He kept still instead. Counting breaths and secrets.
“Luka?” Yael asked on her fourth exhale.
“Yes?” he said on his fifth.
“Why didn’t you join the resistance?”
Ah. There it was. The question he knew was coming. Eventually. “It’s not like they walk around town knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets.”
“You have plenty of black-market connections. You’d have to, to get your cigarettes,” she pointed out. “You could have found us if you’d tried hard enough.”
Try harder, be stronger, be more. Story of my verdammt life.
“You’ve seen what the SS does to traitors. Why choose to get crushed when you can survive?” As far as Luka could tell, it was a legitimate alibi. Backed up by the laws of nature itself.
“Some of us don’t have that choice.” Yael’s words held a tightness: a new-old anger to match the new-old friend. “Some of us have never had that choice.”
He swam in the heat of her voice, stared at her taut arms. The cuff of Yael’s jacket ended a few centimeters short, so Luka could see tattoo ink: the tip of a wolf’s tail, tickling her delicate wrist. He stared at these markings, carved dark into her skin. They reminded him of the sketches his mother used to make on the corners of the telephone message pad (then crumpled up before her husband could see). They bore all the portents of art. So much detail in such a small space: hatching lines both wild and straight shaded out the animal’s fur. It made Luka wonder what the rest of the wolves looked like up close. Just as detailed? Just as dark?
Was there a string of numbers beneath them, too?
He wondered so many things about Yael. The answers of her were only fractions: Inmate. Lab rat. Jew. Numbers he did not understand but meant something. Luka wondered at the long gaps between. He wondered and he wanted to know. “What happened to you?”
There was a moment, stretching into another moment, and another. When Yael finally shook her head, every one of her pale, pale hairs cut against the shining headlamps. Why? her eyes seemed to ask him. Why don’t you already know? Why are you here? Everything about her—stillness, silence, feeling—pared Luka down, cutting to his core.
Why?
Why?
Why can’t you be more?
“I was afraid.” The links of Luka’s dog tag chain bit into his neck. His words felt too honest for his voice. “Still am.”
“Fear is not an excuse,” Yael told him. “Fear is being human.”
What else could Luka say? He had no more in him. His lips twitched, stretched, wanted to sneer, just so she’d stop looking at him the way she was: with ice (or fire?), hate (or love?), extremes of emotions pulsing through those irises.
She felt right. She felt so far away. Too far for someone like Luka to reach.
“You might want to get some sleep. Miriam tells me we’ll reach Molotov by sunrise,” Yael said. Her arms fell to her sides, and the wolf tail disappeared, swallowed by the sleeve’s leather. She lay down on the truck bed, curling her body in the shape of a C. Luka could see the ridge of her spine against her jacket.
Luka had no idea where Molotov was, but he supposed it didn’t matter. The angry Soviet with eyes of gold was right: He was just along for the verdammt ride.
CHAPTER 23
THINGS UNHEARD: A TRANSLATION
Bout I
Miriam: He knows your name?
Yael: Luka’s not like the other National Socialists.
Miriam: No. He’s their poster boy! The one they look up to and adore.
Yael: It’s not like that. He’s not like that.
Miriam: Do you really think so, Volchitsa?
Yael, nodding: There’s something more to him. I’ve seen it.
Bout II
Miriam: He’s all talk, no spine.
Yael: Luka is brash, yes, but that’s not all he is. Give him a chance.
Miriam: A chance? Is that what they gave us, Yael, when they stuffed us into those cattle cars? When they put the numbers on our arms and burned our families to ash?
Yael: I remember it as well as you do, Miriam.
Miriam: If Luka Löwe was more than a National Socialist, he would have found a way to join the resistance. He wouldn’t have hidden behind his blood and name while our people were slaughtered.
Yael:…
Miriam: You know I’m right.
Yael: I trust him.
Miriam: Trust. Are you sure that’s all it is?
