The ping still echoed across the third-floor crossroads when every Resurrectionist rifle turned toward the battered elevator doors.
Fingers tightened on triggers. Men shifted into a firing line two ranks deep, nearly filling the width of the corridor. A few already had grenades in hand, thumbs resting near the pins, waiting for the first clear shape to appear so they could throw death into the lift and turn whatever waited inside into smoke and meat.
Then the elevator doors shuddered and began to part.
Behind the line of men, Crown Prince Wilhelm felt danger before he understood it. His eyes narrowed beneath the hood of his cloak. The mad smile on his face twitched, weakened, and then vanished as he stepped backward, slipping toward the corner of the hallway from which he had come.
Then just as the doors had barely even opened a hand's width, men nearest the elevator saw flickering light through the gap, and behind it, something massive. A black figure of steel stood inside. That was all they saw, as then the elevator erupted in fire.
Heavy calibre bullets tore through the metal doors before they had fully opened. Rounds punched through steel in bright, ripping lines, chewed through the frame, and burst outward into the corridor. They crossed the short distance into the waiting men and struck armor, flesh, bone, and flew past it all into the walls polished marble with the force of hammers.
The Resurrectionist line broke apart in the first second.
Men dropped in sprays of blood and fragments. Hands curled around triggers were torn open. Helmets snapped backward with skulls still inside them. One man's jaw vanished in a red mist, and when he tried to scream, only blood came out. Another twisted sideways as rounds passed through his stomach and threw wet pieces across the floor. Behind them, the walls cracked and spat dust where bullets punched through bodies and struck stone.
The violence was so sudden and absolute that panic had no time to become sound. There was only instinct. Men ducked, fell, crawled, screamed, and tried to make themselves small beneath the storm of heavy fire.
One Resurrectionist at the edge of the line dropped low with a grenade already in hand, his thumb working at the pin as he prepared to throw it into the elevator. Before his arm could complete the motion, a heavy round struck him through the neck. His body snapped backward, his head hanging wrong, and the grenade slipped from his dead fingers.
It detonated in the middle of the crossroads.
The blast tore through the men nearest him, throwing bodies against walls, pillars, and shattered window frames. Smoke and dust burst outward in a choking wave. Two other men, both with grenades already drawn, were hurled aside before they could throw. One struck the marble floor hard enough to lose his grip. The other slammed into a broken column, his hand opening by reflex. Their grenades fell among the wounded.
A heartbeat later, both went off.
The explosions rolled together in a brutal chain. Fire flashed through the smoke. Men vanished beneath fragments and dust. Broken rifles spun across the floor. A helmet struck the wall with something still inside it. Bodies already falling were torn apart before they finished hitting the marble.
Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the firing stopped.
For one brief moment, the crossroads held nothing but smoke, settling dust, the ringing aftermath of explosions, and the distant thunder of battle elsewhere in the palace and beyond its walls. The exchange had taken only seconds, but in those seconds the ruined hallway before the elevator had been remade into a slaughterhouse.
Only then did the elevator doors finish opening fully, and through the smoke stepped something that did not belong to the old world.
Wilhelm saw them from behind the corner: three black-armored figures emerging from the lift. Two carried black ballistic shields and carbines. The third stood between them, massive, broad, and dark, a shape that reminded him horribly of the newspaper engravings of Oskar in his war armor.
For once, the madness in Wilhelm's face gave way to something colder, astonishment.
"What is that?" he whispered.
Then, before the figures could fully turn toward him, he slipped back out of sight.
Most of the world had never seen what now entered the third floor. Even many within Oskar's closest household knew only rumors of the things he made beneath the palace. His wives knew he built weapons, armor, engines, and impossible machines, but even they had not seen every shape his mind had given to war. This was one of those hidden shapes.
At the center came the prototype simply named, The Heavy Trooper, Mark I.
He was not so much a soldier as a moving block of black iron, an unfinished prototype dragged too early from Oskar's secret underground workshop. Reinforced plates covered him from helmet to boot, thick and ugly, built over a fitted black synthetic combat suit and a breathing rig that hissed beneath his mask. Red lenses glowed faintly through the powder haze. In both armored hands he carried drum-fed light machine guns, their barrels smoking from the first burst.
