Felix knew the SS were coming. He’d even made sure the door was unlocked for them, but this didn’t make SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s entrance any less terrifying. The blitzkrieg was loud, for one thing. So many metal-edged boots stomping across the concrete floor. So many bullets biting bookshelves and walls. Miriam grabbed a gun from the card table and used it to take down three of the first advancers before getting shot herself. The radio operators had their own weapons, but instead of using them to remove a few more SS from the earth, they turned their sights on the communications equipment. The girl with the bun full of pencils dispatched her cipher machine, twisting its rotors into a useless combination, before smashing it onto the floor. Henryka ran for the map, managing to rip the Muscovy territories from the wall, all the way down to the Mediterranean before the invaders reached her. The older woman did not go down gently. Her limbs thrashed with wiry precision, breaking one SS-Sturmmann’s nose, crushing the larynx of another. In the end, only a bullet could stop her. Kasper and Johann managed an even higher cartilage-crunch count before being forced to the floor at gunpoint.
It lasted only thirty seconds—a supernova of bone dust and noise. Half a minute, and the room turned to ruin. Reinhard was slumped over his Enigma machine, dead. Henryka looked smaller than small on the floor—surrounded by scattered thumbtacks—life’s largeness shot out of her. Pink misted her cloud of hair.
Felix stood in the hallway entrance, deafened. His hands trembled above his head and kept trembling as one of the SS soldiers yanked him into the kneeling line of resistance fighters. Felix’s kneecaps cracked against the concrete, not far from where Henryka fell. Her body was facing him. Felix couldn’t tear his eyes away from the violence of color around it.
What had he done?
Technically, SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s boots sounded no different from those of any of the other men clattering around the basement. They were made of the exact same material: heel plates and hobnails of iron. But Felix knew Baasch was coming before he entered the map room. Tap, tap, tap to reveal gray eyes (still dead). The sight sent chills up his not-there fingers.
“This is it?” The officer paused and took in the map room. “Quite simple, for a rats’ nest.”
“There are more rooms in the back, Standartenführer Baasch,” an SS-Sturmmann informed him. “They’re being searched as we speak.”
Baasch removed his hat and tossed it onto the table, over the Doppelgänger Project documents. Felix kept waiting for the SS-Standartenführer to acknowledge him. Instead the officer collapsed into one of the chairs and continued issuing orders to his men. “Check the radios. See if any of them are still working.”
“Unhand me!” They’d found Adele. Felix’s sister was back to the wildcat version of herself as the SS-Sturmmann wrangled her into the map room. “I’m a victor of the Third Reich! Commended by the Führer himself! There’s been a mistake! My brother—”
When Adele caught sight of the kneeling row—Lugers to temples, Felix among them—her words dried up. She stopped twisting. Baasch waved her over to his chair.
“Victor Wolfe, I presume?”
At the officer’s signal, Adele’s left sleeve was peeled back. No wolves.
“I am myself, thank you very much,” his sister told Baasch coolly. “Now, if you’ll please tell your men to stop bruising my arms—”
Baasch didn’t. “Check the others! She could be passing for anyone!”
One by one they tore back the prisoners’ sleeves. No wolves. No wolves. They paused when they found Miriam’s numbers—braided with blood from her gunshot wound. “How did she get rid of the dogs?”
“It’s not her,” Felix told them. He needed to get the Luger away from his head. He needed the SS to let him and Adele go. Safely. Just like they promised they would.
“But she has an X—”
“Herr Wolfe is right. The numbers don’t match. So where is Inmate 121358ΔX?” Baasch’s stare landed on Felix. Narrowed. It made Felix feel as if he were back in the Imperial Palace. Thirteen days, twenty thousand kilometers ago. Nothing was fixed. Everything was falling to pieces. Salvation, damnation, damnation, damnation.
Felix examined every face in the map room, saw none of Yael’s. Luka was missing, too. “She—she’s not in the sleeping quarters?”
“Only Victor Wolfe was back there,” explained the soldier who still vised Adele’s arm. “We can check again.”
“No.” The SS-Standartenführer waved at his sister. “Put Victor Wolfe with the others.”
And so Adele was shoved to her knees, held there by another gun. As soon as the hammer clicked back, Felix knew there was no deal. SS-Standartenführer Baasch had never intended to let them go. His sister was a scapegoat, and Felix was a fool. A treacherous fool with a Luger to his head.
What had he done?
“You said Adele would be pardoned,” Felix croaked at Baasch. “You gave me your word.”
The SS officer stayed silent as he pulled out his handkerchief—spotless again, freshly pressed into eighths—and began unfolding it.
“You snitch! You przeklęty coward!” Felix felt Kasper’s snarl. The curses were mixed with actual spit, sticking to the side of the mechanic’s face.
Johann and the blond girl said nothing. They didn’t have to. Their stab, stab murder stares communicated all. And Miriam… if looks could kill, her gaze was a massacre.
