by Ryan Graudin
—KEEP WALKING HEAD HIGH DO NOT FEAR—
The iron voice had finally shifted, determined to make the best of Yael’s decision.
—THEY DO NOT SEE YOU—
No one stopped the two Aufseherinnen to ask them questions. They walked through the swing of the gates, past the dogs’ teeth with ease. The tower guards turned their gazes elsewhere. Every corner Yael turned she expected to see the doctor in his white, white coat. Arms outstretched, needles in hand.
But Dr. Geyer was not around the first corner. Or the second. He was not standing in the broad poplar-lined avenue by the medical block. He was not sitting on the stone steps to the infirmary.
The medical block’s hallway was smaller than Yael remembered. The whole place was caustic with bleach: a scent that scoured her stomach as she walked past the room that held the examination gurney. That door was mercifully shut.
Shades had been drawn over the hall-side glass of the observation cell windows, and Yael did not have the courage to raise them. Were any victims within? Any children from the last transport, routed especially to this camp on Dr. Geyer’s whim? Even if there were, she could do nothing to save them. Not without jeopardizing the mission. If Yael glimpsed their faces now…
Miriam’s thoughts appeared to be similar—past playing into present bleeding into future, rehearsing at the edges of her borrowed Aufseherin face. Her hand did not reach out to lift the shades. She kept walking down the hall.
The door to Dr. Geyer’s office was also closed. Miriam stood watch as Yael slipped two bobby pins from Elsa’s hair and tricked the lock with them. Her heart slammed hard as the door swung open, but the Angel of Death was not sitting at his desk. He was not welcoming her back with his gap-toothed smile.
Yael let out a long breath. They’d planned for both eventualities: the doctor here, the doctor gone. Using pain to wrench the information they needed out of Dr. Geyer, or ferreting whatever intelligence they could out of his office documents.
She was glad that—for now—it was the latter.
The place was soulless but not empty. There was a small television in the corner. A bowl of hard candies sat on the desk, beside a black rotary phone. Metal filing cabinets besieged the walls, stacks on stacks of information trapped behind locks. They were all marked with handwritten labels, experiments clustered into groups of ten.
Yael locked the door, tugged the blinds over the windows, and went straight for the cabinet marked EXPERIMENTS 80–90, using her pins to jimmy its center drawer open. A series of carefully marked manila envelopes rolled out. Dr. Geyer’s cataloging system was much more organized that Henryka’s. His papers were filed according to experiment number, ordered by date.
Miriam flipped through these, muttering aloud, “Eighty-four, eighty-four, eighty-six…”
Where the documents of Experiment 85 should’ve been was a seamless transition from Horror 84 to Savagery 86. Yael worked the other drawers of the cabinet free. Neither held proof of Experiment 85.
“There can’t be nothing,” she said, scanning the collection a third time. Experiment 85 did not exist in these cabinets.
“They’re sensitive documents.” Miriam pushed the center drawer back into place. It schnicked shut with a lock. “Dr. Geyer’s notes were probably relocated.”
Or renamed.
The Angel of Death had been busy in the years since they’d escaped. His experiments climbed into the high hundreds—an overwhelming number of labeled drawers. Yael was beginning to fear they’d never end when they gave way to cabinets branded with letters instead of digits.
DP.
She broke open the top drawer of the first cabinet. Like the others, it held neat rows of manila envelopes, crammed according to date. When Yael grabbed the foremost one and tore it open, a series of photographs slid out: a dozen versions of the same girl. She was young in every picture, too small to fill the portraits’ negative space. Her stare was made of bronze, clashing with the camera. Paleness crept in as the pictures progressed—peppering her hair, patching her skin. Erasing all markings. Only her bones stayed the same.
Yael picked up the oldest photograph, with dark eyes and shadowed hair. She flipped it over to see the writing on the back. Yael Reider. 121358ΔX. Preinjection.
It was her.
Yael Reider. A girl who had been lost for so many years. A girl who was not DECEASED, as the clotted red stamp on the back of the manila envelope stated, but very much alive. Alive and here, seeing herself as she was for the very first time.
