AFTER

Yael saw things differently.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

She sat in front of Henryka’s television screen, pencil in her mouth, homework forgotten, as she watched Aaron-Klaus—friend, survivor, the boy who ruffled Yael’s hair and teased her about being too smart and helped her pretend she was somehow normal—do the unimaginable.

Pop.

Yael’s pencil shattered at the sound of the fourth shot. Moon-gray graphite powdered across her tongue. A taste as acrid as ash.

No. Not him. Not him, too.

She’d known it was coming. Death always did. And Aaron-Klaus had been hungry to meet it—to stand face-to-face with the Führer, gun in hand. Wasn’t it just yesterday that they’d talked about stepping up, killing the bastard, changing the world?

The rally’s order was as smashed as Yael’s pencil: Screams and SS men and civilians and brownshirts all blended together. The Reichssender channel fell into chaos, fuzzed into static.

Henryka walked into the office, squinted at the screen. She’d missed it all. “What’s wrong? Did it break?”

Blond frizz tumbled over the older woman’s forehead as she leaned toward the television, twisted its power knob off. Static to silence.

“Aaron-Klaus.” His name felt different this time, when Yael said it. As if all of its letters were edged with lead. It was the way every one of their names felt, whenever Yael let herself think of them: Babushka, Mama, Miriam. Heavy, heavier, heaviest. All an equal weight of gone.

“Klaus,” Henryka corrected her. “You mustn’t let anyone hear you say his real name. He could get arrested and questioned.”

Yael stared at the blank screen’s glass. It was her own reflection inside the television now: twiggy teenage girl, blond pigtails, lichen eyes, the face she’d chosen for herself, so many years ago, when Aaron-Klaus found Yael by the river. She had not changed it since.

But it looked like someone else’s. It was someone else’s (she’d stolen most of the features from a League of German Girls recruiting poster). Yael watched as the strange girl inside the television started moving her mouth. “Aaron-Klaus just shot the Führer. Aaron-Klaus just shot himself.”

Unreal words. True in the worst of ways.

Yael knelt in the middle of the cinder-block office. The television screen was still dark, dead, dark. There was a candle by her knees, a match in her hand, and a memory in her heart.

You must never forget the dead.

This had been Miriam’s commandment to her after Yael’s mother passed. The older girl had taken pieces of straw from the mattress and woven them together into a memorial candle. It had been waxless and wickless, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d had nothing to light it with anyway.

There was a flame this time. Yael dragged the match across the floor—red chemicals at its end shivered to life. Life, life, something was alive and burning. It danced hot against her fingertips as she guided it to the wick, where it caught. Kept.

Religion was one of the many things she’d left behind in the camp. Mama’s healing prayer, Miriam’s candle, faint memories of a Passover feast… these were the only pieces of her people’s faith Yael could remember. She did not even know the mourning Kaddish prayers. Aaron-Klaus might have: He was the only person Yael knew who shared her numbers, her blood. Who might have known how to say good-bye to himself…

But lighting a memorial candle was something Yael knew how to do. She sat with crossed legs, watching the flame dance through the dark. It was a small and humble burning, but it made a difference.

He made a difference.

It was this thought alone that kept Yael feeling real. Through the sounds of Henryka’s tears and Reiniger’s curses. Through the unforgiving silence of the television. Aaron-Klaus was gone, but his death had meant something. He’d done exactly what he’d promised Yael he would do: Step up, change things, kill the bastard.

And that was something… something to hold on to.

Wasn’t it?

Yael gathered her knees to her chest, and as she stared into the flame, as the tears blurred its light all across her eyes, she decided that it was.

It had to be.

Question: How long can one candle burn?

Answer: Until it has nothing left to give.

Aaron-Klaus’s candle burned for twenty-six hours. The flame was already dying—shrinking into a sickly fringe of blue—when Reiniger stormed into the headquarters. The leader of the resistance slammed the door shut with such force it created a gust. The wind rolled through the beer hall basement, licking the edges of Henryka’s stacked files.

The candle’s light vanished. Smoke rose, wraith tendrils reaching up to the paper airplanes she and Aaron-Klaus had made together. Yael was the only one in the room to see it. Everyone else—Henryka and the other Germania-based operatives—watched the National Socialist general, breath held, waiting for a verdict.

“He’s alive,” Reiniger said. “The Saukerl survived.”

No one said a word. Yael kept her eyes on the smoke, watching it rise. Fading until not even a haze was left. She knew he wasn’t talking about Aaron-Klaus.

As soon as the news that the Führer was not dead reached the public, the television sprang back to life. Its pixels blaring, brighter than ever. Adolf Hitler—in what the Reichssender was calling a miracle—had survived the three bullets Aaron-Klaus lodged in his chest. Assassination attempt number forty-nine.

Question: How many times can one Führer live?

Question: How many times can one not-assassin die?

Answer: As many times as the Reichssender chooses to air it.

They showed the clip again and again and again and again. All four shots.

Survival immortalized.

Another useless death.