Rise Page 2

  “I think you both are.”

  Ekkehardt squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed down bile. Both, she said. Him and Zven. Zven was going to die. He didn’t care about himself as much but Zven—

  “Did somebody find out about me?” Zven croaked, barely audible.

  “I keep telling you; I don't know any details, Zven! All I know for sure is that I've been having visions of the two of you for years in advance, but they all stop after tomorrow. That is the only thing that I know.”

  Did she know he was listening?

  “I'm not going to let anybody hurt him. I'll die before—” Zven cut himself off.

  Wasn't that the point? That they were both going to die? Ekkehardt pressed his face to his shoulder to stifle an anxious snort.

  Liese’s mattress creaked beneath someone's weight.

  “I won't lose him, Liese.”

  “What are you going to do? You don't even know what's going to happen. Or if anything is even going to happen. My visions aren't an exact science.”

  “Science isn't an exact science.” Zven wasn’t wrong. Ekkehardt had said it himself a million times. “It isn't good for us here. Not for anyone, but especially not for people like you and me. Just because people our age don't care doesn't mean that most people don't.”

  “What are you suggesting? Go back to Leipzig with him? He still has another semester.”

  “No,” Zven said slowly. “No, I'm suggesting we leave Germany entirely.”

  “What if he won't go?”

  Zven choked on a laugh. Ekkehardt could practically see the sarcastic twist of his lips.

  “You tell me.”

  3

  They didn't talk about it, at least not at first. What would Ekkehardt even say? He pretended he couldn't mention it first because then Zven would know he'd been listening. The betrayal of trust was worse than what he'd heard.

  ‘Keep telling yourself. Keep making excuses not to talk about it until it's too late.’

  It wasn't too late, though. They still had time. Almost two days, in fact. Unless ‘after tomorrow night’ meant they were going to die tomorrow night, or the night after. Either way, it was plenty.

  It wasn't plenty.

  It was nothing. They were probably going to die in less than two days, and neither of them had said a word about it.

  The silence was becoming too much.

  “Are you okay?” Ekkehardt asked, trying to sound as though he had no idea why Zven’s face had been so hard for the past few hours.

  “I'm fine.”

  Zven’s voice was tight. He didn't sound fine at all, and Ekkehardt told him so. He smiled, exhaling in what was probably supposed to be a laugh. The fact that Zven was at least trying to laugh… He turned the light off and wrapped his arm around Ekkehardt’s waist, kissing the back of his head and lacing their hands together. Even knowing what Liese had said, the warmth and the pressure of Zven against him made his shoulders relax and his stomach unclench.

  Precognition wasn’t real, Ekkehardt reminded himself. They were freaking out over nothing. Zven was freaking out over nothing. Ekkehardt was being completely rational here.

  ‘Completely’ was a subjective term that meant nothing.

  “Ekkehardt, are you still awake?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause.

  “Ekkehardt?”

  “Hm?”

  “I love you.”

  His stomach twisted again, not in the way it usually did when Zven said that to him. It was tight and painful and about to be followed by the very thing they’d been avoiding all night. He didn’t need to have Liese’s gift for seeing futures to know it.

  “Ekkehardt…” Zven let out a long sigh against the back of his neck that made him shudder. “I want you to go away with me.”

  Ekkehardt squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn't leave East Germany. Berlin, maybe, but not Germany. His parents needed him. If his sister ever managed to leave the way she wanted too, it would just be them. His entire life was here, split between the two cities, but still here.

  No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all.

  His entire life was lying behind him, wringing their hands together nervously.

  “Okay,” Ekkehardt said.

  “I don't mean for a while. I mean forever. Out of the country.”

  “I know.”

  Another pause.

  “You heard Liese and me.”

  Ekkehardt nodded. Guilt chewed a hole through his stomach.

  “I did,” he admitted, in case the nod wasn’t enough.

  “What do you think?”

  Ekkehardt hesitated. Part of him wanted to see Zven’s face. A bigger part of him didn't. He didn’t know what he would see.

