by Ryan Graudin
His apology felt so small. A feathered hawk speck against a wide-world sky, suspended on wind currents. No rise, no fall, just flight without motion, hovering between them.
Yael’s arms loosened. Her lips parted, and her breath slipped out until she reached the bottom of her exhale. She had no words left, none for him at least. She gave Felix a nod so subtle he would’ve missed it if he blinked.
Something inside him landed.
Yael continued her hike toward the house. Vlad welcomed her inside, shut the door. Felix stood on solid ground, staring at the cabin’s rough-hewn wood.
“Felix!” Adele called his name. “What are you doing?”
He turned to find the Wolfes still there. Papa rubbing the bald spot on the top of his head. Mama holding her spade in one hand, gripping her daughter with the other.
Felix joined them.
CHAPTER 58
Vlad’s kitchen was everything from Yael’s memories: table covered in a chain mail pattern of mug rings, shelves lined with vodka bottles, teakettle simmering on the stove. Two years later and her trainer was just as unchanged, made of the same scars and scowls. Yael wasn’t bearing her numbers, or any face he might recognize, but he knew her on sight.
“It’s about time you showed up,” the old intelligencer grunted in Russian. “Those two have been pestering me about going home since they got here. You know I don’t like whiners.”
“They can’t have been that bad.” Yael took a seat, clasped her hands over the battered tabletop.
Vlad swept to the other side of the kitchen. “Were at first. Even made a few escape attempts before I convinced them it was better to wait. They’ve at least been tolerable since I got them doing chores.”
“I came as soon as I could.” Part lie, mostly truth.
During the months of war, Yael had kept busy in the map room. Joining Miriam and Kasper and Brigitte and a dozen fresh faces in an attempt to fill Henryka’s role. (No one could, but they did their best.) The months after Bormann’s surrender had been a haze—the ash of war settling, the dust of rebuilding republics rising. Only in the past few weeks had there been room to remember the Wolfes.
Time might heal wounds, but the scabs inside Yael were fickle, falling off in the moments she least expected, bleeding all over again. There were days on end when she could not trust herself to look Felix in the eyes and choose life. Even today, standing by the open garage door, watching the mechanic bent over his work, she’d felt her heart split into a mess of wounds and wants.
Murder or mercy?
On paper, a simple question. In the flesh, a different matter.
It was Miriam who told her the truth of what had happened in the map room. At first Yael would not believe it, could not wrap her mind around what Felix, of all people, had done. It did not match up with the boy she knew—dogged strength, inherent goodness. The one who’d fixed her motorcycle and bound her wounds, who’d said he was on her side no matter what.
No. Not her motorcycle. Not her wounds. Not her side.
Never her side…
Yael had known it would hurt, this inevitable break between them. But never could she have predicted just how devastating the rift would be: Felix’s betrayal, his deal with SS-Standartenführer Baasch, the fall-through and the fallout. Every detail filled Yael with another layer of anger, a smoky ache, new yet so, so old, added to all of her many other griefs. Henryka hadn’t even been buried yet. And Luka’s body… she couldn’t bear to think.
Life or death?
It was a choice Yael hadn’t fully made when she walked into Wolfe Auto Shop. There was no cold blood. No lines of innocence holding her back. Even Felix knew it, asking Have you come to kill me? in the most matter-of-fact tone he could manage.
She was staring at the floor when he said this. At some dark stain that could’ve been blood but was probably something more mechanical. Her heart kept splitting inside her. Growing and breaking, rended and rendered, reminding her that she was so, so sick of death. All it carried. All it buried.
Felix deserved to die, yes. But Yael deserved to let him live.
She could hear the Wolfes’ laughter—faint and full—through the cracks of the kitchen door. Again her heart grew and broke. Vlad poured her a cup of tea and slid it across the table. Sans the vodka he usually slipped in his.
A pity. Today Yael could’ve used it.
