I awake to crackle and warmth. Just like my vision showed, the airplane’s cabin is rent through with tree branches, the plane’s hull peeled back like the skin of a metal fruit. “Antonina.” Someone’s shaking me, yanking at my harness. “Antonina, please wake up. We have to get out!”
Oh. Fire. There’s fire around me. Yes, I feel its heat, hanging in the air that stinks of diesel fuel—
“Antonina!” Andrei shouts again.
I lurch forward, but my momentum’s halted by the harness. The latch is jammed, dented in by whatever struck me in the head. Bozhe moi, but my temple throbs; it feels crusted over as well, and I’m sure I’m bleeding and bruised. “Is there a knife?” My throat sounds raspy, dried out. “You’ll have to cut me out—”
“I got it.” Olga fixes her gaze on me from an opening in the hull, and after a moment, I can hear the mechanical parts of the latch pop and detach.
I scramble to my feet and snatch up my duffel bag, fighting against my aching body’s protests. “Thanks.”
“Now,” she says, gesturing to her prosthetic leg halfway down the cabin, “think you can help me? I’m too heavy to move myself.” In an instant, Andrei’s slinging her arm around his shoulder and hoisting her up. She holds her hand out, and the leg snaps right into her grip; she and Andrei work their way out one of the gaping holes in the plane’s cabin. I follow right behind them. The fire’s on the other side of the plane from us, but it’s spread to a nearby tree. Only the heavy, humid air, moist and warm like the inside of a mouth, keeps it from roaring further.
We join Rostov and Lyubov, who are huddled under a tree at a safe distance from the plane. Lyubov dabs at the numerous lacerations on Rostov’s face. I’m amazed he’s letting her tend to him, though his expression is rather like a cat being bathed. “What about the pilot?” I ask them.
Rostov snorts, the gravelly, bitter sound of a man who can’t be bothered. “See for yourself.”
I glance behind us once we’re a safe distance away. The plane’s nose is buried in the soft, damp earth, while the body juts at a forty-five degree angle, cradled in the trees. Then I see the windshield, or rather, the shattered remains of it, with the pilot’s body slumped halfway out of it, dangling onto the nose. I cover my mouth, my whole body clenching like a jaw.
Our mission hasn’t even begun properly, and someone’s already died because I couldn’t do anything about my visions—the plane, flames, the trees tearing through the hull. If we don’t keep moving, his death won’t be the last. I grit my teeth and head for Lyubov and Rostov.
Andrei eases Olga to the ground, and she sets to work refastening her leg around the stump of her thigh. Rostov scans his field map, but the storm clouds overhead threaten to dissolve the paper. “We’re twenty kilometers too far east of the rendezvous point. Our agent was supposed to meet us at the clandestine air strip with a Schutzstaffel vehicle.” He squints at his compass, then back at the map. “However, we’re only a few kilometers west of the Mittelwerk factory itself. We’ll approach the factory on foot.”
“We can’t just walk up to the factory dressed as SS officers!” Lyubov cries.
Andrei shrugs. “And why not? Doubtless the Fritzes on the front have radioed word of our crash to every fascist around here. Better to get there sooner, before the alarm is raised, than later.”
“Antonina?” Rostov asks. “What is our best chance to evade detection? Heading to our rendezvous point, or making our way straight to the factory?”
I close my eyes and focus first on the twenty-kilometer trek west toward the rendezvous point. A cabin manifests before me—where our informant must be hiding. We trudge through the forest, weary, smeared with dirt and blood and soaked through with rain, then a whistle sounds through the trees, followed by the report of a rifle and the scattering of birds—
No. Instead, I focus on our approach by foot to the factory. The guards look us over once, twice, reach for their radio—but then something sharp and stinging distorts the image. I think it’s failure consuming us again, but then I see the guards waving us through the gate, an unsettling smile smeared like a thick jelly across both of their faces.
I open my eyes again. “We should head for the factory now. Before word of our arrival spreads.” We take a circuitous route through the Buchenwald birch forest, putting as unlikely a path between the smoldering wreckage and ourselves as we can. Andrei uses his remote viewing to check back on the plane every five minutes or so, but there are no signs of the German forces having reached it yet. Finally, the forest spills onto a paved road, pockmarked with shrapnel and other signs of recent aerial strikes. A sign marks the entrance to the compound: Konzentrationslager Mittelbau-Dora.
“Concentration camp?” Andrei asks, wrinkling his nose as he translates the German. “What do they mean by that?”
“It means they have war prisoners working in the factory.” Rostov straightens his sleeves. “They might come in useful.”
