All thoughts of snipers and life-changing kisses vanished when Yael ran to the building’s edge. The burst of flames that had pulled her out of sheer bliss belonged to a grenade, now only a spot of char on the sidewalk. Fighters (all Reiniger’s, Yael could tell, because they were missing their left sleeves) were falling back, using parked cars and storefronts to protect themselves from the fire of the advancing enemy.
War had come to their doorstep.
SS soldiers rounded the corner, moving with boldness that meant numbers. Their bullets hailed through the street. Shattering glass, wounding stones, flaying flesh. Yael watched, transfixed, from the rooftop—a Valkyrie over battle. Unable to choose: Life or Death?
Death…
Death…
It was all death beneath her. More SS and loyalist Wehrmacht flooded the street. (And more and more and more. Until Yael wondered if there were any double-lightning pins left south of the Spree.) Reiniger’s men didn’t stand a chance. What could so few do against so many? The remaining resistance fighters retreated, but the National Socialists gave no chase. Instead they pushed straight into the entrance of the beer hall.
They knew about the headquarters.
It was the only building they entered, and their jackboots strode toward it with such purpose. There was nothing to stop them. Not even a locked door… She and Luka had left the entrance to the basement unbolted for an easy return.
—MIRIAM HENRYKA KASPER FELIX ADELE JOHANN REINHARD BRIGITTE MOVE MOVE MOVE—
But when Yael turned for the staircase, she found Luka barring her way, hands stretched across the door, frame to frame. When she tried to push past, he wrapped his arms around her, not a hug, but something fiercer.
Yael pushed. Luka held. He was strong, and even her hardest strain didn’t budge the pair a single centimeter.
“If you go down there, you’ll just get captured, too.” Luka’s voice rumbled from his chest to hers. “What good will that do anyone?”
There was a way past the victor—but it involved hurting, really hurting him. Yael might have considered it if Luka hadn’t been so verdammt right. She could not save her friends. Not this time. Even if she flew down those stairs in a Valkyrie fury, how many men could she manage bare-handed? She didn’t even have her gun… Like a dummkopf, she’d left it downstairs on the card table. Next to the files.
Oh, Scheisse, the files!
—DESCEND AND YOU WILL NOT ASCEND DOWN IS DEATH—
Here was death, too, Yael realized. SS soldiers were already swarming the building’s bottom levels. How long would it take them to find their way up to the roof?
Luka seemed to realize this, too. His arms loosened, so that Yael could lean back and see the fear on his face, tangling with disheveled hair. His eyes stormed the stairwell. “What do we do?”
Miriam, Henryka, Kasper, Felix, Adele, the other operatives…
She didn’t have room for that many more wolves.
“Yael!”
“Do—do you have any weapons?” she asked.
“Aside from my irrepressible wit and charm? No. You?”
“My knife.” It was tucked in her boot, force of habit, but a fight was out of the question. Only one option remained.
The rooftops.
She pulled Luka away from the door, spattering through puddles made molten by the rising sun. They ran to the roof’s edge, where the gap between buildings required a leap. Yael ignored all her pain—the wail of her wolves, the stitches in her side—and jumped. Luka made the mistake of looking down instead of across. He halted at the brink.
“Any chance you saved that parachute?”
Yael didn’t know if the sound leaving her throat was a laugh or a sob. Probably both. Unbelievable, absurd, irrepressible boy. He wasn’t really scared of the fall. (She could see that in the way he loped over the gap, morning gold flaring through his stare as he landed next to her.) He was just trying to keep her afloat. Laugh, sob, while her life got shot to pieces beneath her.
Together they ran, lunging across a block’s worth of buildings before reaching a gap too wide to cross. When they entered the building beneath, it was quiet. The doors to the flats were locked. Yael threw herself at the nearest one.
It was an artless lunge, doing more damage to her than the door. Yael still had hairpins, but her hands shook too hard to pick the lock. She couldn’t stop thinking about what was happening in Henryka’s basement. There was only one way out of the headquarters. No chance of any of them escaping… no chance…
“Yael?”
Her body couldn’t keep up with her need to—BREATHE JUST KEEP BREATHING—and she began choking on her own air.
“Yael? Yael?” Luka’s voice sounded like the train: yah-ell, yah-ell, yah-ell.
Dead. Oh God. They were all dead.
How had this happened? How was she on the floor, on her hands and knees, crying until she retched and still crying? How was Luka next to her, still saying her name as if it would help something?
“Yael, we can’t stay here. We have to go.”
“Go where?” She laughed, sobbed.
North? Where Reiniger’s forces sat hamstringed by the loss of their headquarters?
South? Where the Volkshalle loomed and the immortal Führer lurked, writing a victory speech for the Reichssender cameras?
East? Where Novosibirsk’s army clawed toward Moscow, unaware of the crushing blow the resistance had just been dealt?
West? Assuming the Americans let them in. Their desire for political neutrality left them little tolerance for refugees. Many had fled there in the last war, only to be sent straight back into the fangs of the Reich.
Any of this was assuming they could leave the building. Even if Yael and Luka raided one of these flats for civilian disguises, they wouldn’t get ten steps through the besieged block without being spotted.
“We’re trapped—”
Five stories below, a door crashed open. Luka held a hand to her lips. Hobnails clattered against the stairwell’s polished wood.
The SS were coming.