by Ryan Graudin
Yael slid out of the car, waved for them to follow.
He was here. He’d made it! To… a beer hall?
Of all the locations Felix had imagined the resistance leadership might meet, a bierstube with swastika banners draped along its walls was not among them. Places like this were hives for National Socialist officers. Baasch himself might’ve even enjoyed a pint here once or twice.
“The headquarters have been here this whole time?” Felix wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale beer as they followed Yael inside. Like most places they’d passed, the beer hall had been abandoned in a hurry: lights out, tables scattered with half-empty glasses.
“We moved when Aaron-Klaus shot the doppelgänger,” Yael explained. “But we’ve always used a beer hall for cover. Any National Socialists loyal to the resistance could frequent a beer hall without attracting attention. If we’d operated out of a private residence or a warehouse, the Gestapo would have noticed.”
“You hid beneath their pint glasses,” Miriam grunted with appreciation. “Smart.”
“Verdammt smart,” Luka echoed.
They walked to the rear of the establishment and descended a set of stairs. To Felix’s eyes, the cellar was just as empty as the hall above, but Yael led them through a series of hidden doorways. The final one was made of reinforced steel, locked from the inside. They stopped in front of it. Yael rapped her knuckles to the metal—two sets of sharp, double knocks—and waited.
The first thing Felix saw when it opened was a cloud of hair, frizzed and floating. There was a woman under it, brandishing an uncapped marker in her fist. “Yael?”
“Henryka!”
They were waved into the headquarters, the door bolted behind them. Henryka and Yael lost no time embracing. A hug that reminded Felix this was her homecoming.
Some home. He scanned the basement. Several people huddled around a pair of radios and Enigma machines. Bookshelves flanked a hallway opening. The Führer glowed in the corner, mouthing “You will be crushed” from the television screen. A typewriter lay on the floor, smashed. There was no sign of his twin sister.
“Where’s Adele?”
Henryka let go of Yael. There was a small flock of marks on her right cheek—cuts that had recently shed their scabs. These collided into each other when she frowned. “She’s—”
“FELIX?” The shriek was muffled, but there was no doubt in Felix’s mind it belonged to Adele. He felt his sister’s franticness—punching along with her fists against a second reinforced door.
The room was too small for the way Felix ran through it. His own body met the door—hard. Nothing budged except his bones. “I’M HERE, AD!”
“LET ME OUT! PLEASE LET ME OUT!”
Felix reached for the handle. Locked. He slammed his right hand against the metal, remembering only too late that it was injured. PAIN shot through him: phantom and real.
The others stood in a semicircle, watching his efforts. Henryka crossed her arms. “Unless you’re a howitzer or a man with a key, you’re not getting through that door,” she told him.
Felix clutched his hand to his chest, fighting back a scream. “W-what is she doing in there? She’s just a girl—”
Every female in the room gave him a withering look.
Luka snorted.
“Your ‘just a girl’ sister can do a lot of damage.” A dark-haired young man tore off his radio headset and rolled up his sleeves to show welts tangling with his inner arm veins. The work of nails. “She fights like a drowning cat.”
“Because you’ve kept her LOCKED UP for a month!” It was his sister’s worst nightmare: being trapped with no way out. No wonder steel rattled at Felix’s back, pounding with kicks and fists and whatever else Adele could throw. “Where’s the key?”
Henryka’s arms stayed crossed. “We’ve kept Adele in there for everyone’s safety. Hers most of all. It’s a war zone outside, and she’s wearing the face of the girl who shot Hitler.”
The face YOU stole! Felix swallowed the accusation back. He mustn’t let his rage build up, mustn’t let them see. “Where is the key?”
Henryka leveraged freedom as effectively as Baasch. The unlocked door came with conditions: Felix assumed all responsibility for his sister. If Adele harmed anyone or damaged anything, both Wolfe twins would go into the closet.
Understood?
Understood. (Anything to get her out.)
