How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth

March 489 I.C., Odin

Count Landsberg’s house was not much different in style from Heinrich’s country estate, but it was much better kept. The ravages of winter hid the fact that landscaping staff were not available to prune back all the bushes and tend the flowers that would come with the spring. All Eva could judge the lands by was the house, which was in pristine condition. The country home was clearly one that the Landsberg family had taken great pride and pleasure in using near constantly, in the years before the civil war. The outbuildings had no sagging roofs, and the main house was not crawling with destructive ivy.

The inside, too, was beautifully kept, showing off the count’s taste in furnishings and art. The walls held original artworks from some of the finest painters of the past few generations on Odin. There were so many paintings hanging on the walls that they felt overburdened and crowded. Eva wasn’t sure if this was just Count Landsberg’s exuberant taste, or if he had relocated all the decor from his capital home to the country for safekeeping.

Eva had visited before, dragged along to a few dinners with Magdalena, so she wasn’t a complete stranger to the house. Nevertheless, when the servants let her in without question in the night, and gave her an already-prepared guest bedroom to sleep in, she felt lonelier than she ever had in her life.

She hadn’t seen the count himself, as he had been out making a social call of his own when she arrived. Eva was told that he wouldn’t be back until either very late or very early the next day. This might have been for the best, as she didn’t think she could muster a single word to say to him. Hilde did most of the talking to the servants, repeating some line Magdalena must have given her, and then left Eva there— reluctant to leave someone she thought needed help, but eager to escape whatever knot was tangled between all the residents of the Kummel country house. Eva croaked out a reassurance that she would be alright, and urged Hilde to stay safe, and Hilde did something resembling the same, and then left.

The night that Eva spent alone in the chilly and unfamiliar guest bedroom was nightmarish. It reminded her of the first night she had come to the Mittermeyer household, in the days after she had learned of her father’s death. Taken from her boarding school and shipped across the planet, to the home of a distant relation she had met only in the briefest moments of her early childhood. She had left behind everything she had known, and the only relation she had loved was dead, without the opportunity to say goodbye. She felt just as small now, or even smaller. Often, looking back on her childhood, she had wished that her adult self could have comforted and protected the child that she was, but she was seized by the paradoxical desire for her childhood self to protect her tonight. That girl had been strong enough to endure it; Eva no longer was sure if she could.

Although crying was usually enough to force her to sleep, she cried until she had no tears left, but remained wide awake. She clutched an overly plush pillow to her chest as she sat on the bed, wearing a servant’s generously-loaned nightgown. She hadn’t packed a shred of clothing, and would have to rewear yesterday’s dress tomorrow. She preferred the idea of the nightgown— like wearing a stranger’s skin, as if that could give her a stranger’s troubles instead of her own. Her thoughts circled each other with no possible resolution.

Perhaps she was about to have a stranger’s troubles. She knew that the Earth Church had prepared some kind of false identity for her, so that they could get on one of the few remaining freighters off Odin, captained by one of the few foolhardy businessmen still willing to deliver goods and take up passengers, risking being attacked by any number of rogues in space. The Earth Church must have paid a fortune for such a thing— since the number of ships escaping Odin was few, and the number of people who wanted to leave was far greater than the available space. This new woman that Eva would become had the imagined shape of a dream life: wealthy, and bringing a husband and child along with her. But there was no way that she could fully be that woman— even if she had a stranger’s problems, her own would follow her, no matter what name she wore.

The only thing that she wanted in the world was to see Wolf, but that was impossible, and was going to become more impossible still, if she went through with her plan to steal Erwin Josef. She didn’t think she had much of a choice. If she refused and backed out now, she couldn’t ever face Magdalena again. Perhaps Maggie would deserve that kind of betrayal, considering— but, no, Eva couldn’t let herself think like that. She didn’t want to be cruel. She could justify abandoning the plan if she thought that she was weak, but she couldn’t if she thought she would be cruel.

It was impossible to not think about Wolf, but she tried. At least she had a fantasy ready at hand: the image of a child, to have and to hold. And if this child was strawberry blond and round cheeked rather than flaxen-haired and with Wolf’s handsome features, that didn’t matter. She believed she could love him just the same. She always had wanted a vessel to contain her love— an unconditional acceptance of it. She had once thought Wolf had been capable of that, but perhaps that was the kind of thing reserved for a mother and child.

The image of Erwin Josef was not enough to put Eva to sleep, but it was enough to let her hold onto the future, rather than the past, and let time pass until morning.

When a servant knocked on her door and told her that there was breakfast if she wanted it, Eva dressed in her clothing from the night before and went downstairs. She was too tired to be surprised when she found Count Landsberg sitting at the dining table already, sipping a cup of tea, his breakfast already eaten and cleared away, though hers remained laid out for her under a covered tray. He smiled at her when she sat down, and she returned it out of politeness, though the expression couldn’t reach her eyes.

“Good morning, Frau Mittermeyer,” the count said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Of course,” Eva said. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Don’t mention it. This house is quite lonely when it’s just myself. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have guests, otherwise I end up roaming the countryside in search of company.”

