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  “And what are you doing out here, Hannah?”

  “Escaping. Or dying as we try.”

  “Escaping what?”

  She turned to look at me again, not in amazement, but something else. A touch of scorn?

  “You must know. You’re an angel. You’ve been to the moon.” She tilted her head back slightly, in the direction of the mountains, but declined to look there. In the wisps of fog and cold I now saw smoke. A handful of modern chariot-like vehicles, the horseless ones, were heading toward us.

  “Let them come,” Hannah hissed.

  “Are they the ones who did this to you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “On purpose?” K’lion asked.

  “They’re Nazis,” she replied. I didn’t know what a Nazi was, but already I dreaded meeting one.

  Behind me, the ship — the ship itself — began a low humming, as it did during the search for K’lion. Hannah’s eyes widened a little bit.

  I took the sklaan from around my shoulders and wrapped it around her. “Go,” I told her. “Go. This will keep you warm.”

  “But the Nazis —”

  “We will stop them.”

  “How?”

  “Just go.” Hannah touched the sklaan—“Like angel wings,” she murmured — then took it off her shoulders and wrapped it around a little girl.

  “Thank you,” Hannah said. “Make sure you find out about the Hammer Cave. Please.” The request was in her eyes, too. Then she turned back to her group, and they shuffled off across the ice.

  For the first time since I had the honor of knowing him, I could not detect a smile on K’lion’s face.

  Moments later, the Nazi vehicles arrived. The ship kept humming.

  Uniformed men disembarked from the vehicle. But the particular uniform scarcely mattered — soldiers are almost always the same. They reminded me of Romans.

  They unsheathed their weapons. In my short time in Earth’s future, I had learned quickly about guns.

  The small regiment surrounded the ship. They looked at K’lion and me, and seemed a little less sure of themselves. “A flying disk,” one of them said. “So it’s true.”

  “Is this von Braun’s?” another one asked. They didn’t know I could understand them.

  “There are so many secrets here. Even from us,” the first one replied. Then he pointed to Hannah in the distance, reaching for his weapon.

  “No!” I commanded. “No!”

  It wasn’t in their language, but the meaning was clear. They stopped. “What if they really are from under the Earth?” the first one continued. “The Over-Beings the Fuehrer always talks about. Especially the dragon man. Didn’t Hitler say creatures like that appear to him in visions?”

  “Hitler says a great many things.” From the others’ reactions, it appeared the soldier who said that had just put himself at risk.

  “What about the escapees?”

  “This is more important right now.”

  It occurred to me the best thing would be to get back on the ship and leave. That thought was interrupted by the click of their guns.

  We were prisoners now, too. Hence we’d need to create the illusion of as much strength as possible.

  “Von Braun,” I said to them. “Von Braun.” It sounded like he might be the one who over-saw the operation here. “The Hammer Cave,” I added. I said it the way Hannah did, in her native tongue.

  The soldiers looked at one another, then motioned for us to get into their chariots, their land-ships.

  “A truck,” K’lion said, in their language. A couple of them visibly jumped.

  They gave him his own seat in the rear, and kept their rifles pointed at him all the way back to Peenemünde.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thea: Hammer Cave

  Early 1940s C.E.

  We were escorted back across the ice to the island of Peenemünde, to the place Hannah and her companions were trying to escape — the Hammer Cave. It was actually a whole complex of caves linked together by tunnels.

  Most of the occupants appeared to be slaves, and I could see why they’d risk their lives to leave: It was like Hades — mostly dark, and either chillingly cold or savagely hot, depending how close you were to the massive furnaces that burned in the center of the complex. There was a large network of metal roadways —“railways,” K’lion called them — leading toward the interior, where it appeared the main labor was to build “rockets,” long, tapered vessels intended for…exploration? Destruction?

  Perhaps both.

