“Papers, please.”
The SS-Schütze who rapped on the window and held out his hand did not look particularly suspicious. Why would he? Two small blond women in a rusted farm truck overloaded with potatoes was the least-threatening thing he’d seen all week.
Yael knew their situation could change in a heartbeat. One wrong word, one too-loud whimper from Felix, one slip of her sweater sleeve, one smudge of her makeup, and all would fall apart. She was careful to—KEEP SMILING MOVE SLOW—as she rolled down the glass and reached into her sweater for her alias’s papers, fingers brushing the TT-33’s cold metal.
“Of course.” She handed the documents over.
There was an SS-Schütze at Miriam’s window as well, combing through her papers. Two more manned the traffic blockade. Yael could see another in the rearview mirror, circling the truck bed. He’d already cut open one of the potato sacks and was impaling the rest with his knife. Stab, stab, sharp, sick sounds.
The man reading Yael’s false papers frowned. For a moment she feared she’d given him the wrong set (wrong face, wrong name, wrong birthplace, wrong, wrong, wrong), but all he said was, “There’s been a lot of fighting going on. Two young fräuleins traveling alone—it’s not safe.”
“We haven’t come far.”
Not Yael’s first lie or her biggest, but still untrue. The odometer had slotted new numbers into place close to three thousand times since departing Molotov. Nearly seventy-five hours had passed. Seventy-five agonizing hours of constant, trade-off driving on Yael’s and Miriam’s part. All go, little sleep. Felix and Luka hadn’t fared much better. The boys were just as jostled as their potato cargo. The drive should have been faster—under average circumstances, the trip would’ve taken only two days.
But nothing about this journey was normal. Muddy back roads, strings of refugees, countless detours, battles unfolding… With Henryka’s instructions, Miriam’s map of back roads, and a bit of luck, they’d managed to avoid the larger cities, where bullets were still flying. Some of the smaller towns were unavoidable, most draped in the same chaos that had befallen Molotov: burnt buildings, smoke hazing the streets. Ruin reigned. Results varied. In some towns, their vehicle was ushered through, waved past smoldering swastika banners by resistance fighters. In others, it was stopped with a “Halt!” and a “Heil Hitler!”
Checkpoint after checkpoint. Lie after lie. They’d crawled out of the Muscovy territories and were now deep in the central Reich, where all the checkpoints belonged to SS, who were scrambling to maintain some semblance of order in this turbulent landscape.
Here discovery meant death.
“These roads are dangerous,” said the soldier examining Yael’s papers. “Most of the uprisings have been quelled, but there’s some fighters unaccounted for. Just yesterday a unit was ambushed not twenty kilometers away.”
So the resistance here wasn’t completely crushed. Still fighting, despite the dismal reports Henryka had received about the region. This thought made Yael’s smile less of a strain to hold.
“You’re not going to Germania, are you?” The SS-Schütze jerked his chin at the line of vehicles stacked up behind them. Many were crammed with families and their earthly possessions: stacks upon stacks of suitcases weighted down with heirlooms. One car had a basket of live poultry pressed against its back window. “A lot of people from the territories are heading toward the capital, thinking it’s safe. But I hear it’s like the Battle of Moscow all over again. Nasty street fighting. You don’t want to get caught in the middle of it.”
“We won’t be on the road much longer,” Yael told him. A true statement. The safe house Henryka had pointed them toward was less than an hour away. The farm would serve as their base for the first portion of the mission. A place for the boys to hide while Miriam and Yael… completed their pit stop.
“We’re transporting potatoes for my uncle,” Yael rattled off the story they’d told at the last ten checkpoints. “Prices are high because the fighting has delayed shipments.”
The frown stayed on the SS-Schütze’s face. Yael gripped the steering wheel, kept smiling, and fought the growing fear that something was about to go wrong.
Miriam leaned over. She was just as skilled as Yael at playing the role of innocent Reichling. Her long yellow braid tapped the gearshift. Her eyelashes—just as yellow, not nearly as long—fluttered. “If you could point us to where we might be able to buy some gasoline, we’d be grateful.”
The soldier shut Yael’s fake papers, slipping them back through the window.
He was going to let them through.
It never ceased to amaze Yael, the moment when she realized she’d gotten away with her lies. The truck’s engine shuddered as she tucked her papers away. It’d been doing that lately. (Three thousand kilometers and counting was a lot to ask of a twenty-year-old machine.) The SS man had just finished giving them directions when the motor sputtered, stopped.
Dead.
The SS-Schütze motioned toward the hood. “Car trouble?”