“Did you sleep well? You must have gotten back late.”

He laughed. “Not a bit! The little informal poetry society we have out here didn’t break up our gathering until, oh, two, and then I stayed with Emil— have you met Emil?” He didn’t bother to wait for her to answer, which was fine, since she had no idea which noble he was referring to. “I was with him until the sun came up. I only just got back in time for breakfast. My butler called to let me know you were here, so I had to bid my farewells. Otherwise, I might have stayed until— oh, who knows.” He laughed again.

Eva could not even bring herself to envy his chipper attitude. But at least he seemed to have no intention of prying into her personal life. “Sounds exciting.”

“Oh, not very.”

“Ah.” She looked down at her breakfast, oatmeal and scrambled eggs and a little bowl of canned fruit, and started eating mechanically. She barely tasted any of it, but she knew she would feel worse if she didn’t eat.

“So, I see our grand adventure is about to begin,” he said. He seemed heedless of the fact that any one of his servants could walk into the dining room at any moment.

“We’ll have to move on the fifteenth,” Eva said.

“Well, that’s in two days. Not long at all.”

“No, it’s not,” Eva said.

“Do you feel ready?”

“I’ll need to talk to the Earth Church, to let them know,” Eva said. “Heinrich told you who to call, didn’t he?”

“He did. How is he, by the way? I’ve missed seeing him at dinner when I’ve come by.”

“I—” She couldn’t quite answer the question.

“That bad?” Landsberg sighed, an affected little sound. “Poor fellow. It’s a shame.”

Eva nodded. The tears were threatening to come to her eyes again, but she squeezed them shut as she took a sip from her scalding mug of coffee, burning her tongue. She felt more resolute when she put it down.

“Are you sure you want to come with me?” Eva asked him. “I already appreciate your help in letting me stay here. I don’t want you to feel obligated.”

“What? Of course I do. Don’t be silly.”

“Heinrich said that you were very eager to agree. I admit I don’t really understand why.”

“Are you a homebody, Frau Mittermeyer?” he asked with a smile. “A housewife?”

“I have a job—” Well, before the civil war she had a job. She wouldn’t be returning to it now.

“No, I’m talking about ambitions, the things that make you excited in life.”

“Well— I suppose I’m not very exciting.”

“The world needs all types,” Landsberg said. “But I suppose you couldn’t understand, then.”

“Would you try to explain?” she asked. She tried to put a smile on her face. The innocent, naive look that apparently had gotten her so far.

“Why do you want to know?”

“It would make me feel better to know that I’m not ripping you away from a happy life here on Odin—”

“Well, it seems like you have far much more to lose than I have,” he said with a laugh. “What have I got? Money? Everybody has money. You have a family, which I gather is much more important. I should really be asking you —”

“Are you asking me?”

He laughed again. “No, Heinrich already told me all about it, when we spoke. I believe I understand completely.”

She wondered what it was that Heinrich had said. “Oh.”

“As for myself,” he said, picking up his tea, “I’m not planning to spend the rest of my life in exile, a stranger in a strange land, as it were. But I’d like to see the universe. I’ve been to Phezzan, of course, but opportunities to get to see the way the rebels live their lives, that’s far rarer of a thing, isn’t it? And I’ll have quite the story to tell.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Eva said.

“I’ll write it down, and I’ll give instructions for it to be published posthumously,” he said. “That’s the only way to do it.”

She didn’t think that Count Landsberg was the type to keep silent about this for the next seventy years. He would certainly say something when they returned, but she bit back the comment that rose unbidden to the front of her mind. It was tiredness that was making her easily annoyed.

But how optimistic she was being— “when” they returned, rather than “if”.

She pushed that grim thought out of her head, and tried to smile at the count. “I see.”

“Publishing things posthumously is a little bit of a mental gamble,” the count continued. “On one hand, it does free a man to say whatever he likes, without any fear of repercussions. But on the other hand, he might say something that tarnishes his legacy forever. You do have to be careful about the things you say after you’re dead.” He laughed, as if it was a funny joke. “Are dead men good storytellers, I wonder? That might make a good poem.”

He started tapping his index finger on the table rhythmlessly, sounding out the stresses of words that he didn’t say aloud.

“You’ll have plenty of time to write poetry once we’re on the road,” Eva said. “I don’t think the journey to Phezzan will be very quick.”

“No, you’re right. I should pack. Do you have any belongings that you’re bringing?”

“The Earth Church said that they would secure me a new wardrobe, and everything we might need,” Eva said. “I don’t need to bring anything.”

And she didn’t want to ask Magdalena to pack up her clothing and bring it over. She didn’t want to face Magdalena or speak to her.

“Perfect,” Count Landsberg said. “From what I can tell, they move quickly, so even with just two days of notice, they should have us squared away.”

The next day and a half was a blur, the moments all flowing into each other without pause, so that she couldn’t pick out any single one to dwell on. At least it kept her busy. The faces and names of the Earth Church representatives who made their appearances at Count Landsberg’s house were forgotten the moment they left her sight. It was the peculiar way they all had of speaking— very calm, very even, repeating the same comforting phrases as each other— that made them feel the same to her. If she had been able to keep her wits about her, she would have pushed back against that sensation, tried to remember the men and women she was speaking with, but she was lost in a fog.

