CHAPTER 25

Chaos did not even begin to describe it.

Henryka needed more ears, more radios, more, more, more. News kept spilling in faster than she and the four operatives could listen, much less record or pass along. Over it all, the Führer’s post-assassination Chancellery Chat was airing on repeat on the przeklęty Reichssender: “I am not dead.… Despite their best efforts… Despite their best efforts… I am not dead.”

Over and over, on and on. Thirty times an hour. Twenty-four hours a day. As much as Henryka loathed Adolf Hitler’s words and still-alive-ness, she refused to turn the television off. She was too afraid she might miss some vital clue.

The resistance wasn’t dead either, despite the recovered Führer’s best efforts. In the space of days, five countries had been reborn, claiming their place on Henryka’s map: Great Britain, the kingdom of Iraq, Finland, Turkey, Italy (the southern half, boot heel to midcalf; north of Rome was still tangled with thin-yarn fronts, battles in progress). Henryka colored in their borders with much less joy than she should have. These victories did not surprise her. The British Isles and the Italian peninsula still held bitter memories of the initial war. Both were a hotbed of pins on her map. It hadn’t taken much for the regions’ wider populations to join the rebellion. Iraq, Finland, and Turkey had all been ruled by Reichskommissariats spread thin, where the National Socialists’ infrastructure could not survive resistance without additional support from Germania.

Five countries won. Six, counting Egypt.

But these victories weren’t enough.

The rest of the map was drowning in red chaos. Death plotted out with thumbtacks and string. The resistance in Paris had taken a vicious blow. Its leaders captured, defamed, executed on the spot. Once-Poland and once-Austria’s uprisings were floundering, if not completely dead. Moscow’s resistance was locked in grid-tight urban warfare, its attempts at breaking into the Kremlin and arresting the Reichskommissar continually rebuffed. But the biggest of Henryka’s worries loomed much closer to home, just a few meters above, tearing apart Germania’s streets. The moment the Führer’s declaration of not-deadness had appeared on people’s televisions, the city spiraled into pandemonium.

General Erwin Reiniger was still alive. (Thank God.) As soon as Henryka had radioed the news of the Führer’s survival, Reiniger and his men had retreated from the Volkshalle to a more defensible position, north of the river Spree. Many of the other conspiring generals followed. Others, upon learning of Hitler’s survival, lost heart, shifting their allegiances before their names could be pinned to any conspiracy. In the end, the divide was strangely matched. Waffen-SS and fealty-bound Wehrmacht men fought against the rebels. Germania’s citizens hunkered inside old air-raid shelters as the city tore itself apart.

There were no bombs yet. The Luftwaffe remained grounded, in part because its commander-in-chief, Hermann Göring, remained in Reiniger’s custody. The main airfield, in the northern town of Rechlin, was under National Socialist control, as were many of the planes and their pilots, but Henryka doubted Hitler was foolish or desperate enough to raze half of his own capital.

Germania was a line drawn in the sand, festering violence. There was no clear offensive. No solid defensive. Just building-to-building combat. Streets taken, blocks lost. On some corners, the swastika hung high. On others, it was burning. Even now Henryka could hear gunshots, staccatoing between the crackling radios. Reiniger had ordered her to evacuate the map room, but Henryka refused. Without this communication center, the resistance would fall apart altogether. She’d labored too hard, too long, to let something like death frighten her away.

She presented this choice to Kasper, Brigitte, Johann, and Reinhard: Stay or go, live or (probably) die. All four remained at their posts, sleeping only a fraction of the hours and subsisting on stale slices of bread and food that came out of cans.

As for Adele… more than once Henryka considered releasing her, but it couldn’t be denied that the girl was a liability. She’d seen too much of their base of operations, and who knew how many things she’d heard through that door. They’d gone this long without being discovered. (None of the movement’s defectors had been people privy to the beer hall basement’s location.) They had to keep every advantage they had.

So Adele remained trapped inside a closet while the calls kept pouring in: victory, defeat, victory, defeat. The Third Reich was crumbling away at the edges, yet becoming more concentrated at its core. Among the incoming reports were those about the Waffen-SS units moving through the countryside, quelling any resistance they could find. Henryka marked their locations on the map with tiny double Sieg rune pins. The capital was ringed in a noose of black lightning. One that was drawing tighter day by day.

Germania’s bloody stalemate could not, would not, last.

Kasper and Johann kept answering the radios. Brigitte and Reinhard kept tapping away at their cipher machines. Both tasks were Sisyphean. Transmissions were coming in a relentless stream, too many to answer, let alone rest from.

Kasper, in particular, was exhausted. Out of all the map room’s operatives, he’d slept the least, receiving report after report, dictating strings of code to Reinhard in a flat voice. But something about Kasper’s current call seemed to spark him: The young man’s face went electric when he read Reinhard’s unscramble. He tore off his headphones, held them out for Henryka.

