CHAPTER 57

It was a warm morning—holding more than a few hints of spring, even some strokes of summer to come. Felix rolled his coverall sleeves as high as the auto shop entrance. He was elbow deep in a Volkswagen engine; its grease claimed every available part of his skin—cuticles, life lines, pores—some of it ingrained so deep not even a shower could lift it off. The only truly clean patch was Felix’s right hand. Wound gauze and antibiotics were long gone, replaced by a black fingerless glove. Adele had stitched its last two openings together to cover the whorled scar.

It had taken Felix months to retrain his maimed hand to hold a wrench again, and even then the grip of the three remaining fingers wasn’t what it used to be. His left hand grew stronger out of necessity. He and Adele had to eat, and food prices weren’t kind—two fixed engines to a decent dinner. There’d been several weeks, in the thick of the war, where Felix felt as if hunger pains had flipped his stomach inside out.

It had ended, once the battles moved south and Frankfurt settled back into a routine as normal as any routine could be in the wake of the Third Reich’s destruction. People brought their broken things to Wolfe Auto Shop, and Felix fixed them. There was bread on the table, cheese, too, sometimes. Some rare days, Adele managed to barter their measly marks for meat or eggs.

Felix ate his meal every night wondering if it would be his last.

Yael was alive. He’d seen her on the television—tattoos hidden, unchanged face—flanking General Reiniger while he addressed Neuberlin and Germany proper on their future as a republic. All details of elections and restructuring a parliament were lost to Felix. He watched Yael and knew Miriam’s mercy had only delayed the inevitable.

The wolves were coming. One of these days, they’d show up at Felix’s door, demanding blood for the blood that was taken.

Every time a new customer ducked into the auto shop, every time he heard Adele scuffing her shoes against the doormat, Felix was certain his reckoning was at hand. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t. And it wasn’t. Winter thawed into spring, which flirted with summer.

Felix kept working. Always, the dead leaned over the engines with him. Martin, Mama, Papa. Luka Löwe (he missed the Arschloch, more than he’d ever imagined he could). Henryka and those radio operatives. Anne Weisskopf. Today’s heat made their presence extra weighty.

“I didn’t think you’d be here.”

Felix dropped his wrench. It clattered through the engine. He didn’t bother picking it up. His fate stood just outside the auto shop, by a stack of spare tires. Dark hair, sleeves short enough to show the left arm pack. He hadn’t heard Yael approach. Of course he hadn’t. She was a feather-footed spy. How easy would it have been for her to whisk behind Felix, slit his throat?

He took little comfort in the fact that she hadn’t. A debt such as this could only be settled face-to-face.

Felix straightened. He knew Yael had weapons hidden on her person, and he kept waiting for her to reach for one. She didn’t. Instead she crossed her arms and craned her neck, reading the letters Felix’s Papa’s father had painted there in the thirties. WOLFE AUTO SHOP, white against black-coated cinder block. Time and weather had peeled most of the finer edges away. Papa always meant to refresh the sign, but it was a chore that kept getting bumped to the bottom of an ever-growing list.

Felix wished he’d thought to touch it up. He doubted Adele would once he was gone.

Yael stepped through the garage door. Her arms stayed crossed. “I thought you sold this place to Herr Bleier for an Axis Tour bribe.”

“I did.”

After the map room, the twins had spent several weeks in Germania, hopping from air-raid shelter to air-raid shelter as the street skirmishes would allow. They made their way to the capital’s outskirts, where Adele’s flat sat untouched. Felix and Adele stayed only long enough to pack valuables, photographs, canned food. Frankfurt, he’d convinced his sister, was where Mama and Papa would return if they were still alive. Frankfurt was their only chance to be a family again.

A journey that should’ve taken less than six hours lasted over a week. The roads were so bad that they were forced to go on foot, and, more than once, war interrupted their path. War had interrupted Frankfurt, too: houses abandoned, stores looted, families gone. Felix and Adele found the garage clammed shut, milk bottles crowded on the house stoop.

Herr Bleier never came to claim his real estate holdings. Felix found out later it was because “Herr Bleier was killed in the uprisings. With no family and no government to collect his property, the deed fell back to us.”

Yael grunted and gave the place a twice-over, her gaze landing on the oil patch shaped like a lopsided heart. The one Felix used to sit on while he watched Papa work. “Looks just like the photographs.”

Felix kept waiting, waiting for the bullet, the blade, but there was no stab, no sudden shot, and he couldn’t stand just standing here anymore. “Have you come to kill me?”

Yael’s eyes snapped up from the floor, holding all the elements Felix had expected: sharp anger, the flinch of the betrayed. Felix wondered what they saw in turn. (Not on the outside; mirrors told him often enough how unkind the months had been. Skipped meals had hollowed out his cheeks, grayed his lids. Even his hair had taken an ashen tinge.)

Could she see the dead crowded around his shoulders? The nights he couldn’t sleep because he felt Henryka’s curls coiling around his thyroid? The days that felt too long because Felix knew they were taken from those unwilling to give? People who had faces?

“I’ve thought about it.” Yael’s gaze broke from his, fell to Felix’s glove. “We’ve been hurt enough, don’t you think?”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know how to breathe. “Then why—why are you here?”

“Is Adele home?”

She was. Felix knew if they entered the Wolfe house, they’d find his sister in the family room, trying to budget out the week’s marks.

“Why?” he asked again.