The Earth Church did nothing to combat the feeling that its members lacked individuality, and, in fact, seemed to encourage it by rarely even letting Eva see or speak to the same person twice. There were so many of the rotating cast that even if she had wanted to form a connection with one of them, she wouldn’t have been able to.

Count Landsberg didn’t seem to notice or care that this was happening. He treated the members of the Earth Church like particularly strange servants, and they responded with a faux deference. Eva noticed the way that they kept him away from important decisions and let him instead obsess over the selection of trunks they would bring, and their rooms on board the spaceship they had planned to take for their escape. Eva rarely saw the count while he was kept busy with trivialities.

She, on the other hand, was constantly overwhelmed with people asking her real questions, urgent ones, ones where they hoped that she’d slip up and give more information than she wanted to give. It was a disconcerting experience, and she understood now why Magdalena had been so afraid of the Earth Church getting unfettered control of the young Erwin Josef. Eva worked hard to keep her wits about herself, and if the terror and stress ever showed in her eyes beneath her glassy smile, she hoped that they would assume it was her fear of the plan that was making her afraid.

It partially was that. The more the Earth Church laid out information for her, the more terrifying it all became.

She got about six hours of sleep, the morning of the fifteenth, and then she and Count Landsberg were shuffled into the back of an unmarked white van, the seats lining the walls of the vehicle so that she and all the other passengers, Earth Church acolytes of some sort, could speak to each other on the drive. Although they had the option of talking, they rarely did. The Earth Church members sometimes said a soft word to each other, confirming or questioning or making a call to one of the other vehicles: other men converging towards the same point. Aside from that, the van was silent as it bumped across the ill-kept country roads.

They set out before the sun came up, and they drove further and further north, towards the mountains that separated the capital city from the rest of the continent. The back of the van was windowless, but when the sun began to rise, the light broke in a hazy golden glow through the windshield. Cast in this light, she could see the members of the Earth Church more clearly, and as she searched their faces, she realized that all of them were silently moving their lips, praying, even as several of them checked and rechecked the weapons that they were carrying. She wondered if it was the sun’s signal that made them pray out of religious obligation, or if they were praying for their success today specifically. One of the men reached beneath the heavy collar of his jacket and withdrew a small necklace, on which was strung a rock engraved with text too small for Eva to read. He rubbed it beneath his fingers for some time, and didn’t notice Eva watching him.

Although she wasn’t a believer in the Earth Church’s religion— even when Heinrich had tried to explain its appeal to her, it lacked any positive resonance within her— she was warmed by the sight of these silent prayers. It was the simple sincerity of it, she supposed. These men had no reason to pray other than to pray, and they were doing so for Erwin Josef’s sake. When she happened to catch the eye of the man with the stone necklace, she offered him a smile. He nodded back.

Count Landsberg managed to sleep on the long drive, though Eva had no idea how. For her own part, she was running the plan over and over in her head, mentally consulting the floor maps that Hilde had sketched out from Elfriede’s description of the Lichtenlade safehouse. She had given the Earth Church the location of the house, but she had kept the description of the easiest entrance to the labyrinth of secret tunnels to herself, as Magdalena had commanded her to. Keeping this knowledge private had been the only way to ensure that she would be brought along, and would have a way to put herself between Erwin Josef and the Earth Church’s machinations, if necessary.

Their route took them into the mountains, which rose up around them as the road wended its way through. They passed farmland in the valleys, but the slopes were covered in trees, a mixture of pines and bare deciduous branches, except in places where the mountainsides were too steep to support a layer of topsoil, and only sheer rock remained. As they came closer to the appointed area, one of the Earth Church members asked Eva for specific directions, holding a map out to her on a tablet.

She drew a wide circle around the roads leading up to the entrance of the mine, and said that the convoy should stop several kilometers away. The roads were all monitored this close to the mine, and there were no other vehicles that they had passed on almost the entire trip. Their car obeyed, swerving off the road to thunk down in a dried up creekbed at the side of the road. The jostling woke up Count Landsberg, who looked around sleepily, and followed the Earth Church members out of the car like a lost lamb. The car was swiftly hidden from the view of the road by the Earth Church— five of them working together used surprising strength to hoist a fallen pine tree over top of the van, its branches cascading down to completely disguise the van from the view of the road.

Now that Eva was standing outside, she was freezing cold. Up in the mountains, snow still clung to the shadowy divots in the ground, and the wind whipped past to rattle the branches of the trees. The sunlight was thin through the grey clouds above, and there weren’t any birds around to sing and cheer the company. When they were ready to start marching, Eva finally took the tablet from the leader of the group and indicated the location of the entrance of the mine, three kilometers away. She was worried, momentarily, that the Earth Church leader would force her back into the van, to go ahead without her, but he merely thanked her for the information and they headed forward.

