The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (5 page)

Klaus and Rudolf shared a look. Klaus shrugged.

Rudolf turned toward Reinhardt. “Where the hell have you been the past few days?”

“Serving the Reich. Carrying out my orders.”

Rudolf stared.

“I don’t believe you,” said Klaus.

“Ask your sister.”

The whine of a drill erupted from the makeshift laboratory. Simultaneously, a long, low moan emanated from a different room across the corridor. The moans became screams as the stink of hot bone wafted from the lab.

The trio moved farther down the corridor in order to better hear each other.

Rudolf shook his head. “Your mouth is full of shit. What orders?”

Reinhardt shrugged nonchalantly, but his eyes still glistened with pride. “I was sent to plug a leak. The defector is no longer a problem.”

“You? They sent
you
?” Rudolf tossed his hands in the air. “This is insanity. You have as much finesse as an incendiary bomb.”

Reinhardt’s mission meant he was the first of von Westarp’s projects to be deemed complete, fully mature. Klaus had expected to garner that honor for himself. While he considered the consequences of Reinhardt’s
de facto
promotion, Heike sidled up the corridor, eyes on the floor and silent like a visible ghost.

Reinhardt spread his arms. “Darling!”

Klaus heard the intake of breath when Heike looked up. She blinked eyes of Prussian blue, then dropped her head again, hiding her face behind long corn silk tresses.

“No welcome-back kiss?”

She tried to pass. Reinhardt blocked her. “I think you missed me. Worried about me.” His fingers brushed the curve of her ear as he tucked back a lock of her hair. Heike shuddered.

“Do you get cold at night?” he whispered in her ear. “I can fix that.”

She looked up. Reinhardt leaned closer. She spat. His head snapped back.

Klaus snorted with laughter. Heike slipped around Reinhardt and hurried toward the debriefing room.

“You’d do well to show me a little kindness now and then, Liebling!” he shouted, flicking away the spittle under his eye.

Rudolf shook his head again. “I cannot believe they chose
you.
”

Since Heike had claimed the debriefing room, and since von Westarp and the technicians were preoccupied in the laboratory, Klaus would have to wait to turn in his battery. He went upstairs to find his sister.

Gretel hadn’t moved since that morning, when she’d dragged a table under the picture window along the colonnaded verandah. The window afforded a view of olive groves, the Ter and Onyar rivers off in the distance, and plumes of smoke rising from the valley below. Although if she had chosen the window for the scenery, it didn’t show. Her attention to the book propped on her lap was absolute. Just as it had been when Klaus departed that morning.

She sat with bare feet propped on the edge of another chair, wiggling her toes, the hem of a patchwork peasant dress draped across her bony ankles. A long braid of raven-black hair hung past each shoulder. Wires snaked down from her skull, twirled around her braids, and disappeared in the folds of her dress where the fabric occluded the bulge of a harness. The window silhouetted the profile of her face, the high cheekbones and hatchet nose. Within arm’s reach on the table stood a stack of books, teapot, cup, and saucer.

“I’m back,” he said. “Did you have a good day?”

Gretel turned a page. She didn’t say anything.

“How are you feeling?”

Her teacup clinked on its saucer as a massive artillery barrage, much closer than the last, shook the building. The saucer danced across the table. Gretel, still absorbed in the works of the modernist poets, reached out with one arm and absently caught it just before it tipped over the edge.

When she moved, the frayed insulation on her wires snagged the collar of her dress.

“Are you in pain? If the batteries are uncomfortable, you could talk to . . . The doctor is here. . . .”

She ignored him. Gretel had become increasingly distant in the years since her ability had manifested itself with visions of the future. He left her to her poetry.

Rudolf watched the exchange from the doorway, cloaked in a quivering rage. The news of Reinhardt’s promotion had gone down poorly. He shoulder-checked Klaus as he stomped to Gretel’s seat.

“Is this how you spend your time? Reading?”

