Not the Fire Lapping Up the Creek

March 489 I.C., Odin

Reuenthal left the city several days before the intended attack on the Lichtenlade safehouse, gathering all the men he would be bringing with him into a small camp near the mountains. It was a camp in the most literal sense: a campground in a public forest that had, in better days, been used for summer programs for the middle class youth of the city. Cabins stretched out in a long line near a lakefront, and strung up in the woods were huge climbing toys: rope ladders and swings meant for entertainment more than exercise. In the foggy late-winter morning, they dangled from the tree branches like hanged men.

Since the civil war was dragging on, as was winter, the place was completely deserted, which made using it for their purposes quite simple. Compared to the situation in the capital city, the rustic settings were practically luxurious: there was an abundance of fresh well water here, and even the outhouses were an improvement from the city’s conditions. Reuenthal and his men couldn’t stay here for long— they were too conspicuous as a group— but they had needed a place to gather before putting their plans into action, and this was as good of one as any.

It should have been a relief to finally be out of the capital and preparing to put his plans into action, ones that would help Yang to take control of the planet. Reuenthal had felt impotent for a long time, since returning to Odin, at the very least, and it should have calmed something inside him to be in motion again. But instead he found himself on edge, which only grew worse the closer the date came to the attack on the Lichtenlade house.

Maybe he was thinking like Mittermeyer, making his mistakes, hoping that something inside himself would change, become better to fit the circumstances, and he was angry that it didn’t.

He had claimed an entire cabin as his office, and he slept deeply on the thin cot in there. He slept too deeply, having nightmares that he couldn’t escape from, different ones than usual. He would dream of Elfriede’s claws on his throat, or of drowning. The new dreams had the same effect on him as familiar ones. He would wake up hot and sweating, his blankets thrown to the ground, feeling sick with an ache and hunger that he could do nothing to satisfy.

Although he did not understand why he dreamed about drowning, he understood perfectly why he dreamed of Elfriede— he thought often about their last conversation.

It had taken place in the dark recesses of the Kummel house. They left the meeting where she told him all her family’s secrets, leaving Hilde and Kircheis to talk it over at the table for a while, and she led him towards the back of the house, the smoking room that the four women living there rarely entered. There were heavy drapes drawn over the windows, but Elfriede pulled them back, revealing the cold snow outside, illuminated only by the light falling out of the rest of the house’s windows.

Reuenthal didn’t bother to sit down on the plush leather furniture— he wouldn’t be staying for long.

“You were very eager to give me a way to kill your family,” he said. “You didn’t even try to make me beg for it.”

“You wouldn’t have.” Elfriede stared out the window. Reuenthal came up behind her. He put his hands on the crook of her neck, between her throat and the shoulders of her dress, and slid his hands forward over her smooth skin, over her chest, towards her breast, though he stopped his movement before his fingers slid underneath the beaded hem of her bodice. He fingered it idly.

“Were you afraid I’d find some other way to get it out of you?”

She made a dismissive noise. “Maybe I should have made you try.”

“You should have.”

“You think less of me for helping you.”

“Yes.”

“You should learn to be grateful.”

“I’m not the type.”

“Neither am I.”

“And is that why you gave them up? No thanks for the people who raised you?”

She was silent.

“You don’t think they’ll live, do you? Even if your grand-uncle surrenders to us, he won’t last very much longer,” Reuenthal said. “Braunschweig is smart enough to know that he’s a liability. I wonder if it’ll be poison, or a quiet shot to the back of the head, or—”

“Are you trying to make me betray you , Oskar?” Elfriede asked. He could feel her breathing beneath his fingertips on her chest. She was quite calm, or she was so good at feigning calm that it didn’t change the beating of her heart.

“You didn’t even want me mentioning your family a few months ago,” Reuenthal said. “It just surprises me that you want them dead now.”

“Do I want them dead?” She seemed to be asking herself the question.

“Or is it just rational self interest?” he asked. He slipped his hands beneath her dress. The fabric was loose and yielding, letting him move freely against her. The feeling of her warm skin disgusted him, but he kept touching her anyway. The disgust itself was enough to make him want it. He pressed himself against her back. “We’re going to win, and so it’s far better to be with us than against us.” Her dress strained against his hands as he pinched her, trying to make her react, but she remained perfectly still. “The last survivor of the Lichtenlade clan,” he murmured.

“Like you’re the last survivor of your family?”

When he didn’t say anything, she reached up blindly behind herself, finding his face. She trailed her cold fingertips down his nose, resting them on his lips.

“We’re nothing alike,” he said. When he opened his mouth on the long vowel, she stuck her fingers inside, playing them against his tongue.

“We’re not?” she asked. “If you were me, wouldn’t you do the same?”

He couldn’t answer in a dignified way with her hand where it was, so he said nothing. It was for the best— he didn’t like either answer to the question. Neither suited him. Elfriede scraped her fingernail along the roof of his mouth.

“Wasn’t it something you always dreamed of?” Elfried asked again.

He bit her finger, hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to draw blood. She pulled it out of his mouth, spit trailing from his lip. She leaned heavily against him, then wiped her hand on his, still shoved down the front of her dress.

“Wasn’t it?” she asked again.

“Why do you care?”

“You have a good imagination, Oskar,” she said. She tilted her face up towards him, her hair folding against his chest. “Imagine that I’m you, and I’ll imagine that you’re me.”

“How touching,” he said. He had intended to be snide, but it fell flat, and Elfriede ignored his comment.

“What would you dream of, if you were trapped in my family’s house?” she asked.

He stood there silently for a moment. The fantasy was easy to fall into, his hands against her body, her body against his. He cupped her breasts in his hands and let himself think of his childish fantasies, his father’s house.

“I’d burn it down,” he said.

The vision of the burning house had stayed with him, but only during his waking hours. Somehow, talking about his childhood dream with Elfriede had made it impossible to dream about again, moved it from the realm of fantasy into something more concrete than that.

He almost entertained the thought of summoning Elfriede to the camp, just to feel something real. It could be justified by wanting more information from her— not like he would need a justification. But he refused to stoop that low.

Instead, on the morning of the thirteenth, Reuenthal availed himself of the dock over the spring-fed lake to go for a swim. The few men who he passed as he walked out onto the dock looked at him like he was insane. There were plenty of men who used the lake to wash clothes or to bathe, running into the water to knee height and shivering violently as they scrubbed themselves down, but it was far too cold for anyone else to want to swim. Reuenthal left his clothes on the side of the dock and dove in without any preamble.

The water was as cold and sharp as glass, and in the moment after he hit the surface his body froze up with the shock, none of his muscles able to move as he sank to the muddy bottom of the lake. The water was like icy hands crushing his chest, and he had to force his arms to move, to drag himself to the surface, force his lungs to breathe, to make the nightmare real so that he could fight against it.

