The engines started, low rumbling like thunder trapped in steel. My heart pounded loud enough to drown it out. Klaus grabbed my sleeve. Axel pressed his face to the little window, breath fogging the glass. Hilde curled into my side, clutching her doll.
We lifted.
Slowly.
Gracefully.
Against every law of nature I'd ever known.
And Berlin—my Berlin—began to fall away beneath us.
My breath hitched.
There it was.
The city where I'd been born, learned to walk, and learned to survive. The city where bombs fell, mothers cried, and children starved. The city that stole so much from me, and yet… it was all I had known.
As we climbed higher, the patchwork ruins came into view. Streets like broken ribs, buildings like jagged teeth, whole neighborhoods flattened into patterns I recognized far too well.
"That—there," I whispered, pointing through the window. "That used to be the Zoologischer Garten… the zoo. My mother used to take me to see the elephants. I always thought they looked like old grandfathers."
Klaus squinted. "Where? I only see… broken."
"Yes," I murmured. "But before… it was beautiful."
As we banked left, I caught sight of Tiergarten, once a forested heart of the city, now a bare skeleton of stumps. I saw the scar where the Kaiser Wilhelm Church stood, broken spire jutting up defiantly.
My chest tightened when I noticed movement. A cluster of children running across a courtyard, tiny figures weaving between mounds of rubble. Bare legs. Torn clothes. I knew them, even if I didn't know their names.
Trümmerkinder.
Like Axel had been, and Hilde. Like Klaus might have become. Children who knew hunger better than warmth.
Farther along, I saw the silhouettes of Trümmerfrauen, women with scarves tied over their hair, standing in lines by the piles of debris, passing bricks hand to hand. Their movements slow, weary, eternal.
My throat burned. I pressed my palm to the window. "They're still there," I whispered. "Working. Always working."
Gideon reached over and covered my hand with his.
"We'll help them," he murmured. "Someday, when we can. But right now… it's your turn to have a life."
I turned to him and smiled through tears. Because he meant it. Because he had already given me a life I hadn't dared imagine.
When Berlin became a gray blur beneath us, the children's awe blossomed.
"It's so small!" Klaus gasped.
"It looks like toy houses,"Axel said.
"It looks like… nothing," Hilde whispered, unsure if that was sad or wonderful.
The clouds swallowed us, thick and white and endless. I had never imagined anything so soft and enormous. I pressed my forehead to the window and whispered a prayer I hadn't spoken since my mother died.
"Thank you."
Hours later, the ocean appeared.
A great, impossible sheet of blue, stretching farther than my mind could grasp. Waves like shifting silk. Sunlight glittered off the surface like thousands of diamonds.