  “Do you believe her?” Ekkehardt asked.

  “I don't want to. I don't want to believe that anything is going to happen to you. To us.”

  “Do you think leaving is the only way to protect us? How do we know that's not how we die? Or that we just move farther than Liese can see?”

  Or that there was any validity to Liese’s gift anyway? Either Zven was looking for any excuse he could get to leave, or he was out of his goddamn mind. It might have been a bit of both.

  Zven shifted. His foot touched Ekkehardt’s ankle and jerked back.

  “Christ, you're freezing.”

  Ekkehardt huffed in protest, but it was hard to deny. The windows weren't sealed right, and it had been an uncharacteristically cold fall. It made the room, and any part of Ekkehardt not pressed against Zven, feel cold. Zven hooked their ankles together, pressing as much of himself against Ekkehardt as possible. Ekkehardt let out a content sigh. The spots where their skin met warmed up, even past what should have been normal, just shy of burning. He shifted, almost squirming on the edge of discomfort.

  “Too hot?” Zven asked.

  Was he doing this on purpose? Controlling and creating fire was impossible enough to believe, but controlling his body temperature to this extent was beyond what Ekkehardt could reconcile.

  “A little.”

  Zven hummed, and the heat faded to a more bearable warmth. It made it so easy to pretend that the rest of the world didn't exist when they were together like this, that it was just them, and nothing and nobody else. But it wasn't. There was so much else out there, almost too much. Ekkehardt wrapped his hands around Zven’s forearm.

  “You didn't answer my question,” he whispered.

  Zven sighed.

  “I don't have answers. Neither does Liese. I'm… guessing. All I know is that I have this really bad feeling in my stomach. I’ve had it for a long time, Ekkehardt. Every time I think about someone finding out what I am, I… I’m terrified. It didn't used to bother me,” he admitted, “but now, it's all I can think about. Getting away from here is the only way to get rid of it.”

  “Will it really be better anywhere else?” Ekkehardt asked, more curious than anything.

  If Zven said yes… If Zven actually believed they would be better somewhere else… His parents still had Lorelei, and maybe he wouldn’t be gone forever. People came back.

  “I believe you won’t be dead. I believe whatever happens to us is going to happen on this side of the wall. That’s enough for me, but if it’s not enough for you, I understand. I—”

  “It is,” Ekkehardt said.

  Zven nodded against the back of Ekkehardt’s head and sighed into his hair.

  “It's too risky. We can't… We can't risk getting caught or worse over a maybe.”

  Ekkehardt frowned but didn't say anything. What happened to the conviction that had been there just moments ago? It seemed Zven was wrestling with himself over the decision more than he was with Ekkehardt.

  “I want you to decide,” Zven said. “If you want to stay, I’ll stay. If you want to go, we’ll go.”

  There was something in that disconnect between ‘I’ and ‘we’ that Ekkehardt was too tired to think about right now. It wasn’t a matter of what Liese said. The truth
was that seeing nothing wasn’t even remotely concrete. Nobody could prove that it meant anything. And while he believed that Liese believed it, he… didn’t. There was just no proof. If there was, it would have been different. But being insightful and being what Liese called a Seer weren’t the same thing.

  Or… maybe they were. He would have to think about it more in the morning.

  “I think,” he said slowly, deciding his words very carefully, “that we should wait. Liese said tomorrow, right? If something happens, we’ll leave.”

  It seemed like a fair compromise.

  “We can’t leave if we’re already dead,” Zven pointed out.

  Ekkehardt shifted uncomfortably, struggling to roll over without falling off the tiny bed. He couldn’t make out Zven’s expression, but he could feel his breath on his face. He couldn’t resist the urge to brush their lips together. Zven sighed against his mouth and tightened his hold.

  “If something happens, we’ll leave,” Ekkehardt repeated with just the slightest hint of his TA voice.

  This time, Zven didn’t argue.

