“Pass code?”
The gun was barrel-first in Felix’s face, such a small circle evoking so much fear. His mouth had gone dry, and his tongue felt nailed to his teeth. He held his hands up. The others were doing the same. Weapons down, arms high.
“The wolves of war are gathering! They sing the song of rotten bones!” Yael tore at her sleeve, unleashing the tattooed wolves. “I’m Volchitsa, and these three are with me!”
The Mausers didn’t move.
Was it normal to sweat when you were this cold?
“All of you take off your shirts,” said the fighter whose rifle was prepped to blow Luka to the heavens. The man’s left sleeve had been ripped off at the shoulder. (In fact, all of the soldiers’ left sleeves were gone.)
“What?” Miriam asked sharply.
“If you are who you claim to be, it shouldn’t be a problem. Shirts off. Now.”
They obeyed, stripping down to their underthings. A fighter by Felix grabbed the mechanic’s bare arm, wiping the mud off his left bicep. Wiping still, until the skin became prickly and irritated.
“He’s clean!”
“This one, too,” Luka’s inspector declared.
The soldier studying Miriam paused, staring at her numbers as if they were a safe combination he couldn’t quite crack.
“It’s not a blood-group tattoo,” she told him, “if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m a face-changer, like Volchitsa here, but I’m not SS.”
“They’re with me,” Yael said again. “General Reiniger and Henryka are expecting us. Now, may we please put our clothes back on?”
It was an affirmative. Rifles lowered, shirts were restored.
“Apologies,” the fighter closest to Yael said. “New protocol. We’ve had a few breaches the past few days.”
“Breaches?” Yael winced when she stood, hands clutching her side. “Enemy skinshifters?”
“Four that we know of. One got shot trying to cross the front. He went frosted postmortem. When we examined the body, we found the blood-group tattoo. Higher-ups figured he was a skinshifter. Another almost killed General Bauer, trying to take his place. He had the blood-group marking, too. That’s when General Reiniger ordered everyone to destroy their left sleeves. We discovered two more that way.”
“Sneaky Saukerls,” Luka muttered.
“When was this?” Yael asked.
“First one got shot a while back. Didn’t ferret out the rest of them until two days ago.”
“Explains our leak,” Yael said to Miriam, who just frowned.
Felix was grateful no one was looking too carefully at his mud-caked face as he listened in. His morphine armor was long gone, and Baasch’s deadline was a noose around his neck—drawing in, in with every passing minute.
There were only a few hours left to reach the resistance’s headquarters, ask them to radio Vlad’s safe house, dig into the truth of things. What was real? Mama’s death or Mama’s life? Felix’s hearing or his hope?
When the SS-Standartenführer first spoke of the resistance, Felix imagined a few hundred men with rifles holed up in a city block. Eavesdropping on the radio conversation in Molotov had only reinforced the image. But as the patrol led them to a transport—passing tank tracks and command tents and men barking orders—Felix realized this was a serious underestimation.
This was more than a few hundred men. Much more.
This was the Wehrmacht.
Everywhere Felix looked, he saw some version of his father’s uniform. All National Socialist badges were gone, and the brown fabric soaked, but the resemblance was unmistakable. Generations of men wore them—some sporting Papa’s gray hair, others closer to twenty-one. The age Martin would have been. Felix spotted one or two soldiers his own age, their Hitler Youth uniforms stripped to barest buttons and seams. Boys who could so easily be him.
Papa, Martin, himself, Papa, Martin, Papa, Martin.
Felix pressed his good hand to the watch in his pocket and wondered what his brother would do in the face of all this. Would Martin have called Baasch from that farmhouse telephone? Could Martin sacrifice all these people to the SS for the Wolfes’ safety?
Could Felix, if it came to it?
The ground was slick with mud—just like the many miserable kilometers they’d slogged through. Only here, the earth had been stamped down by scores of boots, slashed through with tank tracks. Extra-treacherous landscape, perfect for stumbling.
Felix didn’t stand a chance.
Papa, Martin, Papa—face full of mud, teeth pressed into tread. Grit scratched shapes beneath Felix’s eyelids. The ground peeled away before he could even try to push himself up.
Luka—the Arschloch who’d just saved his life—was helping him to his feet again. “You all right there, Wonderboy?”
Not really. He was losing focus, getting distracted by a picture too huge to process. These soldiers passing in dizzying numbers were not Felix, nor his family. They weren’t who mattered, and if Felix allowed himself to think any differently… that’s when doubt crept in. That’s when the choice Baasch gave him would be too horrible to make.
“I’m fine.” Felix tried to wipe the grit from his eyes, but his arm was just as filthy, and he only succeeded in smearing more between frost-colored eyelashes.
