CHAPTER 47

Yael could not stop her tears, but she could make them silent. They streamed down her face as the jackboots climbed. First floor, STOMP STOMP, second, STOMP STOMP… They made so much noise Yael couldn’t tell how many men there were. A dozen? Three? Fewer? More?

Not that it mattered. There was no way off the block. It was over. All dead. All for nothing.

Luka’s hand fell from her mouth. “Give me your knife!”

The blade slid cleanly out of Yael’s boot; she handed it to the victor hilt first. He took it like the weighty thing it was, testing the swipe of the blade against the air as he stood. Then he pulled Yael—gently—to her feet, and pressed the knife’s edge against her throat.

“Keep crying, be ready,” he mouthed before spinning her around to face the stairs.

“UP HERE!”

Three floors below, the jackboots paused.

“HERE!” Luka’s second yell rattled Yael’s eardrum. She dared not flinch. (The blade on her skin was beyond acting. One slip and the slice would be all too real.)

The SS soldiers STOMPed up the final flight of steps, weapons drawn. Yael counted four of them through her tears: two SS-Schützes and two SS-Oberschützes. When they caught sight of Luka, they paused, a dazed look filming their faces. None of them knew quite what to make of the double victor, the knife he held, the girl beneath it.

Four.

Not an impossible number.

—BE READY—

“Victor Löwe?” the foremost SS-Oberschütze asked.

“This is her!” Luka’s knife twitched against her jugular, as close as their kiss had been. “The inmate you’re looking for.”

The men frowned, their weapons drooped. The nearest SS-Oberschütze climbed the rest of the stairs, and the others followed. All within striking distance. “Inmate 121358ΔX?”

“Show them your marks!” Luka’s breath was vicious against her ear.

—DISTRACT THEM—

Yael tugged up her sleeve. Everything inside her tensed.

Four pairs of eyes looked at five running wolves.

Luka’s wrist flicked. The knife whipped off her throat—

—NOW—

Valkyrie unleashed.

Yael’s wolves sprang forward with her, lunging at the SS-Schütze closest to the stairs, seizing his pistol by the grip and shoving him back. The gun was already primed for death, death, death. Three shots in quick succession became three corpses on the floor. One of the SS managed to fire, but his bullets veered into the ceiling. Luka had overpowered the first SS-Oberschütze, his blade finding another throat.

At the end of it all, plaster trickled like hourglass dust from the ceiling. The stairwell was silent. Yael knelt over the men she killed, shards of battle adrenaline slicing her veins. Her tears had stopped; she had a clear view of their faces. Noses, mouths, eyes, sparkless corpses.

How was it they looked so human?

“This one—” Her fingers wandered to the SS-Schütze she’d sent down the steps. She plucked the man’s cap from his head and tossed it to the victor. “You could pass as him. Keep your brim low and your face down.”

For her own alibi, Yael selected the uniform with the least blood. The second SS-Oberschütze. Her imitation couldn’t be exact (it never was with males). All she could do was make her breasts as small as possible, mimic the man’s broad facial bones, and hope no one would look too closely at her throat, where there was a conspicuous lack of an Adam’s apple.

It was the most temporary of disguises.

Luka’s SS uniform was too small on him—its buttons strained as he bent down to collect the guns, padding already stretched fabric with a second Luger. He offered the third pistol to Yael.

“Seconds? You can never have too many guns. Especially considering what’s down there.” He nodded past the half-stripped bodies on the stairs.

She shook her head. “If we get into a firefight downstairs, we’re dead.”

With a shrug, the victor claimed the gun as his own. “So we’ll use your super spy skills to get the hell off this block.… Then what?”

“I’m going to the Ordenspalais.” Yael didn’t know this was her intention until she said it, but when she did, it felt right. It was her end. Her only end. “I’m going to give that speech on the Reichssender.”

Luka’s hands froze over the third pistol, tucked halfway into his waistband.

“I know we’ve lost,” Yael said. “But I can’t let Hitler erase Experiment Eighty-Five and the lives it cost.”

“But the SS has the files…” Luka faltered.

“I’ll be the evidence. I’ll tell the world who I am, in my own face this time.” Change or no change, Yael would leave her mark. Anne, Edith, Talaitha… all of them would leave their marks. “I’ll show them how simple it is for a skinshifter to imitate the Führer. Perhaps that will be enough to cast doubt on his leadership. You—you should go east. Seek asylum in Novosibirsk and carry on the fight from there.”

Luka stared at her—eyes more black than blue in their intensity. In them, Yael could see the forty thousand kilometers they’d traveled together. The three kisses they’d shared. The lifetimes of stories and emotions that bubbled between them.

He knew her.

No matter what face she wore, Luka knew her.

“I’m not leaving you.” He crossed his arms, wrist bones peeking out of his too-tight uniform. “Someone has to man the filming equipment, and I doubt you’ll find many eager volunteers at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. You need me.”

Luka was right. She needed him to film. She needed him to help navigate the building. She needed him.

But the cost?

“Luka, I—” The truth, so hard to tell. Through labored breath, Yael managed it. “I don’t think I’m coming back.”

“I know.” Luka took both of her hands in his. “I know, Yael. I’m with you.”

The enemy was everywhere. More than half the men occupying the street belonged to the Wehrmacht—sleeves and badges intact—bound by oath to the resurrected Führer. SS Totenkopfs winked past in the morning light, bobbing with soldiers’ steps. It almost looked as if the skulls were laughing.