  4

  Nothing happened at first. The next day went by without any kind of threat or disaster. Then the next, and the next. After the third day, Zven stopped trying to follow Ekkehardt to his classes like a goddamn bodyguard. After the fourth, Jakob stopped sighing in relief every time he saw them. On the fifth, Liese stopped biting her nails.

  On the sixth, Zven didn’t come home.

  The house was in an uproar. Liese and Jakob were out driving around the city in her truck, stopping at his usual places first and moving on to any reasonable and unreasonable place he might have been. Ekkehardt wanted to be out there with them, but he was at home calling everyone in Zven’s address book in alphabetical order. By the time he reached the end, he was near tears. A girl in the Cs had watched him get onto a subway. Nobody knew if he’d gotten off or where.

  It was late now, approaching one in the morning. Ekkehardt slumped down on the couch and hung his head in his hands. He had called everybody. Everybody. All he could do was wait for either Liese and Jakob or Zven to come home, or for the phone to ring as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He couldn’t fight it anymore. He wanted to. He wanted to know that Zven was safe, but the couch was so comfortable, and he was so tired. This was the first chance he’d had to rest. He must have only been asleep for a few minutes when his shoulder was being shaken.

  “Mmh?”

  “Wake up,” Zven whispered. “Wake up, we have to go. Now.”

  “What? Now? It’s—” He twisted to look at the clock, but something on Zven’s face caught his attention.

  Blood.

  It stemmed from his hairline and covered the side of his face. There was a lot of it. The collar of his shirt and part of his shoulder was stained red.

  “What happened?”

  “We have to go. We have to go now.”

  “Zven.” Ekkehardt grabbed his wrists. “Zven, what the fuck happened to you? Who did this?”

  He was going to kick their fucking ass. He was going to beat their fucking face in! Nobody, nobody hit Zven and got away with it, not if Ekkehardt had anything to say about it.

  Zven was pale. Ekkehardt would have attributed that to blood loss if not for his trembling fingers and the void look in his eyes. His eyes kept flickering across the room as if there might have been something lurking in the corners.

  “Zven—”

  “I killed someone.”

  That was not what Ekkehardt was expecting him to say. At first, he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. But Zven repeated himself, his voice shrill and shaky, bordering hysterical, and Ekkehardt couldn’t deny it. Ice settled in the pit of his stomach.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “There’s no time. We have to leave right now.”

  “Not until you tell me what happened.”

  There was no room for compromise in his tone. How the hell was he supposed to deal with whatever this was if he didn’t know?

  Zven looked back towards the door. It was still open.

  “It was an accident.” The words came out in a rush. “I was going to Oliver’s to study, and when I got off the subway, there was a riot. I didn’t know it was going on, I was just there. I didn’t know—” He swallowed a few lungfuls of air and struggled to compose himself. “An officer hit me and grabbed me. I didn’t think I just— The fire just started, Ekkehardt. You have to believe me, I didn’t mean to do it.”

  The ice was beginning to thaw, and Ekkehardt could think again. The East Berlin police were notorious for turning peaceful protests into riots and arresting everybody they could get their hands on. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard of someone being assaulted and arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Then what? How did you get away?”

  “Everyone was freaking out and screaming and running. People were saying it was a bomb. I didn’t stick around, I just ran as fast as I could to Oliver’s.”

  Ekkehardt nodded. As far as he was concerned, Zven had done the right thing. He could be horrified about the whole thing later. Right now, he had to make sure Zven was okay.

  “Ekkehardt, we have to go. Oliver called in some favours. This is what Liese was talking about, Ekkehardt. This is why she stops seeing us.”

  “We’re both still alive, though.”

  “Somebody must have seen me! They’re going to come for me, Ekkehardt. Ekkehardt, I—” He took a deep breath. Tears slid over his cheeks. “I can’t stay here.”

