CHAPTER 21

The fever nightmares kept sprouting—mold-dark and webbing. Felix dreamed he was standing by the hatch of the Immelmann IV, gripping his parachute cord, only to realize it was just a mustard-colored thread from Martin’s old chair, unraveling longer and longer the more he pulled it. A pack of dogs tore out of the dark, hurtling with Felix through the hatch and into the sky. They howled, Felix screamed.

He fell! He fell! For Adele!

Suddenly, the parachute opened, lifting around him, drifting down. It landed at the feet of an old woman, who stared at Felix the way his mother used to—eyes flashing love and fear in the same instant. The expression of a person prepared for loss, terrified of it. Felix wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay. He was going back to Germania. He was fixing things.

But then the crone’s wrinkles began peeling—her face curled back like poorly pasted wallpaper, shredding into the girl’s features. The parachute swallowed Felix again, lifted, drifted, whiteness and blood. This time, it fell at the foot of a half beast. Fur sprouted from the man’s head and ears; his words were bear-growly, making no sense. There was a red cross around his arm; his hands were sharp with silver claws. The air was thick with an awful smell: spoiled apple, all its juices leaking out. No—not apple rot. Meat…

Felix knew—suddenly, frantically—that he had to get away. HE HAD TO GET AWAY! But there were hands, hands everywhere, holding him down as the silver claws drew closer to Felix’s fingers.

The nightmare faded just as the creature started to feast.

Felix knew he was awake because of the throb in his fingers. It felt as if Baasch’s boot were landing, again and again. Heel, crush, twist. He supposed the hurt was a good thing, signs of a mending body. Healing pains, Papa had always called Felix’s racetrack scrapes. You’ll be back on the motorcycle in no time!

Time… what was the time? Felix remembered too late that Martin’s watch was broken. His left hand was already on his chest, seeking out his mechanical heart, only to find it gone! Someone had stripped off his Hitler Youth uniform, replaced it with a clean undershirt.

“Ah. Herr Wolfe!” Luka’s face appeared. His hair flopped over his brow, smirk lost to thickening facial hair. Felix knew it was there, regardless. The expression was as essential to the victor’s appearance as his smelly jacket. “Welcome back to this side of sanity.”

Felix’s vision focused on the ceiling above him. Knotted wood rafters. The very same rafters he’d been staring at before… They hadn’t moved, and according to Luka’s budding beard, too much time had passed. Baasch was still waiting back in Germania, his iron heel hovering… poised to take away everyone Felix loved.

“W-where’s the girl?” he asked.

“You know, Herr Wolfe, you really should work on your name retention.”

Name retention? That was rich, coming from the boy who considered it his personal calling to rename everyone in the most ridiculous way possible: Change-o-Face? Grease monkey?

It was hard to believe that once Felix had actually admired Luka Löwe. When fresh-off-the-press 1953 propaganda posters filled store windows and street corners, Felix had studied them with more than a twinge of envy. Who wouldn’t be jealous of the youngest victor in the race’s history? What red-blooded Reich boy wouldn’t want to be posing by the newest Zündapp model in a flashy black jacket?

The twinge was different now. Had been for some time. Adele’s stories from the 1955 tour were less than flattering (fist-worthy, even), and there wasn’t much the victor had done to prove her words wrong. In the flesh, Luka Löwe was by far the most insufferable, smug Arschloch Felix had ever crossed paths with.

As irritated as Felix was, he knew yelling would only exacerbate the situation. “Fine. Where’s…”

Luka raised his eyebrows. “Do you even know her name?”

Felix knew many things about the girl. She was a criminal. (Baasch called her an inmate, and there wasn’t much evidence to argue with the SS officer. Good people didn’t kidnap, lie, murder.…) She was the start of the Doppelgänger Project. She was strong, strong enough to knock Felix out cold in the Imperial Palace, strong enough to shove him out of a Focke-Wulf Condor in flight. She seemed sad, so sad that her soul couldn’t hold it all, but she was also very, very gifted at acting, so good that in the end Felix had no idea what he really knew about her.

The girl’s name, however, had managed to escape him.

“Do you know mine?” Felix countered.

