For nearly six years, Felix had carried Martin’s timepiece. Where Felix went, the pocket watch followed. The tick, tick tempo of its gears beat through varied fabrics: his Hitler Youth uniform, his grease-streaked coveralls, his racing gear.… It was his second heartbeat.
But now the beat was gone. Its absence was gaping over Felix’s chest as he fought for consciousness. Fluttering in, out, into fever-haze nightmares. The dreams were strange. A lifetime of pieces—shifted, rearranged in a way that didn’t work. Driving a motorcycle backward through the Axis Tour, kicking up desert sands in reverse. Adele’s rag doll (the one that sat on a shelf, gathering dust) rode beside him. Yellow yarn hair snagged his wheel, threw him out, out.… He landed on a familiar patch of earth. The one he visited every year on May 2. Grass—bright with spring—peeked out under his knees. The gravestone loomed, its gaping, granite-wound letters: M followed by A followed by R followed by A… No wait, that wasn’t right.…
The letters of his brother’s name were disappearing, rearranging. A new name appeared on the stone: A followed by D followed by E followed by L…
NO! Felix’s whole body jolted awake. He found his skin burning against cool air. The sight above him did not belong to bedsprings or blue sky, but wooden rafters: old to the point of splinters and gray.
Felix’s heart fluttered, questioning itself. Is this real? I’m still alive, aren’t I? The pain—the one that was creeping through his tendons, into his arm, all the way to his mind—told him yes.
Somewhere outside, wood was being chopped. The sound was irregular, thud, thudding at the wrong tempo. But there was no right tempo. Not anymore. Felix reached up to his breast pocket, felt the lump of metal there. All at once, he remembered:
His mission had already failed.
According to Baasch’s timetable, the trio was supposed to land somewhere in the web of small towns outside Germania, close enough to reach the capital in a few hours. Instead, they’d jumped out of the plane thousands of kilometers away. Dumped into the snow-laden, wolf-infested Muscovy territories, not just days but possibly weeks away from the resistance’s headquarters.
Is this real? The watch sat under Felix’s palm: pulseless. My family’s still alive, aren’t they?
That question wasn’t so easy to answer.
Thud, pause, thud went the distant ax. Felix’s heart pumped so hard he felt as if his insides were sweating. Maybe he could find a radio, a telephone, some way to contact SS-Standartenführer Baasch and tell him he was still coming.
Felix’s brain fired clumsy synapse signals to his body. Get up. Out of bed. Call Baasch. But he had only enough energy to roll onto his side. The cabin floor spread out before him: empty jars, rumpled blankets, rat feces, rotting wood. It wasn’t hard to tell that the place was abandoned.
There was no radio or telephone here, and even if there were, Felix couldn’t reach it. He didn’t even think he could say a word properly, much less string enough coherent sentences together to plead for his family. Already his fever was starting to flare again, burning away at his mind’s lucid borders.…
“Felix!”
A flash of white filled his eyes. Not pain, but hair. Her hair. The girl knelt by his parachute. Out came her hand, fingers cold as snow crust against his temple.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Her touch lifted.
How… was he… feeling? The absurdity of the question almost made Felix laugh. Not so much the query itself, but because she asked it. Did she care? Did it matter to her that he felt utterly ruined, that she was his ruination? His family was probably being tortured to death, hanging from piano wire in a Gestapo dungeon, getting carved to pieces, fingers, ears, nose, and toes whittled slowly away, because this girl had stolen his sister’s face.
The girl’s new face was just a few bruises short of terrifying. Broken in, framed by features too perfect, too bright to be real. Felix tried his best to focus on the eyes, expecting to see evil there, some sort of darkness to balance out that brilliant tracer blue. But all he saw was a girl and her sadness. A great and intricate sorrow, long past emotion, made of hundreds of parts…
Did she care?
Did he care if she cared?
No, Felix decided. He’d cared too much already. Look where that had landed him.
“I’m going to check your wound, okay? Try not to move. You lost a lot of blood last night, and I don’t need you spilling more.” The girl began unwrapping his bandages. Whatever she saw beneath them made her breath sharp, scratched harder edges around her lips. “I tried to set the fingers… but…”
Some things are too broken to be fixed. This was what Felix told the girl back in Tokyo, when he thought he was trying to save Adele from herself. This was what he felt now, all the way to the dust of his shattered bones. His injuries had gone too long without proper medical attention—the SS-Standartenführer had refused to dress his injuries beyond a splash of antiseptic, telling Felix the resistance would patch him up once they landed outside Germania.
The wound can’t look too clean, the SS-Standartenführer had said. We don’t want Inmate 121358ΔX getting suspicious.
The wound was not too clean. It was infected.
And the girl was not suspicious. She was sorry.
She muttered this word—over and over—as she splashed more vodka-fire onto his wounds, as she rewrapped them, as she tried to spoon-feed him some of that awful jar-muck, as she pressed dirty snow to the heat of Felix’s forehead. “Sorry, sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” she kept saying. As if one word could erase everything she’d done. Make everything right again.
It would take so much more than a single word for that.
Felix screwed his molars tight. The rest of his head was starting to feel swimmy. Nightmares skittered along the borders of his conscious thought, darkening everything—the cabin’s shadowed corners, the bruises on the girl’s face, the rot inside him.
The faraway ax kept thudding. The pocket watch felt ten ounces heavier over Felix’s heart, jealous of every breath he took. The girl’s eyes stayed on him as she packed more ice against his face. How did they still look so much like Adele’s? Wrong shade, right stare. Sister-to-brother strength.
Felix couldn’t stand it. He shut his eyes, let the darkness take him.