When the door swung open, Adele threw an arm in front of her face, hissing at the brightness. Both he and his sister had been born pale creatures, but a month without sunlight had left Adele translucent. The only color was in her hands, which she’d pummeled raw against the door. When Felix looked above her for the closet light, all he saw was a pull chain. No bulb.
They’d trapped Adele alone in the dark.
Alone. In the dark.
All this time.
“Felix?” Adele dropped her arm, blinking as she tried to reconcile the basement’s light with the sight of her brother. “How—what—”
Adele’s shoulder blades dug like stunted wings into Felix’s forearms when he hugged her. Had they always been this sharp? Or had the resistance been starving her, too?
Felix’s wound burned, and his sister squirmed (she’d always been averse to hugs longer than three seconds, further proof that Adele was, indeed, Adele), but he held her tight, afraid of what might happen if he let go.
“Ow, Felix!” Adele managed to weasel out of his grip. She looked ready to punch something—fists bunched, lips knotted—as she took in the rest of the map room. Her stare froze on “Luka?”
“Fräulein.” The victor nodded, but the rest of his body stiffened, as if Adele were a grenade with the pin pulled and he was fighting the urge to flee before she exploded everywhere. “I’d say it’s been too long, but—”
“What is this?” Adele jerked forward, only to find her collar caught in Felix’s grip. “Revenge for Osaka?”
Felix had to use both hands to hold Adele back. He knew her rage, he felt it. But Henryka was watching the exchange with pressed lips, and the young man with clawed-up arms tensed, ready to hurl both twins into the closet.
“Let me go!” Adele twisted around, blouse tearing, and grasped at her brother’s hands, stopping only when she saw the bandage. “Your hand! Oh, God. Felix, your fingers…”
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he lied.
“What the hell is going on?” his sister whispered.
Felix wished he knew. A clock by one of the shelves told him it was just a shade past midnight. Thirty-one hours had passed since his call to Baasch. Only five remained before… what?
What was going to happen? It all depended on Felix’s next question. Henryka’s next answer. “Yael told me my parents are in a resistance safe house. With a man named Vlad. Have you heard from them?”
“Kasper, have you had any messages from Vlad’s farm?” the older woman asked. The man with the clawed arms shook his head. “Johann?”
Johann sat with his headphones half on, immersed in conversations both verbal and electrical. It took him a moment to answer. “No. Nothing.”
“That’s not unusual,” Yael assured Felix. “Vlad’s something of a hermit.”
“Can we contact him? I want to speak with my parents, to make sure they’re okay.” Please let them be alive. Please let them be them.
All traces of warden-Henryka had vanished, remolding into a motherly smile. “Of course you do. However, it’s quite late. In all likelihood they’re asleep—”
“Please. Can we just try?” YOUR LIVES DEPEND ON IT, he wanted to scream, but Papa’s life might depend on Felix’s discretion, so instead he took a breath and explained, “It’s just, I’d like to talk to them as soon as possible. They’re probably worried sick about Ad and me.”
After a moment, Henryka relented. “Kasper? Reinhard? Would you try hailing Vlad?”
Exhaustion toned Kasper’s eyes as he twisted the radio dials to the right frequency. Another man—older, m
iddle thirties—was typing into an Enigma machine, jotting its results down in a notebook, passing them to Kasper, who read it aloud into the transceiver. Gibberish letters—not unlike the conversations Felix had overheard in Molotov.
The rest of the room went about its business. Johann and a girl whose hair served as a pencil pincushion operated a second communication station. Luka leaned against a bookshelf, his eyes never straying far from Adele. Miriam began arranging the Doppelgänger Project files on a card table, photographs on top. Felix shifted to an angle where the television glow drowned their images out.
Yael began speaking to Henryka in near whispers. “I’m afraid we’ve run into some complications. There’s been a leak—”
Kasper’s radio was a mechanic’s gold mine: cords and gauges and switches and red lights. The Enigma machine was simpler on the outside—not so very different from a typewriter. It held two sets of alphabets. A keyboard version plus a lamp board, which lit up with a letter’s code double when the regular keys were pushed. The code was unbreakable without the exact rotor combination.