He took deep breaths and steadied himself, letting the cold pervade his skin until he was numb and could move more freely again. He was out of practice swimming, hadn’t done it in months, but the cold water sapped every thought from his mind, so he couldn’t berate himself for his lack of adroitness. Any effort more than moving his limbs to keep himself above water was extraneous and punished by the temperature. He swam as far as the small island in the center of the lake, then turned around after he found himself sliding on his stomach through the slimy mud that rose up around the tree-studded hump of dirt, like he was a fish learning to crawl onto land.

The whole exercise didn’t take him more than a half hour, but when he returned to the shore, he found an unpleasant sight waiting for him. Hildegarde von Mariendorf was standing on the edge of the dock, watching him swim. The rest of the men who had been around the lake had vanished into the mist, headed back to the cabins to cook breakfast or warm up. Hilde’s arms were wrapped tightly around her chest as she shivered, the bright red sweater she wore apparently not keeping her warm enough in the March air. She was wreathed in the morning fog, but she was recognizable with her short blond hair and her men’s clothing.

He wasn’t going to remain in the ice-cold water to preserve Fraulein Mariendorf’s dignity, let alone his own, so he hauled himself up the splintering wooden ladder at the side of the dock like she wasn’t there. She picked up his clothes and held his towel out to him, looking at him with an inscrutable expression on her face.

She didn’t shy away from his gaze, nor did she blush or seem affected by the fact that he was naked and freezing in front of her. She might want to pretend that she was a man, that they could speak with one another without that distance between them, dressed like one as she was. Fine. Let her. It was a shallow wish on her part, one that held no real meaning. If their situations here were reversed, he doubted that she would have been quite so comfortable.

He put that thought out of his mind and took the towel she was proffering.

“I didn’t expect you to come here,” Reuenthal said as he dried his hair. “Is there some kind of problem in the capital?”

“In the capital— no,” Hilde said. He left the towel dangling around his neck and took the neatly folded stack of his clothing from her hands.

“Then whatever you have to talk about could have waited until I went back inside,” Reuenthal said, starting to get dressed.

“Rear Admiral— Oskar—” She now seemed to struggle under Reuenthal’s cold gaze. “It’s a personal matter. I wanted to catch you alone.”

“You may think that in your father and Leigh’s absence, I am a suitable man to ask for advice about your relationship with Lieutenant Kircheis,” Reuenthal said as he pulled on his underwear. He didn’t believe this was what she was here to discuss (if Hilde was anything, she was not frivolous), but he was in a poor mood, despite trying to burn the existing feeling out of him with his swim. “If that’s the case, I hope you free yourself from that misconception quickly. What is it?”

“It’s not about me,” she said, cheeks reddening. “It’s about you.”

“Oh? And what of my personal matters have you come to discuss?” He put a warning tone into his voice, though he assumed that this was something brought up by Bronner, whom Oberstein had mentioned that Hilde had spoken to. He shook out his pants and looked over the top of Hilde’s head. There was the smell of woodsmoke, cookfires, wafting out from the campgrounds. He would need to tell his men to be careful— too many fires would be detectable by Littenheim’s forces, the secret police as they monitored the skies. He let his thoughts drift there, away from Hilde’s presence.

“Elfriede told Eva about you and Rear Admiral Mittermeyer,” Hilde said. She didn’t sound scandalized, but she did sound sad— resigned to having this conversation with him.

There was a deadly silence between them. Somewhere above, a bird called, and the wind rippled the water on the lake. Reuenthal finished putting on his pants and stood up straight.

“I came to ask—”

“Ask what?” Reuenthal spat. “That has nothing to do with you.”

“No, I know it doesn’t. And I promise that when I leave, I’ll never bring it up again.” Her voice wavered, but she kept her course. “But I came to ask you to apologize to Eva.”

“Why?”

“No one else was going to.” That didn’t answer the question he was asking— but she had given the answer to the charitable question.

“And who else do you think would— should— demand something like that from me?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Countess von Leigh?”

“She said she already knew,” Hilde said. “She wouldn’t ask you— if she was going to, she already would have.”

Reuenthal laughed. “Do you feel left out for not knowing?” he asked. “Oberstein tells me that you’ve spoken with Rear Admiral Bronner recently. Are you going to happily report to him that his favorite theories about me are correct?” He pulled his shirt on, allowing himself the brief opportunity to scowl before his head emerged from the collar and he shook himself out. He remembered when Yang had told him about the accusations that Bronner had made— homosexuality and arson. It had been almost funny, then. It was not funny now.

“I know you don’t consider us friends, but we have known each other since we were both children. I hope that you have a higher opinion of me than that.”

She hardly was more than a child. It showed in her expression: a scowl, lips pinched together from the slight. The way children react to unfairness in the world. He remembered— unbidden— the younger Hilde leaping at his father as if she could protect him, protection which he had neither needed nor wanted. Reuenthal chased the memory away and smoothed his hair across his forehead, trying to temper his voice, return to being unaffected.

“And a long acquaintance gives you the right to get involved in my personal affairs?”

“Friendship with Evangeline gives me that right.”

“Fraulein Mariendorf, I understand that you grew up watching your father try to lecture me into being something more than what I am. Perhaps you think that, with your father away, that’s your responsibility. Let me assure you, I did not need it from him, and I do not need it from you.”

Hilde winced, but something in Reuenthal’s words seemed to have broken through. She changed her tack.“I’m not trying to lecture you. I’m being selfish: I want Eva to go back to my cousin’s house. Heinrich is devastated that she left—”

“Where is she?”

“She’s staying with Count Landsberg for the moment.” When Reuenthal’s lips curled in a sneer, she continued. “She doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t think she wants to be in the same house as Elfriede— she was really cruel.”

“Is it cruel to tell the truth?” Reuenthal asked. “If it had been my choice, I would have had her know it years ago.”

“It’s cruel to try to hurt someone else,” Hilde said. “I’m asking you to apologize because you’re the one who brought Elfriede to Heinrich’s house in the first place, and she was deliberately trying to ruin the peace.”

“And not because I’m” — He was tempted to be vulgar, but he curtailed the instinct. It wouldn’t have affected Hilde. — “a problem between her and her husband?”

Hilde met his eyes. “I understand that you won’t apologize for that.”

“Then what good do you think it would do for me to speak with her?”

There were, of course, plenty of answers to that question. To show that he was willing to seek some kind of resolution. To let Eva know that he didn’t hate her, personally. They weren’t good reasons, at least not good enough for Reuenthal to sacrifice his pride on the altar of Eva’s forgiveness.

“It’s better to clean a wound than let it fester,” Hilde said.