I’ll bet you had the most beautiful dark hair. You seem like a girl who would have had curls.
Henryka was right. This first picture had been snapped before the processing scissors. Yael’s hair was dark and long, spiraling at the ends in a way the Polish woman would call “gorgeous.”
“This is it.” Yael slipped the picture into her Aufseherin jacket pocket and turned the envelope over, label side up. Experiment 85 had been crossed out, replaced with: Doppelgänger Project.
“There are drawers of these.” Miriam took in all the DP cabinets with a sharp breath. “So much…”
She was right. Yael’s own file was not thin, and it was only the beginning. Papers on papers followed papers on more papers. Yael tried not to think of how many lives (how many deaths) they symbolized as she pulled the next folder out.
“Just look for what’s important.”
“It’s all important.” There was devastation, drowning in Miriam’s voice. One Yael heard only because she felt it. The ocean of grief always there, under everything. Threaded with currents of rage.
“It is,” Yael agreed. Her own throat squeezing. “But right now we need information on the Führer’s decoys.”
Miriam said nothing else. She tugged the second folder free. Began reading.
Years of sneaking peeks at Henryka’s resistance intelligence had trained Yael in the art of skimming files. Her eyes whipped through words, brain snatching up facts it deemed significant, stowing them away for later.
From August 1946: Modifications to the compound following test group 12’s autopsies have yielded a 75% survival rate among test group 13.
Yael shut this folder and moved on to the next drawer.
From December 1946: Reichsführer Himmler’s interest in Experiment 85 has increased since the last presentation. He has agreed to pass along findings to the Führer.
From June 1948: Survival rate continues to hover at 95%. The Führer has signed off on the Doppelgänger Project. The first SS candidates are due to arrive tomorrow for injections. Reichsführer Himmler has assured me only the fittest men have been selected as a part of this detail.
An SS detail! Of course. Hitler’s bodyguards all held Schutzstaffel ranks. It made sense that his decoys belonged to this ruthless force as well.
Yael kept skimming. The survival rate held true. Ten SS men had successfully undergone the “Doppelgänger Treatment,” as Dr. Geyer was now calling it. They were kept under strict observation for a year—their mimicry abilities tested and retested and retested—before they were cleared to return to Germania. Ten more SS men were sent in their place. In the summer of 1949, the cycle began anew. Injections, observation, testing and retesting and retesting…
But these notes were seven, eight years old. Yael needed the complete picture. How many SS skinshifters were they facing? Seventy? Eighty? More? Where were these men posted?
Perhaps it’d be best to skip ahead to the most recent documents. Work her way backward…
Yael opened the sixth drawer. Grabbed the final manila envelope. Her breath caught at its label: SS-Maskiertekommando des Führers.
The Führer’s Masked Detail.
The file began with a roster: a list of twenty soldiers. Men of every blood type (A, B, AB, O), but all of “pure” blood. These subjects had been allowed to keep their names, along with their SS ranking. Most of them were SS-Rottenführers and SS-Unterscharführers. Numbers had been added to the end of their obligatory blood-group t
attoo: A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and so on.
There was a DECEASED stamp on this document, too. Its ink looked much fresher, overlapping the information of AB4. Unknown skinshifter had a name: SS-Rottenführer Gustav Lohse.
SS-Rottenführer. Men who joined the SS did not lead innocent lives, did not die blameless. The man might have been a skinshifter, but he was nothing like her. The lines held true.
The blood on Yael’s hands felt a shade thinner as she handed the roster to her friend. “This is a start. There are separate profiles on each member of the detail.”
Miriam’s fingernails made dimples along the document’s edge. She scanned it. “Dr. Geyer marked them all.”
“He’d have had to,” Yael reasoned. “Otherwise it would be impossible to determine the real Führer from the skinshifters.”
“Tattoos on their left inner bicep,” Miriam read. “Not a very noticeable location. Can’t say I’m exactly relishing the thought of ripping off nineteen National Socialists’ shirts to find the real Führer.”