“It’s an old truck,” Yael told him. She could hear her own pulse inside her eardrums. “This happens a lot.”
“I can take a look at it for you if you want.”
Having SS prodding beneath the hood of their smuggling truck was the last thing Yael wanted. Felix was due for another round of morphine and antibiotics soon, and she wouldn’t be able to signal the time to Luka without the patrol noticing. With the engine cut off, things were so quiet the soldier would hear a cough. Much less a scream.
She twisted the key, desperately hard. The ignition churned… several agonizing seconds… before it caught and held. The SS-Schütze waved them through the blockade.
—GO GO GO—
But the truck wasn’t going. Yael’s foot had to pump the gas pedal several times before the acceleration finally kicked into first, then second gear. She couldn’t tell if the ride’s roughness was due to the cobblestone street or the ailing engine.
Don’t die. Don’t die. Please, don’t die. Her prayer hung—unsaid on harp string breath—as they crawled through the town.
“That was too close.” Miriam cranked up her window. “What if it hadn’t started?”
Yael’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror, watching the SS men watch her. Their black uniforms and silver badges pulled—TOO SLOW—into the distance.
—TOO CLOSE NOT FAR ENOUGH AWAY—
The sight through the webbed-glass windshield wasn’t much more reassuring. Yael supposed that the town could have been charming, but it was impossible to tell. Its peak-roofed buildings were overwhelmed with swastika banners. Even more sinisterly strung were the bodies. Partisans and their boots dangled over the streets, hung from any available post. Mostly men, a few women. Some had crows on their sagged shoulders. All had the same handwritten sign looped around their bloating necks: I AM A TRAITOR TO THE REICH.
Yael tried not to count the corpses, but fifty-six was too many to ignore. Fifty-six lives and fifty-six deaths. Fifty-six signs meant to drain the hope and fight out of all who read them.
Even though all of them said the same thing, Yael read as many as she could. Each new declaration pressed her foot harder on the gas.
—HOPE HOPE FIGHT GO—
The engine kept coughing and smoothing out with each new injection of fuel, while they crawled through the morbid streets. At last, the motor managed to chug to the other side of town, onto what promised to become a quiet country lane. Within minutes, the townscape was already melting back into fields. Farmlands interrupted by lakes and bursts of trees. These passed in shades of silver and green as the speedometer gained momentum.
It was almost peaceful, this land. But no matter how quickly the truck’s wheels spun in their corroded wells, no matter how much Yael opened her window to let the spring air rip into the cab, the death they’d passed lingered. Spoiling her nostrils, curdling her mouth dry.
“Do you really think this truck is going to make it all the way to Germania?” Miriam asked a few kilometers later, when the vehicle began shuddering again. Yael somehow knew her old friend wasn’t talking about the engine.
This truck: a bunch of useless stabbed potatoes + Luka + Felix.
Yael frowned. They’d been over this. And over this. “Let’s just focus on getting to the safe house first. We can get things sorted there.”
But Miriam kept pushing: “All we’d have to do is drop them off outside one of these settlements. We can find a city with a medical facility for the Wolfe boy.”
“They’re in as much danger as we are. The SS arrested them in Tokyo because they thought the boys were a part of the assassination. Luka and Felix were being flown to the People’s Court—”
“Do you really think the People’s Court would choose to execute their double victor?” Miriam asked.
“Hitler executed thousands when the first Operation Valkyrie failed. Some inside his closest circles. There’s no reason a victor would be spared. Besides, the boys know our plan. If we dumped them on the side of the road, how long do you think it would take for the SS to punch it out of them?”
At this, the older girl relented. “We never should have brought them.”
Yael wished the smell of rotting flesh wasn’t so unforgettable. She wished she wasn’t driving toward hundreds more bodies. She wished that she didn’t have to keep throwing herself between her past and her present, Miriam and the boys.
Yael wished that, just for once, her life could hold a shade of normality.
“Tell me about your flat in Novosibirsk.” Yael had never lived in one. Basements and barn lofts and barracks, yes, but never a flat. “What color are the walls?”
It was a sudden shift in topic, but Miriam understood. (Of course Miriam understood.) “They were white when I moved in, but I found a can of bright blue paint and remedied that. It’s small, one room. I got a discount because I’m on the seventh floor and there’s no lift in the building. I have a brilliant view of the city and t-toned c-c-calves—”
This time, when the engine’s shaking peaked and Yael pumped an extra burst of fuel into its systems, it did not smooth out. It cut off instead, rolling to a standstill in the middle of the dirt lane. When Yael twisted the ignition, it groaned and wheezed and did not catch, did not catch, did not catch.
This time, it really was dead.