  There was an unasked question in Zven’s words: Was Ekkehardt going to come with him, or not? This had nothing to do with him, he could stay here, and he would be fine. Whether anybody found out Zven was a pyromancer or if they thought he really had set off a bomb didn’t matter. Whether anybody would care that he was a pyromancer or not was another thing. The truth was that if the police took it into their heads that he or Liese or Jakob had anything to do with it, what really happened would be irrelevant.

  He let go of Zven’s wrist just long enough to scribble the barest explanation for Liese and Jakob and left it on the kitchen table.

  There was a van idling on the curb. The windows were tinted, and Ekkehardt couldn’t see the driver until they got in, Zven in the passenger seat and him in the back. There were bags and boxes of who knew what piled to the ceiling. Ekkehardt barely had space to do his seat belt. He peered around them to get a look at the driver. She was a girl, older than him but he couldn’t tell exactly how old in the dim light. The side of her face he could see was covered in black makeup and her hair was up in spikes.

  They drove for almost an hour, long enough for Ekkehardt to fall asleep again and not wake up until Zven hit his leg.

  “Hey. We’re here.”

  “I’m up,” he mumbled.

  The woman handed Zven an envelope. He tucked it into his jacket pocket. What was in it, Ekkehardt wondered. Money?

  “This is everything you need,” she said. “Papers, new identities. No-one will know who you are or where you came from. You shouldn’t have any trouble. Helfried will meet you on the other side and take you to the Hex Witch’s. You’ll be safe there. After that, Lydia will pick you up and take you to your new place.”

  Ekkehardt could see the wall from where they were parked. The goddamn wall. He couldn’t see much evidence of Berlin anymore. They must have been just outside the city. It seemed so overwhelming, even at this distance. Why didn’t they drive all the way out, past the wall? Wouldn’t it be easier to cross a border somewhere else? The girl seemed to read his thoughts, maybe even literally.

  “Believe it or not, this is one of the places we’ve set up to cross. There are no guarantees, you know.”

  “I know,” Zven said.

  He looked back at Ekkehardt, and Ekkehardt nodded. Ekkehardt knew, too.

  The girl drove off, leaving them in the biting late fall wind, and there was no going back. He didn’t stop staring at the concrete nightmare un
til Zven tugged at his elbow. Zven had clearly pulled himself together during the drive.

  “Come on, Ekkehardt. We have to go. We don’t have time to waste.”

  “What if this is it? How we disappear?”

  Zven didn’t say anything at first. He turned and even with the only light coming from the flame in his palm, Ekkehardt could see the pain in his eyes.

  “I don’t know, but I can’t sit and wait for them to come for me. If you’re having second thoughts—”

  “It’s the same thoughts I’ve had from the start,” Ekkehardt said. “I trust you, and if you think we should do this… We should do this.”

  The pained look deepened, silently betraying the fact that he wasn’t any more sure than Ekkehardt. But he started walking, tugging Ekkehardt with him anyway.

  “We have to hurry. This has to be timed perfectly with the guards. Otherwise…”

  He didn’t have to elaborate. Ekkehardt was trying to wrap his head around why the hell he was here, about what the hell was happening. There wasn’t a single thing that made sense about this. It was too much to wrap his head around.

  With every step they took, Ekkehardt’s heart pushed higher and higher into his throat until he had to keep swallowing it down just to breathe. The only thing that kept him from turning and running or puking was Zven’s hand gently guiding him. Was he as nauseatingly anxious as Ekkehardt? He seemed to be perfectly calm, but Ekkehardt could only see the back of his head.

  They shouldn't have been here. This was insane! How many people managed to make it into West Germany this way? He wanted to turn back. Yes, he wanted to leave the East, he wanted Zven to be safe, but this— this wasn't how they were going to make it. The words were on his tongue, but the barking of dogs made him clench his teeth together. They must have heard the click, heard his heart pounding, heard his stomach twisting into tight knots.

  Zven stopped dead in his tracks and clenched his hand into a fist to put the flame out before pulling Ekkehardt down to crouch behind a military van. His thumb traced small circles on the back of Ekkehardt’s hand as he hushed him softly. As if he was planning on making any sounds.