CHAPTER 44

Still no news on the camera setup, but this didn’t stop Luka from reading until his vision blurred all letters into one. Until even the mug of black coffee by his wrist (which had been drained and refilled multiple times) couldn’t help keep the words straight.

But he wasn’t just reading, was he? His job was to tell. Words were Luka Löwe’s forte, but taking mass murder and human experimentation and Hitler’s largest lie and cramming all these things into a speech was testing even his oratory abilities.

He spent the better part of an hour with a pencil in hand—trying to think of the best way to say the worst thing. Graphite pressed to paper in bursts, the skeleton of a speech took shape.

People of the Third Reich. This is Luka Löwe, your double victor, and I am here to tell you the truth. The Führer Adolf Hitler has been lying to you about a great many things. Peace. Purity. Progress. This is what Hitler tells us our empire has attained. “The Aryan race is great,” he tells us. “The Aryan race is strong. The Aryan race is meant by God to rule.”

Lies.

I am going to tell you the truth. The truth I think most of you already know: We are not great. We are not strong. We are murderers, stained in the blood of innocents. Hundreds, thousands of

He stopped. Pencil stabbing so hard into the paper it made a little hole.

The words did not feel like enough.

“Where’s an eraser?” he asked the room.

Yael grabbed the paper, skimming over his writing instead. “This is good!”

She passed the speech to Miriam before Luka could snatch it back.

“Numbers are easy to dismiss. That’s why they marked us the way they did.” Miriam tapped her forearm. “Numbers don’t hurt. Numbers don’t bleed. Choose one of the autopsy reports. Air that on the Reichssender if you want them to face the truth. Show people a child’s picture, give them a name, a birthday. Show them we’re flesh and blood. Not digits.”

Luka spent another half hour rereading the files. Flesh and blood and bone.

Choose one.

How could he choose just one when there were so many?

So many…

It wasn’t just the words blurring together, but the pages themselves. Luka stared at them until his eyes crossed and the stack melted into a blur. There was an ache in his shoulders that trickled all the way down his spine. Who knew paper could be so heavy?

Yael’s chair scraped out. “I think we could all use a bit of fresh air. Miriam? Luka?”

Fresh air. Did that even exist anymore?

Miriam waved the pair off, not even glancing up from her share of the documents. Dedication: legendary. If only there were a way to bottle up that kind of energy and disperse it across the whole of the resistance. Their victory would be won in days.

Their victory. This thought didn’t surprise Luka, only confirmed what he’d felt twisting inside him for so long. As fierce and fiery as the feeling behind Aaron-Klaus’s face that morning in the Grosser Platz. As frantic as that sable.

This was his fight, too.

Yael led him into the cellar. Instead of heading back to the beer hall, she took a second set of steps that wound up to the building’s rooftop. Sometime in the past few hours, the rain had let up. Clouds peeled back to show hints of the morning to come: A soft glow began to play off the rooftop’s many puddles.

It wasn’t a quiet dawn. Below, the city rumbled, not with the normal electric streetcars or delivery trucks, but a not-so-distant firefight.

“I wouldn’t wander too far from the door,” Yael warned Luka as he stepped out. “There could be snipers.”

He stopped just beyond the threshold. She stood next to him. “What a night.”

“What a month,” Luka murmured back.

Yael smiled. She looked more herself than ever in the gentle light. She’d changed into old riding gear, and her fill-in-the-Aryan features had vanished, reclaimed by the face she’d shown him on the farmhouse steps. Jawline resolute. Black eyelashes so thick they might have been kohl. Eyes that made Luka feel as if he were back in the taiga forest running through wolf-patched snow—green so dark it was brown, brown so fresh it was living. Her hair was still in soft curls, but she’d knotted it into a bun. Some wisps had come free, licking her forehead in the poststorm breeze.

One strand tickled the edge of her lips.

Luka wanted to kiss her. Now more than ever. Instead he stood with his back to the doorframe, breathing in air faint with burning.

“I have a feeling this will all be over soon.” Yael stared out across the rooftops. The city was scarce with lights, which made the silhouettes of the buildings that much more stark. Across the Spree, the Volkshalle caused the rest of the skyline to cower. “It’s all about to crumble. One way or another.”

Luka wondered what amount of explosives it would take to raze a mammoth like the Volkshalle to its foundations. Not much. Take away a few key pillars and the weight of the building would bring itself down.

“What will you do, when all this is over?” he asked.

“If I’m alive…” she prefaced. “If I’m alive, then I’ll live. I’ll wear short sleeves. When people ask what my name is, I’ll tell them the truth. I won’t have to check my face every time I step outside.”

What simple things to dream of.

“What about you?” Yael asked. “Still fancying becoming a poet?”

“A poet?”

“At the Rome checkpoint, you told me maybe you’d become a poet after all this.”

“Did I?” All Luka could remember about Rome was how much he wanted to win. To take back from Adele the victory she’d wrenched from him. He’d sat at that dining room table, seething in cigarette smoke while she slurped her noodles.

“You told me we needed each other. That was when I first started seeing you…” Yael’s voice drifted off, but she was watching him.

He stared back into the evergreen wilderness of her eyes.

“I lied to you, Luka,” she whispered.

“Which time?” he asked.

Both of them smiled, because the lies they’d exchanged were too many to count.

“In the ballroom.” Yael’s voice was as tumbling as their waltz had been.

That was a moment Luka remembered perfectly; he’d spilled out the true truth straight from the heart: There is no one else. And Adele (who was not-Adele but had always ever been Yael) had yanked his cardiac muscle straight from his chest and shredded it to bits with pointed canines: I do not love you. And I never will.

His heart was in her teeth again. Luka stood frozen, waiting for her truth.

“When you won the Axis Tour, I thought you’d ruined everything. When you followed me to that alley in Tokyo, I thought you’d ruined everything. But you’ve surprised me, Luka Löwe. Again and again, you’ve surprised me in the best of ways.”

Yael Reider drew close. Closer than they’d been in the Tokyo alley or on the deck of the Kaiten or on the train to New Delhi. So near that Luka thought he could feel her heart fluttering beneath her chest, just off sync with his.

“I do love you,” she said, and kissed him.

Him. Her. Lips meeting without lies. It was the purest, strongest, most heart-clenching thing.

He loved her, too.

Scheisse, he loved her. It wasn’t just a feeling, but a knowing, hot inside him. Love like burning.

Luka kissed her back. Until he couldn’t tell where he ended and Yael began. Until her fingers raked through his hair and past his scar, and he did not care because they were both alive, and this was the truest thing he’d ever done. Until the world burst into flames around them.

For a moment, Luka wondered if his emotions had simply taken flight. But when Yael pulled back and gasped, he opened his eyes to see that there was no phoenix, no magical incarnation of the feelings roaring inside his chest.

These flames were very, very real. Below them, the street was on fire.