Count Landsberg, having the most energy from sleeping during the drive, bounded to the front of the group. They weren’t walking quickly, so even though the count wasn’t much of a sportsman, he was still able to scramble over fallen tree trunks and lead the pack, often to the point of wandering off in a direction that they weren’t going.

Eva lagged behind. She had been given men’s clothing to wear, pants and heavy boots, and she appreciated the way they made it easy to move through the dense winter forest, but she was nevertheless uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the way they felt on her. She had to measure her steps carefully to avoid stubbing the toes of the boots on the ground. As they walked, the man with the stone necklace found a place beside her. “Are you doing well, Frau Mittermeyer?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I didn’t catch your name, Herr…?”

“Mark,” he said.

She would have expected a family name, but he didn’t offer, and she didn’t press. “I should get used to using the fake name you all have given me.” She tried to keep the pain out of her voice when she said, “I don’t think I can really be called Frau Mittermeyer right now.”

“Frau von Kleiner, then,” he said.

“May I ask a question?”

“Of course. Though I can’t promise that I can answer.”

“Your necklace— what is it?”

Mark smiled and reached inside his shirt to pull the necklace off. He held it out to her, and she hesitantly took it, turning the rock over in her hands. She should have known what the engraving would say: “Earth Is My Mother.” The rock was worn smooth, and a particular divot in its surface was rubbed even smoother, causing the miniscule letters to almost be faded into oblivion. It was warm from where it had rested against Mark’s chest, but quickly lost its heat in the cold air.

“It’s from Earth,” Mark said. “A reminder.”

“Have you ever been to Earth?”

“No— the only time I left Odin was when I was in the fleet. I’d like to go someday, but I doubt I’ll be needed there.”

“Oh.” She was tempted to ask what he meant by that, but she was wary of giving the Earth Church any real indications of her thoughts. She handed the necklace back. “I hope you get a chance.”

“Thank you. Though my bishop would tell you that I’m assured to go there.”

Eva looked at him questioningly. “Is he optimistic about you being promoted, or something? Sorry if that’s a stupid question— I don’t really know how your church works.”

Mark was ecstatic that she played along, however unwittingly. “The soul will always return home,” he said.

“Oh,” Eva said. “Right.”

“Are you nervous, Frau Kleiner?”

Mark helped her through a particularly bramble-filled section of the woods before she answered. “Yes,” she said. She was tempted to elaborate, but didn’t.

They had fallen far behind the group, and she was out of breath by the time they caught up.

“Mother Earth favors you,” Mark said. “You’ll be safe.”

Eva just bit her lip at that.

As they approached the entrance to the underground tunnels, they were joined by several other groups of Earth Church acolytes, swelling their number to almost sixty people, most of them now heavily armed, guns slung across their backs, or carrying backpacks full of supplies that they might need to get inside the Lichtenlade safehouse. It would have been better for them to enter the underground sections through multiple entrances— there were several— but Eva didn’t know where they were exactly, only that they existed. The only one whose location Elfriede had been able to describe in detail was the one she had played games near as a child.

As the Earth Church group came up to its location, they stopped and fanned out. They had approached the entrance from above. It was now several meters below them, down in a crack in the mountainside, with steeply sloping walls of bare rock. The rest of the mountain was still up above, but the heavy cover of pine branches overhead disguised how tall it was. Eva could barely see the sky.

The Earth Church acolytes moved around, using handheld detectors to listen for radio signals that might transmit a warning of intruders. Mark pointed past Eva’s shoulder to show her how one group had found a physical wire emerging from the ground. A group of them worked on carefully attaching a signal-spoofing device to the wire, so that they could enter the area undetected.

When they all entered the ravine, Eva realized that even just a few steps away from its originating point, it was actually wide enough for a vehicle to get through. Though the ground was bumpy, any dirtbike or four wheeler could make it to this point. Presumably the ravine stretched out as far as some road, or at least to a cleared path through the woods. Standing on the rocky ground, the sky was now almost invisible above her, and all that remained was the rock walls. In front of them was the entrance to the underground tunnels.

It was funny to imagine Elfriede as a child, some girl of eight slithering out of her mother’s arms and chasing similarly blonde cousins through dirty underground passageways. She pictured them emerging one by one through the exit, a thin crack in the meeting walls of the ravine— taller than a person, but so skinny that even the children would have to step through sideways. It gaped like a sideways eye.

Before everyone entered, the leader of the Earth Church group smeared a glob of white cream across each person’s forehead. When he dragged his fingers across her forehead, she shivered, like she was receiving a blessing.

“It shows up in the night vision,” Mark said. “In case we run into anyone else in there— makes it easy to see who’s who.”

She almost wished that Mark hadn’t told her that— she preferred the idea that it had been a benediction.

The Earth Church members stepped into the crack in the rock one at a time, turning their shoulders and bowing their heads to squeeze through the gap at its widest point. They vanished into the blackness, out of Eva’s sight.

Count Landsberg squirmed his way into the crack, and Eva stepped up to it. Her heart thrummed, and she hesitated, putting her hands on either side of the rock walls, as if she could push them apart. Even standing right at the entrance, she couldn’t see anyone who had already gone through.

