Blood for Blood

by Ryan Graudin

  Felix had fought before, but never like this: tooth and claw, your life or his, his, his. The room blurred and sharpened all at once. Trapped moments sped by: Brigitte managed to pull down a bookshelf for cover; Miriam abandoned her garrote for a gun; papers flew off Henryka’s desk as SS fell behind it.

  The odds kept shifting. Four to one when Johann was shot in the sternum, fell, did not get up. Two to one after the SS took a wave of bullets and the Wolfes joined the fray. Felix’s hits were far less powerful than Kasper’s, but they were effective. He even used his bandaged hand, striking with cornered animal rage. Again and again and again. Until he couldn’t tell if the red on his knuckles was from within or from the face of the SS-Schütze he was beating.

  The fight evened. One to one. SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s handkerchief fell to the floor as the officer made a graceless retreat for the exit.

  NO.

  It wasn’t desperation to survive that drove Felix to his feet. It wasn’t anger or vengeance that made him lunge after the SS-Standartenführer. The HEAT inside was a different beast, unleashed.

  For the first time since Felix had met the SS-Standartenführer, he wasn’t trapped. Now they met on Felix’s terms: shoulder to spine to concrete. They hit the floor together.

  What had he done? Something a yes, yes could not undo. Something Felix could never take back, though this didn’t stop him from trying. He used both fists: the broken and the breaker.

  Baasch wasn’t a slight man, nor was he one to lie back and take a beating. Their fight was more than even; it was vicious. Crush below, claw above. The SS-Standartenführer’s punches caught Felix in the jaw, ribs, chest, anywhere he could reach. Felix didn’t even try to avoid the blows.

  “Did you—ever have—my—parents?” Iron edged his words, and he was bloody, all bloody, and Baasch’s face was drowning under his fists, but Felix didn’t care. “Answer—me!”

  The SS-Standartenführer’s mouth gaped: broken teeth, airless answer. There were too many ricochets ringing through the map room to hear it.

  “LOUDER!” Felix roared. Only now did he realize that the SS officer’s hits had stopped. Baasch was beaten, but it did nothing. The coals kept searing Felix’s chest. His right hand was a torch, hurt worse than ever.

  Pain mossed over Baasch’s eyes. He drew a breath.

  “Your—” was the only word he managed before his skull opened. The hole was small, only 9mm, but it was large enough for death to worm through, claiming the SS-Standartenführer for its own.

  These eyes were dead. Hindsight proof that the SS-Standartenführer had had at least a glimmer of a soul, however hardened. Felix turned to find Miriam only a few steps behind him, still holding the gun. The soul in her eyes was overflowing—lightning bright and luminous.

  Miriam aimed the pistol at his heart.

  Felix didn’t throw up his hands, the way Baasch’s surviving men were doing under Brigitte’s and Kasper’s guns. He did not try to plead or beg. He’d done what he had to, and now it was time for him to pay.

  Felix stared back at Miriam—blue eyes to blazing—and nodded.

  Adele ran to her brother, lodging herself in front of him. She faced Miriam. “No! Please! I told—I told Felix to do it! He was only trying to protect me! Baasch was going to kill our family.”

  The gun didn’t move.

  Neither did Adele.

  “Ad,” Felix whispered, “get out of the way.”

  “NO!” his sister spit, with every ounce of stubborn, angry love in her body. “No! This isn’t right! Baasch forced you—”

  “I still made the call,” he said, hoarse. “I still chose.”

  A hush had fallen over the map room, allowing for new noises from above: gunshots, heavy machinery churning against asphalt. So that was why reinforcement SS hadn’t come. They were engaged in another fight. Had Reiniger’s men managed to rally back for the block so quickly? It seemed unlikely.… But then, who was on the other side of the battle?

  Miriam heard the sounds as well. She waited another beat. Artillery rumbled. Adele stood in front of her brother. Arms outstretched, as if another few lengths of flesh and bone might protect him.

  “Get out.”

  What? Felix couldn’t believe what Miriam had just said.

  “Take your sister and go!” Miriam waved her Luger at the main door. “If I see you again, Herr Wolfe, you’re a dead man.”

