It had taken hours and more than a few swear words on Luka’s part, but the truck no longer sounded like an asthmatic horse. The victor stood over the open engine, listening to it purr for a good minute before Felix gave a thumbs-up from the cab.
“About time.” Luka slammed the hood shut. “How can you do this all day?”
“It usually doesn’t take me all day.” Felix switched the engine off. His expression matched the smell of a forgotten milk bottle, growing more and more sour as the afternoon turned into evening. Whatever side of the secret compartment Felix woke up on, it was clearly the wrong one.
“Relax,” Luka told him, though he was far from taking his own advice. It was well past dark, and the fräulein patrol wasn’t back yet. The twenty-four-hour mark was still some time off, but this didn’t stop the victor’s eyes from finding the barn door every five minutes. “Everything’s fixed now.”
“Fixed?” Some color was coming back to the mechanic’s face. His body must be making up for all that lost blood. “You call this fixed?”
“I don’t know what else you’d call a running engine.”
The boy slid out of the cab, wounded hand brushing the door. The curdle of his lips broke into agony. Luka supposed that amount of pain would make anyone grouchy. He tugged a spare syrette out of his pocket, decapped it with his teeth. “I think someone needs more pain-be-gone juice.”
Felix—amazement of amazements—took the needle without argument. He leaned against the truck, eyes shut, giving a guttural sigh as the morphine slid back into his system. His hair was a mop of sweat and grime, clinging to his face.
Adele had often looked like that, after long days on the road, when she removed her helmet, held her hand out for a cigarette. Her cheeks had the same weary crease of smile lines.
“I didn’t attack your sister, you know.” Luka surprised himself by saying this. Felix’s opinion of him had been formed long before they met. Just like Miriam’s and most other people’s. “Just kissed her. A few times.”
“That’s almost worse,” Felix grunted.
Luka tossed the emptied syrette into the straw. “I can assure you the spit-swapping was consensual.”
The mechanic’s spoiled-dairy expression was back. When he opened his eyes, their pupils were screwed pinhole tight—the drug taking hold. “Spare me the details. Please.”
The details. Luka’s fingers wandered up to the back of his head, touched the pearly scar-skin there. He’d never told anyone the details. (Not even when he petitioned government officials for a longer hairstyle so he could hide the mark.) He wasn’t about to start now. “Adele knows how to handle herself. She’ll be okay.”
“Did you give me a double dose?” Felix asked after a moment.
“No. Why?”
“Morphine makes you much less of an Arschloch.”
“I could say the same of you,” Luka retorted.
“Ah. There it is. Never mind.”
The barn door slid open. Luka watched as the fräuleins slipped in: quieter and quietest. Both looked heavier… not just in lumpy-sweater kilograms, but in the eyes. Yael seemed close to tears. Miriam looked as if she wanted to eat Luka alive and use his bones to pick her teeth.
“Find what you were looking for?” he asked as lightly as possible.
Yael nodded.
“And more.” Miriam stared an armory’s worth of daggers when she said this. Tonight they were uncommonly sharp.
Yael went straight to Felix, taking his wounded hand in hers and examining it before asking, “Did you get the truck fixed?”
“I fixed the truck. Thank you very much.” Luka snagged the frazzled toothbrush from his ear and waved it like a war trophy. The thing was so loaded with grease it bore more than a passing resemblance to Hitler’s mustache. “Though,” he conceded, “Felix did help.”
“It’s running,” the mechanic said. “It should get us to Germania.”
“Good. Let’s get it loaded up—”
“We’re not leaving yet.”
They all stopped and turned to Miriam. She was reaching under her blouse, bringing back handfuls of medical gauze and envelopes. She chucked one after another onto the barn floor.
“Miriam, what are you doing?”
This wasn’t the plan. One look at Yael’s face told Luka that. An uneasy feeling began to pick at the bottom of his stomach. Nothing good was in those files. Nothing good was in Miriam’s stare. The envelopes kept coming, but the second skinshifter didn’t let him out of her sight. “We’ve missed something. I intend to weed out what.”
Yael watched the pile of files grow, slapping against the straw. “We’re in danger here. We can organize the papers once we get to Germania.”
“Everywhere is dangerous,” Miriam replied. “This needs to get sorted now.”
The final envelope landed on the pile. Miriam crouched down and began opening them. Yael stood to the side, looking worn in every sense of the word, doing nothing to stop her. Luka could not tear his eyes away from the papers as Miriam arranged them into neat piles.
The one she shoved closest to him had a photograph clipped to the front. Young girl. Terrified smile. She wore a six-pointed star on her shirt.
Luka’s stomach dropped and kept dropping.
He’d seen such a star before. It was one of his earliest memories: being young and toddling on Hamburg’s sidewalks, seeing an older boy with a star stitched to his coat and wanting it. When Luka told his mother, she scolded him. “That’s not for people like us.”