“Are you claustrophobic?” Mark asked. “You don’t have to go in.”

Eva thought about Erwin Josef and steeled herself. She pushed herself through. The entrance was narrow, and it thinned as she worked her way in. The cold and damp rock scraped against her shoulders, and her hair caught on the roughness, landing wetly on her face when she finally broke free of the orifice.

The members of the Earth Church had already made quick work of the heavy door that was further into the passageway, and it yawned open. Before they had left, Eva had sketched out a map of the tunnels that she knew— the single route that Elfriede had shared to get to the house— and she pulled that sketch out from her pocket now and handed it to the acolyte at the front of the group. She might have once have held onto the idea of leading the way through the tunnels herself, but in the darkness she was hopelessly disoriented. The acolyte accepted the map with murmured thanks, and began navigating through. Someone closed the door behind them, sealing off the last slip of light.

A strange sound of small motors and splashing made Eva jump, but someone pointed their flashlight down at the ground so that Eva could see what the sound was: a small wheeled robot that zoomed off into the darkness, armed with detection tools like the ones that had enabled them to avoid cameras so far. It scouted the path ahead of them, controlled by one of the acolytes at the front of the group.

Someone— Eva presumed it was Mark— pressed a flashlight into her hand, and they began making their way through the tunnels. Shallow water, no more than a few centimeters of it, sloshed around their feet, but it was enough to splash up her legs and drip down into her socks, chilling her to the bone. Everything looked phantasmagorical in the swaying flashlights, and every sound echoed, dripping water sounding like the planet’s own heartbeat.

When they came to branches in the tunnels, some of their group peeled off into the darkness, making their own maps to find alternate exits. There were other Earth Church members waiting outside, on the other side of the mountains, to rush them to safety, and it would likely be better to leave that way than the way they had come in. The last thing in the world that Eva wanted today was to risk encountering Reuenthal leading Braunschweig’s men, following this same route into the house. They would likely be here in a scant few hours.

Elfriede’s description of the tunnels matched reality quite closely, it seemed, since every intersection appeared exactly as marked on her map, though Eva didn’t know where they all led off to. The journey was agonizing, not just for the physical discomfort of the icy water that had fully saturated her pants, and the horrible darkness, and the fetid air that clung to her skin, but for the anticipation of reaching the end of the tunnels. She didn’t have a sense of how much longer they had to go— Elfriede’s directions hadn’t included much in the way of time— so at any moment they could reach the end of their journey, and emerge into something far more terrible.

Up ahead, the whining of the small remote control vehicle’s motors cut out, and a strange silence filled the tunnel, punctuated only by their breathing and the splashing of their feet. A few of the members of the Earth Church went forward, turning off their flashlights and switching to night vision so that they could disable the last remaining detection systems that guarded the doors at the end of the tunnel. When this had been accomplished, the rest of their group was given the signal to move forward, which they all did, shuffling around the last corner.

The doors, leading up into the house, were huge. There were two: a set that led to an elevator, and a set that led to the stairs. They would have to take the stairs; there was no way that they could summon the elevator down without being discovered. They could, however, disable the elevator at the bottom, which they did by prying the doors open, and then destroying the cable mechanism that sat in the pit beneath the floor. This would prevent Lichtenlade’s retreat, in case they became aware of their approach through the stairs.

Although this was not the only entrance to the tunnels that the Lichtenlade family had access to, it was the only one that went directly into the house itself. The rest, Elfriede had said, went to various points in the grounds, many of them not even staircases, but manhole covers with ladders descending sheer vertical shafts. Eva hoped that there would be no need to use one of those on their way out.

The stairwell was thin and circular, and the Earth Church members all began to run up it. Eva was out of breath before they had even gone what she estimated was a quarter of the way, but she pushed on regardless, heaving air into her lungs as she took step after horrible step up the clattering stairs. She was dizzy, and her vision swam. When she stumbled, a hand steadied her from behind, and she glanced around to find Mark supporting her. She pushed forward and passed Count Landsberg on the stairs. He pressed himself against the wall, letting everyone rush by him, as he tried to catch his breath. In a gasping voice and with faltering hand signals he tried to explain that he would be fine in a second and would come with her, but Eva was already gone before he had gathered the strength to communicate anything coherent.

She didn’t know where the strength within herself had come from. At every moment she thought she might collapse, but she pressed on and on. Although her thoughts were fuzzy around the edges with exertion, she recalled stories she had read in the past, of mothers performing superhuman feats of strength and endurance for their children. Running into burning buildings. Prying apart crumpled metal car frames to rescue a baby trapped inside. Diving into torrential rivers and coming out the other side with their children in their arms.

She kept her flashlight trained on the steps in front of her, looking down to keep placing her feet one after the other. Through the gaps in the stairs, all she could see were the flashing lights of everyone else doing the same. It was a chaotic vision, where light and shadow formed meaningless shapes in an endless spiral beneath her feet.

