CHAPTER SEVEN

DANIEL

Daniel shouldn’t have wedged behind the crates with Rebeka. The cramped space was too much—all he could imagine were the walls squeezing in, his lungs full of lead while his body was on fire. He was back on the train to Łódź, pinned in by sixty or seventy other bodies. His viola case had been ripped from his hands by the sheer mass of humans as the SS soldiers herded them aboard, leaving him with nothing but the clothes he wore. Rebeka had clung to his sleeve, and he’d clung to Ari’s; their mother shed silent tears somewhere nearby, too far away to touch.

But who had Ari clung to when the next trains came? Had their mother held him all the way to Chełmno? Had they smelled it, the same thing he and Rebeka smelled when they stowed away on the passenger train—the stink of exhaust and burning flesh? Daniel smelled it again now, smelled it clinging to him, all over his skin and hair, as if he’d been buried alive with all those corpses. Like he would have been, if he and Rebeka hadn’t run.

Rebeka took his hand and squeezed.

Daniel squeezed back as the truck stopped, channeling every last bit of his terror through their linked hands. It had to go somewhere. Any minute now, the guards would be poking around the wheel wells. He should be hearing the dogs’ snouts snuffling on the other side of the canvas covering. But there was only stillness. No movement. The dull patter of Liam’s German, too warm and chewy to fool anyone.

Daniel reached for the knife he’d taken from an SS officer’s corpse. Meine Ehre heißt Treue, the blade read. My honor is loyalty. He liked the idea of the Nazis’ own motto, declaring their unwavering conviction, being the last thing they saw before he slit their throats. A reminder that for fascism, there was only one cure.

The truck eased back into gear and moved forward.

Rebeka and Daniel exhaled as one, and he let go of the dagger’s handle. “Looks like your American might know what he’s doing after all,” she said.

“He isn’t my American.” But Daniel couldn’t keep a flush of pride from his tone.

“You like him, though.”

Daniel glanced at her sideways. They’d never discussed it before, the way he always made excuses when her unmarried friends invited him to dinner. Rebeka was too observant, though, for her own good. She always seemed to know things without being told.

“He’s very . . . determined.”

Her eyes twinkled. “Like you.”

Determined, and a little frightening. Being around Liam and his chaotic energy felt like standing outside in a thunderstorm. He was obsessive, relentless, clever—and yet beneath it beat a fragile heart that truly wanted to do some good. It pained Daniel how much he could relate to that, how much he wanted to see Liam pull off his crazy scheme. And what he’d said that morning—his confession offered like a secret handshake . . .

But it didn’t matter. There could be nothing waiting for Daniel on the other side of vengeance. Siegen was just one step closer to the end: to finding Kreutzer, Gerstein, Himmler, and the rest. His purpose would be served.

The panel to the front cab cracked open. “Get ready,” Liam said.

They shimmied out from behind the crates and gathered up their equipment. When they’d stolen this truck a few weeks ago, they’d been dismayed to find most of the food inside was potted meat of uncertain but vaguely porcine origin, which seemed cruel enough the Nazis must have done it on purpose. The crates of dehydrated milk helped, but after two weeks, Daniel would have gladly starved rather than force another draft of powdery dairy-water down his throat. He jammed the lid back on the crate where they’d stashed oats from the sheep barn and inventoried his gear.

Sidearm: three bullets in the chamber and a handful more in his pocket. Overcoat. Slender wooden box, the only real possession Rebeka had grabbed from their room in Łódź as they fled. He felt foolish—their parents had hidden it in their jewelry box, after all, rather than nailing to their doorway—but keeping their great-grandparents’ mezuzah near his heart let him pretend their family was alive and protected still.

Rebeka pulled her knit cap low over her brow and gave him a nod. God, that girl was ready for any of his stupid schemes. After this, he’d have to get her further west, toward safety. He couldn’t let her tag along with him toward the end.

Shadows slid over the weak light that had softened the truck’s canvas top, and they crawled to a stop. It was just like any other errand he’d run back in Berlin, he told himself. Gather everything he needed and get out without making eye contact. Only instead of picking up bow rosin and matzo meal, there were men he needed to kill.

