Telling truth from lies was simple, once you learned the science behind it. Yael was having visions of veritas everywhere tonight.
Truth: Luka wanted to join the resistance.
Truth: Luka was afraid.
Truth: So was she, still.
Knowing when to trust someone wasn’t so cut-and-dried. It was a mysterious equation, made of heartstrings and gut feelings. So when Luka’s stare fell to her wolves and he asked “What do they mean?” Yael could not rely on a pulse or a pupil. There was only her iron voice:
—TELL HIM WHO YOU ARE—
Beginning to now. It was a long story, and at times hard to convey. Yael tried her best to do each wolf justice. The Babushka’s magical, miracle words. Mama’s fever-soothing fingers. Miriam’s bravery. (At this point in the narrative, Luka interrupted. “That Miriam?” he asked, rubbing the swollen knife memory on his throat.) Aaron-Klaus’s assassination attempt. (A second interruption: “I remember him. His face was on fire. I mean—not actually on fire. More like… lit.” Yael knew exactly what he meant.) Vlad’s training.
Look straight ahead. Fight with your weak.
At the end of it all, Yael realized, it did not feel very much like an ending. There was still so much more to her story. One of the larger pieces sat beside her in his undershirt. Arms speckled with goose bumps. Jaw made of edge. Though she’d finished talking, he kept listening with an intensity that set the skin on her own bare-wolf arm alight.
She watched him through the silent dark and thought of the next chapter.
“Yael Reider,” Luka said after a moment. “You’re impossible.”
“So are you, Luka Löwe.”
“I think we’re using the word differently, Fräulein of Infinite Faces, who speaks six languages and identifies poisons by smell.”
“A few months ago, I found the idea of a National Socialist poster boy with a heart just as absurd.” Yael placed her hand over his. The picture of her oldest self was still caught between Luka’s fingers. “But here we are.”
His touch tightened against hers. Goose bumps flared across both of their arms. This was no Kaiten kiss. No heaven and earth moving beneath her feet and passion torching her lips while the sun shone overhead. It was no train kiss either.
It was just a touch: skin to raw to skin. The simplest thing.
It was real.
She stared at their fingers: hers slender with neat oval nail beds, his crusted with engine grease, both made of fingerprints and cuticles and nerve endings that shot signals to their brains. (We’re touching!)
(What now?)
“I don’t want to be their poster boy,” Luka said in a husk of a voice. “I never wanted that.”
“Then why did you race?”
“My father.”
Kurt Löwe. Kradschützen. When Yael first read Luka’s file, she assumed the racer was carrying on a legacy, taking up the chrome handlebars of his father’s mantle. But there was an edge in the victor’s words that spoke otherwise.
“When I was growing up, all he ever talked about was the war: riding motorcycles through the Muscovy territories, killing commies. I thought he was a hero. He thought I was a weakling. I started racing because I wanted to prove him wrong, make him proud. But he had too much verdammt pride to share it. No matter how many races I won, it was never enough for him. I was never enough. I needed to be faster, stronger, better. Nothing made a difference. Not even becoming a poster boy.” His hand tensed under hers, as if he was about to pull away. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
It was Luka’s turn to look down at their hands and the picture between. “You’ve been through so much, and here I am complaining about my father.…” He drifted off. “It must seem so small to you.”
Yael started at her young self. “No person’s life is small,” she said.
“Yael.” Her name was gruff and velvet off Luka’s tongue: all at once familiar. “I don’t just want to be a member of the resistance. I want to do more. Fight. Stop this”—his fingers trembled over her photograph—“from happening.”
“That’s always been the goal,” Yael reminded him. “The National Socialists aren’t making it easy. I found a roster in Dr. Geyer’s office. There’s a whole detail of skinshifters dedicated to protecting Hitler. The SS-Maskiertekommando des Führers. The doppelgänger I shot in the ballroom was one of them. There are nineteen others.”
“Nineteen?” Luka gave a low whistle. “Scheisse. That’s some hefty survival insurance.”
Nineteen men who could vanish into a crowd, reappear on the Reichssender at a moment’s notice. Hydra heads, all of them. It wasn’t just a matter of weeding through the doppelgängers to find the real Hitler, but making sure none of them could spring back.…
“Then there’s the matter of the leak,” Yael went on. “Getting access to the Führer was difficult enough when the National Socialists weren’t expecting us. Now the SS could be waiting at any turn.”
“So turn a different way,” Luka said. “If the SS is expecting you to hunt down the real Führer and kill him, don’t. The odds of success sound a bit stacked anyway. Hitler could be sipping mineral water on some tropical beach right now for all we know.”
“Novosibirsk isn’t sending any reinforcements, and Reiniger’s only hope of winning Germania is to increase his army. That won’t happen unless we assassinate Hitler and lift the Wehrmacht’s fealty oath.” Not to mention the dance of politics with captive Hermann Göring. “The plan was perfect.”
