The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis Read Free Book Online Page B

training.
    Gretel didn’t bother to hide her wires. They were twined, as always, through her braids. She had worn them that way back at the Reichsbehörde, too. Even then, the affectation had seemed overly young for her.
    They filed off the train into a muggy heat on the platform. But it wasn’t crowded, which made it bearable. At one end of the platform, a man with a roller brush and a putty knife scraped down placards announcing a lecture sponsored by a group of British Socialists. The speaker was a member of Parliament. The advertisements appeared to have been printed crudely and slapped up quickly.
    Klaus said, “Where now?”
    They had nothing but the clothes on their backs, the few remaining batteries concealed beneath, and the money Klaus had pulled out of a cash register at the port. “We need to find a place to stay.”
    â€œThat’s easy.” She looked up at him. “You shouldn’t worry so much, brother.”
    â€œWe’ll also need money. We can’t keep—” He paused, lowering his voice. “—stealing.”
    â€œPfff.” She waved away the concern with a petite hand.
    â€œWell, then? What does your plan say? What do we do?”
    Gretel folded the paper in thirds, then took his arm. “I’m in the mood for a rummage sale,” she said.
    *   *   *
    The taxi smelled of perfume from a previous passenger. It was a boxy, black hackney cab with suicide doors, like the only other London taxi Klaus had ridden in his life. That ride had ended with him killing the driver. He hoped this would be different.
    Their driver was very young, and olive skinned, but not with the gypsy look of Klaus and Gretel. A Spaniard, judging from his accent, perhaps a refugee from the purges after “spontaneous” workers’ uprisings had deposed Franco and put the puppet Juan de Borbón on the throne.
    Their route took them past a swath of green space. A park. It surprised Klaus to see something so vibrant and colorful in the middle of the sterile urban jungle. The taxi stopped at a traffic light. Cross traffic thrummed past the windscreen; a stream of pedestrians filled the zebra crossing. Klaus watched the park.
    A man and woman held hands while they strolled around the edges of a duck pond. Farther inside, a crying boy watched an adult—his father?—try to dislodge a shredded red kite from the boughs of an oak tree. Somebody else stood at an easel, painting a scene from the park.
    The light changed; the taxi pulled away. But Klaus held tightly to those glimpses. There was something odd, something unusual, about the entire thing.
    They pulled to a stop at a church. Their driver flipped a lever; the meter stopped with a ding . He put his arm across the front seat, craned his neck, and said something to Gretel. She handed him money. His face cracked into a smile when he counted the bills.
    She’d given him the last of their money, but Klaus was too preoccupied to object. He had figured out what struck him as odd about the scene in the park: no guards.
    The people in the park weren’t the subjects in a vast experiment, weren’t training for combat, weren’t prisoners of war. They were doing things—painting, feeding ducks, flying kites—merely because they wanted to. It was a revelation, a color-blind man’s first glimpse of a rainbow. He had never truly understood what freedom meant. Now he did. It made him want to grieve for himself.
    Gretel interrupted his ruminations. “Coming?” She’d already exited the taxi. The driver glared at him. Klaus climbed out. The cab sped away, leaving them standing on the pavement in a cloud of exhaust.
    They stood on a neatly trimmed lawn. The adjoining cemetery wasn’t so well tended; irregular rows of crooked, cracked, and weather-stained gravestones dotted the grass inside a low, wrought iron fence. A few graves had fresh flowers upon them. Rows of