Felix moved as close as he dared to the operator’s shoulder, and even then he had to squint to make out the letters on the rotor markers: W-L-S.
Three tiny letters were all that stood between the resistance and their foe.
Three tiny letters and a phone call.
Felix hoped he wouldn’t have to. He hoped his parents were alive, safe. But this hope was shrinking while Baasch’s noose tightened. Seconds ticked into minutes, and from the look on Kasper’s face, no one had answered his hail. When the young man caught Felix’s eyes—looking, looking—he shook his head.
“Keep trying,” Felix urged.
Kasper repeated the letters into the radio. The room buzzed around them. Henryka and Yael’s exchange was picking up steam—growing hotter and hissier when Miriam joined their conversation. The television emitted a pitch that would drive dogs mad. Pencils scratched. Keys clacked. But the sound Felix needed to hear most never came: Vlad’s end stayed silent.
Kasper sighed. “No answer. Sorry. Like Henryka said, it’s late and Vlad’s the early-to-rise type. He’s probably asleep. I can’t keep jamming the radio waves with all the other transmissions trying to get through. They’re important.”
NOTHING’S AS IMPORTANT AS THIS! “Doesn’t he have a telephone?”
“No. We’re fortunate he has a shortwave, to be honest.” Kasper was already readjusting his radio’s channels.
“But—”
“Leave Kasper to his duties.” A hand settled on Felix’s shoulder. Its fingers were bird-bone delicate, but their grip was made of metal. Henryka spun him around, nodded at his filthy bandages. “For now you have other things to tend to. There are medical supplies in the washroom. Go get cleaned up.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” Yael offered. “You and Adele can catch up in my old quarters.”
The beer hall’s subbasement was an entire warren of rooms. Its hallway was lined with more bookshelves, full of titles Felix had never seen before: The Metamorphosis, The Call of the Wild, The Biology of Desert Wildlife, Les Misérables. Well-loved books with creased spines. The whole place had a well-loved feel. A chocolate smell haunted the kitchen, and three of the four sleeping quarters were stuffed with record players, lamps, quilts, photographs, fire extinguishers, plush rugs, art stranger than anything Felix had ever seen—as if the painters had dropped their subjects, splintering them almost beyond recognition. In one of the rooms—he noted—sat a telephone.
Yael paused by the fourth, starkly empty room. Its doorknob hung in pieces, the wood around it beat to pulp. “I assume I have you to thank for this?” she asked Adele.
“And I assume I have you to thank for all of this?” A month’s worth of unburned energy charged Adele’s words as she fired back. Felix didn’t have to turn around to know his sister was gearing back up for a fight.
The last thing he needed was to get locked into a closet. “Ad—”
“Don’t ‘Ad’ me! I’ve just spent a gottverdammt eternity locked up in the dark, and you’re acting like everything’s FINE?” His sister spit bullets. “A girl came into my flat, Felix. She attacked me the night you left—”
“I know.”
“YOU KNOW?” Adele’s shriek was too large for the hallway. “You know and all you’re going to do is take a shower?”
“It’s”—how could he tell his sister he’d gone to the ends of the earth and back for her? That he would go farther still?—“complicated.”
“Then uncomplicate it.”
Yael—strangely enough—came to his rescue. “You have every right to be angry, Adele, but Felix is the last person who deserves your yells. Let your brother clean out his hand. You’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
Adele sniffed and walked through the broken door without further fuss. Cease-fire. For now. Felix was grateful. The longer he stood here wearing mud-crusted bandages, the more he imagined a new infection rooting, spreading.
He still had so much to lose.
The washroom sat at the end of the hall—as lived-in as all the other rooms—there was buildup on the showerhead and a family of toothbrushes by the sink. Yael raided the towel cabinet for gauze and antiseptic—and though Felix had seen enough of both items for a lifetime, he grunted his gratitude when she handed them over.