Yael:…
Miriam: Don’t let your heart get in the way of your head, Yael. Luka Löwe might be on your side now, but when it matters, he’ll be gone. Men like him only look after their own interests. That’s how our world fell into this sorry state in the first place.
CHAPTER 24
Sleep was beyond Yael. It was not for fear of the nightmare, or for lack of exhaustion, but for the heart inside her chest. The one still fluttering from Luka’s cobweb closeness. The one still high on the impossibility of Miriam here, alive. The one drenched in the blood of men and dreams. The one that did not know what to feel.
The pieces of Yael—life and soul—were clashing.
In many ways, she felt better with Miriam here. Solid, safe. Yael’s third wolf knew her, grounded Yael in an older version of herself. But the little girl from the death camp did not fit with the boy in the brown jacket. The two were worlds and years apart. Deaths and deaths and deaths apart.
She couldn’t blame Miriam for hating Luka. She’d hated the victor, too, at first sight. (And second. And third.) His swastika armband and swagger trained by goose steps had grated on her nerve endings. She’d looked at him and seen the enemy.
When Yael looked at Luka now—burn blistering his collarbone, his indigo stare more question than claim—it wasn’t the enemy she saw, but the boy behind the mask. An ally. A friend. Something, the prickling heat within her chest whispered, more.
What now?
Now Luka was afraid.
And so was she.
Yael lay awake, staring out of the truck into a forest she could not see. Hours passed. The road grew smoother—ribboning into asphalt. She smelled Molotov long before she saw it. War lay heavy in the air: peppery gunpowder, acrid ash. The sun was rising, but when Yael looked up, all she could see was a starless, blueless haze. Smoke spread across the sky, choking everything.
The city appeared street by street, in muted streaks of color. Yael imagined that the place filled with daylight and scrubbed of battle would be picturesque. Broad Baroque buildings painted in shades of daffodil and powder blue stood side by side with wooden merchant houses. Many of their windows were shattered, glass sparkling against the street. Some of the grander houses—the ones with the tatters of swastika banners still fluttering from their balconies—had been torched, doorframes edged in soot. Dark lumps littered the streets, lying with a stillness that screamed BODIES.
Other than the corpses, the Soviets’ convoy met no resistance as they entered the city. When the transports pulled into Molotov’s central square, Yael saw why. The area was circled with the units Pashkov had been ordered to meet—transports, fighters, even tanks. Inside this ring were the National Socialist soldiers of Molotov. Dozens of black-suited SS stood in the center—closest to the square’s iron statue of the Führer—chins sharp, stance unyielding. Several hundred weaponless brownshirts gathered in nervous huddles. There was a sharp divide among them; a good number had torn their National Socialist emblems from their uniforms, substituting ripped cloth for swastikas and eagles. Others wore no uniform at all. Silver-haired grandfathers stood next to schoolboys who stood next to laborers with callused hands and wind-burned faces—men whose bones showed too readily through their skin.
All these prisoners were staring at the north end of the square. It was there Yael saw the bodies, piled in a heap, not so long dead. SS officers with sightless eyes were stacked on top of Wehrmacht men. The stones by their limp fingers and feet glistened with blood.
A future mound of
bones.
Molotov’s central square tore apart with a series of gunshots. Sounds that shook earth and sky and heart. The prisoners gave a collective shudder. Luka jerked awake. Miriam’s eyes snapped open. Even Felix shifted against his stretcher.
Yael watched more bodies being dragged to the pile and felt sick.
These men were being executed.
This isn’t right. Yael looked back at the men without markings. Why would Wehrmacht fighters tear their National Socialist badges from their uniforms? Why would a starving laborer fight alongside the SS against an enemy he hadn’t even known was coming? And, for that matter, how had the Soviets managed to capture Molotov so quickly? The city was not small, and even in the event of a blitzkrieg, a resistance of this number would have battled for at least a few days.
Resistance…
Molotov hadn’t been overthrown by the Soviets. It had been taken by its own people: partisan fighters. Yael’s allies. Her only way to reach Henryka. Men the Soviets were mowing down—
Another round of death shredded through the square, ringing against Yael’s ears.