This only made Luka want the star more. He looked for them every time his mother took him out on errands. But the bright yellow scraps of fabric grew fewer and fewer, until the stars disappeared altogether. When Luka asked his mother where they went, she frowned and said, “Away.”
Away made Luka imagine far-off lands. Boat journeys to skyscraper cities like New York or to South America’s heaving jungles. In school, his teachers explained that the Aryan race needed room to grow, so the Lebensraum’s Untermenschen populations were relocated or put to work in labor camps.
He’d believed them.
Mostly.
There was a part of Luka—one that grew larger with age—that knew these answers weren’t right.… They were too glossy. Too simple. They did not fill the emptiness of the sand-scoured Saharan towns. They did not speak to the tangled skeletons of the Muscovy territories. They did not still the winds that sometimes slunk through the streets of Luka’s childhood, filling Hamburg with a smell that singed his insides, a smell his mother and teachers and neighbors all went out of their way to ignore.
Ignorance was not quite bliss, but it was easy. Much easier than the alternative…
(Why choose to get crushed when you can survive?)
Some of us don’t have that choice. This had been Yael’s answer in the back of the truck. This was the truth unfolding in front of him now, spread across the barn floor by Miriam’s steady hand. Away was not a thriving metropolis or lush tropics. It wasn’t a slave’s life.
Away was this: pages’ worth of lives and deaths and pain. The things Luka found himself reading were brutal, unbelievable. Scrawls about chemicals and injections and pigment levels. Daily reports on blood pressure and core temperatures. Detailed notes on dissections.
There were more pictures. More children. Gottverdammt children—some on the verge of adolescence, others too young to even be in school—stared at the camera, their eyes all shades of solemn dark. Hair just as black and brown. The photographs were divided into series. Luka shuffled through these with a growing sense of horror, one that gnawed an open pit in his stomach. Each collection of pictures, each child ended the same way—a postmortem snapshot clipped to an autopsy report. All looked eerily the same: chalky skin; empty, water-pale eyes; hair the color of nothing; left arms bare and turned out, inked with numbers.
Miriam’s numbers. Yael’s colorlessness.
All Luka could manage to think as he stared at the files was This is not possible. No person could endure this. No person could do this.
But it had been done. And done and done and done. It was only a fraction of suffering, he realized as he stared at the many papers. There were more hidden beneath Yael’s outfit. More left behind in the camp. And the crime itself… hadn’t they called it Experiment 85? There were eighty-four experiments before it. And how many after?
“This…” Felix sat on the floor, looking nearly as wan as the pictures. His head shook. “This… this can’t be real.”
“It is.” Yael was the only one in the barn still standing. “This is where skinshifters come from. This is how Hitler has cheated death so many times.”
“They’re children,” the mechanic whispered.
“Yes. We were children.” Miriam crouched in the middle of the files. Her voice was all this suffering and more—bound into a finite vocal box. “Children of the Third Reich’s Untermenschen. Jews, Romani, Poles, Slavs, so many others… It was Adolf Hitler’s intention to wipe us off the face of the earth. National Socialists have murdered entire nations of people. Are you really so naive to think that a few years of life would make a difference?”
Felix buried his face in his one good hand.
Luka could not look away. Not anymore.
Entire nations. Murdered.
Miriam’s eyes lit on him. “What do you see, Herr Löwe?”
Luka did not know what she was asking, but he knew his answer. He saw what he could not unsee: the work of devils, executed by the hands of men. Men like the hundreds of brownshirts heiling in the Grosser Platz, who looked to the Führer and nowhere else. Men like Kurt Löwe.
Luka’s teeth felt like they were rotting in his mouth. Bile. A mist rimmed his eyes. Not even a scrape of a sleeve could keep it back this time. Don’t you ever show emotion, came the clanging refrain. Shouting through his snow of thoughts. A German youth must be strong.
What good was strength if all it did was this?
Miriam kept asking, questions changing. “What are we missing? Hmm?”
Missing? What is she talking—
Luka wasn’t prepared for the leap. Miriam was as spry and strong as her old army uniform had suggested. She was on him in a flash—papers flying, knife from nowhere pressed to his throat. In any other situation, any other time, Luka would’ve fought. But he stayed, spine to floor. All shock. Wishing the acid decay would leave his mouth.
“Miriam, what are you doing?” Yael yelled, but it made no difference to the pointed pressure on Luka’s larynx. He was positive that if he swallowed, his skin would split open—bile, blood, life everywhere. Not a millimeter of movement could be spared, so Luka stayed on his back, meeting Miriam’s stare.
“How much have you told them?” A snarl. The blade edged tighter.
“W-who?” he rasped.
Miriam’s lips curled. She had very sharp incisors. “You might have Yael fooled, but my heart isn’t clouded with your charm.”
“Clearly.” As soon as Luka said this, he knew it sounded like a stupid, petty thing. Scheisse. Why was he always saying stupid, petty things?
“Miriam!” Yael flashed into his periphery. Her hands on the other skinshifter’s shoulder, trying to pull her away without accidentally slitting Luka’s throat. “Get off him!”
