by Ryan Graudin
“Is that a crime?” Luka asked.
“Some might think so.” Adele blew her angel hairs out of her face. Once upon a time, Luka thought they were cute: all white and frayed, like some ice-princess crown. Now, magic-less, they just looked like hair.
Luka pushed—gently—past Adele. His shoulder met hers, and it truly was nothing. The vague melody of Yael’s voice from the other end of the hall held more electricity.
“Are you sure you don’t have a smoke?” Adele didn’t try to stop him this time, just watched as he stepped around, away.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” he said.
CHAPTER 42
Yael sat in front of the operations map, taking in all of its revisions. Egypt, Great Britain, Iraq, Finland, half of Italy, Turkey. Some of the indigo ink was fresher: the Iberian Peninsula, Greece, and a good portion of the Muscovy territories. (Novosibirsk’s army was closing in on Moscow, sweeping through the surrounding countryside with gray-yarn fronts.) Fledgling countries had been marked in dotted black lines. These crisscrossed through continents, cutting them into smaller parcels of land. Many formed shapes Yael had seen in the pages of Henryka’s 1931 World Atlas.
It was such a vast and colorful difference from the map Yael had studied only a month ago. Old order was being restored. Forgotten countries made new.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, reaching out to touch Egypt’s borders.
“Keep still!” Henryka tchted from her side, brandishing a needle tailed with surgical thread. “This isn’t exactly embroidery.”
Yael settled back into the chair. The bullet graze, for all its stinging, was small. The resistance leader had spent an inordinate amount of time fussing over it, flushing out every speck of dirt with at least three different rounds of antiseptic. There’d never been a cleaner wound.
“I’m glad to see you, too, Henryka.”
The smile lines in the corners of the Polish woman’s mouth weren’t as deep as they should’ve been for her age. The needle paused as she eyed the ink-heavy map. “It is a beautiful sight, but I fear much of it won’t matter if we lose Germania. These new governments have the structural integrity of a seeding dandelion. It wouldn’t take much to scatter them, should Hitler and his government survive to reclaim the territories.”
“Reiniger’s forces seem to be holding their own.” Yael nodded to a second map—one that showed Germania’s streets in winding detail. Pins pocked the blocks closest to the Spree, surrounded the holes of ground gained and lost.
“It’s centimeter warfare.” Henryka’s smile vanished as she kept sewing Yael’s flesh back into place. “Not enough to make a real difference. The SS has us surrounded on all sides, and our supplies are dwindling. We might not even have enough to reach the North Sea.…”
“Cue the cavalry,” Miriam said from the card table. Her appearance was back to what Yael now considered normal—dark hair threaded with silver, eyes flecked with gold. She sat, elbow high in documents.
The Doppelgänger Project files had survived the front crossing in better condition than any of them—dry and unbent. They weren’t the only papers on the table. With the leak in play, all options were laid out. Blueprints of the Chancellery and Führerbunker sat alongside a map of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The latter had been hand-drawn by Luka himself. He was, Yael noted, quite gifted at sketching: showing poise in even the shortest of strokes. His knowledge of the Ordenspalais building was partial, covering only the halls he himself had trod, but it would be enough to guide an infiltrator through the annexed wing that held the Reichssender studios. Enough to sneak an exposé film reel on Experiment 85 and Hitler’s Maskiertekommando into the control room.
The plan was received with much less fuss than Yael had expected, especially on Miriam’s part. She and Henryka listened to Yael’s reasoning—fifteen hydra heads, chaos, poster boy posterity—without interruption, if only because their initial assassination plan was (more or less) impossible.
At the end of it all, Henryka nodded. “We’ll have to consult Erwin and the other officers. But I agree. Revealing this information could invalidate the Führereid and cripple the National Socialist forces.”
Miriam’s sole objection was to the idea of Luka’s presenting. It wasn’t his influence the other girl questioned so much as his right. Seeing a few photographs, shedding a few tears did not an advocate make. Who was he to speak for them?