But there was a worse death inside Felix. A revelation: He was not just broken this time, but the breaker. All of this—tendrils of Henryka’s hair clawing at his pant leg, smashed radios, and the blood, blood everywhere—was his fault. HIS.
Adele kept addressing the SS-Standartenführer in an imperious tone. “When the Führer hears about this—”
“The Führer ordered this. I’m sorry to say his word overrules mine, in the scheme of things.” Sorry? Whatever the SS-Standartenführer used that handkerchief for, it obviously wasn’t tears. If anything, he looked quite pleased with himself. “Personally, I think it’s a waste, eliminating stock as good as yours, but stabilizing the population after such widespread rebellion requires a very… public spectacle.”
Adele blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“They’re going to execute us on the Reichssender,” Kasper said, his voice already dead.
Retaliation in kind. Blood being paid at the guillotine blade. Heads tumbling across the Grosser Platz’s stones, cameras rolling with them.
“Execute?” His sister gave a strangled cry. “But—I didn’t do anything!”
“Start searching the documents. Look for communiqués, rosters, anything that will help us understand how deep this movement goes.” Baasch pulled his Luger from its holster and began using his handkerchief to polish it. “The answers are here. We just have to know how to flush them out.”
Felix couldn’t take his eyes off the weapon.
WHAT HAD HE DONE?
“You promised my father wouldn’t be harmed,” he managed through the scream in his head. “Honor that at least.”
The kerchief stopped sliding. The gun beneath was so bright it looked liquid.
“Honor…” the officer repeated slowly. “Honor and blood. ‘Blood and honor.’ None of those things will really protect you, Herr Wolfe. I’ve been a member of the National Socialist Party since the early days of Munich. I’ve watched men rise through the party ranks and fall just as quickly. Honor and an Aryan pedigree will only carry one so far. To excel, to truly excel, you must be cunning. Ruthless. You must crush those beneath you and claw those above—”
“This radio is working, Standartenführer!” The man examining the equipment pointed to the set in the corner. Kasper’s bullets had only grazed its display—cracked glass here, a dented knob there. A faint voice flickered through its headset, reciting nonsense letters. “The messages are encoded.”
“Try the cipher machines,” Baasch ordered. “Use the combination Herr Wolfe provided us over the phone.”
It took two soldiers to shove Reinhard’s body off the Enigma model. The initial examiner clicked its rotors into place and pecked a few keys before declaring, “It works!” He paused to translate the rest of the message. “Some of the retreating resistance fighters alerted their brass that we took this street. They want to know if the headquarters are still secure.”
Baasch stood. “If we keep radio communications open, we’d know their every move. We could have General Reiniger himself by sundown.”
Tap, tap, tap—a sound that made Felix want to curl into himself and never leave. But the SS-Standartenführer wasn’t walking toward the mechanic this time. When he lifted his finely polished Luger, it came nose-to-nose with Adele.
“Who operates the radios?” he asked Felix.
Felix nodded at Kasper and Johann.
The Luger shifted lanes, parking in front of Kasper.
“You’ll send a message to General Reiniger, assuring him the headquarters are secure,” Baasch told him. “Then you will continue to operate the radio as you would under normal circumstances. They mustn’t suspect we’re listening in.”
The dark-haired young man stared down Baasch’s gun without so much as a twitch. “You think I’m not ready to die?”
“Your men are circled with limited resources. Even if you don’t operate the radio for us, we’ll wear your army down to bones by sheer force.” The officer nodded at the papers that filled the map room’s every nook and cranny. “We’re sitting on all of your movement’s deepest secrets. Every operative. Every name. Entire notebooks filled with the messages you’ve encoded and decoded thus far. What point is there in withholding this information from me? What hope do you have?”
Baasch cocked his shiny, shiny gun.
Kasper said nothing.
The Luger began to wander, drifting from forehead to forehead as Baasch’s jackboots beat out their terrifying rhythm. Tap, tap, Felix’s temple. Tap, tap, the bridge of Miriam’s nose. Tap, tap—Johann’s rock-hard jaw. Tap, tap, Adele—NO, NOT MY SISTER, NOT AFTER ALL THIS!
“Operate the radio or one of them dies.”
“You think the National Socialist war machine hasn’t devoured every single member of my family?” Kasper asked him. “You think I haven’t lost more friends than I can count to the guns of the SS? Preying on sentimentality will get you nowhere.”
The pistol kept drifting.
“I am going to count to three,” the SS-Standartenführer said. “One, two…”
Adele was trying to put on a brave face, but her shoulders shook. A sob half lodged in her throat. The other resistance operatives knew their fate: caught by the SS, a bullet to the head would be a mercy. They stared straight ahead, stone silent, all still. Miriam watched the officer pace through heavy lids. Felix shut his own when the Luger passed him a second time.
All this blood, and no one had been saved.
What hope did any of them have?
“Three.”