  This time, Felix believed her.

  Adele hooked her arm around her brother, pulled him off Baasch’s corpse. They walked into the cellar together. The SS-Standartenführer’s two remaining men followed: stripped of their weapons, dazed with their intact lives. The door locked shut behind them, sealing Miriam and the other two operatives in with a mound of corpses.

  Why was it that this side felt more like a tomb?

  CHAPTER 53

  The dance of prey had come to a close.

  Miriam locked the door to the cellar, hoping the SS wouldn’t get a chance to test their howitzers on its reinforced steel. Hoping the battle above would swing out of the National Socialists’ favor.

  It was impossible to avoid the dead; stepping around one corpse simply led to another. Miriam had to tiptoe her way to the communication station. Her garroting move had ruined the headset cord. Not much had been spared in the second firefight, though the radio still seemed to be working.

  Kasper and Brigitte were another exception. Well-trained though they were, the pair looked overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies. Miriam wondered what it said about her that this carnage wasn’t shocking, had not been shocking for a long, long time.

  What had shocked Miriam was what she’d witnessed on the Reichssender: Luka Löwe not just playing the hero but being one. Himmler’s on-air confession. Yael among wolves…

  Miriam hadn’t seen the end of the tape, as busy as she was fighting for her own life. The television was as much a corpse as the others: screen shattered, circuits laid bare. The Führer’s face was finally gone, but so was Yael.

  It was easy to worry about her friend and harder to hope. But neither of these things would do much good, here among the dead. What would be helpful was a line of communication with the world above. Miriam tested the headset from Johann’s busted radio in Kasper’s machine. Someone was still transmitting on the other end, listing letters faster than Miriam could memorize.

  “Do you have a pencil, Brigitte?”

  The operative patted her hair only to remember that her pencil was half javelined in one of the bodies below. “I had extras. Somewhere…”

  “It’s still broadcasting?” Kasper approached the stool.

  Miriam nodded. “After what just happened on the Reichssender, General Reiniger needs this map room more than ever. Do you have protocols to tell them the crisis has been averted?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “Good. Use them.” Miriam handed him the headset and joined Brigitte in the search. She looked on the card table, where the Doppelgänger Project files lay undisturbed by the chaos. Luka had been using a pencil to write his speech, hadn’t he?

  SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s hat crowned the top of the pile. Miriam swept it off. There was nothing she regretted about squeezing that trigger. It was the final aim that lingered with her—unfired.

  Had it been smart to let Felix and his sister go? Probably not.

  Had it been right? Miriam didn’t know. This mercy went against everything the Soviets had taught her: We will destroy the murderers of our children/comrades/friends. But she’d been learning new lessons as of late, and the way Adele had flung herself between Felix and the gun reminded Miriam of Yael and the Molotov firing line. Reminded her that killing the Wolfe boy would be foolish.

  In the end, his wasn’t her life to take.

  Luka’s pencil lay where the victor last set it, wedged against his speech: half written, now finished. Miriam handed the writing utensil to Brigitte. “Here. This will do.”

  The operative righted a fallen stool an
d settled in front of the Enigma machine. Two bullet holes speckled its unhinged lid, the machinery within untouched. After a few unjumbled letters, more than enough exchanged pass codes, communication between the resistance map room and the forces above was reestablished. Miriam left the operatives to their radio exchange and moved toward the far wall, where Henryka’s map folded into itself. The back of the paper was heavy with indigo ink, bled through. All Miriam could see were new countries. Upside down, piecing themselves together in a sea of white.

  She knelt to the floor and collected fallen thumbtacks until her hands couldn’t hold any more sharpness. One by one, she used them to pin the world back into place.

  CHAPTER 54

  “Werner, what the hell—” Bernhard twisted in his chair when the screen version of Yael appeared on the monitors. Fear swept across his face. “Goebbels will have our heads for airing this.”

  The operator reached for the control panel. Yael reached for her gun.

  “Don’t touch anything!” she barked.