“You’re going to want to take this,” he said. “It’s from the Muscovy territories. The cell in Molotov.”

Molotov. Henryka had to double-check her map to confirm what she knew of the city. It lay a couple of hundred kilometers west of the Ural Mountains and was one of the last significant settlements before the Lebensraum faded into a no-man’s-land of massacred villages and struggling potato farms. The resistance there consisted of slave laborers and disillusioned settlers—men and women forced out of the central Reich by lottery.

“Good news?” She hoped.

“I think it’s Yael.”

“Volchitsa? Is that you?”

While Yael’s breath hitched at the sound of Kasper’s voice, she actually burst into tears at the sound of Henryka’s. The woman was exhausted, her syllables wavering the way they did when she forgot to sleep. Too often Henryka favored the resistance’s cause over self-care, too often Yael had seen the Polish woman’s hairline edged with brown roots, eyes bruised with countless waking hours.

“It’s me,” Yael managed. “I’m here.”

I’m here. We’re all still here. The knowledge stole Yael’s oxygen away and kept stealing it, replacing air with saltwater tears. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized how strong the fear of her friends’ deaths had grown. How like a shadow it followed her…

“We shouldn’t—” Was Henryka crying, too? It certainly sounded that way. A series of sniffs managed their way through the speakers. “We should go back to code. We don’t know who might be listening.”

Encryption codes weren’t meant for flowing conversations. It was infuriating, really, how slowly their exchange crawled. But the information being passed between Molotov and the beer hall basement was too precious for enemy ears.

Yael offered her own report first, trying to cram the past six days into as few words as possible:

REAL FÜHRER IN GERMANIA. BALLROOM HITLER WAS SKINSHIFTER DECOY. EXPERIMENT 85 STILL ACTIVE. NOVOSIBIRSK ARMY INVADING MUSCOVY. INTENDS TO RECLAIM FORMER SOVIET LANDS.

Et cetera, et cetera.

Miriam was doing her due diligence as Comrade Mnogolikiy, translating the messages into Russian for the Soviet officers. The men stood in their red-star uniforms, scattered constellation-wide throughout the front room. Yael could see them cataloging the furniture, trying to determine how many of the Förstners’ possessions originally belonged to slaughtered Soviets.

The minutes stretched. Yael kept finding things to say. Adolf Hitler’s television speech started anew at least half a dozen times. Irmgard continued tapping answers out of the Enigma machine. Ernst made a tray of tea, complete with biscuits. Luka ate his share with great relish. (“Have you tried these?” He tossed one to Yael, which clipped her shoulder in a spray of crumbs. “Worlds better than veggie goo!”) The Soviet officers grew increasingly restless, shifting their weight from boot to boot.

Comrade Commander Pashkov was the first to speak. “Ask what’s waiting for us in Moscow. That’s the reason we allowed this radio exchange, no?”

“Patience!” Yael snapped in Russian, even though her own supply was running short. She, too, wanted to know everything, but keeping Henryka informed was her priority. Who knew where her discoveries on Experiment 85 and Novosibirsk’s army might lead?

But eventually she ran out of information to thread through the Enigma machine. It was time to

REQUEST A STATUS REPORT ON GERMANIA AND MOSCOW.

Henryka’s messages began leaking in, painting a picture of a tipping-point landscape. Everything was on edge: pessimistic failed putsch, optimistic civil war. Hitler’s resurrection had spooked a good number of Wehrmacht soldiers back into the National Socialists’ ranks, but not enough to abandon all hope.

“What of the road to Moscow?” Comrade Fox Brows asked once Miriam finished translating the details of Germania. “How many National Socialist forces can we expect to encounter?”

It took five minutes to encode these questions, along with tactical facts. Another ten minutes passed before they received Henryka’s best guess: Novosibirsk’s army—with its numbers and equipment—should have no trouble reaching Moscow. Storming the Kremlin and demanding Reichskommissar Freisler’s surrender would be more difficult, but possible.

“It’s not the seizure of Moscow I’m worried about,” one of the nameless comrade commanders offered. “None of this is of consequence if the National Socialist regime survives. Hitler won’t suffer Moscow to remain in our hands.”

“I agree with Comrade Commander Chekov,” Pashkov said. “What chance does this revolution really have of succeeding?”

This same question was trapped with the biscuit crumbs in Yael’s teeth, looping alongside all of Irmgard’s handwritten notes. There were so many different ways to word it: Is victory possible? Can you hold out for six more days/weeks/months? How much red will it take? Yael chose to transmit the most succinct option.

CAN WE WIN?