I swallow down the lump in my throat: the accreted half-heard rumors of mass deportations. Dare I voice the stories in front of this SMERSH officer? I’d be disparaging the fascists, but Comrade Stalin has done much the same as they have. Funny how quickly two like souls, two heads of the same hydra, can turn on each other like they did when Hitler betrayed our pact.
“Not only war prisoners,” I say. “They’ve deported Jews, Poles, countless other groups as slave labor.”
Rostov’s eyes narrow into knife slits in his gaunt face. “It’s only a rumor, probably spread by the capitalist fearmongers to cast us in a poor light for initially allying with them—”
“Aren’t those fearmongers on our side now?” Olga asks, with a roll of her eyes.
“For now,” Rostov says.
Andrei’s shifting his weight back and forth, worrying his tongue against his teeth. “Whatever the fascists are up to,” he says, voice watery, “oughtn’t we be getting to work?”
I raise one eyebrow. He’d struck me as the sort of man who liked to slurp up every bit of knowledge he came across—it was certainly the case when we worked together back in Moscow. Perhaps it cuts too close to what happened to his family.
Rostov drops the duffel bag he had slung over one shoulder and distributes an officer uniform to Andrei, and secretarial blouses and skirts to Lyubov and me, while Olga gets a more relaxed men’s chauffeur outfit. As we set off down the passage, an iron band winds tighter and tighter around my chest, prickling like the concertina wire that trims the road.
“Halt!” the guards call out in German, then the first of them storms from his booth. “No one is allowed on the campus today. Where did you come from?”
Rostov opens his mouth, but Andrei rushes to speak over him, his German surprisingly well-accented. “We have an appointment with Herr Grossman to review the facilities and ensure the Fuhrer’s quota is being met for the forthcoming putsch.”
The guard’s face wrinkles. “But you are on foot.”
“Yes, it was the damnedest thing!” Andrei cuts in. “A bloody airplane fell from the sky, scared our chauffeur half to death. Drove us into a ditch.” Andrei touches his forehead, marred with a shallow scrape. Olga, our chauffeur, offers up an apologetic shrug. “You may wish to send a squadron to investigate it. We didn’t see where it crashed, but there could be survivors.”
The guard snorts. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe such a ludicrous—”
The throbbing in my head tightens like a screw as Rostov uses his power. White hot needles skewer my thoughts. The guards fall back, faces drooping like wet clay.
“Please, mein Sturmbahnnfuhrer, right this way.” The first guard stands back to admit us. “Herr Grossman is expecting you.”
The Mittelwerk factory is set into the side of a hill; we enter the network of tunnels and slope downward along the main path. The Nazis scurry like ants through their tunnels, the black uniforms of overseers and dingy lab coats of scientists. The ravages of war have eaten at every surface—at the burned-out light bulbs no one has bothered to replace, the unfinished floors, the abandoned construction projects and tunnels that lead to nowhere. Rostov said they built this facility only a year ago, when the Allies bombed the first one into nothingness. These tired, slump-shouldered soldiers don’t look too capable of protecting this one from the same fate.
But what bothers me the most is the smell in the air. The dirt and wet concrete, like the streets after a hard rain—that I expected. The rest of it I did not. It smells of my first-year anatomy lab, when the corpses we’d been dissecting all semester started to flake apart and turn to mush. That smell, that smell clung to us, in our hair and our clothes and our notebooks and pencil cases. That’s the smell that fills these halls, and I don’t know if it’s another vision or if it’s soaking into me right now.
We meet with Herr Grossman, and with Rostov’s guidance, he happily ushers us into what looks like an eerie cross between a schoolroom and a bomb shelter—ribbed concrete walls, chalkboards, men in lab coats studiously scratching pencils to paper as if they were copying their multiplication tables. I glance at the equations on the chalkboards, but it’s all physics equations, vectors and trajectories—not my forté. Olga, though, has cinched her focus in like a belt after the years of war rations, lips twitching under the brim of the chauffeur cap she hasn’t removed as she puzzles out the meanings behind the equations.
I take a lurching step forward, unsteady in heels after our harrowing journey, as a fresh vision comes to me. In my vision, the blackboard fragments and explodes, shrapnel spraying across the room, tearing through tendons and arteries on its own incalculable trajectory—
Then the vision gives way to a pressure, an intrusion, sharp as a finger pressing into my skull, pushing at my musical shield, my Firebird melody twisting and warping around it. Concentrate on these men. See if any of them appear willing to cooperate with us in the near future.
It’s Anton Rostov’s voice, drilling past my mental shield. The glare I flash him is meant to melt steel, but he does not even look my way, does not care, does not have time.
My jaw is wound like a trap as I scan each man in turn.