  As the self-propelled chariot, the “truck,” drove deeper into the cave, men, women, children, all in the barest rags, mostly skin and bones, listlessly stepped out of our way. Except for one older man, who couldn’t move fast enough. The truck knocked him down and drove over his leg.

  We could hear the crunch of snapping bones as we left him behind.

  Our captors — our “hosts”— didn’t even slow down.

  But neither could any of the worker-slaves afford to stop and help him. Their faces were hollow and haunted; they may have been too worn-down to offer aid. Or to risk it. They all had numbers tattooed onto their arms, and I imagine they were carefully tracked.

  Numbers. In this future, then, even having a name was an act of defiance.

  Some of the slaves, the prisoners (or even, worst of all, the “guests,” as I heard one soldier joke about them), were forced to push or pull wagons along the railways, hauling heavy parts for the further construction of the rockets. Others worked on the tunnels themselves, digging farther into the earth to make this complex larger and, presumably, more useful for its masters.

  But to what ultimate end?

  When slaves grew fatigued, they were beaten or otherwise punished. We saw one young man get hit savagely in the stomach by one of the guards when he couldn’t keep lifting. He crumpled over, tried to throw up, then lay still.

  For sustenance, they seemed to be given crusts of bread and thin soup. Twice I witnessed family members forcibly separated, in what appeared to be the processing of new captives.

  On several occasions, K’lion was about to jump from the truck and help these poor souls, but I tugged his tail to communicate that he shouldn’t move. I knew they would harm my friend as well.

  “Somebody tktt! has to rectify the bullying,” he whispered to me.

  “I know.” The truck stopped, and our hosts gestured with their weapons that we were to walk the rest of the way.

  Some of the slaves stared at K’lion as we passed, but most did not. Even their sense of wonder had been stripped from them.

  We were eventually led toward quarters that seemed to be the working precincts of the military commanders. They certainly weren’t comfortable enough for actual living.

  I overheard the soldiers who brought us in saying to the others that we were to wait for “von Braun.”

  “Von Braun will know what to do with them.”

  “Perhaps. If von Braun even knows what or who they are. Maybe they crash-landed. Maybe we weren’t supposed to find them at all. I told you this mountain’s full of secrets. Even for us.”

  One of their leaders walked in, a man introducing himself as a “kernel.” I didn’t know what that ranking meant, but his military bearing reminded me of a Roman praefectus— the man who leads the horse troops.

  The other men all deferred to him, even seemed a little frightened. When he walked over to me, I met his gaze.

  “Just some spoiled little girl,” he said loudly, for the others. “Not even Aryan.” Then he turned away, dismissing me with his hand. “Why was she brought here? What’s this I hear about spacemen?”

  They tried to tell him about the ship. They pointed to K’lion, who now had guards clustered around him. The praefectus examined him for a long moment. “A very interesting freak,” he said. “We shall have to cut him up and examine him.” I think he chose those words as a kind of test — he was watching K’lion’s eyes.

  “That k-t-kh
! would be rudeness extreme!” K’lion replied. But he said it in my language, not theirs. I had never seen him choose not to respond to an Earthling in his native tongue before. It meant he’d lost trust in them completely.

  “He speaks,” the praefectus said. “He almost sounds human. So these two came from a flying disk, parked somewhere on the ice?” he asked the soldiers skeptically. They told him someone had gone to make recordings and images of our vessel, but they swore, yes, it was true.

  “Well, keep your guns on them. We’ll let von Braun look them over, if the great Wernher ever deigns to get here.”

  “He deigns, Colonel Middlekant, he deigns.” Heads turned, and there was the man I assumed to be von Braun, in a white tunic-like garment, covering what I took to be civilian clothes from the era. It certainly wasn’t a military uniform like the praefectus wore.

  “What is this claptrap about a spaceship?” von Braun bellowed. The men pointed to me and then K’lion. He walked over, looked at me carefully, ran a finger over my forehead. And nodded.