—THIS ISN’T RIGHT DON’T LET THEM DIE—
She dropped out of the truck, boots to asphalt, dimly aware of the shouts behind her (Miriam’s “What are you doing?” alongside Luka’s colorful curses and the guards’ yells) and the cries of Soviet soldiers surprised at the sight of the albino girl parting their ranks. Yael shoved past shoulders and card games and hot meals and fighters singing the patriotic hymns of their long-gone countries, all the way to the firing squad. Ten men were reloading their rifles as another round of National Socialist prisoners were dragged into the line of fire. Most were Wehrmacht, some stripped of their insignia. All of them scared.
There were only two men without brown shirts or fear on their faces, bookending the line. On the far left: a lone SS officer. To the right stood a tall man with silvering hair. Everything about him was gaunt: sunken eyes, frayed trousers, his interruption of an Adam’s apple. Dried blood spackled his bandaged forehead. Yael would’ve wagered her life that he was fighting for Reiniger’s cause.
In a way she was—running up to the execution squad, arms up, coughing between breaths, “Stop shooting! You can’t just kill these men! The Geneva Convention—”
The squad’s leader, the only man without a rifle, turned toward Yael. His eyebrows were the color of a fox’s tail, quivering with rage. “Geneva? You think these bastards quoted the articles of Geneva when they invaded our lands? When they led our parents, our brothers and sisters, our spouses, our children, into the woods and shot them in the back?”
No. The anger in the squad leader’s voice was in all the executioners’ eyes, glinting off the brass of the spent shell casings at their feet. Yael knew it only too well. For so many years it had been her marrow, her core. A burn in her bones, a thirst for an answer.
“There are no rules in this war.” The squad leader spit and yelled back at his men. “Ready!”
They pressed the buttstocks to their shoulders as a single unit.
“These soldiers were already fighting when you arrived in Molotov, weren’t they?” Yael persisted. “That’s because some of these men are part of the resistance. They hate the National Socialists as much as you do—”
“AIM!” The squad leader shouted even louder, determined to drown out Yael’s voice. Ten gun barrels stared straight into ten sets of eyes, a single word separating life from death. One of the swastika-wearing soldiers in the very center of the line began crying, nose running like a schoolboy.
—NOT LIKE THIS NEVER LIKE THIS—
“Please!” The anger in Yael’s bones stretched and grew, and she did not know where to put it. But this—bullets flying, blood at her feet—would not help. “Let me talk to them!”
The squad leader’s rage was growing, too: flushing up his neck, until his face matched his eyebrows. Red. Quivering. “Someone get this girl out of my way!” he shouted at the soldiers who’d gathered to watch.
Two of them lurched forward. A third uniform tore out of the crowd: Miriam. She moved faster than the others, grabbing Yael’s biceps and yanking her close. Instead of shrinking back into the crowd, Miriam turned to the squad leader.
“What is going on here? Who ordered this?”
The squad leader seemed to recognize Miriam on sight. The knowledge paled him. “C-Comrade Mnogolikiy. It’s an honor.”
Miriam did not return the pleasantries. “I asked you a question, comrade. Who ordered this?”
“It”—the squad leader’s eyes began darting around the square, as if his answer were hidden behind one of the bystanders—“was a mutual decision. These men are combatants, Comrade Mnogolikiy. Not civilians. We don’t have the infrastructure for due process.”
“That man”—Yael pointed to the tall, older man at the line’s far right—“is a member of the resistance. More than half of these fighters are. Do any of you know what’s waiting for you in Moscow? You’re going in blind. You’ll need to keep eyes on Germania. If you let me talk to these men, I can get you the information you need to continue your advance through Muscovy.”
I hope. Every significant resistance cell had an Enigma machine with its radio equipment, plus a list of daily rotor combinations. If Yael could talk to the resistance leaders, she could contact Henryka.