“I know you’re good with first aid, but”—she nodded at his right hand’s missingness—“can you manage?”
“Adele can help me,” he said pointedly.
“Right.” Yael dug more of the same out of the cabinet. When she got all she needed, she nudged it shut with her knee, started moving back toward the hall. She stopped suddenly. “Felix, I’m sorry you had to find your sister like that. They shouldn’t have kept Adele in the dark.”
Sorry. As if the word hadn’t been watered down to the point of meaninglessness between them. It was as useless as the sopping wrapping Felix unraveled from his fist and tossed into the wastebasket.
Yael disappeared to tend to her own wounds. Felix wrenched the showerhead on.
It would take a lot more than sorry to fix things.
CHAPTER 41
Luka wasn’t about to let the lady Wolfe sneak up behind him again. He kept his back to the wall whenever one was available. When it was his turn to shower, he did so with the curtain open, never letting his eyes leave the washroom’s lock as the freezing water trickled in a dozen X’s down his shoulders. He did shave with his back exposed, but that was only because there was a mirror involved. The door’s reflection stayed motionless; the straight blade scraped against Luka’s jaw.
She cut him without trying.
He didn’t notice at first. The cut didn’t hurt, just bled: red and less red as it melded with the lather. Luka cleaned it as best he could, keeping his full attention on the removal of hair from skin thereafter.
Adele Wolfe wasn’t worth his fear. Or his bloody throat.
She was waiting for him in the hallway—in plain sight and every bit as striking as Luka’s memories of her dictated. He halted, unsure if he should approach or lock himself in the bathroom again.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for you,” she said coolly. “I don’t barge in on people when they’re bathing.”
Their sparring match had begun. This initial jab was aimed at the first time they’d met, when Luka had walked into the washroom at the Rome checkpoint and saw… well… nothing short of everything.
“Got any cigarettes?”
“No.” Luka decided to try stepping around the girl, but the hallway was small enough for Adele to block his path.
Eleven months of his life, nearly one year out of seventeen. That was how much time Luka had dedicated to planning out the moment he’d face Adele Wolfe again. Now that it was here, all he wanted to do was keep walking.
“C’mon.” Her chin tilted up in the same way it had their first night out of Dhaka, when the jungle sang symphonies around their
camp, and they smoked nearly an entire pack to keep the mosquitoes at bay. That was the night they shared their first kiss. And second. “You always had a few stashed away. Behind your ear? In the hem of your pants?”
She reached out to search these places. Luka dodged. “I’ve got nothing for you.”
Adele’s eyes narrowed. “Are you still sore about Osaka?”
“Sore? Try scarred.”
“I might’ve hit you a little too zealously,” she admitted, “but don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing if you were in my position. In fact, I already suspect you did. Felix told me all about how he found fake me drugged on the Kaiten.
“So how did you do it?” Adele pressed. “Slip the stuff into her kake udon when she wasn’t looking? Shiv her with a syringe?”
“I don’t sedate and tell.”
“You had no problem doing that when we rode together.”
“Things have changed since then.” The Axis Tour of 1955 was closed off in Luka’s mind, encased like some museum display. When Luka thought of the boy who’d sat in the jungle heat, kissing the girl with a cigarette burning between her knuckles, he did not feel angry or vengeful. He felt…
“Changed.” Adele frowned. “Answer me this, then: Why did you invite her to the Victor’s Ball?”
“Why do you care?”
The girl’s chin tilted higher; she stepped closer. “She was me, wasn’t she?”
No. Not-Adele was not Adele. She’d always ever been Yael—a girl who, when she touched his fingertips, made his heart beat a dozen times faster than it ever had in this fräulein’s arms. Yael, who believed that no person’s life was small. Yael, who made him want to be more, but in a way that mattered. Yael, who was in the main room, waiting for him to return so they could start plotting the Reich’s death blow.
“The two of you could not be more different. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
For spending a month locked in a closet, Adele was surprisingly agile, matching his next side step as well as a shadow. “I know that look. You like her. You more than like her.”