He was glad when they finally reached their transport: a Kübelwagen. The car was too small to fit the four of them plus a driver, but it was the only vehicle the front could spare. They crammed into the seats, slipping on account of mud everywhere. Felix couldn’t tell if the girls had shifted their hair into darker colors or if they were simply that caked in dirt.
“We look like golems,” Miriam muttered as they settled in.
Felix had no idea what a golem was, but Yael laughed as she climbed into the front passenger seat. The sound was so at odds with its surroundings, so… hopeful.
“We’ll be clean soon enough,” she assured them, then turned to Felix. “You’ll be reunited with your sister. I’m directing the driver to Henryka’s office.”
Almost there.
Battle sounds faded as their vehicle pulled away from the front lines, but they returned within minutes. Germania was smoldering. Felix smelled the city’s ashes through the open windows, mixing with rain. They drove farther and farther into the city, past standstill streetcars and buildings pocked with bullet-hole constellations. It was hard to reconcile these streets with the bustling capital Felix had visited only a month before. Gone were the housewives carrying freshly wrapped baked goods under their arms, the schoolchildren thronging along sidewalks. Cafés usually cluttered with coffee cups and congenial conversations were gutted clean.
Felix kept expecting the Kübelwagen to pull to a stop—in front of an imposing house with a brass door knocker, by the steps of a stately marble structure—but the driver kept going, until the gunshots were a deafening distance away. He could almost feel the heat of the battle when the engine cut off.
Yael slid out of the car, waved for them to follow.
He was here. He’d made it! To… a beer hall?
Of all the locations Felix had imagined the resistance leadership might meet, a bierstube with swastika banners draped along its walls was not among them. Places like this were hives for National Socialist officers. Baasch himself might’ve even enjoyed a pint here once or twice.
“The headquarters have been here this whole time?” Felix wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale beer as they followed Yael inside. Like most places they’d passed, the beer hall had been abandoned in a hurry: lights out, tables scattered with half-empty glasses.
“We moved when Aaron-Klaus shot the doppelgänger,” Yael explained. “But we’ve always used a beer hall for cover. Any National Socialists loyal to the resistance could frequent a beer hall without attracting attention. If we’d operated out of a private residence or a warehouse, the Gestapo would have noticed.”
“You hid beneath their pint glasses,” Miriam grunted with appreciation. “Smart.”
“Verdammt smart,” Luka echoed.
They walked to the rear of the establishment and descended a set of stairs. To Felix’s eyes, the cellar was just as empty as the hall above, but Yael led them through a series of hidden doorways. The final one was made of reinforced steel, locked from the inside. They stopped in front of it. Yael rapped her knuckles to the metal—two sets of sharp, double knocks—and waited.
The first thing Felix saw when it opened was a cloud of hair, frizzed and floating. There was a woman under it, brandishing an uncapped marker in her fist. “Yael?”
“Henryka!”
They were waved into the headquarters, the door bolted behind them. Henryka and Yael lost no time embracing. A hug that reminded Felix this was her homecoming.
Some home. He scanned the basement. Several people huddled around a pair of radios and Enigma machines. Bookshelves flanked a hallway opening. The Führer glowed in the corner, mouthing “You will be crushed” from the television screen. A typewriter lay on the floor, smashed. There was no sign of his twin sister.
“Where’s Adele?”
Henryka let go of Yael. There was a small flock of marks on her right cheek—cuts that had recently shed their scabs. These collided into each other when she frowned. “She’s—”
“FELIX?” The shriek was muffled, but there was no doubt in Felix’s mind it belonged to Adele. He felt his sister’s franticness—punching along with her fists against a second reinforced door.
The room was too small for the way Felix ran through it. His own body met the door—hard. Nothing budged except his bones. “I’M HERE, AD!”
“LET ME OUT! PLEASE LET ME OUT!”
Felix reached for the handle. Locked. He slammed his right hand against the metal, remembering only too late that it was injured. PAIN shot through him: phantom and real.
The others stood in a semicircle, watching his efforts. Henryka crossed her arms. “Unless you’re a howitzer or a man with a key, you’re not getting through that door,” she told him.
Felix clutched his hand to his chest, fighting back a scream. “W-what is she doing in there? She’s just a girl—”
Every female in the room gave him a withering look.
Luka snorted.
“Your ‘just a girl’ sister can do a lot of damage.” A dark-haired young man tore off his radio headset and rolled up his sleeves to show welts tangling with his inner arm veins. The work of nails. “She fights like a drowning cat.”
“Because you’ve kept her LOCKED UP for a month!” It was his sister’s worst nightmare: being trapped with no way out. No wonder steel rattled at Felix’s back, pounding with kicks and fists and whatever else Adele could throw. “Where’s the key?”