As they climbed the stairs, Eva became aware that there was some trouble at the front of their group. The whole party, thirty or so people, was spread out over a wide stretch of stairwell, partly to avoid crashing into each other in the narrow confines if any one member happened to stumble, and partly because each person had their own pace. They had started out much more clumped up at the bottom, but now Eva could only see the shoulders and feet of three people ahead of herself, when she swung her flashlight up to look around. The trouble moved through the group in hand signals and breathy words that Eva didn’t quite catch (perhaps spoken in some other language that she didn’t know) as they echoed down the stairs over the heavy tromping of footsteps upwards. It must have arrived over the radios that the leaders were carrying, since the movement of the group upwards didn’t stop.

“What’s the matter?” Eva managed to ask, as she passed one acolyte who had flattened himself to the wall to allow everyone else to pass. It seemed like he was taking a contingent back down the stairs. He didn’t answer her, but Mark made his way up the line, passing several other men, then came back down to join Eva, matching her step for step.

“There’s someone else in the tunnels,” he said. “Another group.”

Eva couldn’t breathe. “They’re not supposed to be here yet.”

“We’ll have to take another route out,” Mark said. “It’ll be okay.”

Somehow, through her panic, Eva was able to keep climbing. Although she found it hard to think, she mentally surveyed the floor plan of the house, and the alternate ways down the mountainside that had been marked on the map Hilde had shown her. The tunnels were a better retreat strategy— but not if they were already cut off from that direction.

She mentally cursed herself for not forcing Hilde to re-explain the plan, trusting her when she said that nothing had changed. The plan might not have changed enough for Hilde to think it worth commenting on, but Reuenthal’s presence indicated that something was different, which meant that nothing was safe. It hadn’t been safe before, but it was even less so now.

They were coming to the top of the staircase. This wasn’t announced by anyone at the top reaching it, or any slowing of their pace, but by a pair of sensations: one a sound, and one a wind. From above, there came a wailing alarm, sweeping up and down its frequencies, growing louder and louder every step they took upwards. From below, a slight wind moved where there had not been one before, whistling up through the darkness. It chilled the sweat on her face, and fluttered her hair, though its most noticeable feature was the way it made a strange and terrifying noise in the staircase, a thousand tiny mouths blowing through the punched-hole texture of the metal slat stairs.

“What’s going on?” she asked, trying to yell but not quite succeeding. Her breath was caught in her throat.

There was no response from anyone, not even Mark right behind her. She didn’t know how much longer it was to the top of the stairs, but she kept climbing another few steps, until she crashed into the man ahead of her. The people above had turned off their flashlights. Mark grabbed her shoulder roughly and pulled her to the side of the wall. He pulled the flashlight out of her hand and turned it off, plunging them into near total darkness. She tried to get out of his grip, but then, from above her, she heard a woman begin to scream. The sound cut off as soon as it began, with sounds of something heavy hitting the stairs.

Something hot and wet dripped down through the grates of the steps and landed on Eva’s face. She almost began to yell, but Mark slapped his hand over her mouth, keeping her silent. Although the wind in the staircase was predominantly moving upwards, as Eva struggled to breathe, snorting in air like a horse, above the damp smell of the tunnels and the tang of the metal stairs and the sweat from running, she detected the unmistakable scent of smoke— wood and something more acrid than wood.

Eva understood what was happening now. The alarm distantly wailing was not an intruder alarm, but a fire alarm. Reuenthal had set the Lichtenlade house on fire. The entire household was trying to flee through the tunnels, leaving through the closest exit, and Reuenthal’s men were surely waiting at the bottom of the stairs to kill them. Eva and the Earth Church were trapped in between: fire above (maybe five or six stories overhead) and certain death below.

But closer than that, Eva heard the Earth Church members doing exactly what they had come here to do, undeterred by the fire. The Lichtenlade family had run into the staircase without realizing what was waiting for them, and by the time they did, they were already dead. The Earth Church acolytes killed them one by one. In such a confined space, they couldn’t use their guns, so instead they used the knives at their hips. The Litchtenlades stumbled blindly in the darkness, spread out far enough that those in front had no hope of truly warning those behind, and the Earth Church members grabbed them one by one, covering their mouths to stop them from screaming, then slitting their throats. There were noises from above, a few aborted yells, and the sounds of violence and gurgling death. Bodies fell down the stairs, though in such cramped spaces they couldn’t go far. The Earth Church members further below kicked them further down to clear a passage. Some landed at Eva’s feet.

She couldn’t move and could barely breathe, held trapped by Mark, and she realized that she was crying, her sobs choked and muffled by the broad hand covering her mouth. With one burst of strength she pulled herself free, though she wasn’t sure where she was going, and ended up falling forward, her arms landing on the soft and warm flesh of a corpse. She scrambled upwards, but only encountered another, and another, crawling over the dead in the darkness. Her hands were covered in blood, and her knees, and bile rose in her throat. She choked on it, still trying to crawl forwards.

Above her, a child wailed, on and on and on, until the sound stopped. Eva cried out then, like she herself had been stabbed. Someone’s hands were under her armpits, and he pulled her to her feet, keeping her steady.