On either side of him advanced the Enforcer Mark I prototypes, known among the Eternal Guard as the Black Shields.
They moved with their shields raised and their carbines braced along the shield edges, black armor marked with the Imperial eagle and the simple numeral of First Company. They were part of Oskar's future plans, revealed too early to a world that was never meant to see them like this: untested, unauthorized, and dragged from secrecy by desperation alone. Only the collapse of the palace itself had given the Eternal Guard cause to ignore their master's usual precautions.
Now the three figures moved out of the elevator carefully, boots grinding over spent casings, broken glass, and blood.
Around them, the living still stirred among the dead.
From behind bodies, pillars, shattered doorframes, and the corners of the main corridor, surviving Resurrectionists aimed and fired. Bullets struck the Prototype Shock Cell from several angles at once. Shields rang. Armor sparked and dented. The men inside staggered under the impacts as if beaten by iron fists.
But they answered.
The Black Shields fired first, short and controlled, killing anything that moved too clearly in the smoke. The Heavy Trooper followed a heartbeat later. Both machine guns roared, and the crossroads became fire again.
Men were torn open, head's popped and brains struck walls in red bursts. A Resurrectionist crawling behind a corpse convulsed as rounds found him through the body he had used for cover. Another rose to throw a grenade and vanished beneath a storm of impacts, his arm spinning away from him before the grenade ever left his hand.
Near the shattered doors to Oskar's family wing, the Resurrectionist machine-gunner was still alive.
Blood covered half his face. One eye was swollen almost shut. His hands shook around the grips of his weapon, yet when he saw the Heavy Trooper lumbering toward him through the smoke like some armored knight dragged out of nightmare, fear became rage, as he used all his might to then swing the machine gun around and fire.
For a second and a half, the weapon roared.
The burst struck the Heavy Trooper full in the chest, shoulders, and helmet. The black giant staggered. Sparks leapt from his armor. Plates buckled. His left arm jerked back, and blood sprayed inside the cracked edge of his respirator mask as the force passed through steel, padding, and flesh. He took another step and nearly fell, one knee dipping toward the marble before he forced himself upright.
Then one of the Black Shields found the gunner through the smoke and fired once.
The round struck the machine gun's housing near the barrel assembly. Metal cracked. The weapon bucked violently in the gunner's hands just as he squeezed off another burst. The next rounds drove forward into the damaged barrel, struck the broken steel, and had nowhere clean to go.
The machine gun tore itself apart. The barrel split. The receiver burst open. Shrapnel and shattered pieces of the weapon blasted backward into the gunner's face and throat. His head snapped back, his hands still locked around the ruined grips for one final instant before his body sagged against the broken doorway and slid down the frame.
The Black Shields did not pause.
They finished what remained of the men still moving in the smoke, then reloaded with practiced speed, empty extended twelve-round magazines dropping to the marble as fresh ones locked into their upgraded M1 carbines. Shields rose again. Carbines braced. Step by step, they pushed forward with the Heavy Trooper following behind them, slow, damaged, and terrible.
Ahead of them lay the corridor from which the Royal Guard Resurrectionists had come. Men still crouched there behind corners, side-room doorways, pillars, broken furniture, and the bodies of their comrades. The Black Shields advanced into that smoke like executioners, while behind them, within Oskar's family wing, the entire firefight had been nothing but noise, flashes, impacts, and pieces of men and stone flying down the hall.
Anna crouched behind the corner at the entrance to the girls' room, her back pressed against the wall. Her dark brown hair had fallen loose across her face in damp, tangled strands. Sweat slid down her throat and into the deep opening of her torn nightgown, the loose white fabric clinging where blood from the cuts across her back had soaked through. One strap had slipped from her shoulder, leaving the garment barely held in place as her heavy chest rose and fell with each hard breath.
Her stolen rifle lay beside her, it was empty.
Juniel and Lailael had crawled into her arms, trembling, their pistols still clutched in small white-knuckled hands. Anna held them close and kept their heads down, one palm pressed protectively over their hair.
She knew she should still be fighting, she knew that. But her body would not leave the girls. Every instinct in her screamed that she was a mother first, a woman second, and a soldier never. Her rifle had no rounds left, and she saw no spare magazine near enough to reach. All she could do now was shield the girls with her own body and pray that Azarael and Liorael were still alive behind the pillar.