Turning a page, she yawned.

“Is this all you do while we’re out there”—he jabbed a finger at the window—“facing bullets and bombs?”

From his vantage in the doorway, Klaus saw one corner of Gretel’s mouth twitch up in the hint of a smile. He frowned.

Rudolf continued, “Years of work to harness your willpower, and to what end? So that you can study poetry? I can’t imagine why the doctor keeps you alive. Even the imbecile Kammler is more useful than you. And your brother, at least he overcame that mongrel blood in your veins.”

“Hey!” Klaus made to intercept Rudolf’s tirade, but Reinhardt caught his arm. He liked a good fight.

Rudolf’s feet left the floor. Hovering next to her table, he said, “Look! He made us great.” He spread his arms and pirouetted above the floor. “He made us gods!” He landed. “But then there’s
you
. A disgusting waste.”

Gretel noted the place in her book, set it on the table, then downed the rest of her tea. She scooted her chair back and stretched. Her back popped.

“What,” Reinhardt muttered, “is your sister doing?”

Klaus shook his head. But then Gretel dropped to all fours, and his unease became full-blown dread. Klaus fumbled for his wire. He plugged it into the battery on his waist and clicked the latch.

Gretel crawled under the table.

The scent of singed pine curled up from the floorboards beneath Reinhardt’s boots as he invoked his
Willenskräfte,
his willpower.

Rudolf laughed. “That’s right! Crawl away, mongrel, crawl away to your dog house.”

Gretel curled up, knees to chest, and clamped her hands over her ears.

The taste of copper flooded Klaus’s mouth as he accepted the surge of electricity into his brain. The Götterelektron energized his Willenskräfte, turning him insubstantial at the same moment Reinhardt armored himself in a searing blue nimbus.

Rudolf saw them and frowned. “What—?”

WHUMP
!

The explosion sent shrapnel winging harmlessly through Klaus’s ghost-body. Debris from the errant mortar shell vaporized in Reinhardt’s corona. He defended himself with a burst of heat that ignited the wooden floorboards.

The smoke drifted through the hole where the window and part of the roof had been. Klaus’s ears rang.

He rematerialized. Then he realized it wasn’t ringing he heard, but screaming from throughout the farmhouse. A figure lay on the floor, streaked in blood and clothed in burnt tatters, hands clasping its face.

“Gretel!”

She clambered out of her makeshift bomb shelter and dusted herself off. Klaus exhaled with relief.

The room fell silent but for the crackle of flames, and screams that trailed off into sobs. Rudolf shuddered.

Gretel kneeled next to him and took his hands. Shrapnel had reduced his face to so much meat. His breath came in explosive gasps.

She leaned close. Like a lover, she caressed his ruined face, kissed his cheek, whispered in his ear. A single word passed her blood-smeared lips:

“Incoming.”

She stood. The hem of her dress draped across Rudolf’s face as she stepped over him. Then she sauntered out of the burning room, trailing the flying man’s blood.

Rudolf stopped shuddering. He died on the spot. Just as Gretel had known he would.

4 February 1939

Barcelona, Spain

T
he cashier wrinkled his nose. After a day and a half on the road, the smell of incinerated hotel still infused Marsh’s clothes. It even wafted out of his hair. He expected to find soot streaked on his face when he finally used a real washroom. And he couldn’t work up enough saliva to clear the smoked-pork taste from his mouth.

Marsh let the cashier glimpse the bundle of cash under his hand. The distaste on the other man’s face turned into greed. He licked his lips. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Marsh slid his hand across the counter. With that, he traded every pound and peseta for a berth on the last British steamer out of Barcelona.

Marsh shook his head.
Nearly a grand for something that shouldn’t cost one pony. Thank you, Franco
. It would have been easier to use the tickets intended for Krasnopolsky, but someone had been watching him; given the fool’s conduct, Marsh couldn’t risk adhering to the original travel plan.