She cupped her hands around the warm china, let the heat crawl through her fingertips. Vlad settled in the chair across from her, one eye squinted and seeing all. “How are you holding up?”
Yael knew he didn’t have to ask. She knew she didn’t have to answer. “Barely.”
“Better than not at all,” Vlad grunted, took a swig of his own tea. “It’s a wonder you’re here after all those stunts Reiniger put you through. He got another job lined up for you yet?”
“There are ten remaining members of the Maskiertekommando still at large,” she told her old trainer. “Reiniger thinks most of them have taken to the ratlines.”
Though the boats departing from Europe’s shores were being combed for fleeing National Socialists, it was impossible to catch all of them. These escape routes—ratlines—were crawling with SS. Uniforms tossed, monsters trying to pass as men. Most, their intelligence told them, were headed to South America, hoping the continent’s vast mountains and jungles would be enough to swallow them.
It wouldn’t.
“You’re certain there are only ten?” Vlad asked.
Yael was. Not only did they have the whole of the Doppelgänger Project files at their fingertips, but they had an expert witness. Dr. Engel Geyer’s escape attempt had not been as successful as some of his counterparts’. He was captured on his way to the coast. Several vials of the Doppelgänger Treatment were on the doctor’s person, though Geyer’s face was his own: gap teeth, sharp eyes. He admitted he was too afraid to self-administer the compound. Five percent was too high a risk for the Angel of Death.
Ten Maskiertekommando men. Miriam and Yael. These were the only skinshifters left. The rest of the compound had been locked away, preserved as evidence in the trial of Dr. Engel Geyer.
“Reiniger wants Kasper and me to track the skinshifters down and give them… more visible marks.”
Long, long ago, an X had marked Yael as a survivor. But it would be a double Sieg rune that marked the skinshifting war criminals. A black jag on each cheek. Impossible to hide, no matter what face they ended up wearing when they were brought to trials of their own.
“Ten skinshifters. That should keep you busy.”
“We have their files. Himmler kept extra-careful tabs on them. He didn’t want them slipping away either. He noted all of their familial attachments, significant places in their past. If they cling to any of these, we’ll find them.” Yael blew on her tea and took a sip.
Vlad’s cup was empty. He made no move to refill it. “Have you stopped yet?”
Both of Yael’s arms were on the table. Six wolves and a lion. Yes, she still faced them every sunlit day. Yes, she still stopped to recite their names every darkening night.
“I remember.”
Where she came from, what she came through.
“The dead we will always have with us.” Vlad’s eye twitched as he leaned back in his chair. “But I don’t mean taking time to reflect, Yael. I mean taking time. You’ve spent your whole life hiding and fighting. You’ve earned some rest.”
“I am. Resting,” Yael told him. “It’s not all spy stuff. I have a place of my own now.”
The residence was half Miriam’s as well, a place for her sister to stay when she wasn’t traveling to and from Moscow, attempting to balance a seesaw of politics. They’d painted the walls blue and were trying their best to keep a collection of potted plants watered. Nay, blooming.
Every day Yael learned more about herself. Not just her past, but the past before that: the history that ran through her blood. Miriam’s memories of life before camp ran deeper than Yael’s—after al
l, she’d had eight more years of them. She gave Yael what she could: prayers, stories from the Torah, Hebrew in parcel and part.
Her rest came in the form of Shabbat. Every Friday evening, no matter what hardship or grief the week held, Miriam and Yael lit candles and said a blessing over a cup of wine. Miriam did not remember how to make the braided loaves of challah, nor did any of Neuberlin’s bakeries, and so they had to make do with regular bread.
The National Socialists had tried to burn all traces of Judaism from the earth. Much had been scorched—synagogues, Torah scrolls, souls—destroyed on a scale almost too vast to comprehend. (How many, how many?) Yet it was not all ashes. There were survivors—men and women and children who’d managed to ride out the New Order years in Novosibirsk and its surrounding wilderness. Most chose to remain in these places, where roofs and jobs were plentiful, where a synagogue still stood, where they need not fear their neighbors’ knives. For some, however, the call of the old-countries-made-new was too strong.
