Only Thing To Fear

Chapter Four

With Bastian behind her, Zara ducked into the cramped utility room where she and the other cleaning girls stowed their belongings. She heaved a sigh once she shut the door behind her. The cadets wouldn't follow her here, even if their cackling still roared in her ears.
Two of the other cleaning girls chattered inside the dark space, readying their carts with rags and bottles of bleach. Zara glanced at them, but they ignored her like always. A slow ache wove through her heart, and she wished that Molly were here. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to, especially after her run-in with Bastian. What exactly did he want to talk to her about?
"You're late," one of the girls sniffed at Zara. "I had to pick up the dormitory sheets for you."
      Zara reached for a pile of rags from a metal table. "Thanks. It won't happen again."
"Make sure that it doesn't."
The girls pushed their carts out the door, leaving Zara alone in the mildewed room. She twisted the rags in her hands until her knuckles hurt. Decades may have passed since the war, but most Eastern Americans still shook their heads at Zara's lineage. They had never forgotten — and had never forgiven — the cruelty the Japanese had dealt during and after the war: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the internment camps for captured rebels, the death marches along the American West Coast. Even today, the Empire of Japan ruled the Western American Territories as the Nazis ruled the East — with a harsh and oppressive fist. This was why the Kleinbauern shunned Zara just as they had her mother, once they learned she had given birth to a half-Japanese child.
It made Zara's blood boil when she overheard the farmers warning their daughters not to become like Annie St. James. Her mother had been a lonely eighteen-year-old when she met a young Japanese soldier while cleaning the cafeteria at Fort Goering. Annie's own mother was sick with tuberculosis and her father had recently been jailed, leaving her and her brother, Redmond, to care for the farm. With so many burdens pressing in on her, Annie had lost herself in the fling, but she broke it off after her brother discovered it. But by then, she was already pregnant.
Shaking off the memories of her mother, Zara spent the next six hours in a blur of dull chores. While the cadets scaled ropes outside and debated Mein Kampf in the classroom, she washed the bedsheets and scrubbed the cooking pots. Most of the students lived at the academy full time, arriving at age twelve and graduating at twenty. Their application process had been rigorous, and their coursework was even more so: mathematics, war strategy, and racial sciences along with shooting, first aid, and heavy combat training. About a dozen cadets dropped out every term, but Zara was never sorry to see them go. Fewer sheets for her to wash. At least until the next semester.
By early afternoon Zara's uniform smelled of dish soap and old soup, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had to fold the tablecloths and organize a storage closet for Frau Schumann, one of the history teachers. Tugging off her apron, she dashed into Frau Schumann's classroom, darted around the desks, and squeezed into the dimly lit closet as the cadets ambled to their seats. She was about to reach for the filing cabinet when another cleaning girl hurried inside.
"Good God, what a mess!" the dark-haired girl whispered. She wedged her nearly six-foot height into the space. "When's the last time Frau Schumann cleaned out this thing? You'd think she —" Her voice stopped when Zara turned around. "Oh. I thought Lizzie would be here."
Zara swallowed her groan. "Hello to you, too."
The girl didn't return the greeting. Instead, she tackled a pile of papers on the floor, pretending she was the only one there.
Zara yanked open the file drawer, her fingers dredged in dust. She had hoped for a quiet afternoon, but now she would have to share this musty closet with Kristy Coulter, of all people. Most of the cleaning girls simply ignored Zara, which wasn't so bad after she had gotten used to it, but Kristy could be cruel.
The bell clanged and a stale silence filled the storage room, only broken by the sound of shuffling papers and the sharpness of Frau Schumann's voice. Zara tried to tune out the lecture, but the words drilled into her eardrums anyway.
"Quiet, please!" Frau Schumann said in German. She was a petite woman, only five two, but she possessed the voice of a general. "Fräulein Huber, sit down. Herr Dresner, open a few windows. It's too warm in here. Now then, let's get started on your history reports. Herr Zimmermann, I believe you volunteered to go first."
The reports ticked by in a parade of Nazi pride. Herr Zimmermann spent ten minutes lauding the Anomaly war hero Lukas Ansel, or the "Jewel of the Third Reich" as he was known, who destroyed eight American cities with his ability to create mile-wide explosions. His "contributions" slaughtered millions and eventually led to President Roosevelt's surrender, but Ansel only lived three years beyond the Nazis' victory. Unstable genes, the autopsy found.
Fräulein Huber went next, detailing the life of Führer Gustav, the son and heir of Adolf Hitler, who reorganized North Africa into colonial states and nearly warred with the Soviets over the Lithuanian border. After that, Herr Dresner described the history of the Corps of Four, from the very first Dual Anomalies to the current Corps, who had, to date, saved Führer Dieter from five assassination attempts.