The pause was shorter than normal. When the Polish woman answered, she used codeless, full-flesh words: “I don’t know. W-we weren’t prepared for this. A putsch, certainly. A revolution, somewhat. But Hitler still alive, on the Reichssender, telling people they’ll be crushed if they resist…”

Hitler’s survival changes things. That’s what Miriam had told Yael in the graveyard village. That’s what Yael could see here, cast in the television’s sickly glow. He’d always been monstrous, but now when Yael watched Hitler looming on the screen, she was reminded of the many-headed hydra she’d read about in a book on Greek mythology. Cut off a head and two more sprang back. Try to kill him once, twice, fifty times, and he only grew stronger, crippling entire nations with a single speech.

Hitler wasn’t supposed to be the person who changed things. That had been Volchitsa’s calling, the one Yael had tried—so hard—to fulfill with 20,780 kilometers of race and a ballroom bullet. But what had changed? The wrong man was dead, an even worse one was alive, and Yael sat beneath a chordless piano, feeling more helpless than she had in Tokyo’s streets, running as the putsch ignited and exploded half a world away.

Back to code:

REINIGER PUSHING NORTHWEST TO OPEN NORTH SEA PORT FOR SUPPLY LINES AND BRITISH AID. SS CALLING IN REINFORCEMENTS FROM SUBDUED TERRITORIES. FÜHREREID DIVIDING WEHRMACHT. DESERTION RATE GROWING.

“What is a—a Führereid?” Comrade Commander Pashkov asked.

“It’s a fealty oath,” Yael explained in swift Russian. “Every soldier in the Reich is required to swear unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler himself. One of the main ideas behind both the first and the second Operation Valkyrie was that Hitler’s death would free the Wehrmacht soldiers from the Führereid and allow them to choose new allegiances.”

“Who would’ve thought the Germans would be so honor-bound to their horrors,” Pashkov muttered.

“Not all of them,” Yael said. Not Erwin Reiniger. Not all the other Wehrmacht officers who’d tossed away their Iron Cross reputations for this plot. Not all the thousands of soldiers who’d made the choice to stay and fight on the resistance’s side of the Spree.

More letters were pouring in. A final diagnosis. Two questions.

VICTORY IN GERMANIA REQUIRES MOMENTUM SHIFT. IS NOVOSIBIRSK OUR ALLY? CAN TROOPS BE SENT?

Yael held her breath as Miriam translated. The Soviet officers exchanged shorthand glances, D-O-U-B-T spelled out with brown eyes and blue.

“Moscow is our priority,” Comrade Commander Chekov began. “We simply don’t have enough resources to storm Germania and maintain our control over Muscovy. Even considering the companies we’re scheduled to meet in Novgorod.”

Miriam’s forehead furrowed, still ridged with piano-key indents. “What of the armies on their way to reclaim old Leningrad? Perhaps if we diverted them—”

“Is it even a feasible option?” asked one of the unnamed commanders. “How many weeks would it take our army to fight its way through the central Reich? Does General Reiniger have the resources to hold out that long?”

“What are they clucking about?” Luka’s elbow mashed into an old photo of himself, 1955 issue, as he pushed himself up from his newspaper perch. “Am I the only one who could go for more biscuits? A wash would be nice, too. I’m all for natural musk, but this Eau de Muscovy Wilderness Trek is a bit much.”

All seven Soviet officers stared at the double victor, Reich’s face on top of Das Reich’s face. The room’s very air was alert—as if electric charges had slipped away from their machines, into eyes and ears and veins.

“What did he say?” Comrade Fox Brows growled.

“He wants a bath,” Yael explained. “You shouldn’t worry. Victor Löwe doesn’t understand Russian.”

“But you do.” The officer’s red eyebrows twitched. “Forgive me, comrades, but I don’t think we should be discussing such things in front of the prisoners. Nor is there any point in debating this until we’ve established an open line with Novosibirsk.”

Several of the comrade commanders nodded. The radio crackled—Henryka waiting for an answer. The room’s static anxiety started migrating onto Yael’s skin, stiffening her arm hairs, wreathing through her wolves.

“Agreed,” Chekov said. “Have one of the radio units brought here. Comrade Mnogolikiy will take over the communications with Germania. Contain the prisoners to the rear of the house. Allow them food and baths, but under no circumstance should they be permitted near this room.”

Prisoners. After all this, they still thought of Yael as a threat. Yael, too, felt threatened, the adrenaline under her skin buzzing.

—DON’T LET THEM LOCK YOU AWAY—

She couldn’t just sit here—captive to red tape and politics—while her friends died. “No! Let me stay and—”

Miriam stepped in front of her: a fresh scent of lilies, chin set to the side. Something in the way she moved—so deliberately in front of the comrade commanders’ stares—killed Yael’s argument, leaving its corpse right there in her throat.

“Remember what I told you,” Miriam whispered in German. “Be careful. Play the prisoner. Let me take care of this.”

Her third wolf was protecting her, the way she always had.

Slowly, slowly, Yael nodded.

PLEASE HOLD. MATTER IS BEING DISCUSSED.