“Give me the boy,” Mark demanded behind her. In the blind, fumbling darkness, someone passed the child like a bag of dirt over Eva’s head. His legs hit her shoulders when those ahead lowered him down to Mark. She reached up to touch him, the fine cloth of Erwin Josef’s pants wet with blood.

“Give him to me—” Eva sobbed.

“Don’t worry— he’s fine,” Mark said. “I’ll carry him. Come on.”

He pushed Eva forwards, up the stairs. She tried to walk, but stumbled over the dead, ending up scrambling with her hands, pushing corpses aside or climbing over them. The stairwell was filling with smoke more and more the further they went up. She couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but the air still stung her eyes.

Now there was a horrible fire-light glow above, and the roaring sound of it eating the house above them. There were fewer bodies on the stairs here— those that had only made it this far had been able to turn around and take their chances in the other direction. The smoke alarms had long since ceased blaring, and the heat pressed down on Eva. She didn’t think she would be able to take another step forward, except for the man pushing at her back. “You have to move,” he said. “Go.”

The other members of the Earth Church ahead of her had entered the burning house, navigating by remembered floorplans. Eva squinted her eyes against the light, not used to seeing anything, seeing them only as dark smears against the flames.

They had entered into a hallway, one with huge windows already smashed open by someone. The windows overlooked a sheer cliff face, a hundred meter drop onto sheer rock below, and based on the bloody smudges of handprints on the shattered glass, it looked like someone had already taken that route out, or tried. Smoke roiled across the ceiling, and the whole house groaned.

It was stone in its backbone, but wood in its skin, and flames were eating their way along the walls. Distantly, there was the sound of glass popping and exploding, and a hungry roar as the fire drank the alcohol hidden somewhere in the house. Eva turned in circles, not sure where to go, the half-remembered floor plan of the Litchtenlade house unrecognizable when compared to this hell of flames. She could breathe for now, with clean air coming in through the windows, but this chimney was only feeding the flames elsewhere in the house.

Mark had Erwin Josef tossed unconscious across his shoulder, but he pulled the boy off himself and shoved him into Eva’s arms. He weighed almost more than she could carry— he wasn’t a small boy at seven— but having him in her arms made her more able to move, steeled her resolve. Behind her, coming up from the stairs, Count Landsberg— but Eva paid him no attention whatsoever.

Mark picked the less smoke-filled side of the overlooking hallway, and pulled Eva through by the arm. They entered a parlor where the walls were engulfed in flames, old family oil portraits burning like ghostly apparitions on the walls.

The library was a white wall of flame, and Mark shoved Eva past it— she could barely see or breathe through the smoke, but then there was the dining room, long and relatively unscathed— no plush furniture crowded close together that provided easy fuel— though the ceiling was a thick cloud of black smoke. Eva ran through without seeing much of it.

The wooden paneling in the hallway was cracking as fire wormed its fingers beneath it, eating the lacquers and then starting on the wood itself, but the long hallway past the dining room was still a tunnel of safety, and was the last room before the kitchen— the blessed kitchen, with its white tile floor and the back door for deliveries thrown wide open. Eva almost ran out, but Mark grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and stopped her.

The fire roared on every side, fed by the cold air coming in through the open door and the busted window. She screamed and thrashed, but Mark threw her behind himself as he stepped towards the door. She tripped backwards and stumbled into the marble countertop of the island in the center of the room, clutching Erwin Josef’s unconscious body to her chest.

As Mark crouched in the doorway, Eva heard the whine of rifle fire, and a tile on the wall behind her exploded when it was hit. Eva looked out the doorway, and didn’t see the gunman, but did see bodies of the Lichtenlade clan littering the ground, picked off by sniper fire as they exited the house. Mark pulled his gun from his back and took aim at someone Eva couldn’t see. More shots rained into the building, and Eva dropped to the ground behind the marble island, sheltering Erwin Josef with her arms.

Behind her, something collapsed in the house, timbers crashing down and the roar of the fire growing even louder. Count Landsberg, who had somehow stuck with her without her paying him any attention whatsoever, ran forwards, tripping over his own legs, and shoved past Mark to get out of the building.

A spray of rifle fire pockmarked the ground at his feet, and Mark ran out after him, putting his own body in front of Count Landsberg and raising his gun. He took aim and shot, but as he did, one of the shots from the sniper hit home, straight through his skull, and he collapsed backwards to the ground, his forehead a destroyed lump of gore. Count Landsberg kept running, heedless of anything happening behind him, and made it to the trees on the other end of the courtyard.

Eva didn’t want to move, couldn’t make her limbs cooperate with her. She was trapped on the ground, her fingers curled through Erwin Josef’s bloody blond hair. The fire crept along the kitchen ceiling. Something else in the building collapsed behind her.

Erwin Josef was unconscious still, breathing so shallowly that his lips were blue. Eva pressed a kiss to his forehead and rocked back and forth on her heels. If she didn’t move, they would both die here.

She forced herself to her feet, taking step after step. No rifle fire awaited her as she crossed the threshold of the doorway— Mark had killed the sniper. She stepped past his body, trying not to look at his blank eyes staring up at the sky. She dragged herself to the woods.