He checked the bullet chamber on his P38 and took a deep breath.

The door to the cab slammed shut, and Liam’s footsteps circled the truck. There was a low exchange in German, then a single soft tap against the side of the bed: Liam’s signal. Only one guard, then. A the smile spread across Daniel’s face.

“Yes, if you must, it’s right in here,” Liam was saying. His German accent was slightly better, thanks to Daniel’s coaching, but it wouldn’t get them far. “Step inside—”

The truck bed shuddered as the guard climbed in.

He was just on the other side of the crates. Daniel could hear him breathing, a slight, huffy sound, like the damp autumn air wasn’t agreeing with him. It always pleased Daniel to remember the Nazis were humans—not that they were deserving of empathy, but that they breathed, they got sick, they too could be weak or dumb. They had soft tissue and organs that rarely tolerated bullets and blades.

Daniel stepped out behind the guard as soon as he passed the stack of crates and wrapped his free arm around the man’s mouth. Before the thought to scream could even form in the guard’s brain, Daniel’s knife punctured his throat.

A quick slash was too good for him. He dug deeper and twisted the handle. Only total tracheal collapse would do.

Hot blood poured over Daniel’s fist as he held the knife in deep. He wondered who this guard was. How long ago he’d decided that blaming Germany’s Jews was the easiest answer to his woes. How many of his own neighbors he’d sold out. How much he’d longed for the structure and control of the Third Reich to relieve his need for thought. He wondered about who might miss him, a mother or a girlfriend. How many children he had who would no longer hear his hateful rants.

Killing him was like snipping a thread on its loom. It might have already been woven in, but at least it wouldn’t taint the weaves to come.

Daniel breathed in. Rode through the guard’s hapless efforts to thrash. Waited for him to go still. Breathed out. The guard’s body was so heavy, slumped against him. Daniel took a step back and slowly lowered him to the bed of the truck. He took in the sad little eyes, the diagonal scar across the man’s mouth. The useless fingers twitching at his side.

A few more pitiful gurgles, then the guard’s eyes turned dull. Daniel pulled the knife free and wiped it and his hands on the corpse’s coat.

Liam let out a low whistle. Shaking, Daniel stood up to face him. His expression was an even mixture of terror and awe, and Daniel felt that warmth again in his gut.

“Ready when you are,” Daniel said.

Rebeka stepped over the corpse with her hand held over her nose and mouth. Her expression was harder to read, which Daniel hated. He knew she didn’t regret what he did—how could she? How could anyone with an ounce of good in them? But her patience with their journey was growing thin. She didn’t understand—each one he killed was only a drop in the sea of blood they were owed.

They moved to a corner of the concrete bay, shielded by rows of supply trucks. “The archives are in the old performance hall,” Rebeka said, after scanning the shipping manifests. She studied a facilities map taped to the wall. “One thing these bastards are good at is meticulous recordkeeping.”

Liam was standing with his jaw clenched and his fists tight, his stare somewhere far away. Deep shadows pulled at his features, more than they should have in the garage bay’s lighting. It was the way he looked when he gathered energy, tapping into that shadow world with the trees that breathed, the ruins that echoed, the behemoth that fed on fear. Liam had called him scary before—but if so, they were two of a kind.

Liam inhaled deeply and opened his eyes, then smiled at Daniel. Tapped his elbow lightly. “Whaddaya say we thin out the SS’s ranks a little more?”

Daniel sheathed his dagger and followed him to the door with a flutter in his heart.

They’d agreed to keep up their ruse for as long as they could—no sense pulling the entire compound down on their heads just yet. The moment someone challenged them, though, they were ready. Rebeka’s pistol was wrapped in the jacket she carried over one arm, barrel pointed forward, while Daniel kept his shooting arm loose, ready to snatch up his P38. Only Liam appeared completely unarmed, but Daniel knew better.