And now Krasnopolsky was dead, reduced to so much ash in the span of a few heartbeats, along with most of the information he carried. During his journey from Tarragona, Marsh had emptied the unburned scraps from the valise into an envelope along with the cash and Krasnopolsky’s passport. There wasn’t much left: the lower-left corners from a half dozen pages of a memo or report, written in German; half a photograph; and a jumble of acetate strips. The strips were all that remained of an eight-millimeter filmstrip. The film had been coiled on a reel, but when the
valise ignited, a portion of the film had melted and disintegrated, rendering the rest a jumbled mess of confetti.

Marsh had pored over it all a dozen times. The legible pages contained no mention of a Doctor von Westarp or children. The visible portion of the photograph showed an unremarkable farmhouse. And the scraps of film were unintelligible to his naked eyes.

Marsh took the proffered voucher and retreated back through the crowd mobbing the ticket window. A breeze mingled fear, seaweed, rotting fish, and diesel fuel into a stomach-churning mélange. Every port in Catalonia must have been staggering under the influx of refugees as the Nationalists made their final push into the Pyrenees.

He headed for his pier, scanning the crowd as he went. There wasn’t much time before his ship departed, but Marsh wanted to find something first. He watched a portly well-dressed man pushing a hand truck piled high with luggage. The man stopped on the boardwalk to pull a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket.

Aha
, thought Marsh.
Those should do the trick.

The man frowned at his ticket, then looked around in search of a placard. Marsh orchestrated his collision with the hand truck to make it appear as though he’d been too intent on his own ticket to notice it. Luggage clattered to the boardwalk.

“Hijo de puta!”

“Lo siento! Lo siento, señor.”

Marsh swiped the eyeglasses while helping the man gather his things. “
Lo siento muchísimo.
” The man departed with a crack about burying Marsh’s heart in a hole so deep, the Virgin Mary couldn’t find it.

A piercing shriek echoed throughout the port. The steam whistle on Marsh’s ship, making its penultimate boarding call. People scurried up the gangplank in ones, twos, and threes. Marsh needed to get going, but his curiosity couldn’t be contained any longer.

A stack of cargo crates formed a passable shelter from the wind and crowds. Marsh hid behind the crates, crouched on a coil of rope. He pulled an acetate fragment from the envelope inside his shirt. What the fire hadn’t destroyed outright it had made very brittle, so he took great
care when handling the crisp film. Using the eyeglasses as a makeshift magnifier, he strained to identify the images.

Twenty frames of a brick wall. The second fragment showed an empty field. The third showed two men in Schutzstaffel uniforms kneeling over an empty container and smiling. The fourth fragment showed a machine gun nest and the long view down a firing range.

The fifth showed an antiaircraft gun hovering above the same range. Marsh shook his head. Too many hours on the road and not enough sleep. But when he looked again, it truly did look like the eighty-eight was floating in midair. No evidence of an explosion, either, though it was hard to tell from a few frames of heat-damaged film.

What on God’s green Earth were you mixed up with, Krasnopolsky?

The fragments crackled against each other when he dropped them back in the envelope. Once the envelope was secured inside his shirt once more, he stood as though he’d merely ducked behind the crates to tie his shoes.

A gypsy woman stared at him from across the boardwalk with wide plum-dark eyes. She’d been beaten. The skin around one of her eyes looked like the rind of an aubergine; the corner of her mouth quirked up where her split lip had scabbed over.

Marsh frowned. He sized up her companion, a man with the same olive skin as the woman. Brother? Husband? A tall fellow, but not problematically so.
Enjoy beating up women, do you?
Marsh cracked his knuckles as he started for the pair.

Another breeze rolled off the harbor. It tugged up the kerchief tied over her hair and fluttered the braids hanging past her shoulders.

And jostled the wires connected to her head.

Marsh stopped. He looked again.

Wires. In her head.