When Herr Dresner finished, Frau Schumann studied her roll and nodded at Bastian. "Herr Eckhart? We have time for one more presentation."
From her vantage point in the storage closet, Zara peeked into the classroom and saw Bastian heading toward the teacher's desk, his head bowed. A couple of female cadets sent each other sly smiles, obviously pleased at the prospect of gazing at Bastian for his entire report. There was only a small number of female cadets at the academy. Many girls their age joined the League of German Maidens, where they prepared for their roles in Nazi society — wife, mother, homemaker — but it was getting more common to see German women in the military or finding work within offices and factory management.
"Dr. Eva Himmel was born in 1910 in Dresden, Germany," said Bastian in a quiet voice that wasn't very fitting for a colonel's son. "With an IQ of 174, she was destined for great things. She received her doctorate in genetics at the age of twenty and became the first female scientist to work in the Führer's national laboratory."
Zara scowled. Laboratory? It was more like a torture chamber. The Nazis may have prided themselves in creating Anomalies, but their discovery was paid for in blood. Thousands of test subjects, mainly Jews, had been subjected to experimentation. Some were even children. What was worse, the German history books had reveled in these deaths, lionizing Adolf Hitler for ridding the world of the "great Jewish filth."
Bastian's gaze remained glued to the pages of his report, never looking up once. "Dr. Himmel proved instrumental in the Dresden Study, specifically in the engineering of Subject K3, the very first Anomaly soldier who survived the testing process. Then, after the war ended, Dr. Himmel worked for years trying to solve the Anomaly genetic instability that had led to the early deaths of over fifty percent of the division."
Continuing on, Bastian described the good doctor's battle with cancer, but Zara had tuned out his report and had returned to organizing the file in her hand. She had barely made a dent in the pile today, which meant she would have to stay late to finish the job. On top of that, Uncle Red needed her help with the planting once she got home. She'd be lucky to go to bed before midnight. Heaving a tired sigh, she reached behind her for the trash basket, but her hand knocked into Kristy's stack of alphabetized files, sending the papers toppling.
"I've spent forty minutes on that!" Kristy hissed.
"I didn't mean to —"
Kristy wasn't finished. "Stupid kami."
Zara flinched before a flare of anger ignited inside her. She had heard that slur often enough — a shortened version of kamikaze — that she should have gotten used to it by now, but it always punched a hole in her heart.
Stupid kami.
She tried to shrug it off, but it rang inside her head.
Kami.
Zara hated that word. And she hated that Kristy had used it. For years Kristy had simply snubbed Zara like the rest of the cleaning girls, but then her father had gone to the Western American Territories to find work at a lumber mill. He only made it a few months before his Japanese employer hanged him for attending a few Freedom Resistance meetings, the rebel movement out West. Not long after that, Zara arrived at school to find her apron in the toilet and her cleaning cart knocked onto its side. That was when the name-calling started, too.
Zara crushed a piece of paper in her hands. She had never even met Mr. Coulter, but Kristy somehow blamed her for his death. Months of resentment rushed through her in a wave, and her face grew oven-hot. She forced herself to breathe. In and out, in and out. She wouldn't have an episode, not here.
Suddenly, a gust flew through the classroom windows, snatching papers from the desks and swirling them along the ceiling. The cadets laughed, but Frau Schumann clucked at them. "Settle down! Class isn't over. Remember to read chapters ten through twelve as your homework assignment."
Once the final bell chimed for the day, Zara leapt to her feet, ready to escape from the dusty room. She hurried to Frau Schumann's desk and asked for a restroom break.
"Make it a quick one," Frau Schumann said, but Zara didn't hear her.
Running into the hall, she wedged herself through the mass of uniforms and hurried to the nearest place where she could be alone. The broom closet. She shut the door and gulped down a breath, but the tears came anyway. She swiped at her eyes. She didn't know why she was crying — Kristy had called her a kami dozens of times before — but maybe the last few days had been too much for her. First Sentinel Achen's visit, then the beating, and now this. Sometimes she wanted to stand in the middle of the square and scream at everyone who had hurt her or her family. But if she did that, she would end up like poor Mr. Kerry.
A minute ticked by, and Zara tried to pull herself together. If she didn't get back to work, her pay would get docked, and she needed that money for the farm. Besides, she couldn't let Kristy get under her skin. The anger flared again, but Zara used it to make the tears stop. She took a deep breath.
Three knocks tapped against the door.