  Then, like the praefectus, he walked over to K’lion but still didn’t say anything. Instead, he took out a pencil and poked K’lion in the face.

  “Yaagh!” K’lion exclaimed.

  “Interesting,” von Braun replied, scribbling something down on a small tablet. “We shall have to keep him for observation. Perhaps the Allies are running genetic experiments, too. In the future, you know, everyone will.”

  “But —” one of the foot soldiers began. The praefectus and von Braun stared at him. He suddenly seemed terrified at having spoken out.

  “Finish,” the praefectus commanded.

  “But what if the lizard man is from the center of the Earth? What if he’s an Ancient One? Didn’t our Fuehrer tell us there are beings —”

  And here von Braun slapped him across the face.

  “We build rockets to carry explosives to foreign cities and German soldiers to the moon. No matter what the Fuehrer says, I will not waste my energy on trying to contact space aliens, find the Holy Grail, or discover the secrets of time travel! This is all nonsense! The Reich should stand for empirical science!”

  Mother believed in science, too. But not as an excuse to hurt people.

  “Who is this girl? This little brown-skinned girl?” Von Braun squeezed my chin, forcing me to look at him. “Why did you come, hmm? How did you get all these men to believe you have a ship? Did the Americans send you? Why are you here?”

  He was really hurting me.

  Why were we there? I didn’t know.

  I prayed it wasn’t to find Eli. Not in that place. It horrified me. But I was to see worse.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eli: Drachenjungen

  December 24, 1941 C.E.

  I can’t believe what I’ve just been through in the last hour. My life is in danger — I nearly drowned a few seconds ago — but it’s the picture of the mother and child I can’t shake.

  I only glimpsed them a little while ago in a wrinkled photograph that A.J. had, and I only saw that for a moment in the wind, under the flickering glow of a lighter held by Charlie.

  “Right here’s where I baptized Dan, and right over there’s where he confessed.” Facts and figures have been spilling out of A.J. ever since we left the car. He spoke in between huffs and puffs and grunts, as we tried to stay out of the way of patrol cars heading out to investigate the wreckage on the road, and scrambled down the cliffs to the beach.

  If I thought I was cold before, I was even colder now, by the ocean at night.

  Apparently A.J. knows all these back routes because he used to work here, on this army base, the Presidio — but not as a preacher, as a cook.

  “Preachin’s what I did on the side,” he explained. “Makin’ scrambled eggs and potatoes and chipped beef with gravy was what I did in the main. But the preachin’s what got me known. I would just come down to the beach and start talkin’ about visions I had, about how the world was gonna be changed forever in our time, and not necessarily in good ways. About how those who knew what was happening had to stick together.”

  It was funny, but in a way A.J. sounded like Mr. Howe. Howe is always saying there’s only a handful of people who really know what’s going on. But he would never use a phrase like “stick together.” Howe’s the kind of guy who says you have to use secrets to fight secrets.

  But whatever it was that A.J. was saying, apparently he’d get people down here on the beach to listen “crack of dawn on Sunday mornings.” And as he talked more about these visions he was having, he’d eventually get people coming up afterward or drawing him aside and telling him things.

  “Unburdening themselves” is how A.J. described it as we stumbled through some bushes on the way toward the shore. “Because the unspoken things in this world are becoming more and more terrible.”

  So army guys who were getting pictures from Europe of places called “death camps,” with “gas chambers” in them, would come to A.J. to tell him about what they were seeing, things they couldn’t put in the newspapers here. “Things like this,” A.J. said as he held the picture out. It was a fuzzy black-and-white print, showing a mother in a heavy overcoat clutching a child. She’s turned away from a German soldier who points a gun at her back. He’s about to kill the woman and child. Maybe with the same shot.

  Even in the dark, under a sputtering lighter, the image was burned into my brain. What was that soldier thinking? He had a mother. He might even have been a father.

  What kind of orders could possibly force someone to do a thing like that?