Henryka’s arms stayed crossed. “We’ve kept Adele in there for everyone’s safety. Hers most of all. It’s a war zone outside, and she’s wearing the face of the girl who shot Hitler.”
The face YOU stole! Felix swallowed the accusation back. He mustn’t let his rage build up, mustn’t let them see. “Where is the key?”
Henryka leveraged freedom as effectively as Baasch. The unlocked door came with conditions: Felix assumed all responsibility for his sister. If Adele harmed anyone or damaged anything, both Wolfe twins would go into the closet.
Understood?
Understood. (Anything to get her out.)
When the door swung open, Adele threw an arm in front of her face, hissing at the brightness. Both he and his sister had been born pale creatures, but a month without sunlight had left Adele translucent. The only color was in her hands, which she’d pummeled raw against the door. When Felix looked above her for the closet light, all he saw was a pull chain. No bulb.
They’d trapped Adele alone in the dark.
Alone. In the dark.
All this time.
“Felix?” Adele dropped her arm, blinking as she tried to reconcile the basement’s light with the sight of her brother. “How—what—”
Adele’s shoulder blades dug like stunted wings into Felix’s forearms when he hugged her. Had they always been this sharp? Or had the resistance been starving her, too?
Felix’s wound burned, and his sister squirmed (she’d always been averse to hugs longer than three seconds, further proof that Adele was, indeed, Adele), but he held her tight, afraid of what might happen if he let go.
“Ow, Felix!” Adele managed to weasel out of his grip. She looked ready to punch something—fists bunched, lips knotted—as she took in the rest of the map room. Her stare froze on “Luka?”
“Fräulein.” The victor nodded, but the rest of his body stiffened, as if Adele were a grenade with the pin pulled and he was fighting the urge to flee before she exploded everywhere. “I’d say it’s been too long, but—”
“What is this?” Adele jerked forward, only to find her collar caught in Felix’s grip. “Revenge for Osaka?”
Felix had to use both hands to hold Adele back. He knew her rage, he felt it. But Henryka was watching the exchange with pressed lips, and the young man with clawed-up arms tensed, ready to hurl both twins into the closet.
“Let me go!” Adele twisted around, blouse tearing, and grasped at her brother’s hands, stopping only when she saw the bandage. “Your hand! Oh, God. Felix, your fingers…”
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he lied.
“What the hell is going on?” his sister whispered.
Felix wished he knew. A clock by one of the shelves told him it was just a shade past midnight. Thirty-one hours had passed since his call to Baasch. Only five remained before… what?
What was going to happen? It all depended on Felix’s next question. Henryka’s next answer. “Yael told me my parents are in a resistance safe house. With a man named Vlad. Have you heard from them?”
“Kasper, have you had any messages from Vlad’s farm?” the older woman asked. The man with the clawed arms shook his head. “Johann?”
Johann sat with his headphones half on, immersed in conversations both verbal and electrical. It took him a moment to answer. “No. Nothing.”
“That’s not unusual,” Yael assured Felix. “Vlad’s something of a hermit.”
“Can we contact him? I want to speak with my parents, to make sure they’re okay.” Please let them be alive. Please let them be them.
All traces of warden-Henryka had vanished, remolding into a motherly smile. “Of course you do. However, it’s quite late. In all likelihood they’re asleep—”
“Please. Can we just try?” YOUR LIVES DEPEND ON IT, he wanted to scream, but Papa’s life might depend on Felix’s discretion, so instead he took a breath and explained, “It’s just, I’d like to talk to them as soon as possible. They’re probably worried sick about Ad and me.”
After a moment, Henryka relented. “Kasper? Reinhard? Would you try hailing Vlad?”
Exhaustion toned Kasper’s eyes as he twisted the radio dials to the right frequency. Another man—older, middle thirties—was typing into an Enigma machine, jotting its results down in a notebook, passing them to Kasper, who read it aloud into the transceiver. Gibberish letters—not unlike the conversations Felix had overheard in Molotov.
The rest of the room went about its business. Johann and a girl whose hair served as a pencil pincushion operated a second communication station. Luka leaned against a bookshelf, his eyes never straying far from Adele. Miriam began arranging the Doppelgänger Project files on a card table, photographs on top. Felix shifted to an angle where the television glow drowned their images out.
Yael began speaking to Henryka in near whispers. “I’m afraid we’ve run into some complications. There’s been a leak—”
Kasper’s radio was a mechanic’s gold mine: cords and gauges and switches and red lights. The Enigma machine was simpler on the outside—not so very different from a typewriter. It held two sets of alphabets. A keyboard version plus a lamp board, which lit up with a letter’s code double when the regular keys were pushed. The code was unbreakable without the exact rotor combination.