“Of course, Fritz. As for Yael…” Luka’s stare shifted toward the door. “I’m not sure where she is. How much do you remember?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” Remembering wasn’t the problem. It was the extraction of reality from the nightmare that was giving Felix trouble. His fever had blended the two realms together. All those gravestone letters—changing, rearranging, becoming the wrong death. The old woman’s face melting away. The red-crossed man-bear digging into his flesh with silver claws.

These parts were nightmares. They had to be.

“We jumped out of a plane,” Luka began.

“I remember that,” Felix said.

The other boy shrugged. “Figured as much. But it sounds more impressive if I start off that way. Anyway, we jumped out of a plane, hiked until you went all fever crazy on us—”

“I remember that, too.”

“Are you going to let me tell the verdammt story or not?”

Again Felix wanted to yell. Again hurt like knives spread up his broken fingers. Everything—inside and out—ached too much to argue, so he fixed his stare on the ceiling as Luka kept narrating his version of events. “We played house, I got a splinter chopping firewood, the Soviet army rolled in, and Yael used her nifty face-changing trick to divert them.…”

Face-changing trick. That’s right. The girl could change faces. The old woman melting had been real. And if she was real… With a good deal of effort, Felix raised his right, bandaged hand and held it in front of his face. What he saw made no sense at all.

The last two fingers were gone, severed at the base. Both were flaring: crushed bones, tendons on fire. Felix stared and stared. He passed his left hand over the space. It collided with nothing.

Luka was still talking, but his voice sounded as if it were underwater.

Felix’s fingers were gone. And they hurt.

And they hurt.

And they hurt.

This was a nightmare. It had to be.

Felix screamed loud enough to hear himself through his shock. The sound was all pain, filled with the agony of his not-there wounds. The door to the cabin swung open, and the man with the red cross appeared. Only now, in the full light of feverless waking, Felix could see he wasn’t a bear-man at all, just a medic wearing a fur cap, with flaps that went over his ears. The medic pushed Luka aside, twisting the top off a tiny, kanji-inscribed syrette. The air around Felix went cold as his shirt was shoved up. There was a pinch and a warmth.

Felix had never taken morphine before, but he knew its effects instantly. Heat tugged at his belly, lifting his insides up. His sob settled into a shudder. The medic checked his bandages and gave him a pill, plus a swallow from a canteen to wash the bitterness down.

“Where’s our friend?” he heard Luka asking the medic when the man moved to leave. “What have you done with Yael?”

These questions made Felix want to scream again. The girl was no friend of his, no matter how much sorrow or sorry her stare held. Felix’s fingers were gone—scrap yard bound, beyond fixing. The Wolfes would suffer the same fate, if they hadn’t already. All of this—pain, loss, nothingness—was her fault. HERS!

The medic had no answers. The cabin door opened and shut.

Was the Arschloch frowning? His forehead held a crease Felix had never seen before—concern in the shape of a V. “Sorry about the fingers, Herr Wolfe. I saw that wound. If Yael hadn’t cleaned it out, if the Soviets hadn’t rolled in when they did, you wouldn’t have been long for this world. Stone-cold crow food. Consider yourself lucky.”

 Lucky? Felix wanted to hit this Schweinehund, but when he tried to make a fist, the pain struck anew. Too strong, too fresh for the new dose of morphine to reach. He gagged on it.

“Easy there.” Luka’s brow wrinkles deepened. “You don’t need to go throwing any punches.”

No, Felix wouldn’t be tossing any more right hooks. Nor would he be able to twist a Zündapp throttle or grip the many, many tools he used to fix things.

“I can still feel them,” he whispered.

It wasn’t a question, and Felix really didn’t expect an answer, but Luka offered one anyway. “Phantom pains. Your body thinks that whatever is gone is still there. Will for a while. My father used to get them. He lost his arm in the war, made him a hard Saukerl.…”

Phantom pains. There was no healing in this hurt.

The door opened again, flooding their cabin with the grumble of truck engines. A soldier motioned Luka to his feet, prodded the victor outside at riflepoint. Two other men came to either end of Felix’s stretcher (a real one, he realized now, no more bleeding parachute) and hoisted him high. All this as the morphine opened up a sky inside his body, lifting Felix up, up with every next second into a painless atmosphere. Heights he did not have to fear.