Reuenthal let out a derisive sound. This particular wound had been festering for well over a decade— the maggots had long ago chewed a hole in his chest and emptied out his ribcage. There might be nothing left of him but the rot. “You’ll suggest amputation, next,” Reuenthal said.

“I won’t suggest anything. It’s not my business.”

“It’s more of a cancer, anyway,” he said. “Cut it off, it grows back somewhere else.”

“Oskar— please just say something to her.” She paused. “Hank would want you to.”

This was the wrong thing for her to say. Reuenthal’s lip curled. “Are you somehow under the impression that he hasn’t known?”

“Oh,” Hilde said.

“Don’t act like you understand who Leigh is,” Reuenthal said. Hank von Leigh— the name itself was a fantasy. “I don’t believe you know him very well at all— he certainly wouldn’t expect me to beg for Frau Mittermeyer’s forgiveness.” When Hilde was silent, he said, “He would be relieved that you now think less of him for it.”

Hilde’s voice was tight now. “Then let me ask for only myself,” she said. “Rear Admiral, please speak with Frau Mittermeyer.”

Reuenthal pulled on his jacket, the last piece of his outfit, and looked at her. She refused to cow under his gaze— it was the one admirable thing about her, he supposed. He thought about her skinny fists raining futile blows on his father’s back.

“Do not ever ask me for anything like this again,” he said. “If I owe you something because your mother helped me as a child, this is where that ends.”

“You’ll speak with her?”

“After the fifteenth,” Reuenthal said. “I have more important things to worry about than trivialities.”

“Thank you.”

Reuenthal nodded coldly and stepped past her, heading back towards the campgrounds.

“Oskar—”

“What?”

“Please stay safe.”

He had no response to that, and vanished into the thick fog.

Reuenthal had about forty men at his disposal for the attack on the Lichtenlade house. It was a comically small group, considering that he was a rear admiral, and the crew of a single ship made up well over ten times that number. Braunschweig had very few men on the planet to begin with, and Reuenthal had given Oberstein a decent number of them, to assist with the plans in the capital as he saw fit. During their strategy meetings, Hilde and Kircheis laid out a minimum viable number of men to support their sabotage of Littenheim’s ships, and Oberstein asked to give them fifty percent more. A further handful of men remained in the capital to warn Reuenthal about any movement towards the Lichtenlade house from the Littenheim camp, or any other reasons that they might need to call off their attack or alter their strategy.

Reuenthal was theoretically in communication with the city over encrypted radio, but it was dangerous to broadcast anything— if Littenheim’s camp noticed any broadcasts, they would immediately hunt down the source as well as deploy signal jamming. The men who remained in the capital would have the opportunity to broadcast possibly only one message, and Reuenthal would not be able to reply.

Communications within his group were better, though only barely. The low power, short range radios that they used were less easily detected, but they would be even more vulnerable to jamming.

Their base camp was already in the mountains, to the west of the Lichtenlade house, and so it was a relatively short journey the morning of their planned attack. Reuenthal split his group into several approach paths. The first group approached the house from the north, around the side of the mountain on which the house was situated, to set up a watch from above for the movements of the Lichtenlade household.

They were in position by the time the sun rose, and they reported that the house was occupied. They described watching some nanny lead the young Erwin Josef outside, letting him play with a small dog in the courtyard area behind the house. They didn’t report on Litchtenlade’s presence, but it was clear that if Erwin Josef was in the house, Lichtenlade would be as well.

Reuenthal’s plan was to move to attack the Litctenlade house at the same time Hilde and Kircheis were destroying the airfield. Even though they were a several-hour drive from the capital city, Littenheim had access to air and spacecraft that could move quickly— if his entire apparatus was not kept occupied during the attack on the house, Reuenthal’s forces would not be able to escape. This would be especially true if Lichtenlade realized who was attacking him, and decided that his best bet for survival was to surrender to Littenheim to get help. At all costs, Reuenthal needed to prevent that from happening.

By midmorning, Reuenthal’s small group of men had gotten into position around the house undetected, and were waiting for the prescribed time. Reuenthal himself was outside the house with a group of fifteen men, about a kilometer away, staked out on one of the dirt trails that led in towards the building. He had a rifle on his back, but he doubted that he would need it. Yang’s resigned words from years ago rang through his head: “If an officer needs to engage in hand-to-hand combat, the battle’s already lost.”

Bergengrun, Reuenthal’s subordinate who had accompanied him when he left his fleet post to join Braunschweig’s army, had volunteered to lead the other group through the tunnels. He had done so primarily to stop Reuenthal from heading that charge himself: the house itself was likely to be much less dangerous to control than the mountain passageways, which they had no maps of. Reuenthal was annoyed by Bergengrun’s insistence on his safety, but even he recognized that he was correct— the commander should avoid placing himself in unnecessary danger simply for his own pride or entertainment.

Their observation team higher up in the mountains pointed out several places where the tree canopy broke or thinned suspiciously, signaling a human-cleared piece of land, demarcating trails from the underground passageways towards either the house or the road. Reuenthal’s group found several of these hatches dug into the stony forest floor and sealed them up.

The goal was to assault the house from two directions— Reuenthal’s group on the surface would begin the attack, and, if possible, capture Lichtenlade and Erwin Josef before they could escape into the tunnels or the woods. The other direction would be from below, the rest of his group waiting within the tunnels for anyone who happened to make it out of the house. It was a fairly simple plan, and even with only forty men (five sent as scouts to observe from above, his team of fifteen on the ground, and twenty below), he was reasonably certain that they could succeed. While the Litchtenlade house was well hidden, there was a limit to the number of armed guards Litchtenlade could keep there, along with his staff and family. Reuenthal was fairly certain that the population of the house was mainly the decrepit Lichtenlade clan and maybe tens of guards, and not a standing army.

They were planning to wait until eight, the safety of darkness and the beginning of Hilde and Kircheis’s assault in the capital, but at noon, Reuenthal’s plans changed. His radio buzzed to life, displaying on its screen the single encrypted message that the capital group could risk sending.

MAJOR MOVEMENT OF TROOPS IN CAPITAL. REASON UNCLEAR. HEADING TOWARDS N.S. COMPLEX. NO ATTACK ON AIRFIELD YET. MOVE NOW.

Reuenthal had no idea what this meant— his initial instinct was that there was a coup in progress at Neue Sanssouci, but he had no way of knowing who the major players were. Regardless, it made his goal of reaching Litchtenlade that much more critical— if there was instability within the Littenheim camp, it might be possible for Lichtenlade’s remaining support to take back control of the planet. And if he was under Reuenthal’s thumb at the time, that would be all the better.