Zara jumped back. "I'm on a break!"
A pause. "Fräulein St. James?"
She froze. She knew that voice, although it was strange to hear him address her so formally again. Most cadets referred to her as Hausmeisterin. Some simply called her "girl."
       "I need to speak with you for a moment."
Zara's nails dug into her palms. She only wanted a minute to herself, but the Nazis wouldn't allow even that. She sighed and twisted the doorknob to find Bastian standing in the emptying hallway, his warm ochre eyes peering into her dark ones. Out of habit, her gaze dropped to the tiled floor and fixed upon his leather shoes. The toes of his loafers were a little scuffed. Perhaps he wanted her to shine them for him. After the day she had had, she wouldn't have been surprised.
His head tilted to one side. "Are you ill, Fräulein?"
"I'm fine, Herr Eckhart," she forced out. "Do you need my assistance?"
"Frau Schumann wanted a quick word with you once your break is finished. You ran out before she could tell you herself, so I told her I'd relay the message." As he spoke, a set of dimples emerged at the corners of his mouth. Undoubtedly those dimples sent the Nazi girls sighing, but Zara never understood the appeal of them.
"Thank you for letting me know." Frankly, she was surprised that Bastian was delivering the message instead of another cleaning girl; but she urged her lips into a smile, knowing that she had to act extra politely around the Colonel's son. "My deepest condolences about your great-uncle."
Those dimples slid away. "My great-uncle?"
"He, um. I heard that he had passed away."
"Ah. You must mean my" — he clutched the dog tags around his neck — "my Opa."
"My apologies. I didn't realize." Zara grimaced at the mistake. Bastian had lost his grandfather, not a great-uncle. She waited for him to huff and storm off, but he didn't move.
"I mentioned earlier that I needed to speak with you."
Zara stiffened. There were only a few things that a Nazi would want from a cleaning girl like her, and she didn't like any of those reasons. Her mind frantically searched for an excuse to put him off, but she came up empty.
Bastian's long fingers dropped the dog tags and fidgeted instead with his red-and-yellow striped tie, the academy colors. "My mother is searching for a new housekeeper. Our previous one left quite suddenly."
Zara sighed, relieved. He wasn't offering reichsmarks for certain "services" from her. She knew what he was asking before he even said it.
"My mother needs someone to fill in while we search for a permanent replacement. I told her that I could speak to a Hausmeisterin at school, and so I thought I would ask you. You seem —" He played with his tie again, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation. "You seem very skilled."
Very skilled? Zara wondered if she was supposed to take that as a compliment, but it only reminded her of how these Germans viewed her: a work mule to service their needs. It was humiliating enough to scrub the Nazis' bathrooms every day, but now she had been asked to personally clean Colonel Eckhart's toilet, too.
"It's only an hour or two a day," Bastian said. "We'd compensate you, of course. Twenty reichsmarks per hour."
The amount made Zara suck in her breath. She only made half of that at the academy, and she had to grudgingly admit that she could put that money to good use at home. The stove was broken and the water heater needed to be replaced. She missed her hot showers dreadfully. But twenty reichsmarks per hour was, frankly, too much. Even the most experienced Hausmeisterin didn't make that. Zara gripped the edge of the doorframe, uneasiness sliding through her. And why was Bastian looking for a new housekeeper when his father's staff could've made the request? This task seemed rather beneath a cadet like him.
"Maybe you could stop by my house? We could walk together if you don't know the way," he offered.
Now that was even more baffling. A colonel's son would never be seen walking home with a cleaning girl.
"It won't take long," Bastian went on. His eyes grasped on to hers, and she saw the gold and green flecks inside them, like a mosaic. If he wasn't German, she might have thought them pretty.
Looking away from those eyes, Zara wondered what she should do. She couldn't refuse him, of course, but she couldn't shake the niggling feeling that something about this conversation was off, that he wasn't telling her the entire truth. She thought about all of those times she had caught him glancing at her — why? But the thought of twenty reichsmarks an hour was enough to put her questions aside. "I have to work tonight, but maybe tomorrow?"
"I see." He chewed his bottom lip, disappointment threading through his voice. "I have track practice until four. How about then?"
She nodded.
"Tomorrow at four." A smile flooded his lips, but it vanished so quickly that Zara wondered if she had imagined it. "Good day."
Zara headed back to the history classroom, but halfway there she glanced backward to find Bastian standing outside the broom closet, watching her leave. That prickling feeling tickled at the nape of her neck.
She sped past the lockers. She had no idea what to make of her day.
And she had no idea what to make of Bastian Eckhart.