Even then, in the middle of terror, some small part of her felt relief that the silent alarm had come so early. The Eternal Guard had trusted no one and called for no servants. Because of that, the corridors were not full of maids, nurses, and frightened girls running blindly into gunfire. At least they were not here. At least that much had been spared.
She brushed her shaking fingers through Juniel's and Lailael's hair, trying to calm them, trying to calm herself, when the fighting beyond the room changed. As for a moment, the gunfire thinned.
Anna lifted her head and looked out.
Through the smoke she saw sparks, black shapes, and metal moving in the haze. Then her heart leapt with fierce, painful relief. Two black figures of steel had set themselves before the shattered doors with their backs toward her, shields raised, carbines firing into the smoke. Behind them came a huge armored shape, clambering forward with heavy, awkward steps like a wounded machine forced to keep moving. Its cracked faceplate turned toward the corridor, and its machine guns opened again, pouring fire down the hall.
It was the Eternal Guard, they had come.
Then from the stairwell came shouting and the hard thunder of boots. More black-armored men rushed down from above and into Oskar's wing. Three regular Eternal Guards ran past the Prototype Shock Cell, moving low and fast. The one at their head pointed toward the twins behind the pillar, and one of his men broke off at once, sprinting toward Azarael and Liorael.
The other two came to Anna.
"Lady Anna!" the sergeant called as he reached her. "Are you hurt?"
Anna did not answer at first. She only stared up at him, stunned, breathing hard, still holding the girls against her. The sergeant crouched before her and placed one armored hand on her shoulder, steadying her as he looked quickly over her face, her torn gown, the blood on her back, the empty rifle beside her.
Behind him, the second guard entered the room and went to Cecilie and stopped there, clearly hesitant not knowing what to do.
Anna saw it in his posture before he turned back.
"No," she whispered. "I'm fine, Sergeant. Just cuts. But Cecilie… she's gone."
The sergeant looked into the room. The other guard knelt beside what remained of Cecilie, checked for any impossible sign of life, then looked back and shook his head.
There was no miracle.
For one moment, grief moved through the sergeant's silence. Then duty swallowed it.
"She will be avenged," he said. "But we must go now. Please, my lady. Follow me, and we will get all of you to safety. I swear it on my life."
Anna's eyes sharpened through the shock.
"The others?" she asked quickly. "Are the younger children safe?"
"Yes," he said. "They are in the basement and waiting for you. Now move."
There was no time to mourn.
The Eternal Guards formed around them, three black-armored men becoming a wall of flesh and steel before Anna and the four children. Liorael helped Azarael up, one arm around his brother's waist as Azarael leaned heavily on him, his wounded leg shaking beneath him. The sergeant glanced once at the blood soaking through the boy's makeshift bandage, but did not stop.
"Keep him moving," he ordered. "Do not let him fall."
Bullets cracked from the hallway as they left the room.
Rounds struck the Black Shields, ringing off armor and biting into raised plates. Sparks flew from the Heavy Trooper's battered chest and helmet as well. The great armored man swayed under the impacts, his faceplate cracked, one red lens flickering, but he did not move aside. The Prototype Shock Cell shifted with the family, covering them as they crossed the broken corridor toward the freight elevator.
Two of the Eternal Guards moved to hold the stairwell. The sergeant led Anna and the children into the lift. The Black Shields backed in after them one at a time, still facing outward, and the Heavy Trooper came last, stumbling into the corner like a wounded iron statue.
The elevator was nearly ruined. Bullet holes pocked the doors and walls. One small lamp flickered weakly overhead, casting the inside in a sick yellow pulse. The floor was slick with blood, dust, spent casings, and fragments of glass.
Anna looked at it and swallowed.
"Sergeant," she said, "could we not use the stairs?"
The sergeant answered with a note of apology, but no hesitation, "The second and first floor are compromised, my lady."
Anna did not ask what compromised meant. She only pulled the children closer.
The sergeant forced them against the right wall of the elevator, placing his own body between them and the doors. The other Eternal Guards formed up in front of them. Shields forward. Carbines ready. The Heavy Trooper slumped against the opposite corner, both machine guns hanging low for a moment as if even lifting them had become an act of faith.