Felix moved as close as he dared to the operator’s shoulder, and even then he had to squint to make out the letters on the rotor markers: W-L-S.
Three tiny letters were all that stood between the resistance and their foe.
Three tiny letters and a phone call.
Felix hoped he wouldn’t have to. He hoped his parents were alive, safe. But this hope was shrinking while Baasch’s noose tightened. Seconds ticked into minutes, and from the look on Kasper’s face, no one had answered his hail. When the young man caught Felix’s eyes—looking, looking—he shook his head.
“Keep trying,” Felix urged.
Kasper repeated the letters into the radio. The room buzzed around them. Henryka and Yael’s exchange was picking up steam—growing hotter and hissier when Miriam joined their conversation. The television emitted a pitch that would drive dogs mad. Pencils scratched. Keys clacked. But the sound Felix needed to hear most never came: Vlad’s end stayed silent.
Kasper sighed. “No answer. Sorry. Like Henryka said, it’s late and Vlad’s the early-to-rise type. He’s probably asleep. I can’t keep jamming the radio waves with all the other transmissions trying to get through. They’re important.”
NOTHING’S AS IMPORTANT AS THIS! “Doesn’t he have a telephone?”
“No. We’re fortunate he has a shortwave, to be honest.” Kasper was already readjusting his radio’s channels.
“But—”
“Leave Kasper to his duties.” A hand settled on Felix’s shoulder. Its fingers were bird-bone delicate, but their grip was made of metal. Henryka spun him around, nodded at his filthy bandages. “For now you have other things to tend to. There are medical supplies in the washroom. Go get cleaned up.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” Yael offered. “You and Adele can catch up in my old quarters.”
The beer hall’s subbasement was an entire warren of rooms. Its hallway was lined with more bookshelves, full of titles Felix had never seen before: The Metamorphosis, The Call of the Wild, The Biology of Desert Wildlife, Les Misérables. Well-loved books with creased spines. The whole place had a well-loved feel. A chocolate smell haunted the kitchen, and three of the four sleeping quarters were stuffed with record players, lamps, quilts, photographs, fire extinguishers, plush rugs, art stranger than anything Felix had ever seen—as if the painters had dropped their subjects, splintering them almost beyond recognition. In one of the rooms—he noted—sat a telephone.
Yael paused by the fourth, starkly empty room. Its doorknob hung in pieces, the wood around it beat to pulp. “I assume I have you to thank for this?” she asked Adele.
“And I assume I have you to thank for all of this?” A month’s worth of unburned energy charged Adele’s words as she fired back. Felix didn’t have to turn around to know his sister was gearing back up for a fight.
The last thing he needed was to get locked into a closet. “Ad—”
“Don’t ‘Ad’ me! I’ve just spent a gottverdammt eternity locked up in the dark, and you’re acting like everything’s FINE?” His sister spit bullets. “A girl came into my flat, Felix. She attacked me the night you left—”
“I know.”
“YOU KNOW?” Adele’s shriek was too large for the hallway. “You know and all you’re going to do is take a shower?”
“It’s”—how could he tell his sister he’d gone to the ends of the earth and back for her? That he would go farther still?—“complicated.”
“Then uncomplicate it.”
Yael—strangely enough—came to his rescue. “You have every right to be angry, Adele, but Felix is the last person who deserves your yells. Let your brother clean out his hand. You’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
Adele sniffed and walked through the broken door without further fuss. Cease-fire. For now. Felix was grateful. The longer he stood here wearing mud-crusted bandages, the more he imagined a new infection rooting, spreading.
He still had so much to lose.
The washroom sat at the end of the hall—as lived-in as all the other rooms—there was buildup on the showerhead and a family of toothbrushes by the sink. Yael raided the towel cabinet for gauze and antiseptic—and though Felix had seen enough of both items for a lifetime, he grunted his gratitude when she handed them over.
“I know you’re good with first aid, but”—she nodded at his right hand’s missingness—“can you manage?”
“Adele can help me,” he said pointedly.
“Right.” Yael dug more of the same out of the cabinet. When she got all she needed, she nudged it shut with her knee, started moving back toward the hall. She stopped suddenly. “Felix, I’m sorry you had to find your sister like that. They shouldn’t have kept Adele in the dark.”
Sorry. As if the word hadn’t been watered down to the point of meaninglessness between them. It was as useless as the sopping wrapping Felix unraveled from his fist and tossed into the wastebasket.
Yael disappeared to tend to her own wounds. Felix wrenched the showerhead on.
It would take a lot more than sorry to fix things.