Miriam sheathed her teeth and looked to Yael. “Let me take care of this.”
“Take care of what?” Yael asked.
Luka’s pulse flickered three beats against the blade before Miriam answered, “The SS knew we were coming.”
Another two beats: “Who were you talking to on the telephone?”
“The Reichsführer. He thought he was ordering Dr. Geyer to destroy all traces of Experiment Eight-Five. He was scared, Yael. There’s something in these pages.…‘Sensitive information,’ he called it. Sensitive enough that the SS would rather wipe the Doppelgänger Project out of existence than let its records fall into the hands of the resistance.”
“That’s why you wanted to take the files,” Yael whispered. “But… how could Himmler know about our mission?”
“He said they’d been informed. We need to know what else has been leaked.”
“What makes you think Luka told them?”
Miriam’s laugh had no humor in it. “What makes you think he didn’t? How many lies has Herr Löwe told to get his way? Didn’t he betray you before just so he could win the Axis Tour and the Führer’s approval?”
His revenge against Adele. God, it all seemed so petty now. So stupid and petty.
“Victor Löwe is the Reich’s hero, and now he has a chance to save it. An opportunity you’ve practically handed him.”
“I disagree,” Yael said.
“You can’t just go blindly trusting this boy—”
“I’m not.”
“We need answers,” Miriam shot back.
“We’ll get them, but Luka can’t talk with your knife at his throat.”
When Miriam pulled back the blade, it was rimmed with red.
Luka’s throat burned. His investigative fingertips came back crimson. “If I’d wanted a shave…”
Stupid. Petty. Stop. Miriam needed no extra stabbing incentives.
Yael stepped between the two and locked her stare into Luka’s. There was no love (or hate?), no ice (or burning?) in her gaze. She was even better at cutting those things off than he was. She reached out to take Luka’s pulse, touch heavier than ever against his wrist as she launched into her control questions.
“What is your name?”
“Luka Löwe,” he managed through his traumatized larynx.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Did you tell the SS about our mission?”
Luka shook his head. “No.”
“Have you had any contact with Reichsführer Himmler or his men?”
Again, “No.”
Yael held his stare another second. She dropped his wrist. “He’s telling the truth.”
“You don’t know that—”
“I do,” Yael said. “Look at his eyes.”
“Tears are easy to fake.” It was only after Miriam said this that Luka realized he was still crying. Full tears now. Too much for even a soft leather sleeve to sop up.
“His pupils are constricted. If he were lying, they’d be owl wide,” Yael explained. “His pulse is steady. He has none of his traditional tells.”
“He’s fooled you before.”
The Kaiten kiss.
“Yes, well.” Yael cleared her throat. “I was distracted.”
Luka had lied many times in his life. But not then. Not now.
Miriam wasn’t convinced. The second skinshifter’s hand was married to the hilt of her knife as she turned back to Luka. “If you’re not here to get information, then why are you here?”
Luka had nothing left. He’d been bled of blood and defenses and stupid, petty remarks.
“Because of Yael,” he said.
Both fräuleins watched his pupils. Both saw the pinprick truth.
Miriam sheathed her knife. Yael turned away.
It wasn’t just Luka’s heart that hurt. He could only hold his nausea back long enough to run out of the barn, into the yard. He braced against the weathered wall as the heaves came, and came, and came. Lasting long past the contents of his stomach.
His face was all tears and bitter beard-bile. Luka smeared this away with his sleeve, gagging on the smell of wet Scheisse leather. Or was it the dog—still buzzing with rot, not ten meters away—he smelled? The scents were the same.
They were all dead.
Another heave (dry, full of nothing) overcame Luka as he reached for the dog tag around his neck. Blood of himself. I want to be like you, better/stronger/more. War hero. Loyalist lemming. Murderer. He pulled and kept pulling, until the line of fire on the back of his neck matched the front. Until the links snapped, not so strong after all.
What good is it?
For most of Luka’s life, the jacket had been too large. Dragging past his fingertips, rubbing his knuckles, weighing him down. Only in the past year or so had it truly begun to fit. Father’s shape, Father’s form. It felt too small now. Suffocating his skin as he pried it off. He shoved the dog tag in its pocket, took his pistol out and reholstered it in his waistband. He didn’t bother holding his breath as he walked to the still Alsatian. Its stench was everywhere. With two hands he took Kurt Löwe’s jacket and draped it over the carcass. Brown leather covering blood-matted fur.
Luka couldn’t go back to the barn. Not just yet. Not now that all of him knew—the choice Miriam and Yael and oh so many others never had. The choice he’d made not to ask more questions, find more answers, because he’d seen the cost of true resistance at the Grosser Platz (inferno in the skin, Luger to the skull, BANG).
I was afraid.
Still am.
Guilt crushed Luka anyway, pressing down with a galaxy’s weight. All those stars. All those hundreds of thousands and millions of stars…
He made his way through the patchy weeds to the farmhouse steps, where he sat, head in arms. Feeling everything.