The main compound at Siegen was a stucco and wood Bavarian relic, badly outfitted with electric lighting that didn’t so much illuminate as suggest. With their uniforms and bowed heads, they didn’t attract a second glance in the dim and moldy corridor as they strode with purpose toward the archives. Wehrmacht and SS personnel crowded the halls, but there were also numerous civil servants—secretaries and accountants and maintenance workers and more.

It was the civilians whose presence tightened like a fist around Daniel’s throat. They weren’t career thugs like the soldiers; they were nobodies, just like the Eisenbergs’ neighbors back in Berlin. That bored-looking blond woman clutching a stack of folders could have been the shopkeeper he bought sheet music from, the one who complained to his face about Jews as if they were a parasitic vine coiled around Germany before hastily assuring him that he wasn’t like them. That boy, barely Rebeka’s age, pushing a cart of coffee and sandwiches—he’d been fed a steady, meaty diet of disdain, of an unswerving conviction of the German people’s greatness—and that if Germany were anything less, then it could only be the doing of the Bolsheviks, the Poles, the Jews. If their pay cannot stretch far enough, his mother once said, they’ll gladly blame anyone but the man who doles it out.

Daniel blinked, trying to clear the red-soaked rage from his sight. He would kill every last Nazi responsible for his family’s death. But he knew the Nazis alone were not to blame.

“Left,” Rebeka said under her breath, when they reached a junction in the corridor.

Liam nodded and turned.

“Stop.” A guard stepped toward them as they started down the new branch. “These rooms are forbidden to unauthorized personnel.”

“Ja, ja.” Liam patted at his uniform’s pockets as if searching for credentials. “Give me one minute . . .”

The first guard was twenty, tops, while the second had the sagging shoulders of a man in his forties trying to cling to a former glory he’d never truly possessed. Maybe they chose this, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they bore some responsibility: either way, they would pay.

“Ach. Here it is. In my pocket.” Liam smiled and slowly withdrew his hand from his breast pocket as he hummed a strange melody.

Daniel slid his sidearm free, but it turned out there was no need.

The shadows erupted from the floor like lava and wrapped around each guard in an instant. Any screams they might have made were instantly shoved back down their throats as viscous darkness poured into their mouths, their nostrils, their eyes. They dangled, suspended by the bloody vines, and twisted back and forth as Liam curled his fingers. Then he slammed his palms together—and they folded away into nothingness.

The hallway stood empty before them.

“Wh-where did they go?” Rebeka asked.

“Through the veil.” Liam’s hands trembled as he dropped them to his sides, wisps of shadow still trailing from his fingertips. “Let the—the creatures over there deal with them.”

Daniel recalled the faceless behemoth stalking through the underbrush and savored his sudden flush of cruel delight.

Liam cocked his head toward Daniel. “Now, as for the archives door—”

“Just a moment.” Daniel slipped his makeshift lock-picking tools from his pocket and made quick work of the doors. They were finely carved, the wood trim swirling with flowers and the remnants of paint. Such a needlessly elegant building for such appalling purpose. Rebeka scanned the corridor while he worked, but Daniel sensed Liam’s gaze on his fingers and felt a blush creep up the back of his neck.

The doors swung open.

The chamber had once been a music hall. The floor gently sloped and was studded with bolts where rows of chairs had been ripped up; a stage was shrouded at the far end. Now the hall was crammed with hastily constructed shelving and stacks and stacks of reinforced file boxes. Weak sunlight wafted in from the courtyard windows that lined one wall, but otherwise everything was dingy gray, redolent with decades of must.

“Well.” Daniel swallowed. “Where do we start?”

“I’m after the confiscated property and inventory records. If you’re looking for officer names and postings . . .” Liam met his gaze, some kind of judgment behind that stare. Not disapproving of his quest, exactly, but sad for it—sad that it had to happen, sad for where he feared it might lead. With a scowl, Daniel looked away. He’d had enough of that from Rebeka. Forgiveness was not a virtue. Vengeance was the least he deserved. What happened after—that was not Liam’s concern.

“Inventory records are here,” Rebeka called from the far-left row. She gave Daniel a similar look to match Liam’s.

