The pictures couldn’t be real.
That’s what Felix told himself as he stared at the photographs. Kids laid out on cold tables—white hair first—their stillness seeping through time and ink. Most of them had been… dismantled. Cut open. Insides spilled out. Someone with bent crab-leg handwriting had sorted through these pieces, taken inventory. Bone density, urine samples, blood analysis, all glands and organs measured. Thyroids—there were lots of pictures of those—spread out like fleshy butterflies before being sliced, diced.
Crustacean writing on the photograph by Felix’s foot told him that particular thyroid belonged to Inmate 125819ΔX. Not a criminal, but a girl. He knew this because the numbers matched a different picture: Anne Weisskopf. 125819ΔX. Preinjection. She looked close to Felix’s own age. She looked scared. Her eyes reached through the camera lens, pleading.
In Tokyo, he’d wondered how face-changing worked. What made it possible? Now the answers were spread at his feet, and all Felix could do was cover his eyes. It was easier not to look at Anne Weisskopf and her insides, so he sat in the straw, his good hand over his face. All he could feel was the morphine Luka had just given him, glowing through his arteries, veins, capillaries. Taking the iron in his blood and making it shine.
A scuffle and a yell made Felix peer through his fingers. Miriam was on top of Luka, knee to chest, knife to throat. Yael was trying to intervene. A drama unfolded. Even though the scent of motor grease mixed with golden-sweet horse feed inside Felix’s nostrils, it seemed as if he were watching a show on the Reichssender. Yells, tears, knife-wielding… all of it went through an extra filter of detachment.
“Who were you talking to on the telephone?” Yael asked Miriam.
“The Reichsführer. He thought he was ordering Dr. Geyer to destroy all traces of Experiment Eight-Five.…”
Felix’s phone call to SS-Standartenführer Baasch had made the rounds, all the way back to Miriam. But how had Miriam convinced Reichsführer Himmler he was talking to this Dr. Geyer fellow? Unless…
Unless ears could lie… Doppelgängers could change their vocal cords to sound like anyone. Yael had shifted her own to sound like Adele. What was to stop one of the SS doppelgängers from impersonating his father?
Real, wrong, false, right, what was truth, twisting, everything was twisting…
What if the Gestapo never had his parents at all? What if Mama and Papa really were at Vlad’s safe house, alive and unharmed? What if Felix—not Yael—was the rat, scrambling as frantically as he could toward SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s trap?
All these realizations hit Felix at once. Slam, slam, slam as he watched Miriam lower her knife from Luka’s throat. As he listened to Yael question the victor. Information had been leaked, and both women were on the hunt. It wouldn’t be long before their attentions turned to Felix.
Should he run? (Out of the question. Fleeing on morphine legs wouldn’t get him very far.) Should he tell Miriam and Yael the truth, beg for mercy? (But what if Papa’s voice really had been Papa’s voice? What if Felix only had a day and a half, less now, to save him?)
Already they were walking around the pile of dead paper children. Yael knelt in front of Anne Weisskopf’s file, her skirt flowering over hay and hellish things. She grabbed the inside of his wrist, pressed her fingers to his pulse.
Good, lesser, evil, lies, death, so many shifting skins… there was so much to focus on. Too much. Felix had to narrow his sights. The one thing he knew for certain was this: He could not, would not risk Papa’s death. Lying was his only option.
“What is your name?”
“Felix Burkhard Wolfe.” Felix stared at the powdered bridge of Yael’s nose as he answered. The not real feeling filmed his insides. He clung to it.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Felix, did you tell the SS about our mission?”
One of the few useful things SS-Standartenführer Baasch had given Felix was a list of things to avoid when telling a lie. Body language basics: no swallowing, no looking to the left, no hesitating. There wasn’t much he could do about the shape of his pupils or the rate of his pulse.…
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
Miriam loomed nearby, watching his eyes with hawklike intensity. Yael’s face was a blank slate as she read Felix’s own. Could they see? Was his body betraying him, inkblot pupils spreading out? Pulse peppering—lies, lies, all lies—through his skin?
“Have you had any contact with Reichsführer Himmler or his men?”
“The last time I saw the SS was when they shoved us in the Immelmann IV to fly us back for our trial,” Felix told them.
“That didn’t answer her question,” Miriam pointed out.
“No, I haven’t contacted Reichsführer Himmler, or any of his men. Why would I? All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is to get back to my family. Adele, Mama, Papa, all of them are safe with the resistance.” Were they? Yael seemed to think so, which was all that mattered for this lie. She couldn’t possibly know about the leverage Baasch had on him, because that leverage might not even exist.
“No pupil dilation. No pulse variation,” Yael declared after a moment.
Felix blinked and wondered how. Maybe it had something to do with the surrealism of everything.… Even his body couldn’t tell the difference between true and false, pain and drug, Wolfes and doppelgänger ghosts.
“Someone did it.” Miriam was still suspicious. Still watchful. “Who else, if not these boys?”
“It could’ve been anyone.” Yael dropped Felix’s wrist. Her fingers migrated to her temples, pressing either side of her head as if she could squeeze a solution out. “It must have been someone from Molotov. Or Germania. Or the National Socialists discovered our Enigma code and managed to listen in.”
“If that’s the case…” Miriam’s breath was more of a hiss. “What else does the SS know? Yael, if they’re aware of our assassination plans, they could be waiting for us in the Führerbunker. The real Führer could be transferred anywhere. The Kehlsteinhaus. The Wolfsschanze.”
“We don’t know that,” Yael said.
“That’s right. We don’t know!” Miriam kicked at a tuft of straw. The woman’s knife was put away, but she still looked ready to stab someone. “We could be walking straight into an ambush, and we’d have no idea!”
Only then did Felix notice the lump behind Miriam’s foot. It was the syrette Luka had just used, emptied of its morphine. Morphine now soaring like a golden sunrise inside Felix, turning pain into peace, lies into truth.
The drug! It was the drug that had spared him—calming his heartbeat, tightening his pupils. Yael must’ve thought Felix was still abstaining from the painkiller. If she saw the crumpled syrette, realized how it was affecting him…
“We do have one advantage.” Yael waved her arm, indicating the files and photos. “Though it’d be better to get these records sorted in Germania. Henryka and Reiniger need to be informed about the leak as soon as possible.”
Miriam’s foot kept scuffing the barn floor, kicking up enough straw to cover the syrette. Out of sight, out of suspicion.
“I’m going to find Luka,” Yael said. “As soon as all this is cleaned up, we can depart for Germania. Agreed?”
Scuff, stamp. Miriam nodded. Yael ducked through the half-open barn door. Felix sat; the drug in his veins climbed higher, shone brighter as Miriam started collecting the Doppelgänger Project documents. He considered the straw mound, wondering if he should try to dig up the empty syrette, pocket it. But no. Felix picked up Anne Weisskopf’s papers instead—brittle hair, brain matter, help me stare—and tucked them back into their manila envelope.
Some things were better left buried.