Rostov is talking to them calmly, but the visions of possible futures blister out from the scene in front of me—that man diving under a desk, or that one jabbing his finger to my chest, screaming, spitting, sharp. One threatens to scream, scream until help arrives, to march us to the nearest SS officer, a real one. None of these.
This one … this one, he glances to the left and right, makes a little sigh like he’d dreaded and anticipated this day, and curves his shoulders forward.
This one will work with us. I place the words on the edge of the musical shield, hopefully where Rostov can scoop them off without digging into my thoughts again. I don’t like knowing he’s capable of that. When powers like his were a theory, a cold description in badly set type, I admired them. New specimens to examine. In the flesh, though, I find myself wishing they could be destroyed.
Rostov nods. Suddenly, I see Andrei’s face constrict, and I realize it is now his turn for Rostov’s probing. I don’t know if this makes me feel better or worse.
“Herr Trammel.” Rostov strides up to the man I’d pinpointed—wire-frame glasses, dirty blond hair parted straight down the middle, bangs brushed back like decorative wings on a flightless bird. He’s round faced and pink, like I remember good hams used to look. “Will you come with me, please?”
Our shepherd, Herr Grossman, clears his throat. “Mein Sturmbannführer, if you wish to speak to any of my men, you may do so in my presence.”
“Ah, but I’m afraid that there you are mistaken. This is a delicate matter, and I cannot allow you to intrude.”
In an instant, Herr Grossman’s face transforms, and he steps back to allow us to pass.
As Rostov leads Herr Trammel back into the main corridor, I glance over my shoulder, wondering why, if he’s so capable of twisting everyone’s mind around, he is trying to separate him from the herd, as it were, before making his pitch. Maybe there is a limit to his power, then—he can only maintain the illusion on so many people at once. The thought gives me sick comfort for a moment before I recall that Rostov is on my side. That my scientific career is built around enabling people like him to serve the Motherland.
We crowd into an empty office and Lyubov latches the doors behind us. Rostov flings Trammel into the chair and seizes him by the throat. “You will tell us where they keep the schematics.” His voice is as rough as uncut stone. “All of them.”
Herr Trammel’s glasses are buckled up to one side of his face, and his pink cheeks are flushed with crimson, but still he laughs in Rostov’s face. “I know what you are. All of you. You’ll never be able to reproduce our work. You Russian swine will—”
He cuts off with an agonizing yelp; the room swirls with static that grinds against my skin like broken glass. A drop of blood leaks from Trammel’s nostril. Andrei and I share a look.
“The archive room. It’s in cabinet K, shelf 12—but the real schematics are the ones drawn in blue, not black.”
Rostov glances up. “Olga. Andrei. Antonina. Fetch the schematics and return to me.” The static hisses and snaps. “Let us verify that he’s telling the truth.”
“You’re too late,” Trammel says, blood painting a vulgar mustache across his upper lip. “The Americans are coming for me in Berlin. I’ll never go with you Communist rats. You think you’re better than the Reich? You think you wouldn’t do the same in our place? Yeargh!” Trammel’s face wrenches upward like a piece of clay, smeared by a dissatisfied potter.
“Gently,” Lyubov says to Rostov, though her expression is none too concerned. “We don’t want to damage the valuable knowledge he possesses.”
Rostov grunts, then relents, releasing whatever psychic hold he has on Trammel to turn toward us. “You studied the maps. What are you waiting for?” Rostov asks us. His expression is calm, calmer even than when he’d issued orders on the plane. The soft tilt to his lips makes him look bored. “Go.”
Andrei and I clamber out of the office, Olga right behind us.
“Monster,” Andrei mutters under his breath, once we’re far enough down the corridor not to hear Trammel’s screams.
Olga shrugs. “Trammel’s a monster, too. Another all-too-willing Nazi collaborator. I’ll save my sympathy for another day.”
I wonder whether I’d also fit that description. I willingly agreed to work with Stalin and his secret police, after all, because of the research opportunities it afforded me and the doors it opened. But now that I’m seeing for myself what true believers like Rostov can do …
We find the doorway labeled DAS ARCHIV, and I reach for the handle, eager to be out of the hall, with its stench of death and sounds of agony. The lock clicks, seemingly on its own, as Olga unlatches it.
“Wait.” Andrei places a hand on my wrist. “There might be guards inside.”
Andrei flattens against the wall, eyes scrunching shut, lips going slack. He’d looked the part of an SS officer so flawlessly, I realize, that I’d almost forgotten he was just playing a role, until this moment when he’s let the mask fall away. He has a bad habit of that—of blending into the scenery, of melting into a crowd, of camouflaging himself with whoever he’s around. It isn’t until he ceases to do so that I notice him, really notice him. His youthful lilt and unsettled limbs and a face that I can’t believe I’d not noticed before.