A woman named Shoshana was among the first to arrive in Neuberlin. Her fingers knew how to knead the challah dough, braid it just right. Now every week she made loaves for Miriam and Yael, for the five, ten, fifteen others who appeared. Among them was a rabbi by the name of Rosenthal, who had a Torah scroll in his possession, its Hebrew calligraphy more precious than gold.
They were a community on edge—constantly looking over their shoulders despite the protection promised by Reiniger’s government. (The world was changed, yes, but it was far from perfect. There was a reason Yael kept her P38 close.) But their roots went deep, bound them together in collective memory. With each new arrival, they pieced together more of their past, built more of their future.
“I have the living with me, too,” Yael told her fifth wolf. “What are you going to do, once the Wolfes are gone?”
“Weed the garden. Keep the cows alive.” Vlad caught the look on her face, laughed. The sound was as growly as everything else that came out of his mouth. “Reiniger has new tasks for me, too, I’m afraid.”
He did not elaborate, and Yael did not press, though she did wonder. Vlad’s talents and resources were many. Exactly where would Erwin Reiniger direct them? Toward relations with Moscow? Or the situation in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where restlessness had gripped the populations, threatened Emperor Hirohito’s rule?
“We’ll survive.” Vlad topped off both drinks. Without vodka, again, but this didn’t stop him from raising his teacup, tapping it to Yael’s own. “Who knows, maybe we’ll even thrive.”
CHAPTER 59
The camp was deserted. After Reiniger’s victory, the place—and all the others, far, far too many others—had been seized, exorcised. There were no SS at the gates. No rifles resting on their shoulders. No bristling Alsatian dogs at their sides. The watchtowers stood blind. Weeds sprouted through the rocks between the railroad ties—the ones that had whispered Yael’s name to her so many years ago. (Yah-ell, yah-ell, yah-ell.)
They said nothing now, adding to the silence that lay thick over the place. It hovered above smokeless stacks, walked the empty barracks, seeped through every brick and board, soaked into the souls of all who heard.
They were few; they were more than Yael could have hoped—the ones who’d come to pay their respects. Most of the community from Neuberlin made the journey, bearing candles and matches, stones and prayers. There were others, too, men and women Yael didn’t recognize. Some spoke Russian. One couple had a baby. There was a young man whose face reminded Yael so strongly of Aaron-Klaus that she had to stare at him a good three seconds before deciding that, no, she was not seeing ghosts, just visiting them. Some were already lighting their Yahrzeit candles, flames shivering against their palms as they coaxed their matches, set them to the wicks.
Yael’s candle and matches remained in her pocket. She didn’t want to light it alone, because she did not have to. Miriam was here, somewhere. They’d endured the drive from Neuberlin together, navigating the final stretch of gravel road, past the pines that grew along it. Again, Yael wanted to run into the trees, but as soon as they reached the gates where Rabbi Rosenthal and the others were beginning to gather, Miriam clapped her on the shoulder and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
So Yael stood, taking in the quiet. A wind rushed through the forest—carrying pine-needle whispers and a sappy scent she couldn’t remember from her childhood. Evergreen had outlasted the smoke.
When Miriam returned, there was a strange look on her face: heavy and hard and hopeful. Soil was wedged into her knuckles and nail beds. She held her hand out to Yael, unfurled her palm.
Soft flesh, life line, grainy wood.
Yael couldn’t speak when she picked up the doll. She could not cry when she twisted the biggest one open and found the next, and the next, and the next. Four faces, each different, all of them there. Aside from some loose clods of dirt, the set of matryoshka dolls looked untouched. Plucked straight from dark-night memories: the offering of the Babushka’s wrinkled hands, Yael falling asleep with the family knotted against her chest, Miriam’s promise to keep them safe.
They’ll all be together again someday, she’d told Yael.