Not for, Yael had reasoned, with. It had taken several rounds of head-butting to sway Miriam from the “absolutely not” into the “maybe, fine” camp. The subject was now a bruised, tender thing between them.
Speaking of tender… Yael grit her teeth as Henryka sewed the last of her stitches. Needle piercing skin—even for healing purposes—set her on edge.
“Has the cavalry found anything?” she asked Miriam.
“Just more of the same.” Apart from a shower and a quick bite, Miriam had been inseparable from the files, scanning every single page once, twice, thrice, as many times as it took to make sense of the panic she’d heard in Reichsführer Himmler’s voice. “No silver bullets, yet.”
Yael thought what they had—proof of the experiment, a roster of the Maskiertekommando, Luka’s word—was enough. Still, it made sense to sort. Whichever one of them infiltrated the Ministry of Propaganda would only have a few minutes to air the reel before being discovered. Their program needed to be brief enough to fit inside this window, powerful enough to spark change. Only the most relevant files would do.
Henryka cut the thread, padded Yael’s side with antiseptic, and smothered the sting with a bandage. She nodded at the map of Germania’s streets. “Maybe your time would be better spent studying ways in and out of the Ordenspalais.”
In paper terms, they were only a finger’s length from the Reichssender station—a half-hour stroll over the Spree, down to Wilhelm Street. But the double-lightning pins of the SS units between the two points resembled a spider’s nest. Yael stared so hard at the Sieg runes that they blurred into one hairy arachnid blob. Infiltrating the area would take stealth and luck. Escaping would require even more of these things.
It wasn’t as impossible as a mission into the Führerbunker, but it was nearly as dangerous.
“Luka will help with that once we plan out the presentation. Any news on camera equipment?” she asked Kasper, who’d just signed off on a transmission.
He ground the heel of his palm into his eyes, as if sleep deprivation were something that could be pummeled away. “Nothing yet. But they’re telling all units to keep an eye out. If any of our men find filming equipment, they’ll contact us.”
Yael made her way to the card table. Though it was late, the day’s sleep and the adrenaline from the crossing left her with too much energy to call it a night. Time to start reading—Reiniger’s approval pending, cameras or not.
Luka emerged from the hall, freshly showered. The victor’s wet hair was slicked back, and he’d shaved so tightly that Yael noticed angles on his face she hadn’t before. The architecture of his cheeks reminded her of a cathedral—vaulted, somewhat Gothic, base of stone.
Funny, how even completely unmasked, he could keep showing new sides.
Yael’s heart revved—autobahn fast—as Luka settled in the chair next to hers. She had to glance down at the floor to make sure her own chair wasn’t floating. She needed to be grounded, now of all nows. She’d made the mistake of letting Luka distract her at the end of her last mission, and it had cost her the race.
Yael tried to push these feelings back, but it was like swallowing sunshine. Bright yellow rays shimmering inside her. Had they been alone, she would’ve reached out to touch him again. Not the hand this time. Someplace closer. The ridge of his shoulders. The nape of his neck…
“You cut yourself,” she said.
“Oh. Right.” Luka’s hand scouted out the spot on his lower jaw, stopping when it smudged red. “It’s just a nick.”
“You
are not getting blood on these files,” Miriam warned.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Comrade Mnogolikiy.” Luka wiped the blood off on his shirt, pronouncing Miriam’s Russian name so flawlessly that she did a double take at the boy.
“Your Russian’s improving.”
“Nyet.” Luka shook his head. “Just my manners.”
Miriam’s smile was faint, but Yael didn’t miss the pinch of future crow’s-feet. She pointed to a stack of autopsy reports by his elbow. “If you’re going to give the presentation with us, you should familiarize yourself with Experiment Eighty-Five. Start by reading these.”
Luka set himself to the task. Opening up the first folder, setting aside the photographs with careful fingers. Yael delved into her own pile. It was taxing work, wading through life after life, reliving Experiment 85 through: Anne Weisskopf (125819ΔX), Edith Jacobson (137992ΔX), Talaitha Mirga (143026ZX).
Longer, longer ran the names. Higher, higher climbed the numbers.