The message had been short, and there would not be another. Reuenthal kept whatever it was he was feeling off his expression and out of his voice as he radioed the rest of his team, the ones who would be entering the underground passageways through the route that Elfriede had described. He told them to enter the tunnels now, and report back when they were in position at the bottom of the main stairway.

Reuenthal moved his team closer to the house. They were silent and undetected as they crept through the forest, laying low in the underbrush. Even to Reuenthal, as soon as they stepped away from him to take up different positions in the forest, their camouflage jackets made them fade into the underbrush.

As they approached close enough to see the house itself, Reuenthal raised binoculars to his eyes, and watched the movements of the people inside, like ghosts. There were no visible guards, around the house, but there were plenty of cameras studding the outside, watching for any enemy’s approach. Reuenthal’s group was well enough hidden by the trees that they wouldn’t be seen until they stepped out into the open space surrounding the house.

The house was three stories tall, austere, partially stone walled, with red wooden shingles on the roof. Smoke drifted out of the chimney, blown south by the wind coming down from the peak of the mountain. The southern face of the house looked out over the mountainside, dropping off in a sheer cliff studded with trees. Reuenthal couldn’t see the dropoff from behind the house, but he knew it was there from Elfriede’s description. To the west was the main road that led to the house, though it was little more than a dirt track that was quickly swallowed by the pines, and to the east there was more dense forest. Reuenthal and his men took up positions to the north, hiding in the trees and facing a courtyard behind the house. When he gave the signal, most of his team would head for two of the entrances, while several others would wait outside, prepared to shoot at any who made it out the door. They would aim to push people towards the stairwell that led to the tunnels, rather than letting them escape into the woods.

As they waited for the signal from the men in the tunnels, Reuenthal ran through the house layout again and again in his mind, picturing walking through the austere hallways. Although he had the layout, he had no idea what the inside of the house looked like, so his mind filled it in with the scenery of places he knew, familiar rooms. He pictured the Lichtenlades running from him, seeing their long blonde hair rather than their faces as he raised his gun.

His radio for communicating with the rest of the team buzzed in his hand and he held it to his ear.

“ —someone else in the tunnels!” Bergengrun hissed into the mic. He was hardly audible, whispering, and Reuenthal had to crank the volume of the radio to hear him over the roar of static. When the message resolved in his ears, Reuenthal’s blood froze, his heart beating strangely. Whatever was going on in the capital— this had to be connected.

“Littenheim’s people?” Reuenthal asked.

“Can’t tell— they’re armed, heading in the direction of the staircase. A few have split off, but not many.”

“How big of a group?”

“Forty, fifty, maybe.”

“Have they spotted you?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Stay out of sight behind them until they’re on the stairs, if they’re all headed that way,”

Reuenthal ordered. “We’ll corner them from above.”

“Sir—” Bergengrun was clearly about to protest and tell Reuenthal that he didn’t have enough people.

“Be prepared to get Lichtenlade and the boy if you see them,” Reuenthal said. “They’ll probably end up in the tunnels, too, and whoever else is there is going to want them alive.”

“Yes, sir,” Bergengrun said.

Bergengrun would have been right to protest that Reuenthal and his fourteen men couldn’t face a group of sixty, even if they met them at the top of the staircase. There were certain differentials in manpower that even the best terrain couldn’t overcome. But if he could cause enough chaos up above that Bergengrun’s larger group could make headway against them, that would be enough. Reuenthal could pick off the survivors from the outside.

He signaled to one of his men, the one carrying the zephyr particle cannisters. He doubted that they would be useful in combat, but he had brought them along as an option, and he was now glad he had. The man crouched down next to him in the underbrush, and Reuenthal pointed at the chimney of the Lichtenlade house, and the smoke blowing downwind.

“Is that hot enough to ignite zephyr gas?” Reuenthal asked.

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “Looks like a wood fire— there’s enough sparks that make it to the top to do it.”

“Can you throw that far?”

The man judged the distance to the roof. “Not without being seen,” he said.

Reuenthal nodded and looked around, searching for another solution. “How wide of a field can one of those cover?”

“Effective range is twenty meters, sir, but it’s only rated for indoor use.”

He pointed towards a tree, thick pine branches shielding several of his men from sight of the house. “If you were to climb to the same level as the chimney, and let the wind move the gas, would it ignite when it reaches the heat?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Try it,” Reuenthal ordered. “Use multiple canisters.”

The soldier nodded and hastened away, climbing the pine tree as stealthily as he could. The branches covered most of the view of the house, even up high.

Reuenthal bit his tongue— trying to stop himself from being annoyed at not being the one to light the fire himself. He wanted to wield a match. Instead, it was this inhuman and distant maneuver, invisible air carrying cold fire.

He couldn’t see if the zephyr gas had made it to the house, even when he heard the click and hiss of the canisters opening. He trained his binoculars on the chimney top, looking for the flash of ignition.

There wasn’t any of the usual explosion of zephyr fire. The gas caught in tiny sparks, popping flashes near the chimney. They formed small expanding bubbles, reaching out from the first point of contact with the heat source and catching whatever sparse gasses had been carried in by the wind. They drifted for a moment and then faded away. But then, in a lull in the wind, when the next canister hissed open, they caught in longer and longer streams, ribbons or tongues of flame licking the roof. Usually, zephyr fire dispersed immediately, as the highly volatile fuel source was consumed, but with the gas so spread out, it lasted long enough to be seen.

The red wooden slat tiles of the roof were flammable, though even with the intense heat that the zephyr particles generated, it took time and a third canister of gas for them to catch. Reuenthal, looking through his binoculars, saw it begin at the edges of the uppermost tiles, the fire traveling along their edges in a bright line, crawling faster when the wind pushed the sparks along.

It would take some time before the fire reached the house’s interior, needing to travel downwards into the building itself. It was painfully slow, the process of the roof catching.

While Reuenthal watched it through his binoculars, he pulled another one of his men over to him, von Viers. He too was one of the trusted ones who had come with him from his office in the Ministry of War, not one of Braunschweig’s crew.

“We might have trouble getting out on foot,” Reuenthal said to him, voice low and not looking at him, just watching the fire. “Especially if we’re carrying prisoners.”

“Yes, sir,” Viers said.

“Take a team and go down to the shed where Lichtenlade keeps his motorbikes— get as many as you can back up here.”

“It’ll be loud, sir.”

“We won’t have to worry about that in a minute,” Reuenthal said. “But we need a way to get Lichtenlade out of here quickly, once we have him.”

“Yes, sir.” Viers summoned a handful of men and they disappeared into the undergrowth, heading down the road to the west. Reuenthal’s team was very small now, but he didn’t think that was a problem.

The fire had grown large enough to cover most of the roof, though when he peered through the windows of the house, no one seemed to have noticed it yet. The upper section of the building must have been an empty attic— if the top floor was occupied, they would have heard it eating the wood by now.