Neither of them believed that day was a real, tangible thing. That twelve years later they’d be standing outside the open gates, preparing to light candles for the dead.
Yael took the smallest doll from her pocket and placed it inside the rest. Snap, snap, snap, safe. Not ten steps away, Rabbi Rosenthal cleared his throat to greet the group and bring them into a more organized mourning. Those who’d been lighting their candles stood, and though they had all the space they’d ever need, their group drew inward, shoulder to shoulder, knit tighter than any. Miriam’s hand found Yael’s, squeezed hard. Yael squeezed back and did not let go. Her other hand held the doll tight.
Wind was still sweeping down from the pines when it was time to recite the Kaddish. It wrapped itself around the voices of Rabbi Rosenthal and the other men, gave their words wings. The prayer lifted up, up, out.
Yael shut her eyes and listened.
Here was a people. A family. A faith.
Her people. Her family. Her faith.
Here was a silence broken.
Yael’s name was already in the history books (inked—forever and always—beside Luka Wotan Löwe), but this did not stop her from accomplishing more. She followed the ratlines to South America and marked every Maskiertekommando she could find. She stood at the end of the Avenue of Splendors and watched the Volkshalle’s dome crumble to dust; the shock waves of its demolition shook the roots of her molars. She thought of the dead and fought for the living, entering the battleground of Neuberlin’s politics to make sure the voice of her people was not lost, would never be lost again.
She ate challah. She laughed. She wept. She wore herself proudly: short sleeves, first-face forward. The wolves and the lion went with her, always with her, running across warm skin, under daylight. The sun kept shining, and there was nothing left to her that was a lie.
Happily, sadly, humanly ever after…
Yael Reider lived.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I can’t believe I’m writing this sentence, because it means, for all intents and purposes, that this book is finished! Done! Finito! I cannot count the number of times I stared at my messy Word document, doubting that I’d ever be able to turn it into a finished novel. And yet, here I am, at the series’ end.
Telling a story as expansive as this one requires a lot of support. (A LOT.) I had plenty of expert cheerleaders a
nd cheerleader experts. Jacob Graudin helped me plot Germania’s downfall over pints of beer. Kate Armstrong read early chapters and gave me the encouragement I needed. Megan Shepherd and Anne Blankman provided excellent rough-draft feedback. Since I’m nowhere near as gifted with languages as Yael, Anna-Anya Spann aided me with Russian and Nora Leitz with German. Nagao and Wombat spent hours helping me brainstorm the breakdown and subsequent repairs of the GAZ-AA truck. Rick Zender of the College of Charleston Communications Museum faithfully answered e-mails. Matt Hunter fielded my medical questions. The amazing people behind the C&Rsenal YouTube channel let me pick their brains about firearms, battle tactics, and alternate war scenarios. I’m especially indebted to Lisa Yoskowitz and Judah Beilin for their cultural insights.
Publishing is a tough business, and I’m fortunate to have a grade-A team in my corner. Tracey Adams—agent extraordinaire—has put such faith in me and the stories I wish to tell. She also found me an amazing publishing home at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. My trust in Alvina Ling’s ability to edit my stories has become unshakable. (You really are a superhero!) Nikki Garcia, Hallie Patterson, Kristin Dulaney, Andrew Smith, Megan Tingley, Victoria Stapleton, Danielle Yao, Emilie Polster, the NOVL team—thank you for all that you do to get my books into the hands of readers. Orion continues to do a stellar job publishing my books across the pond. Felicity Johnston took up the editing torch midseries and did so fabulously. Nina Douglas—thank you a thousand times for the blogger tea, Platform 9 ¾, and for just being brilliant.
This series has had so many avid supporters. Laini Taylor, Jackson Pearce, Amie Kaufman, Victoria Schwab, Megan Shepherd, Victoria Aveyard, Marie Lu—thank you for shouting from the rooftops about Yael’s journey. I’ve continued to be astounded by the power of readers’ love. It’s one of the best things an author can ask for, really.