  Bernhard stopped. The terror of his expression went a shade darker. “W-Werner? What’s wrong with your voice? What’s going on?”

  Yael didn’t answer. He’d find out soon enough.

  The whole world would.

  Something on the monitors caught the operator’s attention. Kept it. “Is—is that Victor Löwe?”

  It was. Yael’s eyes teared as she watched Luka standing in front of Reichsführer Himmler. He looked so vibrant in front of the cameras. So verdammt alive.

  But she knew what was coming.

  Yael held her Luger aloft, keeping half an ear toward the hallway. Nothing yet. But the SS had seen her on the screen. Phone calls were being made. Jackboots would come running. There was only one door into the master control room from the hall. Yael locked it behind her: a small defense. Metal (one jammed handle + four bullets + a blade in her boot) wouldn’t stop an SS unit.

  There’s always a way out. One of Vlad’s lessons. Her trainer had taught her to look for every possibility inside a room: windows, lies she could weave, faces she could steal. But now Yael wasn’t so certain she wanted to find it.

  Life or death?

  Never had the second option been so tempting. It had claimed everyone else—why not her? For so long Yael believed she was chosen. Spared to do what others could not: kill Hitler, destroy this kingdom of death. The deed was done, and the sword Yael had used to do it was catching up to her. Outside, the hall exploded with sound: shouts, boots, louder shouts. They’d found the studio. Hydra heads, Himmler, Double Victor Löwe, blood everywhere, and Dietrich.

  Not long now.

  Luka was reciting the names. Bernhard was beyond speech; his mouth was slack, all lines of dread gone. Hearing not just a list of victims but an entire new vein of history. Watching not just Victor Löwe take a bullet but an entire frame of existence fall back, shatter, die.

  But why? Yael’s heart rended. Why, why, why?

  She watched herself run to him. She heard other steps—real ones—outside the control room door. The handle rattled. There was a shout. On-screen Yael was pleading, trying to stop what could not be.

  Question: Why?

  Yael stared at the Luger in her hands. The very same gun she was smuggling off Luka’s body in a dozen monitors. The weapon that had brought her here.

  Answer: Luka died to get the truth out there.

  And now it was.

  Answer: Luka died so Yael could live.

  And now she would.

  —GO GO GO—

  The hall door shuddered and splintered. The lock held, barely. Yael snatched a wool coat from a nearby stand, throwing it over Werner’s blood mark as she made for the rear of the control room, scanning its ceiling tiles, screens, buttons… looking, looking…

  —THERE’S ALWAYS A WAY—

  The place had been divided into segments by load-bearing columns, some as wide as walls. It was larger than Yael first thought. Consoles stretched into consoles stretched into consoles nearly half the length of the Ordenspalais annex. Yael dodged rolling chairs and countless images of her past self, putting as many columns as she could between herself and the view from the hallway door.

  Shots sounded. New bullets? Or her own, long fired? Yael didn’t stop to investigate. She kept running with all the strength and speed and need to live left in her.

  —THERE’S A WAY—

  The room ended with daylight. A window! Its glass sluiced from ceiling to floor: the rigid, grand signature of Albert Speer’s architecture.

  —TWO WAYS—

  To her right was a door. The plaque read ARCHIVES. When Yael cracked it open, she was greeted by the smell of mothballs mixed with dust. A sliver of darkness.

  —DEAD END—

  The window wasn’t much better. Its panes looked out onto a street lined with government buildings, alert soldiers. In Werner’s bloodied civilian clothing, Yael wouldn’t make it half a block before being stopped.

  The SS would expect her to try. Yael counted on this as she used her final bullets to crack the window, kicking a sizable hole in the glass. She slipped into the archive room. There was a brief second of light to memorize the space: large, stretching with shelves upon shelves of old Chancellery Chat film reels.

  The door eased shut. Darkness fell over the graveyard of the Führer’s words.

  Yael didn’t trust herself to go far without stumbling, but she had to get away from the door. Ginger steps guided her to the end of the first stack of film. She slipped past it—second, third, fourth row of reels.