But something about the numbers was off where the SS-Maskiertekommando des Führers was concerned. It was a discrepancy Yael had first noticed reading through the notes in Dr. Geyer’s office. If the Doppelgänger Project officially started in 1948 and ten SS candidates went through the injections every year with a 95 percent survival rate, basic math dictated that there should be seventy-six SS skinshifters.
So why could they find evidence of only twenty?
“Good question,” Miriam said when Yael posed it. “There could be other Maskiertekommandos. Ones that aren’t assigned to Hitler.”
“Wouldn’t their rosters be in here?”
“We had to leave a lot of papers behind,” Miriam reminded her. “And we haven’t read through everything yet.”
“Fifty-six more skinshifters running around?” Luka grunted. “Cheery thought.”
Wasn’t it, just?
All of this stretched Yael’s soul a bit thinner, but she didn’t want to miss anything, so she kept reading. Every word on every page. Whenever the numbers and names and memories became too overwhelming, she would look to the operations map and its defiant wash of indigo. What hope Henryka had, marking these reclaimed lands with ink—permanent, unchangeable. Yael stared at it as long as guilt would allow, but the ink from the Angel of Death’s fountain pen—just as permanent, just as unchangeable—kept calling her back.
She’d reached 1952. An entry from June: Reichsführer Himmler has ordered the cessation of new SS subjects due to the Führer’s recent decision to remain out of the public eye.
Yael shared this with the group.
“That explains the numbers.” Miriam frowned. “Somewhat.”
“But that was only a few weeks after Aaron-Klaus tried offing the Führer,” Luka pointed out. “Why would they halt the doppelgänger conveyer belt if one just saved Hitler’s life?”
Yael read on, summarizing. “There were other Maskiertekommandos for some high-ranked National Socialist officials. Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler. It says here all their members were eliminated to reduce the risk of the Doppelgänger Project’s exposure.”
“Himmler and Hitler must’ve known the panic it would cause,” Miriam reasoned. “After the Grosser Platz shooting, they passed the Führer’s survival off as a miracle and erased as much evidence of the doppelgängers as they dared. Now history is repeating itself.”
“Not really.” Yael shook her head and set the page full of Dr. Geyer’s penmanship aside. Next to Anne and Edith and Talaitha. By the fury of her five wolves. “Some things cannot be erased.”
And these things were about to be aired on the Reichssender for all the world to know. Everything the Führer had tried to hide would blaze like dry brush in the wilderness, burning both the Führereid and the people’s trust to ash.
Hitler, Himmler, and Geyer—they did not make her.
They would not unmake her either.
But Yael would try with everything that was in her—sunshine and suffering, stolen lifetimes and death at her wing tips—to destroy them.
CHAPTER 43
Never had time dragged so slowly. Never had hours passed so swiftly.
Four hours: Felix should’ve felt better after the shower. Mud gone, muscles loosened. Instead he was as exposed as the wound he held aloft for his sister. On-fire raw. Both sat on the bunk in Yael’s sleeping quarters. Its plain white bedding became littered with bandages and bottles as Adele performed first aid, casting aside whatever she didn’t use. Martin’s pocket watch lay among them.
“I’ll look at that next.” This meant worlds beyond worlds, coming from Adele. She looked at Martin’s pocket watch as often as she visited their brother’s grave: rarely, never. “We’ll need something to keep track of time, and they might get suspicious if we keep popping in and out of the map room.”
He’d told Adele everything he could, fitting a recap of the Axis Tour, the Tokyo torture, Baasch’s plan, and everything that had come of it, into fewer minutes than did the tale justice.
“Those Saukerls!” his sister said once the story ended.
“Which ones?” Felix wondered.
“All of them!” Adele’s hair hung bright around her face, but days of darkness roiled beneath her words. “Baasch, Yael, the whole verdammt lot!”
Felix remembered that anger—red, revenge rage. How it covered the floor in Tokyo, filled the cracks inside his mouth. Some of it still throbbed under his fresh bandages, but the absoluteness of the feeling had evaporated. Baasch’s mission no longer felt like his right. It was all a muddy mess of lives and deaths and wrongs, and by God if Felix didn’t want to wash his hands of it!