“Then I’ll take the right.” Daniel turned away from them.

“I’m looking for Porta ad Tenebras. Tomasi Sicarelli. The cover is pressed leather, looks like swirling lines feeding into an archway,” Liam told Rebeka, but Daniel shut them out. He found a row of Wehrmacht and SS reports, and with a taste like gravel in his mouth, he forced himself to dig through them.

Boxes and boxes of invoices and receipts. Accounting records, troop authorization orders, payments, rations records, requisitions forms.

Carefully tabulated accounting and procedure for confiscating the property of deceased Jews.

He tried to move on. This wasn’t what he was searching for. But then he came across the Einsatzgruppen reports—the SS’s death squads—and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Men crowing over the results of their pogroms—blood and bone and brain flying in a hail of bullets, of shouts, of fire and shattered glass and hate—boiled down to nothing but numbers, sometimes in the thousands on a single ledger line.

Three thousand dead at a fort in Kaunas.

Thirty-seven hundred in Vilnius.

Eighteen hundred as reprisal for a German officer’s death inside a Jewish ghetto.

A slow calculation of death and devastation, all the meat stripped from it, personalities flattened like tin, names erased, bones bleached to nothing but tally marks. He couldn’t take in the volume of it, the enormity of its blandness, how completely and utterly banal—how exhausting—it all was. How drearily they’d had to codify murder and genocide as if it were just another thing to requisition, like filing folders and typewriter ink. So repetitious it required blank templates, boxes to be checked, forms to be filed in triplicate. So pervasive it filled this entire music hall—so blatant it cared nothing about leaving behind such a massive, meticulous record of its crimes.

Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, one document read. A report on the final solution to the Jewish problem. Slowly, methodically, he read through them all, unable to do anything but bear witness. Someone had to see these horrors for what they were—

And then he reached a contract—an agreement for the Chełmno camp to sell human hair to a candy cloth factory, at fifty Pfennigs a pound.

Cement was hardening in Daniel’s blood. That’s what did it—the weight of human hair. That’s what turned him into stone.

Ari’s loose curls, his mother’s long, wavy locks, their father’s thick hair—shaved from their corpses and sold by the bag so Germans could use it to decorate their hats. All while SS soldiers bickered about who got the gold fillings and shoes and wedding bands.

It wasn’t a record of crimes. It was merely law now, from the repeal of Jewish citizenship to the Nuremberg Laws to the ghettos to the death camps. It was enough to crush Daniel where he stood. How quickly the Nazis had smothered down their humanity, how willingly a whole nation had turned human beings into things. A problem to be solved. An entire culture to be erased. How straightforward they had made it, how many checklists they had designed, so easy anyone could replicate their system, anyone willing to forget that they were people, that they were alive—

“I think I have something,” Rebeka called to Liam, from the other side of the stacks.

But Daniel moved on to the next box.

A report on the testing of Prussian cyanic gas on Russian prisoners of war, dated August 1941. Stapled to it—approval to advance to trials in the detention camps. Far more efficient than the exhaust-fed vans method employed at Chełmno, the approval concurred. Permission granted to begin construction on such facilities in Auschwitz and Bełżec for administration of Zyklon-B gas.

Human beings, gassed to death. For daring to be alive. And so many of them to be killed that the Nazis had to worry about processing the sheer volume of them, about efficiency.

With eyes burning, Daniel ran through the names on his list again. If the Nazis could have checklists for their brutality, then so could he. Every SS officer responsible—every one that he would kill. Gerstein, the camp capo who sat back, boots on the desk, congratulating himself on a well-run system as the people sent to Chełmno were slaughtered en masse. Kreutzer, the man who stole people from Łódź for his experiments. And should Daniel survive long enough, then he could work his way toward the names at the top of every transcript: the very leaders of the Reich.