Nor was Yael. Nineteen remaining SS skinshifters. The number was both relievedly low (at the rate of Dr. Geyer’s earlier notes, she’d been expecting quadruple that) and dreadfully high. Nineteen men who could wear Adolf Hitler’s face at a moment’s notice… How many could Yael and Miriam handle discreetly before finding the real Hitler, ending him?
Was assassinating the real Führer even possible?
There was still so much they didn’t know. Yael looked to all the files she’d skipped in her haste to reach the end and wondered how many more secrets they held. Was Hitler’s Maskiertekommando the only one? How much had the compound evolved? Was skinshifting still the only side effect or had the Angel of Death managed to coax more sinister impossibilities from the human body?
“Do you ever wonder what you would have been like if…” Yael kept staring at the open cabinets, thinking of the first-face Reider girl inside her pocket. “All this… hadn’t happened?”
“Dead.” Miriam looked up from the roster. “Why?”
“You don’t feel as if…” Yael hesitated. Maybe the poison she felt inside her hadn’t come from Dr. Geyer’s syringes at all. Maybe she was still alone in this.…
“As if what?”
“He made monsters of us.” It was the first time Yael had let the fear inside her take the form of words. Her voice had never felt smaller.
“It doesn’t matter how many drugs Dr. Geyer put into our veins. He didn’t make us. We’ve made ourselves. We’ve fought tooth and nail for the right to live.” There was a certainty lining Miriam’s sentences that Yael ached for. “Monsters cut children open and call it progress. Monsters murder entire groups of people without blinking but get upset when they have to wash human ash from their garden strawberries. Monsters are the ones who watch other people do these things and do nothing to stop it. You and I are not monsters. If anything, we’re miracles.”
Maybe Miriam was right. Maybe Luka was, too. Maybe a monster wasn’t made out of a few drops of blood or a mother’s fevered cries (“It’s a monster!”) or the monster, monstre, mOHcmp whispers from Barrack 7’s terrified women. Maybe Katsuo’s motorcycle death was truly an accident. Maybe SS-Rottenführer Gustav Lohse was a death that could be pardoned.…
Maybe she was a miracle.
The miracle it would take to change things.
Her first wolf had always seen it. (You are special. You are going to change things.) Her second wolf had hissed against the monster, monstre, mOHcmp rumors until the very end. Her third wolf was here, saying it to her face. Her fourth wolf had shot a skinshifter, and Yael knew in her heart that Aaron-Klaus was not a monster. Nor was Vlad, fifth wolf, master of killing.
Her wolves knew her.
And now, Yael Reider was beginning to know herself.
The office flooded with noise—bright and terrible. Not an alarm, but the telephone. Ringing. Once. Again. Too loud. People would hear the sound if they hadn’t already. Yael reached out to yank the connection cord from the wall.
“No!” Miriam stopped her. “If the line goes dead, that will raise suspicion!”
Yael eyed the door; panic knotted her stomach. “We can’t just leave it ringing!”
A third ring. A fourth. Miriam’s hand lifted the receiver. Her voice dropped several octaves, as close as her gender-bound vocal cords could manage to the timbre of Dr. Geyer as she said, “Hello?”
CHAPTER 33
It was not like Dr. Engel Geyer to let the phone ring more than once, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler mused as he held the receiver to his ear. He supposed, though, that their conversations hadn’t been particularly pleasant lately. No one’s were. How could they be, when everything they’d worked so hard to achieve was under attack, eroding away territory by territory.…
The scene from the Victor’s Ball had left Himmler as shocked and reeling as everyone else in the Reich. That, combined with over a dozen different uprisings all over the map, had caused him to panic. Panic had caused him to sign off on SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s release-retrap plan. One that was turning out to be fantastically unhelpful and unnecessary, as Himmler realized only after the Immelmann IV landed three passengers lighter. He didn’t need some mechanic from Frankfurt bumbling around at espionage when he had an entire detail of doppelgängers at his disposal. Well, not an entire detail now. There was the initial death in Tokyo, and another member of the Maskiertekommando had been shot trying to cross the front. Three others, on the same mission, had breached the resistance’s lines, only to go radio silent.