“Do you really think Mama’s dead?” Pitch-black emotion seeped through Adele’s teeth.
“If she’s not, if she and Papa are really at Vlad’s…” What good had ifs ever done him? Best to go with a more solid answer. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, Ad.”
His sister palmed Martin’s broken watch. “Don’t you?”
Three hours: Adele told her side of things as she fixed the watch, using tweezers from the medical cabinet (she’d had to wait for Luka to leave the washroom to retrieve them) and Felix’s instructions. In the end, there wasn’t much to either the tale or the repair. Aside from Yael’s attack in the flat and Adele’s three escape attempts, her month had been reduced to bruised toes and lightless noise. She’d overheard quite a bit through those layers of steel. Enough to know that the resistance’s chances of overthrowing the Führer were dismal.
“Even if your SS-Standartenführer doesn’t have Mama and Papa, what will happen when the SS takes back Germania?” Adele asked. “We’ll be captured and beheaded regardless. They’ll torture the location of Vlad’s farm out of someone, and Mama and Papa will die, too.”
When the watch started working again, they set it to the time kept by the map room clock: 2:43 AM (Central Reich Time). Martin’s timepiece counted seconds steadily, ticking with the exact urgent volume it had used in the Imperial Palace’s guest quarters.
You know what you have to do, it seemed to say. Don’t you? Don’t you?
Two hours: Adele was right.
One hour: He crossed the hall with leaden steps, into the sleeping quarters with the telephone. The others were in the front room, voices jumbling together while they discussed the Doppelgänger Project papers. As if those files could actually make a difference.
What if they could? The question followed Felix through the door. It slithered around his neck as he walked to the chest of drawers, where the telephone sat. It flared inside his phantom fingers as he lifted the receiver, trying not to think of Yael or the hundreds of Wehrmacht men who could be Papa, Martin, himself.
The thought reared its head anyway. Doubts—a dozen, hundred, thousand different faces’ worth—crept through the tendons of Felix’s good hand. Stilled it. But there were hands that kept moving: Martin’s watch itched in his pocket. Reminding Felix that his life—the lives of all he held dearest—would be much shorter unless he k
ept his focus, reached out, and dialed. And really, what faces was he thinking of? Yael was the faceless girl. The men of war were faceless, too, soldiers destined to die no matter what Felix did.
The only faces that mattered were the ones he could save.
This was it. The last piece.
Salvation, damnation.
Felix dialed.
Despite the predawn hour, it took only two rings before the call was answered, then transferred. Felix hardly had time to second-guess his decision when Baasch got on the line, sounding half asleep as he growled his greeting. “Yes?”
Felix’s breath quivered in his throat.
There would be blood.
There had to be blood.
But it would not belong to the Wolfes.
“I’m in position,” he said.
CHAPTER 44
Still no news on the camera setup, but this didn’t stop Luka from reading until his vision blurred all letters into one. Until even the mug of black coffee by his wrist (which had been drained and refilled multiple times) couldn’t help keep the words straight.
But he wasn’t just reading, was he? His job was to tell. Words were Luka Löwe’s forte, but taking mass murder and human experimentation and Hitler’s largest lie and cramming all these things into a speech was testing even his oratory abilities.
He spent the better part of an hour with a pencil in hand—trying to think of the best way to say the worst thing. Graphite pressed to paper in bursts, the skeleton of a speech took shape.
People of the Third Reich. This is Luka Löwe, your double victor, and I am here to tell you the truth. The Führer Adolf Hitler has been lying to you about a great many things. Peace. Purity. Progress. This is what Hitler tells us our empire has attained. “The Aryan race is great,” he tells us. “The Aryan race is strong. The Aryan race is meant by God to rule.”
Lies.
I am going to tell you the truth. The truth I think most of you already know: We are not great. We are not strong. We are murderers, stained in the blood of innocents. Hundreds, thousands of