AWAY! But there were hands, hands everywhere, holding him down as the silver claws drew closer to Felix’s fingers.
The nightmare faded just as the creature started to feast.
Felix knew he was awake because of the throb in his fingers. It felt as if Baasch’s boot were landing, again and again. Heel, crush, twist. He supposed the hurt was a good thing, signs of a mending body. Healing pains, Papa had always called Felix’s racetrack scrapes. You’ll be back on the motorcycle in no time!
Time… what was the time? Felix remembered too late that Martin’s watch was broken. His left hand was already on his chest, seeking out his mechanical heart, only to find it gone! Someone had stripped off his Hitler Youth uniform, replaced it with a clean undershirt.
“Ah. Herr Wolfe!” Luka’s face appeared. His hair flopped over his brow, smirk lost to thickening facial hair. Felix knew it was there, regardless. The expression was as essential to the victor’s appearance as his smelly jacket. “Welcome back to this side of sanity.”
Felix’s vision focused on the ceiling above him. Knotted wood rafters. The very same rafters he’d been staring at before… They hadn’t moved, and according to Luka’s budding beard, too much time had passed. Baasch was still waiting back in Germania, his iron heel hovering… poised to take away everyone Felix loved.
“W-where’s the girl?” he asked.
“You know, Herr Wolfe, you really should work on your name retention.”
Name retention? That was rich, coming from the boy who considered it his personal calling to rename everyone in the most ridiculous way possible: Change-o-Face? Grease monkey?
It was hard to believe that once Felix had actually admired Luka Löwe. When fresh-off-the-press 1953 propaganda posters filled store windows and street corners, Felix had studied them with more than a twinge of envy. Who wouldn’t be jealous of the youngest victor in the race’s history? What red-blooded Reich boy wouldn’t want to be posing by the newest Zündapp model in a flashy black jacket?
; The twinge was different now. Had been for some time. Adele’s stories from the 1955 tour were less than flattering (fist-worthy, even), and there wasn’t much the victor had done to prove her words wrong. In the flesh, Luka Löwe was by far the most insufferable, smug Arschloch Felix had ever crossed paths with.
As irritated as Felix was, he knew yelling would only exacerbate the situation. “Fine. Where’s…”
Luka raised his eyebrows. “Do you even know her name?”
Felix knew many things about the girl. She was a criminal. (Baasch called her an inmate, and there wasn’t much evidence to argue with the SS officer. Good people didn’t kidnap, lie, murder.…) She was the start of the Doppelgänger Project. She was strong, strong enough to knock Felix out cold in the Imperial Palace, strong enough to shove him out of a Focke-Wulf Condor in flight. She seemed sad, so sad that her soul couldn’t hold it all, but she was also very, very gifted at acting, so good that in the end Felix had no idea what he really knew about her.
The girl’s name, however, had managed to escape him.
“Do you know mine?” Felix countered.
“Of course, Fritz. As for Yael…” Luka’s stare shifted toward the door. “I’m not sure where she is. How much do you remember?”
“I don’t… I don’t know.” Remembering wasn’t the problem. It was the extraction of reality from the nightmare that was giving Felix trouble. His fever had blended the two realms together. All those gravestone letters—changing, rearranging, becoming the wrong death. The old woman’s face melting away. The red-crossed man-bear digging into his flesh with silver claws.