Count Landsberg was ahead, flattening himself to the trunk of a tree, his eyes wide and his breathing ragged. “Where is the Earth Church?” he asked.

Eva’s mind didn’t register his question, but she knew that there were Earth Church members waiting on the other side of the mountain to take them to safety, and the mountain was there ahead of her, even if the scale of it was hidden by the thick cover of the pines. She started walking. Gunshots rang out in the woods, and so did shouts, but Eva moved in a near-catatonic straight line, placing one foot in front of the other as she climbed the steep hill. Count Landsberg followed behind her, though whenever a shot sounded nearby, he dodged behind trees. Eva didn’t have the strength to alter her course: if she stopped moving, she would never be able to start again. So she just kept walking.

When the Earth Church acolytes found her, her arms were so stiff from clutching Erwin Josef to her chest that she couldn’t move them on her own, and he had to be pried out of her arms.

When the Earth Church had gotten her away from the mountain with Lichtenlade’s home, she had managed to ask why Erwin Josef was unconscious, as the van bumped and sped along the road. She was wiping the blood off of the boy’s forehead as he lay across her lap, and he didn’t stir at all. His breathing was less shallow when he was laying down, and some normal color had returned to his cheeks, making him look less like a corpse.

To their credit, one of the surviving members of the Earth Church group gave her a straight answer. “We gave him a sedative— a large dose. He’ll wake in a few hours. He would have been difficult to manage awake.”

Eva nodded, and looked down into the boy’s sleeping face. He was quite peaceful— the one peaceful thing she had.

The Earth Church hid her in a nondescript house, far out in the countryside. It seemed to belong to one of their members, an old woman whose windowsill shrine in the living room had spilled out to cover not just the window and the surrounding wall, but a good chunk of floor space as well.

Eva didn’t think much about her surroundings. The only thing that mattered to her was her refusal to be separated from Erwin Josef. They could have put her in the lowliest of prisons, rather than in this room that smelled of an old woman’s soap, with the threadbare quilt on the bed— it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

She undressed him, taking the bloody clothes off him and tying them into a bag to be disposed of. When she pulled off his shirt, it caught on something around his neck, and she discovered, with a choked lump in her throat, that Mark had placed his stone necklace around the boy’s neck. She left it there as she changed him into clothing she had been given for him: plain, soft clothing. She felt like she was dressing a doll, more than a boy, he was so limp.

Erwin Josef was still asleep long after the sun went down, but when one of the Earth Church members delivered her some dinner— a bowl of soup with a fried egg draped on top of it— he was beginning to stir, rolling over on the bed occasionally. She didn’t bother eating the food. It grew cold on the desk where she left it. All she did was sit on the bed and watch the rise and fall of Erwin Josef’s chest, the way his face twitched with dreams.

He finally woke with a start, shaking himself all over and coming fully back to consciousness without any of the sleepiness Eva would have expected from a child. He sat bolt upright and looked around, his eyes wide and his breath coming in frantic gasps. Perhaps he had come out of a nightmare. His eyes settled on Eva warily, and, in a voice cracked with thirst, demanded, “Who are you?”

“Oh—” Eva didn’t know how to muster the right words. “I’m— you can call me— I’ll be taking care of you—”

Erwin Josef took a second to process this information, then said, “I want Frau Marie. Where is Frau Marie?”

“She’s—” Dead, Eva thought. “—not here. I’m Eva— I’m here instead.”

“Give me Frau Marie right now,” Erwin said. His voice, though he tried to keep it haughty, was clearly on the edge of panic. He was tensing himself up, his little hands balled into fists, and he winced when he discovered that parts of his body were bruised. “Give me— my—”

“Erwin— it’s alright!”

“Where is she?” He was yelling now. “Where is she? Tell me or I’ll kill you! I really will— I’ll make Herr Klaus kill you— HERR KLAUS!”

Eva made the mistake of trying to reach for him, thinking she could provide a comforting touch, but instead Erwin leaped at her with surprising strength. His fingernails were sharp in the way only a child’s could be, and he went directly for her face, clawing four scratches under her left eye down her cheek. She shrieked and raised her arms to protect herself, falling backwards off the bed to the floor. This didn’t deter Erwin, who grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her head up off the ground. She kept her arms over her face, and, unable to claw at her eyes, he bit her arm hard enough to draw blood, bit it hard enough that when the Earth Church members downstairs heard the screaming, and they burst through the door and pulled the boy off of her, she was missing a chunk of flesh from her forearm.

Erwin didn’t stop at attacking just her. He leapt at the Earth Church acolytes with a scream, and when he found that his pounding fists couldn’t get any reaction out of them, he tried to dive between their legs to run out the door. Eva laid on the floor, her chest heaving, snot bubbling in her throat and blood dripping from her arm all over the white painted floorboards of the old woman’s room.

When they sedated the boy, they had to sedate her too. She was simultaneously laughing and crying so hard that she couldn’t breathe. They stuck the needle in her arm, and she lacked the ability to resist. The only thought she had as she slid into unconsciousness was how funny it was.

So many people were dead, and the only injury she had sustained all day was from the boy whose life she had come to save.