  “German government got machine-gun squads in eastern Europe, goin’ around, takin’ Jews, Gypsies, whoever they don’t like, linin’ ’em up and killin’ ’em all. They let the bodies fall in ditches. Then they force other people to help bury the bodies before they kill those people, too.”

  The lighter was blown out by the wind. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas anymore,” Charlie said.

  A.J. shook his head. “The common people ain’t safe after this war. Both sides are trying to build rockets, and bombs that blow up entire cities all at once. They’re workin’ on breakin’ atoms apart, too.”

  He meant nuclear weapons. It was weird to think about a time when they weren’t around. Them or the laser and space weapons that would come later.

  I mean, you just grow up assuming there’s a chance the world could be blown up one day. You don’t think about it; it’s just there. I wonder what it was like to be a kid before they could blow everything up — did everyone feel safer?

  “That’s not all. They’re workin’ on time travel, too. Both sides.”

  “That’s not possible,” Charlie said, sitting down in the sand. “Now you’re the one telling ghost stories.”

  Without thinking about it, I brushed the cap on my head. How could I tell Charlie that it was possible?

  Except they didn’t have time travel back here in 1941. Speaking from personal experience, that didn’t happen until 2019.

  No, wait. Mom was blasted back into time, and that was just over a year before I went. And then there’s Thea, who I took across the Fifth Dimension with me, to save her from the fires and the mobs in Alexandria.

  And she was born hundreds of years ago.

  Maybe something is wrong with history now.

  “Well, if they’re ghosts, they’re all wearin’ uniforms and street clothes, and they’re all holed up over there”— A.J. pointed —“trying to bend time itself.”

  All I could see was the tide, the bluffs above us, and the Golden Gate Bridge looming ahead. “You can’t see it from here,” A.J. continued. “They’re in Fort Point. It’s under the bridge on this side. The only way to get to it is through the water.”

  “We have to swim in the ocean? At night?” Charlie’s looking a little more agitated than he did about the time travel.

  “There’s a boat tied to some pilings. We can use it to get around the bluffs, then row back in toward the fort. But we’ll ru
n into guards soon enough. Our only hope is to convince them that we know everyone working on Project Split Second is in danger.”

  “How do you even know what it’s called?” I asked him. I was getting really annoyed that everyone seemed to know what my mom was up to but me.

  “Because I baptized Dan Sterning in these waters one Sunday morning, Eli, and he confessed to me. He’s been giving classified information to the Germans.”

  Dan the Oboe Man. “He’s a spy?”

  And he was trying to date my mom.

  “Evidently he has family back in Europe. They’re in a camp somewhere.” A.J. had stepped into the tide. “We have to work our way around these boulders here. The boats are kept in a little cove on the other side. Normally, I prefer parking by the bridge and climbing down the metal girders underneath.”

  “You do?” No wonder this guy made such a good preacher — he wasn’t afraid to dunk people in freezing water at the crack of dawn on Sundays. “Why did Dan tell you all this?”

  “We all got family, son. He feels he ain’t got any choice but to protect his.”

  “How come you didn’t tell somebody?”

  “I’m not allowed to share what people confess to me. It’s sacred. And secret. Between preacher and parishioner. That’s why they feel free to talk. But I told Dan to tell someone else. To confess what he’d done and make amends.”

  He suddenly lapsed into silence. “Well, what happened?”

  “I guess he told somebody something. But it wasn’t a confession. The captain came and discharged me from my cook’s job. Said I was sufferin’ from delirium, talkin’ about time travel and all. Thing is, I never mentioned it to him. Must’ve been Dan, not quite able to own up to what was happening, probably saying I told him about Project Split Second. Captain probably doesn’t even know what’s going on under his own nose. They’re tellin’ people they’re usin’ Fort Point as medical quarters for sick infantrymen. Nobody knows what’s really goin’ on there. Not even most of the army folk.”