Anna looked at the guards around her.
"What about the others?" she asked. "Where are the rest of you from the upper floor?"
The sergeant did not look back.
"Do not worry about them, my lady. They are doing their part. We are doing ours."
The Black Shield nearest the panel punched a code into the hidden keypad beneath the ordinary buttons. The doors shuddered closed. The elevator groaned, then began to descend toward the basement.
In the dim, trembling light, Anna looked over the children.
Juniel and Lailael clung to her nightgown, faces pale and streaked with tears. Liorael sat close to Azarael, one hand gripping his brother's sleeve. Azarael's thigh had been wrapped with a field bandage, but blood was already darkening the cloth, and pain had turned his face almost white.
Anna sank down and pulled him against her chest before he could protest.
"You were brave," she whispered, holding him tightly. "So brave. Your father would be proud. We are going to make it. Do you hear me? We are going to make it."
Azarael's jaw trembled. He said nothing.
Then the sergeant and the other guards tensed. A small indicator beside the doors flickered.
Second floor.
In front of Anna, the Eternal Guards became a wall. Shields in front. Three regular guards behind them shoulder to shoulder, rifles raised. The Heavy Trooper dragged himself upright in the corner, armor torn, breath rasping through his damaged mask. Slowly, painfully, he lifted both machine guns again.
His voice came from beneath the cracked faceplate, low and distorted.
"Grant me strength to be worthy of the gifts bestowed upon me," he muttered, "that I may lay waste to these architects of ruin."
Anna wanted to ask what was happening, but before she could, the answer came in bullets. Bullets ripped through the elevator doors.
The Eternal Guards fired back at once.
The enclosed space became thunder. Muzzle flashes turned the lift white and orange. The children screamed and clamped their hands over their ears. Casings bounced across the floor like hot rain. Bullets tore through the doors in both directions, punching metal inward, punching bodies beyond it apart, filling the elevator with smoke, sparks, and the deafening roar of too many guns in too little space.
Anna could not tell how long it lasted.
She could not hear anymore. The world became ringing pressure and flashing light. She turned her back to the doors and wrapped both arms around the boys, holding them tight against her body. She could not let anything happen to Tanya's sons. She would never forgive herself. She would die for them as readily as she would die for her own girls.
Then the elevator passed the second floor.
For one breath, there was silence, ringing in her ears, smoke in the air, and the flicker of the dying lamp.
The Heavy Trooper sagged against the back wall, armor torn, machine guns still aimed high. One of the Black Shields lay on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, his shield half-covering his body as if even in death he had tried to remain useful.
The overhead light flickered once, then it died.
Darkness swallowed the elevator as it continued its descent. As then through the smoke, the ringing silence, and the frightened breathing of the children, the sergeant's voice came quietly.
"Get ready."
The indicator clicked toward the first floor. Then the guns began again.
Elsewhere, the battle had not paused.
While the freight elevator sank through darkness, bullets, smoke, and screaming steel, the Royal Palace of Potsdam continued to tear itself apart.
Inside the palace, gunfire still cracked through marble corridors and gilded galleries. Men fought beneath painted ceilings, around shattered statues, beside overturned chairs and smoking doors. Servants who had once carried trays, folded linens, polished silver, and whispered in corners now crawled on their bellies beneath tables while Royal Guards and Eternal Guards killed one another across floors made for emperors.
Moltke had taken command where he could.
Not of the whole battle. No one commanded the whole battle now. That illusion had died with the first shot. But the old general still had enough authority, enough voice, and enough coldness left in him to turn panic into orders.
"Secure the servants," he snapped. "All of them. Tie their hands. Bring them to the main hall. No shooting unless they resist."
The Resurrectionist Royal Guards obeyed because they needed someone to obey.
They dragged frightened servants from side rooms, from kitchens, from under tables, from behind curtains and broken doors. Men and women who had served the imperial household for years were forced down the staircases with hands bound, faces white, mouths trembling with half-finished prayers. Some wept. Some begged. Some stared in shock, unable to understand how the palace they had cleaned, warmed, and fed had become a prison around them.