One of the servants emerged from the house, a basket of wet laundry on her hip that she was planning to hang outside, and she stopped and sniffed the air. When she smelled the smoke, she turned around in confusion, and then caught sight of the roof ablaze. She started to yell— too far away from where Reuenthal was for him to make out anything other than the sound and the flapping of her fleshy lips in the view of his binoculars. Several other servants emerged from the house at the sound, leaving the doors open as they did.

The topmost part of the roof began to sag, the timbers eaten away by fire, and a hole opened, blazing tiles falling through into the third floor, air rushing up and out, feeding the fire as it now spread indoors. An alarm began to wail, but now members of the Lichtenlade house were emerging in greater numbers: servants in plain clothes and well dressed women of the clan, wearing some echo of Elfriede’s face.

Reuenthal held his hand up to hold off his men from attacking as he scanned the gathering crowd. He was surprised that anyone at all had emerged from the house: if the family had tunnels dug underneath the building specifically for the purpose of escaping from danger, any emergency plan should involve heading there. But, of course, it was only the women who were coming out— probably afraid of remaining in any structure on fire, even if the tunnels wouldn’t be touched by it. Reuenthal swept his binoculars from door to door of the house, looking for Lichtenlade, but he didn’t see him.

A servant holding the hand of a seven year-old boy emerged from the house. Before Reuenthal could even give the command, one of Braunschweig’s men hidden in the bushes took a shot. If he was aiming at the servant woman with the boy, he missed, and instead struck the Lichtenlade family member behind her, who had been looking up at the fire with her hand held over her mouth in horror. Now, she staggered sideways, her hands clutching her throat, and fell to the ground.

There was a moment of total confusion from the Lichtenlade camp, and from Reuenthal’s group. No one except the man who had fired the shot was clear about what had happened. But then the servant with the boy dragged him back into the burning house, his screams audible even from where Reuenthal was hiding. The rest of the Lichtenlades began to run, some heading back towards the house, others heading towards the trees.

Their cover now lost, Reuenthal ordered his men forwards, except for the few who would take up positions to guard the exits. Several of them took shots at the fleeing women, but Reuenthal headed for the open back door of the house with a single-minded determination, crossing the field where several women’s bodies now lay.

Reuenthal had entered through the kitchen, all tiled and not yet on fire, though the regular house fire was still roaring there in the hearth. There was no one in the kitchen, so he pushed through into the remainder of the building, several of his men now behind him. He signaled for them to split off and search the rest of the house. Flashes of blonde hair disappeared around corners, running from him, like a nightmare he had once had. His hands felt sluggish as he raised his rifle.

He kept running, looking for Lichtenlade. Despite the danger, he checked upstairs first, climbing the grand staircase and then moving through the upper hallways, shoving open bedroom doors as he went. All he found were empty rooms, while the roaring of the fire overhead grew louder. The heat from it was pressing down on this floor, and when he looked up, he could see it through the wooden beams girding the ceiling, seeping through the cracks in the third floor down to the second. As he heard timbers begin to give elsewhere, Reuenthal hastily headed back down to the ground floor. The fire grew hungrier the more it ate.

Even at the bottom of the house, smoke was beginning to fill the air, making it harder to see as he ran. The Lichtenlades had left many of the doors to the house open, and that only fed the fire more oxygen, at least around the outer walls of the house. It was being eaten away from the outside in.

In the front hallway, the one that overlooked the cliff face, the entrance to the underground passageways was open. The elevator door was open, too, but the elevator itself had moved downwards about a meter and then stopped, some internal mechanism failed or disabled. The elevator was empty— those who had been trying to use it had pried the doors open and climbed back out to take the stairs.

The stairs were pitch black; whoever had disabled the elevator must have also disabled the lights. From within, he heard agonized screaming, the sounds of a fight, and then people turning tail and running back up towards him. The family was encountering the other intruders, those who were also now trapped by the fire on one side, and Bergengrun and the rest of the team on the other. If the Lichtenlade family wanted to escape, they might decide to take their chances in the burning house, rather than the stairwell. Reuenthal dropped into the elevator and crouched down, hiding himself from sight, and watched people emerge from the staircase.

The first out was a servant, who stumbled through the house, heading for the front door. Reuenthal let her go. Next up was a young man— fifteen, maybe— with curly blond hair and a terrified expression. He took stock of the fire, now creeping down the walls of the hallway, and ran past Reuenthal without seeing him. Instead of heading for the door of the house, he picked up a decorative marble clock from the hall table and threw it at the big windows that overlooked the cliff face. The windows shattered, and he climbed out that way, cutting his hands on the broken glass. As he held on to the outside of the mangled window, he saw Reuenthal: their eyes met, his widening in shock and fear, and then he dropped down heavily to the ground outside, sliding down the near-sheer rock face. Reuenthal didn’t know what became of him after that.

Several more members of the Lichtenlade clan pulled themselves out of the stairwell, and Reuenthal let them run off through the burning house without pursuing them. The fire was growing worse around him, the smoke thick and choking, making timbers groan.

Lichtenlade emerged from the stairwell. He was covered in blood, a wound on his arm bleeding profusely, and he stumbled forward, assisted by one of the young men of the household, this one brandishing a gun. Neither of them saw Reuenthal, and they began pushing their way through the house. Reuenthal let them get to the end of the hallway, so that Lichtenlade wouldn’t have the ability to turn back into the stairwell, and then raised his rifle and shot the young man in the head. He toppled to the ground and brought Lichtenlade down with him.

The old man tried to right himself, but his wounded arm couldn’t support his weight as he tried to get off the ground. Reuenthal leaped out of the elevator and sprinted down the corridor to get him. Several more people emerged from the stairwell— these ones at a run— and they didn’t look like members of the Lichtenlade household. Reuenthal, guarding the prone Lichtenlade, shot them all.

“Sir!” one of Reuenthal’s men yelled, emerging from the smoke. “We need to move!” He saw Lichtenlade on the ground behind Reuenthal and grabbed him, hauling him to his feet. Lichtenlade now seemed barely conscious, and the soldier pulled him in a fireman’s carry over his shoulder, having to drop his gun to do so.

“Is there a clear way through?”

“The front is closest,” the soldier yelled over the crackling of the fire.

Reuenthal followed, taking up a position to guard them, and as they ran through the house he shot at anyone who came near, Lichtenlade family and the other intruders alike.

The smoke was very thick near the front door, and the flames were so hot that his skin felt like it was being torn apart. It was impossible to breathe— like drowning. The door itself was open, and the doorframe itself was wreathed in flame.

The soldier carrying Lichtenlade braced himself and ran straight through, and Reuenthal couldn’t see what became of him after he made it out the door. The smoke was too thick and heavy to see more than a few feet ahead. Reuenthal himself was frozen.