Daniel barely felt his knees hit the floor before the bile was burning at the back of his throat, his tongue, his teeth. He only knew what he and Rebeka had heard in snatches of rumors and the smell of Chełmno, but that had already been too much. Had his parents died screaming, clutching each other as gas filled their lungs? Had Ari been amongst the ones who hauled the dead to mass graves before he too was killed? Maybe at least he’d gotten to squeeze their mother’s cold hand one last time as he lowered her into a yawning, hungry ditch—

Pale yellow spilled onto the wood, chunks of powdered milk in it. It only took one good heave to empty his stomach, but his body kept working, trying to wring the agony out of him. It didn’t know any better—didn’t know that what needed to be purged from his system was the entire world, that there was nowhere he could be safe from the poisonous potential of every human being alive. The Nazis in particular, to be sure; yet who were they but people who had been given too many assurances? Who’d never been challenged or had their voices silenced when they themselves were discussed?

He dragged himself back to his feet, clinging to the cheap plywood. Gerstein, Kreutzer, Himmler—where were they now? His hands raked over boxes, but he was uncoordinated, drunk with rage. Where were they now?

Approvals, so many approvals. For transfers, for requisitions. For experiments—so many experiments, some of them marked with Kreutzer’s name.

Gerstein. Kreutzer. Himmler. He’d etched their names into his heart with acid. Their poison would not spread.

“No—this doesn’t make sense,” Liam was saying, a few aisles away. “The book should be here. Why would they transfer it to Wewelsburg?”

“Wewelsburg,” Rebeka echoed, a frown in her voice. “But that’s the headquarters of the SS.”

Daniel clutched at the cheap wooden shelving to pull himself up. The SS headquarters—Himmler at the least would be there, and possibly the others, too. Plenty of guilty SS officers, in any case. He didn’t give a shit about Liam’s book, or Liam, or Rebeka, or anything else. All that mattered was killing his way through these men—

“Who’s there?” a voice called in German. “Where are the guards?”

Someone had entered the music hall.

Daniel tore his knife free and stalked toward the door on unsteady legs, staying hidden behind the shelving. Nothing mattered but feeling another rush of blood over his hands, turning cold. Tremolo strings built under him, the churn of a Rachmaninoff or Mahler symphony threatening to boil over into chaos. Liam could continue his magical hunt, Rebeka could pretend the war would end and they’d go home someday, but for Daniel, there was nothing left but this: his rage and the Germans’ soft flesh, the fear in the whites of their eyes as they saw their deaths reflected in his blade.

It was sweeter than the cascading opening of Scheherazade, darker and more devastating than the torrential sawing of Mussorgsky’s Bald Mountain. He’d honed his fingers on études, but they had only been training for his true purpose: this.

He lunged from the stacks, knife raised.

The clerk ducked out of the way of his initial thrust, screaming as he stumbled. He was still screaming when Daniel fell on top of him, while the knife plunged crudely into his chest. Again and again. It took so much effort to stab a man to death, and Daniel had spent all his energy in the stacks. Nothing was left but wounded-animal instinct and fury. He’d lost his lunch, lost everything but this, his final act of contrition, his only way to atone for the fact that he and Rebeka survived where so many had not—

A hand fell on his shoulder, wrenching him back. “Daniel,” Liam was saying. “Daniel. He’s dead. Daniel—”

He stumbled off of the clerk’s body and sprawled onto his back, hot tears mingling with the blood that peppered his face. It was everywhere. It dripped into his eyes and burned; it salted his lips and tongue. He wondered, with bleak, hopeless humor, whether maybe his body would appreciate it more than the powdered milk.

“They’re coming.” Liam gripped his forearm, bracing him. He stood strong above Daniel, gorgeous even in his fear, that little wrinkle between his eyebrows, his hair like dusty gold. It was almost a shame that there could be no after for Daniel—not even for this strange, magical boy.

“They’re coming,” Liam said again.

Daniel scrubbed the blood from his eyes and tried to find his feet as he shifted his weight toward Liam, letting himself be pulled up.

“How many?” Daniel asked. He didn’t know why. It would be far too many for the three of them—even with Liam’s abilities.

But Liam had no chance to answer. The door burst open, revealing a wall of rifle barrels aimed at them.

Then the world tore itself in two with a scream.