Moltke did not call them hostages, not aloud. But every order he gave made them so. While the Kaiser and Empress were kept far from the main hall, locked away under guard, in a safer place.
If the fighting could not be ended by force, then perhaps it could be ended by coercion. Servants, clerks, maids, footmen, old men, frightened girls—all gathered where the palace could see them, all useful as coin in the bargain Moltke still hoped to strike.
Outside, within the palace grounds, the battle was even louder.
The First Company barracks had become a fortress. Its windows flashed with black carbine fire. Its roofline spat bullets into the gardens. Eternal Guards fired from upper rooms, from ground-floor slits, from behind sandbagged windows and torn curtains. Their numbers were too few, but they made every window costly. Royal Guards and men of Prittwitz's Seventh Army detachment had already learned that charging a building held by Eternal Guards was not an assault, it was a sacrifice.
Maximilian von Prittwitz stood at the rear, near a line of trucks and wounded men, his face dark beneath his helmet.
"Forward," he ordered. "Bring the tank forward. Suppress the barracks."
One of the tanks groaned into motion. Its tracks chewed into the palace lawn, ripping through flowerbeds and throwing dark soil across clipped grass. It crawled past a marble fountain where a dead horse lay on its side, past shattered benches, past the bodies of Royal Guards who had fallen before the barracks windows. Behind the tank, Seventh Army men advanced in short rushes, crouching low, rifles in hand, white armbands bright against field-grey sleeves.
The Eternal Guards in the barracks did not retreat.
Their fire struck sparks from the tank's plates and cut down the men foolish enough to step too far from its shadow. But the machine kept coming, slow and ugly, its gun turning toward the barracks like a blind eye finding a face.
At the palace gates, the remaining tank continued its own work.
It sat near the entrance like an iron animal guarding a butcher's yard, blasting at Karl's manor across the wide street. Its machine gun swept the frontage in hard, rattling bursts. Its main gun fired whenever the crew saw movement, or imagined they did. Each shell struck with a brutal flash, tearing stone, brick, plaster, wood, and memory from the house.
The street between the Royal Palace and Karl's manor had become no-man's-land, as bullets crossed it endlessly.
From the palace walls and gatehouse, Royal Guards fired toward the manor. From behind Karl's low stone wall, from its iron spear fence, from garden corners, shattered hedges, cellar vents, upper windows, and hidden firing slits, the Second Company answered. Men appeared, fired, vanished. Others crawled from one patch of cover to the next while bullets cracked over their backs.
No one crossed the open street and lived long.
Police sirens wailed somewhere beyond the fighting, first distant, then louder, then swallowed again by cannon fire. Reinforcements were coming. But not fast enough, and deep down Karl knew that.
He stood on the roof of his manor and saw it all.
The morning wind tugged at the black cloth around him. Smoke rolled across the street in slow grey sheets. Below, his house was being destroyed piece by piece.
The stone lions that flanked his front entrance—ridiculous, proud things Oskar had once laughed at and then praised because "every proper little king needs lions"—were no longer lions. One had lost its head to machine-gun fire. The other had been torn open by shrapnel until it looked like some butchered beast from an old myth.
The garden was worse.
His precious garden. The little trees he had planted with Heddy and the children were split and burning. The bushes were shredded. The neat paths had been churned into mud by boots and fragments. The iron fence was twisted outward in places, the spear points bent, broken, or blackened by smoke.
Then he saw the garage.
For a moment his jaw simply hung open. The custom motorcar the Kaiser had given him—the gift for saving Oskar's life, the machine that had made him feel like the smallest grand gentleman in Germany—was now a blackened skeleton inside a burning carriage house. Flames licked through the roof. Tires burned with oily smoke. The polished leather seats, the reinforced frame, the little imperial note he had kept folded in the glove compartment like a holy relic—all of it was gone.
Karl's mouth twitched and for one insane second, he almost laughed. Then he looked beyond the smoke, toward the palace itself.
Oskar's family wing was wounded.
Smoke poured from its high windows. Stone was blackened around the shattered frames. Curtains fluttered in tatters. Somewhere inside those rooms were Anna, the girls, Tanya's boys, Cecilie, and every frightened child Oskar had ever gathered beneath his roof.