“Best-laid, I know.” The starlight above was fit only for ghosts, but every centimeter of the victor’s face was shining as he went on. “What if you don’t have to kill Hitler again? What if all you need to do is destroy the idea of him?”
Yael stopped breathing. “What do you mean?”
“The Führereid makes soldiers swear unconditional obedience to ‘the leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler.’ Not his nineteen decoys. Proof of them alone would be enough to nullify the oath in some men’s minds. If we copied these files and printed them in Das Reich, if we found a way to expose the Doppelgänger Project on the Reichssender, it wouldn’t just be Wehrmacht soldiers rallying to General Reiniger’s cause.” The lit-ness of Luka’s brow and cheeks spread to his voice. “We know Hitler’s been using skinshifters, but the rest of the Reich has no idea.… Show the Reich what you showed me—get all that ‘sensitive information’ out there—and we’re sure to get more than a few civilians in the mix.”
Das Reich? The Reichssender? Civilians? Yael’s head spun with possibilities and oxygenless sparks. She took a new breath in, let the thoughts settle.
It wasn’t a terrible plan. It wasn’t even a bad one. It could actually be good. (After all, what better way to kill a hydra than by severing all its heads at once?) With the evidence of the Maskiertekommando and its origins out there, all trust in the Führer as a figure would be broken. Hitler’s unquestionable hold on the masses would, in fact, be questioned. (Real? Or doppelgänger?)
“That would cause chaos.”
“Exactly.” Luka grinned.
Breaking into the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda would be easier than infiltrating the Führerbunker. Possible, at least. “Accessing Das Reich’s printing press would be too time-consuming. We’d be better off using the Reichssender, but…”
“What?”
The truth Yael carried under her sweater, beneath her skin, was shocking. For most it would not go down well. Even with paper-and-ink proof. Even if she showed the world who she was, what she’d endured. “Who’s going to believe me?”
“It doesn’t have to be just your word against the National Socialists. Let me present the information on the Reichssender with you.” Luka was a candle unto himself. Face and words and faith: bright, bright. Alive and burning. “Before you shot fake-Führer, the entire Reich watched him give me a toast. They’ve watched me race for the past five years. They know me. Hell, some of them might even trust me. If I’m going to be Hitler’s verdammt poster boy, then I might as well use that status to hamstring the Saukerl.”
His fingers danced under hers. Nerves shouting louder than ever: WE’RE STILL TOUCHING! WHAT NOW? WHAT NOW?
“Luka, the Reichssender station is in the middle of Germania—”
“I know where it is. In the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. At the Ordenspalais on Wilhelm Street. SS central. Shares cups of sugar with the Chancellery. I’ve been there plenty of times for interviews. The front-desk girl has a collection of my autographs.”
Of course she does.
“I know you love sporting the jacket as a hat, but that won’t cut it this time,” Yael told him. “Walking down Wilhelm Street with Victor Löwe would be the equivalent of pasting a bull’s-eye to our backs.”
“The Ministry of Propaganda can’t be the only place with filming equipment,” Luka reasoned. “If we find a camera in Reiniger’s section of Germania, we can prerecord the presentation, the way they do with Chancellery Chats. All you’d have to sneak into the Ordenspalais is the film reel.”
“It”—if there was another argument, Yael couldn’t think of it—“could work.”
“It will work.” Luka’s confidence was contagious. Spreading like fever-heat through his fingertips into hers until Yael’s insides were brimming. Nerves mixing with iron voice and hope that was not heavy.
What now?
—NOW WE MAKE OURSELVES—
Yael was not a monster. Luka was not the next generation of National Socialism. They were what the Reich would come to fear the most. A Jewish girl and a German boy holding the future and the past in their hands—together.
They sat this way for as long as they could—her wolves to his skin—until the barn door opened wider, bathing the yard with light. Miriam called them back.
Luka squinted at the brightness. “She’s not going to stab me, is she?”
“Not tonight.” Yael didn’t want to let go of his hand. “One last thing.”
Her picture was clearer under the new light, full of finer details: eyelash swoops and the frays of thread peeking from her collar. Yael stared eleven years back, took all the buzz and brim and feelings inside, and changed.
Into herself.
It wasn’t an exact replica, but a reimagining. (Adolescence left much room for interpretation.) Her forehead was high, with an oblong bone structure. Brown hair grew long, curling at the ends, tickling the insides of her elbows. For the eyes Yael chose a color to match her mother’s. Pine-forest dark: made of cool shadows and rich earth. Altogether such a far cry from Adele Wolfe or Elsa Schwarz or the many other skins she’d spent her life slipping into.
This one fit.
A mirror would have been nice, but Yael didn’t really need one. She knew this face was right. She could see it in the way Luka was staring at her. His eyelids were raw from tears, and the fire of an idea, a plan, changing things still roared behind his indigo irises.
“It’s your best face yet,” he said.