Yael tugged her own cap down and walked south. Luka stayed a half step behind, using her broadened shoulders as a shield. They kept a decent pace: slow enough to look unhurried, quick enough to keep eyes from lingering. None did. The men they passed were engulfed in their own duties: searching buildings, hauling in artillery, securing the block.

The river was only a few streets on. The closest bridge across was blackened with SS traffic, flowing both ways. Yael and Luka encountered no barbed wire or blockade when they walked across. The Spree rushed beneath them, as unyielding as it had been the day Aaron-Klaus caught Yael trying to pick his pocket. As fresh and old as the grief inside her. Every death Yael had ever faced was welling up to the surface of her skin. Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Katsuo, Felix, Adele, Kasper, Reinhard, Johann, Brigitte, Henryka, Miriam again…

Dammed tears ached behind her eyes.

Not for nothing.

They reached the south bank without interference. Yael knew they were close to the Reichssender studios when she spotted the broadcasting tower—its skeletal heights clambered into the sky. (Apart from the pillars of smoke rising from the northern horizon, the morning was blue, all blue. A perfect day for ruination.)

Wilhelm Street. The heart of things, where swastika banners hung so thick from buildings that their very stones were hidden. The enemy was thick here, too, but Yael and Luka blended in. Their stolen uniforms and quick waves of their passes were enough to get them past the first checkpoint, in view of the Wilhelmplatz. The park was ordinary enough. Looking at its trees and gravel paths studded with memorials, one wouldn’t guess it was a playground for beasts.

On one end: the Chancellery. Opposite that: the Ordenspalais. The former palace’s facade was cobbled—old stitched into the grotesquely new. After the war, when radio broadcasts gave way to the Reichssender as the foremost means of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels had his ministry expanded, adding an annex large enough to hold filming studios. There were stages for the terribly scripted shows about Lebensraum families, along with desks for the evening news (just as terribly scripted). It was a sprawling place—halls twisted around nonsensical corners, and every door looked the same. The main entrance bristled with security, far too much for their imperfect disguises to dupe.

This didn’t seem to bother Luka. The victor took the lead, veering them to the ministry’s newer end.

“Where are we going?” Yael asked, trying to keep her steps confident when she was anything but.

“Filming propaganda is long and excruciatingly boring,” Luka explained. “I had to find all sorts of places to sneak smokes between interview takes.”

One of these sorts of places was a service entrance. The heavy door opened to a gravel lot full of vehicles from the Reichssender’s camera fleet. It was too much of an afterthought to be guarded, locked from the inside. Yael knelt in front of the lock, retrieving the bobby pins she’d stowed in the SS-Oberschütze’s pockets. Her hands had steadied over the last half hour, but it took a good deal of tooth-grinding and lip-licking to work the lock free. It slicked back like a sigh of relief, hinges creaking, door cracked.

They were in.

No one noticed. There was no one to notice. The annex was strangely deserted, but, Yael supposed, there was no need to go on filming Story of a Perfect Lebensraum Lie when most of the Lebensraum settlements had been wiped off the map. There was no need for news either when the Reich wanted to keep its people in the dark. The Führer’s speech was enough.

The granite hallways stretched and stretched. Decades’ worth of propaganda posters lined their walls. Goebbels’s finest work. Many were from the war: impossibly tall soldiers with impossibly strong jaws, swastika flags billowing like storms behind them. There were old watercolor advertisements for the League of German Girls, including the one with the face Yael had borrowed so long ago.

And then there was Luka.

1953. Sieg heil!

Yael had seen the poster before, but this time it made her stop.

His jaw was just as impossibly strong as the others. He stood in front of a Zündapp KS 601, saluting something beyond the painting’s reach. An Iron Cross hung around his neck. In the background, a swastika flag melted into a map of the Axis Tour’s path.

The real Luka paused next to her, giving an unimpressed grunt. “I had to pose for the painter—Mjölnir—for hours. Goebbels kept yelling at me every time I twitched. You wouldn’t believe the places that start to itch when you’re not allowed to move. Earlobes, pinky toes, unmentionables… Whenever Goebbels wasn’t looking, I’d try scratching with the motorcycle handlebars.”

Yael couldn’t help but smile at this image: fourteen-year-old Luka using a parked Zündapp to dismiss his epidermal urges. Such a very different portrait of the boy, far removed from this Sieg heil! swastika-everything picture.

Luka wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed at the poster, sharpened in a way that made Yael wonder what he saw when he really looked—past paint and into memory.

“That’s not Luka Löwe,” she whispered. “That’s the boy Hitler and Goebbels and Mjölnir tried to make. You could have become him, but you chose to be more.”

Something about this last word tore the victor’s stare away from his watercolor rendering. This time, he did smile. It wasn’t the half-cocked grin Yael was so used to. Nor was it forced. The expression was toothless. A soft, genuine emotion.

“We should keep going, before our luck dries up,” he said. “I’ve never seen the place this deserted before.…”

It was eerie, how their footsteps echoed past a dozen more Mjölnir paintings. How they turned a corner to find yet another empty hall, all its doors shut. Luka led the way to the nearest one.

“This is the studio where they conducted my more formal interviews,” he explained. “It should have what we need to film a presentation.”

The victor reached out, opened the door to the studio.

It was not empty.