Karl's heart tightened. Something was wrong there, not merely dangerous, but wrong.
He could feel it in the same strange place where he sometimes felt Oskar before he saw him, that odd warmth and pressure that had grown over the years without ever being named. He did not know whether it was instinct, friendship, madness, or some spark that had passed from Oskar into everyone who stood too close to him for too long.
He only knew this: He was not reaching them quickly enough.
Lower in the palace, through the shifting smoke and broken windows, he saw movement in the main hall. Groups of people being herded together with their hands bound. Royal Guards driving them forward at rifle point.
They were hostages.
Karl's expression went cold.
"So that is your plan, Moltke," he whispered. "You old bastard."
A burst of machine-gun fire struck the roofline near him, spitting tile fragments into the air. Karl did not flinch. He only lowered his head slightly, eyes still fixed on the tank before the gates.
His revolver sat at his hip.
The black belt around his waist was lined with cartridges, each one gleaming dull brass against the leather. At the center of the belt, because Oskar had thought it hilarious and Karl had pretended to hate it, was a little black bat emblem.
In his right hand he held a single round grenade. And he was dressed as a bat.
There was no dignified way around it. The suit was black from throat to boot, fitted close to his compact, muscular frame, reinforced at the knees, elbows, ribs, and shoulders. A hood covered his blond hair and most of his face, leaving only his mouth and chin exposed. Short pointed ears rose from the mask, still absurd no matter how much Oskar insisted they were "aerodynamic intimidation." From wrist to ankle, folded under his arms and along his sides, lay the dark gliding membranes of the suit, no longer the crude cloth he had worn in America years ago, but Oskar's improved work: stronger, smoother, reinforced by hidden ribs and lines of flexible support.
It had once been a ridiculous experiment. Then it had become a legend. Now it was war gear.
Behind him, Captain Dieter leaned out from the upper balcony where he and two Eternal Guards had helped hoist Karl onto the roof. His voice carried up through the smoke, strained almost to breaking.
"Herr Karl! Please reconsider! This is a very poor plan!"
Karl did not look back.
"That has been said of many of my best decisions."
"You have no parachute!"
"I noticed."
"If the wind drops, you will fall."
"Yes."
"If you land badly, you may break half the bones in your body."
"That would still leave the other half."
Dieter stared at him, torn between horror and admiration.
The roof rose four stories above the manor front if one counted the attic line. The palace gates stood across the no-man's-land below, framed by smoke, bodies, and the remaining tank. Between Karl and that tank lay distance, bullets, wind, and a very real possibility of becoming the most ridiculous corpse in German history.
Dieter's hands clenched against the balcony rail.
"Herr Karl," he said, voice lower now, "I am begging you. Let us charge. Let the men make the opening."
Karl finally glanced back. The mask hid most of his face, but not his mouth. Dieter saw the small, tired smile there.
"No, Captain. Your men are needed alive."
Dieter swallowed.
Below them, another shell struck the manor. The whole roof trembled. Dust burst from the chimneys. Somewhere beneath, stone collapsed with a long grinding roar.
Karl looked back toward the palace.
"Oskar gave me this house," he said quietly. "He gave me work when others saw only a small oddity in a suit. He gave me trust when I had done nothing to deserve it. He gave me a purpose." His fingers tightened around the grenade. "And his family is in there."
Dieter said nothing.
Karl drew in a breath and straightened.
"Duty calls."
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Dieter struck his fist against his chest.
"Godspeed, Herr Karl," he said. "If you succeed, we will be right behind you. If you fail, we will charge anyway and bring you back, dead or alive. Second Company is proud to have served your house."
Karl's smile sharpened.
"I would prefer not to require rescue, Captain."
"So would I, sir."
Karl turned away.
The wind brushed across his face from the east, slight but present. Enough to stir smoke sideways. Enough to tug at the folded wings beneath his arms. Not much. Not the strong American gusts that had once carried him like a screaming idiot over a frozen field and into a river, but perhaps it would be enough.
He climbed carefully onto the highest ridge of the roof.
Tiles cracked beneath his boots. Smoke rolled past his knees. Bullets snapped somewhere below. The tank before the gate fired again, and the blast lit the morning orange.
Karl looked down, very far down.