There was no other way out except through the burning passage, nothing to do but to cross the threshold out of danger and into the cold air outside. But it was the doorway itself that transfixed him, cast a spell over him, held him from moving. He knew what crossing the doorway would feel like, or he could imagine it like one could imagine the flames of Hell.

Whatever pain happened in the moment would be instantaneous, temporary, but it wasn’t exactly that which made him hesitate. It was the idea that he would remember the moment forever, live out stepping through the doorway over and over in his memory.

His thoughts had only taken a fraction of a second, if that, and they were confused by lack of oxygen, the smoke scorching his lungs the longer he stood in the fire. He raised his arms over his head to shield his face, and he ran through the door.

The fire caught on his shirt, melting the synthetic camouflage jacket against his back, even as he dropped to the dirt outside and rolled to put out the fire. It was an excruciating pain, but it was localized and unlikely to spread. His hands were only scorched, his face and legs were unharmed.

“Sir!” one of his men shouted. “Over here!”

It was Viers, with the motorbikes. The soldier carrying Lichtenlade had already boarded one, the unconscious former prime minister slung across his back like a sack of potatoes. Viers and the other soldiers who had fetched the bikes were guarding them, shooting at anyone who came out of the house.

Reuenthal pulled himself up off the ground. He didn’t try to take off his jacket— if it was melted to his skin as he feared, that would only make the wound worse. He ran for the bikes and took one.

“Did anyone get the boy?” he asked.

Viers was about to answer, but before he could, there was gunfire from the trees, and he instead yelled, “Move, sir!”

The shots fired at them missed their targets— the gunman might have been aiming to disable the wheels or engines of the motorbikes— but it was enough to get the soldier holding Lichtenlade to drive off down the dirt road. Viers stayed standing out in the open and shot at the trees, guarding Reuenthal’s retreat.

Reuenthal followed the other soldier, pushing his bike as fast as it would go, even as he was unfamiliar with the way it felt beneath him. It would have been darkly funny if that had been what killed him, but he managed to keep his balance even on the winding dirt trail.

After they had made it a kilometer down the road, it became obvious that there was no real pursuit, and so they turned their bikes and headed for the predetermined meetup point, with their cars and supplies and radios.

It took several days for things to calm down enough for Reuenthal to take stock of the situation. The capital city was in complete chaos, and all radio communications out of it were being jammed. Reuenthal couldn’t speak with Oberstein, let alone Mariendorf or Kircheis, to determine their statuses, unless he wanted to have couriers sneak into the city. And he didn’t have any intention of doing that.

He and the remainder of his men— twenty-five of them had made it out of the Lichtenlade house alive— were in the safehouse they had prepared ahead of time, a summer home owned by some distant relation of the duke’s that had fallen into complete disrepair. It was little more than a cabin, but it was far from what remained of civilization, and they were unlikely to be detected there.

A doctor from the closest town had been pressganged to treat the wounds of their group. The most serious was Lichtenlade, who had lost a significant amount of blood before anyone had been able to staunch the bleeding from the stab wound on his arm. He might lose the limb, and would probably never regain all function in it— the knife had gone deep through critical muscles. They kept Lichtenlade sedated— a dose of opioids from their military med kits so strong that the doctor who had treated him cautioned them that any more might stop the man’s breathing entirely. Reuenthal found it hard to care about that.

He had almost refused to let the doctor look at his own wound— the nasty melted burn across his back. When they pulled off the jacket, skin came off with it. It was only the fact that the injury could become infected and kill him, especially without access to much in the way of antibiotics or advanced care, that he let anyone else touch it at all.

He was told it would scar, a permanent swathe of ugliness down his back. That disgusted him far more than the sight or feeling of the wound did. Even if he couldn’t see the wound, not under bandages, not under his shirt, not on his back, he avoided mirrors.

When the fire at the Lichtenlade house had been put out by rain, and there seemed to be no one watching the wreckage of the building, Reuenthal returned to the scene.

The place where the house had stood was as unrecognizable as an alien planet. The fire had spread through the forest, though not too far. The mountain provided too many natural firebreaks for it to travel a great distance, and the whole forest was wet enough with snowmelt that the trees were reluctant to burn. But near the house the destruction was almost total. The skeletons of pines stood like soldiers, and all the undergrowth had burned away, leaving the sight lines clear for an unnatural distance. Only the stone structures of the house remained, empty walls like those of a labyrinth, and they showcased the pits that led down into the tunnels. Wind whistled up from them, bringing a smell of dampness and death. There were charred bodies on the former lawn, but those dead down below had escaped the purification of fire.

There were vultures circling overhead, scared off by the fresh arrival of the living. Several days had done their work on the corpses that lay outside on the scorched remains of the grass— what animals had returned to the mountainside after the fire had already picked them over.

Two questions had brought Reuenthal back to the house: was Erwin Josef alive, and who was responsible for the other group during their attack? It seemed like too strange of a coincidence for it to occur on the same day as his planned invasion— he suspected that there was an information leak somewhere, though he had not mentioned that thought to anyone else.

Of course, there was no reason that Reuenthal should need to visit the burned husk of the house himself. Any number of his men could have done it without him there. But he wanted to see the destruction.

Now that he was there surveying the wreckage, he felt empty and cold. He kicked through the ashes of the house, uncovering still smoldering coals, and thought nothing. There were bodies burned black where people had died in the fire, and he looked for any that might have belonged to a child. Some of the other men had the much more odious task of climbing down into the hole in the ground and picking over the rotting corpses for any kind of identification.

Tucked against one corner of the stone walls, buried under a profusion of charred debris, Reuenthal found two corpses: one large, one small— a child’s. Whoever this had been must have tried to take refuge against the stone as the fire swept through, but the house had collapsed on top of them, still burning. Touching the bodies with the toe of his shoe made them fall apart into carbonized flesh and bones, and there was no way of identifying who the people had once been. Gender was indistinguishable, and their clothing had been the first things to burn. It might have been the young Erwin Josef and the maid he had been with, but Reuenthal couldn’t tell. Even if he had access to tools to sequence genetics, the body was probably too burned to provide any information.

He looked at the scene for a moment longer, then left it where it lay, going to look down into the empty staircase hole in the ground, carefully avoiding the sheer vertical shaft that had once been the elevator. The scent of rot was almost unbearable— his men had drawn their shirts up over their noses to avoid as much of it as they could, but there was no escaping the putrification. Reuenthal could only see them in the beams of their flashlights as they swept over the bodies on the stairs, looking for clues.

“Did you find anything?” Reuenthal asked as one of them came up.

The soldier was holding a blood-stained white cloth, pinching it with two fingers and holding it away from himself to avoid touching the dirty parts. “Look at this, sir,” the man said as he laid the cloth on the ground outside.