If Henryka was still alive… How many days had it been since the putsch was thrown into action? Five? Six? For all Yael knew, her friends were as crushed and gone as Felix’s fingers.
These thoughts did nothing to ease the frantic feeling in Yael’s esophagus. This and the blood at her feet (so real, too real, nothing nightmarish about it) were starting to break her. All of Vlad’s breathing exercises and compartmentalization techniques couldn’t blunt the hysteria that crept into her voice. “You can’t just shoot these men in cold blood!”
Miriam’s grip around Yael’s arm tightened. Silence, the pinch of her fingers said.
The squad leader did not look convinced. “There’s no cold blood here. These men deserve to die. Have you not seen the villages? Do you not remember—”
“I remember,” Miriam cut the squad leader off. “Believe me, comrade. But Volchitsa is right. We need information on Moscow’s defenses as well as the state of Germania’s retaliatory capabilities. These men should have access to communication channels that can help us acquire that information. Killing them would be foolish.”
“Volchitsa?” The squad leader’s eyebrows swept away under his lone-star cap. “I’m to listen to a prisoner of war on how to treat prisoners of war?”
“No,” Miriam said firmly. “You’re to listen to me.”
The squad leader did not challenge her. “How do we have any way of knowing which of these men are absolved?” he asked instead. “Any one of them could tear off their badges.”
“The resistance has security protocols. Pass codes and such,” Yael explained, her voice a smidge steadier. “Let me talk to this man. If I can confirm his membership with the resistance, then he can point me to the group’s leader. They’ll be able to vouch for their own members.”
“What do you suggest we do with the others?”
Yael looked back to the line. All ten men were watching her. Resistance, Wehrmacht, SS… their eyes scaled the range from basic hope to acid hate.
“You don’t need to add any infrastructure,” she told the squad leader. “The resistance has been planning the uprising for over a decade. They’ll have a contingency plan for prisoners. Let me find the resistance leaders and talk to them. We’ll get things sorted.”
The rifles stayed high, still ready for that one word (FIRE!). The men’s arms began wavering from the wait and the weight. Their aims drifted. The squad leader’s face drifted as well. His eyebrows were back down to a reasonable level, and his skin was back to a normal shade. Neither flushed nor pale.
“Do what you must,” he told Yael, before ordering his men, “At ease!”
They lowered their Arisak
as. Miriam let go of Yael’s arm. The middle, weeping Wehrmacht soldier hiccupped with relief. The gaunt man nodded.
Yael walked to him, leaned in to his ear, and whispered the first half of the resistance’s pass code in German: “The wolves of war are gathering.”
“They sing the song of rotten bones.” The man’s answer was as frail as his frame.
“I need to find the leaders of your cell,” Yael told him. “Will you help me?”
He did. Many minutes of searching and many whispered pass codes later, Yael found herself standing in front of a man named Ernst Förstner. He looked close to Reiniger’s age, with similar lines around his eyes and dips in his hairline. His altered Wehrmacht uniform was a few sizes too tight, a few years too faded—last war’s relic. When he greeted Yael, it was not with joy, but wariness. She couldn’t blame him, with the pile of bodies less than ten meters away and the spit of Soviet soldiers flecking stones and faces alike. It also didn’t help that Yael had acquired a train of officers: Miriam followed by Comrade Commander Pashkov, followed by Comrade Fox Brows, followed by five other top brass uniforms. Ernst Förstner and his band of wounded men regarded the entourage nervously.
“What happened here?” Yael asked the leader of Molotov’s resistance.
“This cell has been growing for years,” he explained. “When the signal was sent over the Reichssender, we seized control of the camps to the north and freed the laborers. Many joined us. It took two days of fighting to win the city. We surrounded the SS headquarters, arrested the leaders, and brought them here to the square. That’s when the Soviet trucks started rolling in; they had us outnumbered and outgunned. When they demanded our surrender, we saw no reason to fight, so we laid down our arms. They made us stand here with the others.”