"Oh," he whispered. "That is higher than I hoped."
His stomach clenched, but his will did not. He would not allow it, not while Oskar's family was trapped inside that smoking palace.
For one breath, Karl was no longer on the roof.
He was younger again. Smaller. Not merely in body, but in the eyes of the world.
Back then, he had been Essen's adopted dwarf son: clever, useful, amusing, perhaps even impressive, but never quite treated as a full man. In a world of tall bodies, old names, and quiet cruelty hidden behind polite smiles, Karl had been a curiosity before he had been a person. A mascot. A clever little attendant. A thing to be pitied, protected, or laughed at.
Even kindness had often felt like a cage.
He had once imagined a small life for himself. A little money from accounts, wagers, and careful deals. Perhaps a quiet house one day. Maybe some land. A family, if God was feeling generous. But the thought of a woman choosing him freely—not out of pity, not out of desperation, but because she wanted him—had always seemed like a dream best buried before it began to hurt.
Then Oskar fell down the stairs, woke changed, and everything began.
Karl remembered the first time that strange, broken prince had looked at him. Not down at him. Not through him. Not with pity polished into good manners. Oskar had looked at him as if his height meant nothing.
As if Karl were simply a man, an equal.
"My little man," Oskar had called him.
From anyone else, the words might have cut. From Oskar, somehow, they became a title.
Then came the red book. The impossible sketches. The broken German. The mad dream of financing a battleship with something called the German Welfare Lottery, as if history itself could be cheated by selling hope on numbered tickets.
Anyone else would have laughed. Oskar had not laughed, he had bet everything on it. More than that, he had bet on Karl.
He had trusted him with money, accounts, factories, secrets, lies, inventions, and truths that could have ruined them both if spoken in the wrong room. Karl had complained, of course. He had complained about the hours, the madness, the impossible deadlines, the endless papers, and the way Oskar seemed to think sleep was a weakness. Complaining was his sacred right.
But beneath every complaint had lived gratitude. Because Oskar had given him consequence.
Through Oskar, Karl had become more than the odd little man in the corner. He had become the mind holding the Oskar Industrial Group together. He had crossed oceans, dealt with inventors and ministers, watched factories rise from ink, and become richer than his younger self would ever have dared imagine.
But money was not the miracle, Heddy was. His wife, children, a home. Friends who followed him not as a joke, but as a leader. Men who called him sir and meant it.
All of it had come from Oskar.
Not because he was a dog at his heel. But because Oskar had been the first man to give Karl's life back to him.
And now Oskar was not here, and his family was in trouble.
Looking at the palace in the distance, Karl's hand tightened around the grenade.
He remembered the park years ago: Oskar unconscious in a ring of bodies, refusing even then to fall; Karl bleeding in the grass with a revolver in his hand; the hospital afterward, where he had muttered a promise Oskar had not even been awake to hear.
Next time, he had said, he would bring his revolver and save Oskar's butt again if he had to.
Karl's mouth twitched.
"Looks like next time came," he murmured.
Below, the tank's turret shifted near the gate. The gun swung slowly, searching for another target. Behind him, Dieter and Second Company waited for the opening he was supposed to make.
For one final moment, fear and doubt rose together inside him.
Then he remembered Oskar's voice from years ago, warm, foolish, and impossible to ignore.
Remember this, my little man. When the hour is small, you may think, plan, complain, and doubt as much as you like. But when the great decision comes, fear must no longer be allowed to vote. A man either does the thing, or he does not. There is no try.
Karl opened his eyes. Now he understood what Oskar had meant.
If he was going to leap from this roof, if he was going to save Oskar's family and perhaps help save the Empire itself, then he could not do it halfway. He could not jump while already imagining failure. He could not carry fear with him like a second body.
He had to give everything, or not go at all.
Karl drew one slow breath.
"All right, my friend," he whispered. "Then let us see if I have what it takes."
He stepped back across the broken roof tiles, two steps. Then he lowered his body, fixed his eyes on the tank before the palace gates, and spread the black wings of the suit.
Then Karl ran.
His short, powerful legs drove him forward. Smoke whipped past his face. Behind him, someone shouted his name, but he no longer heard it.
The edge came and Karl leapt into the air.