“I made you a promise, back in Molotov,” Yael said slowly. “I was only able to keep half of it. Today I’m going to see it to the end.”

Is this real? The garage was going dizzy blue. Felix blinked, took a breath to push the sparks away. He thought it was. He hadn’t had a dream this good in a very long time.

“I’ve come to take you and Adele to your parents.”

Yael led the way on her motorcycle, another Zündapp KS 601. Adele drove, her fingers tapping nervously against the Volkswagen’s steering wheel as they wound through the countryside. Felix stared out the window. The day was so pleasant he half expected to see families out picnicking. Baskets brimming with cheese, rolls, figs, and bottles of mineral water, blankets spread out over the grass. But most families had neither the time nor the extra food to spend on a picnic lunch. As for grass…

War had wrought its ruin on the land. Kilometer after kilometer of torched orchards and crater-pocked fields streamed through Felix’s reflection. These scars were months old. Even the full force of spring wasn’t enough to mend them.

But there were places the war hadn’t touched. Where the road itself became more suggestion than fact. Where the trees grew with a rugged consistency that reminded Felix of the Muscovy taiga. Where the mountains rose into grand things: rock, rock, snow, peak.

Their Volkswagen engine churned against growing slopes. The turnoffs became fewer and the drive longer. Felix began to wonder if Yael was leading them toward the end of the world. They’d certainly come close to the top of it: The sky’s blueness looked near enough to touch. Felix rolled down the window. Was air supposed to smell this sweet? Was his chest supposed to feel so light?

The safest place in Europe sat at the top of a hill. Vlad’s farm. Felix leaned forward to look through the windshield for a better view. He could make out a barn, a house—simple wooden structures. The first person he saw was… Mama! Alive. Out of bed. Gardening. She knelt among rows of infant seedlings. Her hair was wrapped in a plaid kerchief; she held a spade in her hand. When she glanced down the drive and caught sight of Felix’s face pressed to the Volkswagen window, she started running.

Papa appeared next. He stood at the barn door, holding a pail of milk. This dropped, sloshed everywhere, when he realized whom his wife was dashing toward.

The car hadn’t yet pulled to a stop, but this didn’t keep Felix from opening the door, stumbling into the gravel, falling on his hands, pushing himself up again, running to his parents. The meeting was a sobbing embrace. Papa smelled like straw; Mama was all earth. They hugged Felix with a strength he didn’t think they still had, pressing him against their chests until his earlobes hurt. Adele wasn’t far behind, joining the tangle of arms. She didn’t try to squirm away until her hair was practically soaking with their mother’s tears.

“We thought you were both dead!” Adele said through tears of her own. Her eyes crinkled together, as if she was trying to squeeze the emotion back in. “We were in Frankfurt, waiting and waiting! Why haven’t you come home?”

“We tried,” their father explained. “A few times. But Vlad convinced us it was safer to wait here while the resistance tracked you two down.”

Is this real? Felix had to be sure. These could be doppelgängers for all he knew.

“Mama, what color was the blouse you cut up for Adele’s doll? The Christmas Papa came back from the front?”

“That was so long ago.” His mother was taken aback by the question. Her soft eyes blinked several times before she answered, “It—it was blue? Wasn’t it?”

It was.

Felix turned to Papa next. “What did Martin get that Christmas?”

His brother’s name drew a veil across all their faces—something somber and gray. Something that made his family themselves, and Felix knew even before his father answered that the Wolfes were together again. As together as they’d ever be.

“A pocket watch,” Papa answered. “He didn’t put the thing down for a week. Even tried to bathe with it. Do you still have it?”

Felix plucked the timepiece from his coverall pocket. It sat, silver and shimmering, over his glove. Mama and Papa noticed his amputated fingers and gasped at the same time.

“Safe and sound.” Felix handed the watch to his father, but it didn’t stop beating.

You remember what you did, don’t you? Don’t you?

He looked over his shoulder to find Yael standing in the middle of the gravel drive. It was colder here. Felix’s coverall sleeves were back to their original length, but Yael had already removed her riding gloves and jacket. Her arms were bare again, still crossed. Mountain light brought her wolves into finer sight. He now noticed there were more of them—no, just one more wolf.

Felix had never asked Yael what the tattoos were for, but as soon as he saw the lion, he knew. At least, in part.

The farm’s third inhabitant appeared on the porch. Vlad. It must be. Even holding a cup of tea, the man looked dangerous: a gallery of gashes and missing body parts. When he caught sight of Yael, he raised his cup in greeting.

She began walking toward the house.

“Yael.” Felix broke away from his family—three steps and pause.

Yael paused, too.

Sorry would not bring back the dead. Sorry would not fix things. But it was all Felix had to offer. “I’m sorry.”

His apology felt so small. A feathered hawk speck against a wide-world sky, suspended on wind currents. No rise, no fall, just flight without motion, hovering between them.

Yael’s arms loosened. Her lips parted, and her breath slipped out until she reached the bottom of her exhale. She had no words left, none for him at least. She gave Felix a nod so subtle he would’ve missed it if he blinked.

Something inside him landed.

Yael continued her hike toward the house. Vlad welcomed her inside, shut the door. Felix stood on solid ground, staring at the cabin’s rough-hewn wood.

“Felix!” Adele called his name. “What are you doing?”

He turned to find the Wolfes still there. Papa rubbing the bald spot on the top of his head. Mama holding her spade in one hand, gripping her daughter with the other.

Felix joined them.