CHAPTER 43

Never had time dragged so slowly. Never had hours passed so swiftly.

Four hours: Felix should’ve felt better after the shower. Mud gone, muscles loosened. Instead he was as exposed as the wound he held aloft for his sister. On-fire raw. Both sat on the bunk in Yael’s sleeping quarters. Its plain white bedding became littered with bandages and bottles as Adele performed first aid, casting aside whatever she didn’t use. Martin’s pocket watch lay among them.

“I’ll look at that next.” This meant worlds beyond worlds, coming from Adele. She looked at Martin’s pocket watch as often as she visited their brother’s grave: rarely, never. “We’ll need something to keep track of time, and they might get suspicious if we keep popping in and out of the map room.”

He’d told Adele everything he could, fitting a recap of the Axis Tour, the Tokyo torture, Baasch’s plan, and everything that had come of it, into fewer minutes than did the tale justice.

“Those Saukerls!” his sister said once the story ended.

“Which ones?” Felix wondered.

“All of them!” Adele’s hair hung bright around her face, but days of darkness roiled beneath her words. “Baasch, Yael, the whole verdammt lot!”

Felix remembered that anger—red, revenge rage. How it covered the floor in Tokyo, filled the cracks inside his mouth. Some of it still throbbed under his fresh bandages, but the absoluteness of the feeling had evaporated. Baasch’s mission no longer felt like his right. It was all a muddy mess of lives and deaths and wrongs, and by God if Felix didn’t want to wash his hands of it!

“Do you really think Mama’s dead?” Pitch-black emotion seeped through Adele’s teeth.

“If she’s not, if she and Papa are really at Vlad’s…” What good had ifs ever done him? Best to go with a more solid answer. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, Ad.”

His sister palmed Martin’s broken watch. “Don’t you?”

Three hours: Adele told her side of things as she fixed the watch, using tweezers from the medical cabinet (she’d had to wait for Luka to leave the washroom to retrieve them) and Felix’s instructions. In the end, there wasn’t much to either the tale or the repair. Aside from Yael’s attack in the flat and Adele’s three escape attempts, her month had been reduced to bruised toes and lightless noise. She’d overheard quite a bit through those layers of steel. Enough to know that the resistance’s chances of overthrowing the Führer were dismal.

“Even if your SS-Standartenführer doesn’t have Mama and Papa, what will happen when the SS takes back Germania?” Adele asked. “We’ll be captured and beheaded regardless. They’ll torture the location of Vlad’s farm out of someone, and Mama and Papa will die, too.”

When the watch started working again, they set it to the time kept by the map room clock: 2:43 AM (Central Reich Time). Martin’s timepiece counted seconds steadily, ticking with the exact urgent volume it had used in the Imperial Palace’s guest quarters.

You know what you have to do, it seemed to say. Don’t you? Don’t you?

Two hours: Adele was right.

One hour: He crossed the hall with leaden steps, into the sleeping quarters with the telephone. The others were in the front room, voices jumbling together while they discussed the Doppelgänger Project papers. As if those files could actually make a difference.

What if they could? The question followed Felix through the door. It slithered around his neck as he walked to the chest of drawers, where the telephone sat. It flared inside his phantom fingers as he lifted the receiver, trying not to think of Yael or the hundreds of Wehrmacht men who could be Papa, Martin, himself.

The thought reared its head anyway. Doubts—a dozen, hundred, thousand different faces’ worth—crept through the tendons of Felix’s good hand. Stilled it. But there were hands that kept moving: Martin’s watch itched in his pocket. Reminding Felix that his life—the lives of all he held dearest—would be much shorter unless he kept his focus, reached out, and dialed. And really, what faces was he thinking of? Yael was the faceless girl. The men of war were faceless, too, soldiers destined to die no matter what Felix did.

The only faces that mattered were the ones he could save.

This was it. The last piece.

Salvation, damnation.

Felix dialed.

Despite the predawn hour, it took only two rings before the call was answered, then transferred. Felix hardly had time to second-guess his decision when Baasch got on the line, sounding half asleep as he growled his greeting. “Yes?”

Felix’s breath quivered in his throat.

There would be blood.

There had to be blood.

But it would not belong to the Wolfes.

“I’m in position,” he said.