  Her pulse was everywhere, scattering with every raw-meat beat of her heart. The SS men were all noise outside the ARCHIVES door. Glass crackled as they broke the window even wider, following Yael’s supposed path.

  “To the street! Quickly! She won’t have gotten far! The control room operator says she’s wearing civilian clothing. Black coat. Spread the word! Alert the checkpoints!”

  More glass crackled and snapped. And then, nothing.

  Yael’s diversion had worked—

  The door to the archives room swung open, bathing the place in light. Darkness shrank into shadows on the wall, gathering in the form of a single man. He paused—silhouetted—in the doorway. Yael kept her back to the stacks, breath going stale in Werner’s throat.

  The overhead lights flickered to life. The shadows vanished, but the man didn’t. Yael heard his every step as he moved along the first stack of reels. She twisted into the length of the fourth stack. Out of sight, crouched low.

  Her hunter paused at the end of the stacks. Just three rows, two meters away. Air became acid in Yael’s lungs. She gripped the knife in her boot. Her fingers trembled against its hilt.

  The jackboots resumed their beat: iron heel to linoleum. They sounded hungry, prowling past the second stack and the third, closer, closer.…

  One more step and he would raise the alarm.

  One more step and Yael’s life would be over.

  Yael leapt out before he could take it, using Werner’s hefty frame to slam her opponent into the linoleum. The floor cracked the wind out of the soldier’s lungs, snuffing his half-formed yell. This didn’t stop him from thrashing, wild blows that Yael dodged with automated precision. Her blade was in her hand. One swipe, one strike was all it might take.… But…

  The SS-Sturmmann’s uniform was pristine. Perfectly tailored to an escape. Knives were, by nature, messy tools of killing, and if Yael used hers, it would sabotage her future alibi with blood blotches and stab holes.

  Not by the blade this time, but by her fist.

  Bone to flesh to flesh to bone.

  One blow to the temple and the storm trooper went limp. Yael lost no time peeling off Werner’s clothing, studying the SS-Sturmmann as she did so. Brown hair, pristinely trimmed. His lids, when she peeled them back, revealed blunt blue eyes. Mole on the edge of his jaw. Bottom teeth slightly overlapped.

  Yael moved in a flurry of buttons, stripping the SS-Sturmmann of his oute
r garments and dressing herself in the storm trooper’s insignia: skulls, eagles, runes, all silver. The official papers in his uniform pocket told Yael she was impersonating Otto Gruber.

  The SS-Sturmmann wasn’t dead, just lifeless. Yael couldn’t bring herself to cut his unconscious throat (there were still some lines left), so she used strips of Werner’s clothing to secure him in the archive’s far corner, well away from any stacks of reels Otto might be able to thrash against when he woke. It should be some time before he was found.

  Yael straightened the collar of Otto’s uniform, returned the knife to the SS-Sturmmann’s jackboot. She walked to the exit, switched off the light, and shut the door. Yael paused by the blasted window; the scene beyond it was just as jagged. Frantic street, milling with SS uniforms.

  She blended right in.

  SS-Sturmmann Otto Gruber walked down the lane, just as much a hunter as the others. His stale blue eyes searched doorways, glossed over vehicle windows. Every time someone asked if he’d seen a man in a black coat, he shook his head. The question grew rarer the farther he walked, replaced by different rumors.

  Adolf Hitler. Heinrich Himmler. Dead.

  These names, combined with this word, exposed an emotion Yael had never before seen on the faces of the Schutzstaffel—fear. They were doubly orphaned. Leaderless, leaderless. From the lowest SS-Schütze to the highest SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer, none were spared this panic.

  For the first time, Yael walked among them as the only fearless one. She carried on the search for herself, circling the shrubs of the Wilhelmplatz, even stopping to peer through the gated entrance of the U-Bahn station. (The place was impassable.) She moved as subtly as she could to the checkpoint. Its guards were being bombarded from both sides. Concerned National Socialist officials wanted to see evidence of the dead Reichsführer and his Maskiertekommando puppets with their own eyes. More officials wanted to leave the Wilhelm Street area to tend to urgent matters. One of them had the great misfortune of wearing a black coat.