Berlin — July 22, 1948, Thursday night
I kept runningthrough the same impossible questions. How do I get out? How do I get Klaus out? How do I reach Gideon?
I had no answers to any of them.
The villa was a palace, yes—but it was also a prison.
There was a phone downstairs, a black rotary thing on a delicate little table in the hallway, but even if I could sneak to it, even if I could dial… I didn't know Gideon's number. Elke didn't have a phone. Die Ecke had one, but I didn't know what to ask the operator for. I didn't know anything.
I hadn't seen any way to leave the villa yet, without an escort. I didn't have papers or money. I had no freedom. Every possibility dried up before it even formed.
So I sat stiffly on a velvet sofa beside Klaus, pretending to sip tea while my father smiled his polished smile.Everything about the room gleamed: polished floors, expensive drapes, silver trays. Everything in me shriveled.
Klaus leaned into my side without seeming to notice he was doing it, and I threaded my fingers through his. They were cold and a little sticky.
"Are you tired, Klaus?" my father asked gently.
Klaus didn't answer. This man was a stranger to him. He had no memories of our father—had never met him, before today— and that was probably a blessing for him, because for me, it added to the torture of seeing my miraculously-returned-from-the-dead father in front of me, yet not. He was nothing but a bad caricature of the man I knew and called Vati once upon a time.
Klaus stared at the door, squeezing my heart, because he knew. He understood more than any six-year-old should.
My father kept talking about howwonderfullife would be now, how we'd never want for anything again, how we'd all live here asa model family, how I would learnproper values. How I would forget thelies of the West.
I pretended to listen. Inside, I was screaming.
And then?—
Something shifted. There was no warning other than maybe a slight change in the air, a ripple of… heat, a strange prickling sensation that rolled over my skin, like the atmosphere in the room had thickened. I straightened.
Klaus feltit too—his fingers tightened around mine.
My father kept talking, oblivious.
"Vati," I said suddenly, cutting him off. "Do you hear?—?"
The words died as the window behind him darkened. Not by a cloud or shadow. With something alive. Something vast. For a split second, my brain refused to understand what I was seeing: a hulking shape, bronze-gold scales catching faint moonlight, wings unfurling in a terrifying silhouette?—
A dragon.
A DRAGON!
A scream ripped out of my throat before I could stop it, and I yanked Klaus against me as the window exploded inward. Glass rained like frozen stars.
The whole room shook.
The dragon landed in the parlor in a thunder of muscle and heat, filling the space like a living storm. The air around him shimmered with warmth, not burning my skin warm, but washing over me like a heartbeat.
Klaus buried his face in my side. My father stumbled back with a shriek. "GOTT IM HIMMEL?—!"
Two guards burst in with rifles raised. The dragon roared. A sound that rattled my bones but didn't frighten me. Not like it should have. Not like it frightened the others. Because as that roar rolledthrough me, something strange and impossible happened. Recognition hit me. Recognition that came on a deep, primal level. It came from a flash of those eyes. Those golden eyes. The way they were burning. Fierce and familiar: Gideon's eyes.
My breath stopped, and my heart flipped.
That's him.
The thought wasn't logical, it wasn't even possible or sane, and yet, I knew.
Everything in me knew.
