She started walking. I fell in beside her.
At first, we passed streets where people had tried to pretend life might return. Boarded shopfronts. A café with two lonely tables beneath a patched canopy. A stretch of cobblestone swept clean enough to be ashamed of the dirt pushed into the gutters. Someone had nailed glass back into window frames, hung tarps that tried very hard to look like curtains. A tram clanked past in the distance, carrying people who looked more like ghosts than passengers.
But the farther we went, the more the city stopped pretending. The lights thinned. The streets narrowed. Small fires smoldered in the ruins, casting crooked shadows against walls that might collapse tomorrow or stand another year out of sheer spite.
The dragon stayed close to the surface as we walked, muscles coiled, fury banked and waiting. Because even if she'd been spared, they hadn't been. Not yet.
By some ruins, she stopped, "This is it."
"This is…where?" I asked because saying it out loud made it sound less like an accusation and more like a question.
She glanced at me and shrugged. "It's fine," she said. "Thank you." She tugged at the jacket, as if to return it. "I can go alone from here."
She held out my coat like an offering, eyes locked on my face to see what I would do. I didn't take it. She didn't want me to see where she lived. I knew that. I also knew I couldn't leave her here.
"If you want me to—" I began, and she hesitated, then pointed toward a darkened block where a building hung together by timber and tape and prayers. It looked like a paper house someone had tried to mend with glue and stubbornness.
"I'll be safe," she said, thrusting my jacket into my hands, and it read like a lie she didn't seem to believe either. "Thank you again."
She moved faster then, ducking over piles of masonry, climbing the broken steps of what had been an apartment block. Once she stumbled on a loose slab, and I wanted to leap across that gap in one stride. I wanted to catch her, to be the man whose hands never missed. But I held myself back because the truth was ugly and simple: if I went with her inside, I'd be forcing my way into a life I hadn't been invited to, and that would be worse than walking away.
She looked back over her shoulder once, frowning, and in that instant, I realized I was still too close. I had been holding her back without meaning to. Her face told me not to follow. So I stepped back into the dark and watched.
She disappeared through a doorway patched with planks. The light inside was thinner than the streetlight; it looked like hope kept to a single candle. When the door closed, it sounded like the last hinge on a house trying to survive the night.
For a second, I stood rooted, jacket in my hands, rain on my shoulders. Then I walked to the curb and flagged a battered taxi. The driver squinted at me through a cloud of smoke, then nodded and opened the door. The cab smelled of old leather and sweet, cheap perfume. I gave the driver the address of the McNair barracks, which he seemed to know well. The vehicle jolted, and we pulled away, the cab's taillight a candle floating through Berlin's broken spine.
On the way back to the barracks, I thought of a lot of things I didn't like. I didn't like the Russians, men who could make an alley into a courtroom and sentence a woman without a trial. I didn't like myself for how easily I wanted to answer force with force. I didn't like how all the old certainties had been unstitched the day the war ended.
Most of all, I didn't like the way my hands had trembled with the urge to burn the men where they stood. Not in a cold, tactical way. In a raw, animal way I'd never felt before, even on the day Mark had gone down. Fire had felt methodical then; this was blood in my mouth and claws under my skin. I wanted to shift, big and terrible and hot, to unmake them as easily as the world had been unmade in 1944. The thought was almost beautiful in its completeness.
And then there was Inga. She was a small, stubborn flare in a city that had learned to snub out flares. When she'd clung to me, I'd felt something I hadn't allowed myself to feel in years, not pity, not even exactly protectiveness, buta fierce, sharp heat that made my head spin. It scared me because I had no room for complications. I had duties and ghosts and a contract and a rhythm that kept the darkness at bay. I didn't need a girl who smelled of rain and scared breath to complicate my life.
I ran my hand through my hair until my fingers came away damp. I told myself a hundred times in that taxi the reasons why I should forget her: rules, distance, the stupidity of getting attached in a city that could fall apart again tomorrow. I said I didn't want anything to do with anyone who lived in these ruins.
The truth was different—softer and more dangerous. I liked the look she'd given me when she'd saidThank you,like it was a word she'd never expected to say again. I hated how much that small thing mattered.
"How long have you been in Berlin?" the driver asked, going for small talk.
"Too long," I answered, not in the mood for conversation.
He nodded, maybe out of politeness, maybe because he knew better than to pry. In the faint glow of the dash, I saw the missing stump where his left hand used to be. A war souvenir. Maybe he'd lost it to one of my bombs. Maybe he was the one who shot Mark down. We'd never know, and it didn't matter. Three years ago, we would have shot at each other and not thought twice. Now we were supposed to trade small talk like it was just another night.
The city thinned out as we drove south, past darkened shopfronts and piles of brick that used to be houses. The rain had turned the streets slick and quiet. Ahead, the road narrowed where the checkpoint squatted across the boundary between the American and Soviet sectors: a wooden barrier, a shed with a lamp burning low, and a pair of Russian guards in gray coats watching every car that passed.
The driver slowed, fished out his papers, and leaned out the window. One of the guards stepped up, his flashlight cut across my face, then down to the insignia on my jacket. His eyes were like glass, no curiosity, no warmth, just the kind of emptiness you learn from too many winters.
"U.S. Airlift," I said, holding his stare.
He studied me a second longer than he needed to, and I could tell he wanted to detain me. My dragon almost dared him to give it a try, but something in my eyes must have unsettled him, and he waved us through with a flick of his fingers. The barrier lifted, creaking, and the car rolled on.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. The driver didn't look at me, just muttered, "Always the same. They like to remind us whose road it is."
He wasn't wrong. Every inch of this city belonged to someone else. Every mile was borrowed from the ruins.
The drive wasn't long after that, and the driver must've picked up on my tone, because he didn'tsay another word until the barracks loomed up out of the dark. McNair Barracks, solid and gray and pretending to be American now.
By the time he stopped, my coat felt heavier than it had when I'd taken it off the hanger. I paid the fare, nodded once, and walked the rest of the way alone. The sound of my boots on wet stone was the only thing I trusted to tell me I was still me.