It was a shawl of some sort, white woven fabric, but printed on it in unmistakeable letters were the words “EARTH IS MY MOTHER. EARTH IN MY HANDS.”

“The Earth Church?” Reuenthal asked.

“Or someone pretending to be them,” the soldier said. “Though I don’t know why anyone would do that. There’s a whole bunch of these down there.”

“Strange.” Reuenthal looked out across the barren landscape of the burned house. It was odd— he remembered standing with Yang in the snow, watching the Earth Church’s headquarters in the capital burn down. That had been so many years ago that he had almost forgotten it, relegated Yang’s curiosity about who the arsonist was to the back of his mind. The image stood out starkly in his vision now, the two fires superimposing themselves on his memory.

It took a few more days yet for Reuenthal to make his way to the Kummel house. He had been hoping that the situation in the capital would resolve enough for him to get in contact with Oberstein, Mariendorf, or Kircheis, but there seemed to be no sign of the radio jamming ending. The only way they would have to send messages in and out of the city, then, would be leaving them at a cache, and it seemed highly likely that Mariendorf would head to the Kummel house if she had something to report.

There were other things he needed there, as well. If, as Reuenthal suspected, there had been an information leak somewhere to cause the Earth Church to attack the Lichtenlade house, the most likely source of it was Kummel himself, whom Reuenthal had not properly met. He knew that man was a devout member of the church, and it was not impossible that he had managed to gather enough information about Reuenthal’s plan to betray him to the higher ups in the organization. Why the Earth Church was interested in attacking Lichtenlade, Reuenthal didn’t know. He intended to find out.

Additionally, he had a reason to speak to Elfriede, to ask her if she had any young relatives whose body might have been the one he discovered in the wreckage of the house. If she didn’t, Erwin Josef was likely to be dead.

The last reason, of course, was the most unpleasant. Reuenthal had not exactly been avoiding the odious duty of apologizing to Evangeline Mittermeyer, but he had done his best to put it out of his mind. Thinking about it now, he arrived at the Kummel estate in a foul mood.

It was a warming March day, late in the month, and the sun shone brightly through the trees. A few flowers had poked their heads up in the lawn outside the decrepit looking house, and only Magdalena’s car was in the driveway. Reuenthal had come alone to the house, and he knocked on the door. No one answered, so he knocked again, harder this time, making the door rattle.

Magdalena— the only one of the women Reuenthal had no business with— came to the door. When she saw him, she paled like she was looking at a ghost.

“Oskar!”

“Countess von Leigh. I need to speak to Elfriede,” he said, trying to step past her into the house.

She didn’t move, blocking the door, though it seemed to be more because she stood there in shock than any actual effort to block his path.

“I thought you were dead,” she finally said. She started to reach for his arm, as if to confirm that he stood there in the flesh before her, but she dropped her reaching hand when she processed the cold look on his face. Something about her, too, had changed— the Magdalena of a few months ago would not have hesitated.

“Oh? Why would you think that?”

“It’s been days— I thought—” She finally moved out of the way, and he stepped into the hallway. “You should have sent a message.”

“I have had more important things to worry about than reporting back to you,” Reuenthal said.

“Hilde didn’t. She was here. She mentioned that she spoke to you earlier— she was surprised you hadn’t come by yet. That was what made me think—”

“How long ago was she here?”

“Three days ago.”

“Did she leave a message?”

“Yes, a letter. I’ll get it for you.”

“Did she tell you what’s happening in the capital? I haven’t been able to contact anyone there.”

Magdalena’s face fell further. “You should read Hilde’s letter. I assume she’ll tell you about it better than I can.”

“Fine. I need to speak with Elfriede, Baron Kummel, and—”

“Heinrich? What do you want with him?” The strange edge in her voice made Reuenthal look at her face, and she looked away. “He’s probably asleep right now, anyway,” she said.

“Then I’ll speak to him last. You can wake him up for me.”

“Please don’t make me— he’s been so depressed since Eva left. They were very close.”

“And you’ll have to give me directions to the Landsberg house. Mariendorf told me she was staying there,” Reuenthal said, trying to sound bored. “I need to speak with her, as well.”

There was a moment of strained silence. “She’s not there, Oskar.”

“Oh? And where is she?”

Magdalena stared into his eyes. “Where does any married woman go who doesn’t want to be married anymore?”

The worst thing about this feeling of victory was the knowledge that Mittermeyer would never forgive him. He felt sick. “It’s very stupid to try to go to Phezzan at a time like this,” Reuenthal said.

“I can’t blame her,” Magdalena said.

Reuenthal scoffed— Magdalena was as much to blame as anyone else. “Where is Elfriede?” he asked again.

“And what do you want with her?”

“I’m right here,” Elfriede said, coming down the grand staircase into the entry hall. “I was told to assume that you died.”

Magdalena made a face at Elfriede’s appearance and went upstairs herself, pushing past her on the stairway.

“You must think very little of me to assume that,” Reuenthal said as she came towards him.

“I didn’t say that I believed it.” She cocked her head at him. “How is my grand-uncle?”

“Alive,” Reuenthal said. “In my custody.”

“Shall we sit down?” she asked.

“I’m not planning to stay for long.”

“Pity.” She directed him towards the parlor and closed the door firmly behind them. When she tried to touch him, Reuenthal stepped away, hands behind his back (the motion pained his bandaged wound) and went to look out the window. Elfriede sat down on the couch.

“Sit,” she said.

“No. This isn’t a social visit.”

“Then what are you here for?”

“Do you have any young cousins who might have been at that house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I found a corpse that I couldn’t identify,” he said. “I would like to know whose it is.”

“You didn’t get Erwin Josef when you got my grand-uncle, then?” she asked.

“He’s either dead or missing. I found a child’s body— I hope it’s his. It will be quite annoying if he’s still alive somewhere.”

“You think someone killed another child, took his head off, to make you think Erwin Josef was dead?”

“Your uncle would do something like that?” Reuenthal asked. “It would be a poor strategy.”

“If that’s not what happened, what makes you unable to identify the corpse?”

“I burned the house down,” Reuenthal said. “The body was beyond recognition.”

She was silent for a moment. “That wasn’t the plan you described to me,” she said, getting up off the couch. She came up behind him. “Did you let your fantasies get the better of you?”

When she tried to touch his back, Reuenthal turned around and slapped her hand away, snarling. She stepped back, real fear on her face.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“We weren’t the only ones attacking the house that day,” Reuenthal said. “It went badly.”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

Reuenthal turned away again. “No, though I should.”

She had learned her lesson, and didn’t reach out to touch him. Her voice was cold, when she asked, “So, who else was there?”