The silence did not bode well, nor did the news from Baasch’s snitch.
Ring, ring, went the telephone. Himmler was just about to hang up when the doctor answered, “Hello?”
Geyer’s voice sounded off, as if clogged by a head cold. Perhaps it was, but Himmler didn’t take the time to ask. This wasn’t a cordial call. “Dr. Geyer. This is the Reichsführer. I know it’s late, but I have a matter that needs your immediate attention. We’ve been informed that the resistance might attempt to access information on the Doppelgänger Project. Under no circumstances can this be allowed to happen. Alert the perimeter guards to be on the lookout for intruders. Destroy everything connected to the project. Documents. Compound samples. I want all of it gone.”
“But it’s my life’s work—”
“There is far more at stake here than your work, Dr. Geyer! Or your life!” Panic. Again. Making him snap. Himmler paused, inhaled, exhaled, until he was sure he could speak again without yelling. “Those files contain sensitive information. If it falls into the wrong hands, it could unravel everything.”
The doctor’s hesitation oozed through the phone. The Reichsführer couldn’t fault him for it. Experiment 85’s research and results were remarkable, truly the work of a lifetime. But none of it was worth what those documents could cost them.
“Who informed you of this possibility?” Everything about Geyer’s question—the wording, the nasal-drip haze in his voice, the lack of respect—grated on Himmler. All pity evaporated.
“Need I remind you, Dr. Geyer, it was your carelessness that allowed for Inmate 121358ΔX’s survival in the first place. This mess is on your head, and I am currently the only soul standing between you and the Führer’s wrath. You’d do well not to question me. Destroy all evidence of the Doppelgänger Project. Now. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes. I’ll take care of it right away.”
CHAPTER 34
“Yes. I’ll take care of it right away.”
“Who was that?” Yael asked after Miriam set down the receiver. The conversation had lasted less than a minute, but whatever had occurred on the other end of the line was drastic. Ingrid Wagner’s face was tile white, corpse white, filled with anger and colorless fear.
“We’ve missed something.…” Miriam’s voice returned to its normal octave, clenched as tight as her jaw. She turned back to the filing cabinets.
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s something here, something important.” The meticulous order of the DP drawers crumbled as Miriam began pulling out envelopes, stacking them on the doctor’s desk. It was a random pile, containing a few files from every single drawer: early 1945 all the way to the Maskiertekommando profiles. Anguish abridged. “We need to take these. As many as we can carry. Find something we can use to secure them beneath our jackets. Hurry!”
Yael wanted to keep pressing for information, but her friend’s urgency was contagious. She searched the office’s other drawers and came up with two rolls of medical gauze. “This should do the trick.”
Miriam was already unbuttoning her jacket, shoving up her blouse, pressing as many envelopes as she could against her bare torso. Their block shapes, so crammed together, reminded Yael of explosives. The amount of gauze used to secure them was only excusable for a surgical patient.
Yael constricted her body a dress size in order to pack more papers between cotton and ribs. They managed to tie the entire pile from Dr. Geyer’s desk onto their bodies, plus some extra envelopes retrieved for good measure, before Miriam nudged the drawers shut. One by one they locked back into place, each a little emptier than before.
“We have to leave,” Miriam said. “Right now.”
“What do you—” Yael was still tucking her blouse back in, yet her friend was already at the door, peering between the shades’ slats into an empty hallway. “Miriam, your jacket isn’t even buttoned!”
The other girl’s fingers twisted the overseer uniform back into place. Her hidden papers crinkled.
“Careful! If you move too fast, they’ll hear you,” Yael reminded. “What’s going on?”
“Questions later.” Comrade Commander Mnogolikiy was back. (In spirit, if not in face.) Barking orders. “We need to get out of the camp.”
Miriam pushed open the office door before Yael could argue, conquering the hallway with clipped steps. Yael followed; scores of concealed pages rustled against her rib cage as the two made their way out of the medical block, leaving the drawn shades and scent of bloodless bleach behind.