Then he opens his eyes and the façade goes back up. He is scenery once more.
“Are we safe to—” I ask, but Andrei shushes me by pressing his index finger against his lips.
The door handle clicks open and the door swings wide under Olga’s power. I fly against the wall beside Andrei, but Olga’s weight is shifted to her prosthetic leg and is in no position to move quickly. My heart pulses into my throat. We’re not supposed to be here, even if we could pull off flawless German accents (which we can’t) and intimate knowledge of SS protocol (also out of the question). Without Rostov here to alter thoughts, we’re twisting in the wind.
A guard saunters out into the hallway, unlit cigarette clenched between his lips. His eyes scud across me, as uninterested as a gust of wind, and he continues on down the hall with a heavy thud of his boots.
How could the guard not notice us? Not care? “But how—why—”
Andrei’s jaw shifts left, right, tectonic. “I thought I’d—I’d just give him a push. He was standing right there, so close to the door, and if I just nudged him along, encouraged him to step through…”
“Like Rostov did to us. Intruding in our thoughts.” The needling feeling is back, scratchy as raw wool. “But you—you’re not—”
“It was only a suggestion, all right?” Andrei turns away from me and yanks the door open, hard. “I didn’t make him do anything. Would you rather we be caught?”
The archives are deceptively plain in appearance—rows and rows of file cabinets, powdered with cement dust from the uneven ceiling overhead. Each cabinet bears multiple combination locks, but Olga looks almost bored as she sets to work spinning the dials this way and that on the cabinet K Trammel mentioned. “Shouldn’t we check the other cabinets, just to be sure?” she asks.
“Yes, but remember we can only bring what we can carry out of here with us.” I scan the labels on the cabinets: propulsion schematics, work records, inventory. The blue-ink plans look authentic enough to my untrained eye, but I grab all of them to be safe and roll them up tightly into a narrow cylinder. “We still don’t have a plan. And who knows how long Rostov means to keep up his—”
The sirens start churning, cutting me off. At first I think they’re in my head, in the future. The wail nudges forward with each churn, then fades off. Someone’s cranking them by hand to make them sound that way—they can’t spare electricity this deep in the caverns. But Andrei and Olga look up, then at each other and me, and I know this is no vision but is happening right now.
“Air raid,” Andrei says, but with that hopeful twist to it. I wonder what world we live in where an air raid is the ideal outcome.
“No. They’ve found Rostov.” Olga charges for the door with her uneven gait. She’s got schematics rolled up and tucked under one arm, but she stops herself at the door. “Antonina, can you help me…?”
At first I’m not sure what she’s asking, but she tugs the left leg of her trousers out of the boots and jabs the prosthetic leg toward me. I help her ease the boot off, then we roll the trousers up higher. There’s a little compartment cut into the calf of the prosthesis. Olga uses her power to pop it open, then I slide the rolled-up documents inside.
“Thanks,” she says. “Sometimes, the old-fashioned way is less of a hassle.”
Andrei uses his remote viewing to scout out the hallway for us, but it’s sheer chaos, he reports—we’ve little to fear from our “fellow” Nazis. We hurry out into the stream of administrative workers, shouting and shoving toward the exits. The electric lights strung overhead dim a little each time the sirens sound, as if the siren’s drawing too much power; my confidence in the tunnels’ structural integrity is none too high right now. But we push ahead.
“There—that’s the tunnel we came from.” Andrei points to the left when we reach a T junction.
I gesture to the German signage before us. “This says there are exits in both directions.”
Andrei looks at me, chewing his lower lip, as he bears the full weight of what I’ve said. That we do not have to return to that office, with Rostov and blood and static noise. That I needn’t forever make myself Stalin’s pawn in the name of science. That even Antonina Vasilievna, model Party labrador, is willing to shed her leash.
The lights dance, sputtering and flickering, as something rumbles deep in the tunnels’ bowels. The Allies are bombing us—bombing the Germans, rather, with us inside. For the first time since I’ve met her, Olga looks afraid. Andrei, however, has thrust his chest forward in his black slimy officer’s uniform and clenches his fists like he wants to punch something but hasn’t decided what.
“No.” Olga takes a step back, weight sliding to her good leg. “No. You saw what he can do. If we—if we were to—”
The next explosion is on top of us, concrete splitting open like a wound, rubble cascading before us. Only twenty feet ahead of us. Down the hallway to the left.
Cutting us off from Rostov and Lyubov.
None of us says a word, but Andrei reaches for my hand with his left and Olga’s with his right, and we follow his lead.