“The Earth Church,” Reuenthal said. “I wonder if your generous host didn’t happen to overhear plans and betray us.”

Elfried made a dismissive noise. “Heinrich is barely capable of staying awake fifteen minutes at a time. I doubt it. What use would he have with my uncle, anyway?”

“There’s plenty of use for a boy-king,” Reuenthal said. “Is he dead, or is he alive?”

“I don’t know,” Elfriede said. She stepped away from him. “I haven’t spoken to my family in a year— I have no idea who my uncle invited to stay with him.”

“Could there have been another child in the house?”

“Ask my uncle, if he’s as alive as you say he is.”

“We keep him sedated,” Reuenthal said. “Any risk of him escaping is too high. And I think it’s useful to not let him know that we do not have the boy.”

“I don’t know, Oskar,” she said. “There. Does that answer your question?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

It was an awkward conversation, with their backs to one another, and they stood there silently. Reuenthal should have let her touch him, but the idea of her picking at the wound on his back filled him with an unbearable disgust. He tried to make himself want it, but failed, for the first time.

“You should either thank me, or punish me,” Elfriede said in the silence. “Pick one. I know that’s really what you came here for. I’m tired of this game.”

“For telling Evangeline my secrets?” Reuenthal asked. He stared out the window, pretending to be disaffected. “I don’t care.”

“Liar.”

“Did you do it to upset me, or please me?” Reuenthal asked.

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“Liar.”

“We’re well matched, then.”

Reuenthal turned towards her. “I’ve taken care of your family problem,” he said. “You can be free of me now. Walk away. No need for me to keep you out of their hands. I’ll even make sure Leigh arranges things with the Kaiserine so that you have all their fortunes. The last survivor of the Lichtenlade family.”

“How generous of you.”

“What are you trying to get out of me?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“I said nothing, Oskar.”

“Were you planning to stay living in my house after this?”

“It’s funny that you think you have a house to go back to. Someone might have burned it down. Too bad you didn’t do it yourself, before the opportunity was taken away from you. Or maybe you didn’t do it because you weren’t strong enough to.”

He stepped towards her, and she turned around to face him at last. Her expression was strange and wild.

“I didn’t need to do that,” he said. “And I didn’t need anybody else to free me.”

“And you think you’re free?” She stepped up to him, chest to chest, though they didn’t quite touch each other. His hands remained behind his back. He watched the way her throat moved when she swallowed.

“You think you’re the chain on me, Elfriede?” he asked.

She made a derisive noise but didn’t say anything.

“Are you unhappy that I took your revenge for you?” he asked. “Would you have wanted to do it yourself?”

She didn’t answer that question either.

“Do you still want it?” he asked. “Or will you have me do it for you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re not the last of the Lichtenlade clan yet,” Reuenthal said. “Your grand uncle is still alive.” He put a disaffected tone in his voice and looked over her heard. “As I said, he won’t live too much longer. Someone will kill him when he outlives his usefulness— it could be you, if you’re strong enough for it.”

Elfriede slapped him across the face, hard enough to leave a red welt in the shape of her fingers on his cheek. Reuenthal froze for a moment in surprise.

It wasn’t the instantaneous pain that startled him, though Elfriede did not hold back in the least. It was the fact that he had managed to taunt her into hitting him first— it went completely contrary to the familiar, safe, pattern they had with each other. Elfriede had never before given Reuenthal the opportunity to be the first one on the defensive, the one allowed to lose control.

She seemed just as startled by it as he was, her eyes widening in shock, like she had been the one to be hit.

What was strange to Reuenthal was that the sensation of losing control did not come. He still held every momentary possibility tightly in his hands: he could have easily walked away from Elfriede, stalked out the door and slammed it behind him. He could have slapped her back, or pulled her hair, or said something cutting. A better man than him might have done any of those things, but Reuenthal did not. He peeled back the options laid out before him, and he found the one that let the disgust fill his mouth like bile— the option that would confirm to them both exactly what kind of man he was. Strong enough to do the worst thing; strong enough to keep control and choose to do it. They had never needed confirmation, but perhaps Elfriede wanted it.

His thoughts had taken no time at all. As Elfriede pulled her own stinging hand to her chest, Reuenthal shoved her backwards. She stumbled, tripping on the coffee table behind her, throwing her arms out to break her fall. Reuenthal grabbed her by the front of her dress before she could topple over, and she yelped as he shoved her back further.

“Don’t make a sound,” he said. Though even if Elfriede screamed, he doubted that Magdalena would come interrupt. He shoved her onto the couch and climbed on top of her. There was no way that she could escape him; he was much stronger and heavier than she was. He forced her head against the arm of the couch, turning it so that he didn’t directly have to see the genuine fear on her face.

He kept pressing down on her cheek with his palm, forcing her mouth to open against the arm of the couch: a muffled sound of pain emerging, and drool. Her eyes roved in their sockets, straining to look at his face.

He could have stopped at any point. It was a difficult, clumsy fumbling with one hand to hike her dress up around both their hips, force her legs open, pull off the silky nylons she wore. It was even harder to undo his belt and get his pants around his knees. They were awash in the fabric, and it separated them everywhere except for the crucial points of contact, his left hand on her face and his right hand on her cunt.

It would have been less disturbing if she had fought him— that would have felt natural. But she was stiff and still beneath him, her hands curled into the fabric of her skirt.

He forced himself into her— she didn’t make a sound other than both their ragged breathing. Reuenthal lay atop her, his head near her neck, and he let go of her face. He closed his eyes. Without seeing, with the single blinding point of motion between them, pain and heat, there was no sense of where he ended and she began.

“Imagine—” he said, haltingly, into her shoulder. “Imagine I’m you, and you’re me—”

“I’ll kill you,” she said. “I’ll kill you—”

“Yes—” he said.

When he was done, he left her there on the couch in the parlor. Reuenthal found Magdalena was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine. She seemed disaffected, either unaware or uncaring of what had happened in the other room.

“Here’s your letter,” she said, holding a tan envelope out to him. He took it from her without saying a word. “And Heinrich took something like four of these” —she held up a mostly empty bottle of pills and rattled it around— “so unless you’re staying for dinner, you probably won’t be able to wake him up.”

“No, I’m not planning to stay. I’ll talk to him later.” Reuenthal said. There was a memo pad on the counter, along with a pen. He wrote the address of the safehouse on the paper, ripped it off, and left it on the table in front of Magdalena. “If Mariendorf or Kircheis makes it out of the city looking for me, this is where they can find me.”

“Fine,” Magdalena said.

Reuenthal had nothing else to say to her, or anyone else in the house, so he simply left. Outside the Kummel house, the spring had taken hold of Odin, a warm sunset burning in the sky, and the smell of growing things rising up from the dirt.