The boots stopped near Doom’s head. A pebble, disturbed by the footsteps, rolled against the back of his neck.

  “Another one?” said a rough male voice. Doom pegged the speaker as middle-aged. “How do they keep getting out?”

  “I heard some rumors about that other one.” Another male voice, younger than the first. “Heard she was supposed to get out.”

  They spoke English. The older voice was American. The other accent was different. Dutch, Doom thought.

  “Trust the plan,” said the older man. “Trust the plan.”

  “What about this one? Have you heard anything about him? I haven’t.”

  “No. Maybe he got out after the woman, before the crack got sealed. He doesn’t look like part of any plan, does he?”

  “And where are his clothes?” said the younger man.

  “Do I look like I took them? Don’t know, don’t care. He’s not going anywhere. That’s what matters.”

  A boot jabbed Doom in the side. “You’re awake,” said the older guard. “I know you are. Get up.”

  Doom’s breath turned into a low growl of anger.

  “He’s not obeying, Jerry.”

  “Make him face us, Pieter.”

  The younger guard grabbed Doom’s arm, and with a violent yank, turned him onto his back. The guards recoiled at the sight of Doom’s face. He glared at them, the spineless cowards covering their mouths in horror, their eyes wide, and helpless as he was, for that moment he had the upper hand.

  Jerry, the American, recovered enough to speak first. “Cover his face,” he ordered the other guard.

  “With what?” Pieter demanded, averting his gaze.

  “Your shirt.”

  “My what?”

  “Take it off. Wrap it around his face. I’m not staring at that all the way back to the mines.”

  “Why my shirt? You don’t outrank me. Use yours.”

  “Who said anything about rank?” Jerry turned on his partner and grabbed his arm. He was taller and heavier than Pieter. He had the look of a man who, until he answered the Red Skull’s call, made a habit of going to bars with the goal of breaking as many faces as possible. Pieter, leaner, looked more fit, but also inexperienced. He was the sort who found his outlets for violence from within the safety of numbers.

  Jerry punched him twice, meaty fist slamming into Pieter’s stomach and jaw. Pieter tried to twist out of Jerry’s grip but made no effort to fight back. All he wanted to do was run. Jerry hit him again, and Pieter sank to his knees. He fumbled with the buttons on his black jacket, and then with the black shirt underneath. Jerry tore it from him before he fully had his arms out of the sleeves.

  Doom watched their struggle with a contempt so pure it sent heat through his limbs. He still couldn’t stand, but his body was beginning to feel like a unified whole again.

  Jerry tore the shirt, then turned back to Doom. He tossed it onto Doom’s chest. “Cover your face, scum,” he said.

  Doom grunted. He managed to move his hands, but only a few inches.

  “I think he really can’t move,” Pieter croaked, on his knees and gasping for air.

  Jerry snorted, disgusted. He grabbed the shirt again, tore it into long strips, then pulled Doom’s head up by his hair and wrapped the rags around his face beneath his eyes. When he let go, Doom’s head fell back hard against stone.

  “That true, then?” said Jerry. “You really can’t move?”

  Doom gazed at the guard as he would a pinned insect.

  Jerry snorted again. “Give me a hand with him,” he said to Pieter.

  The other guard obeyed. They hoisted Doom up until they had his arms wrapped around their shoulders. They started down the hill, his feet dragging.

  “This is going to take forever,” Pieter grumbled.

  “You want to leave him?” Jerry asked. “Have a report sent to the Skull that we found an escaped prisoner and just ignored him?”

  Pieter didn’t answer.

  Now that he was vertical, Doom could see more of the landscape. He was in a waste of debris that nestled against gray, rocky hills. Downslope, and a mile or two across the valley, mining structures built of iron rose from the rubble.

  Bit by bit, strength returned to his body, and by the time the guards had brought him to the valley floor, he could walk on his own again. The guards encouraged him to with kicks and insults.

  At the entrance to the mine, prisoners in chains hauled cars out on rails, emptied them of their cargo of rock, and then dragged them back down into the mouth of darkness. Guards lounged outside a large, corrugated metal shack, watching the work. Others, on shift, walked back and forth along the lines of struggling slaves, striking shins and backs with flexible batons as the spirit moved them. The shack’s back wall was flush with the hillside of the mine. A watchtower of iron girding stood fifty yards out from the shack. In its wooden superstructure, a guard armed with a long-barreled rifle watched the prisoners. He seemed as bored as the rest. He had the rifle propped up beside him, and lazy smoke rose from his cigarette.

  “Found us a stray,” Jerry said as they drew near. He gave Doom a hard kick that would have knocked him down a few minutes earlier. Stronger now, he remained standing.

  “What’s the mask about?” a guard asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” said Jerry. “Subhuman stuff. Revolting.”

  Pieter went into the shack and emerged a moment later with the gray tunic and trousers that made up the prisoners’ uniform. Doom put them on in silence, picturing how best the guards would pay for their crimes.

  “You don’t suppose there are others out there?” said another guard. He sounded worried at the prospect of their security being found lax.

  “Not a sign,” said Jerry. “Figure this one somehow got lucky the other night. No one else is getting out that way.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  “Let’s get him chained and put to work,” said Jerry.

  A few minutes later, they had Doom shackled, joined to other prisoners pulling a mining cart.

  “There you go,” said Pieter. “Back where you belong.” He gave Doom another kick, still trying to regain the dignity he had lost when Jerry had taken his shirt.

  Doom gave the two guards who had found him long, cold looks.

  “What?” said Jerry. “You have something to say?”

  “Yes,” said Doom. He could speak again, his voice rough as broken glass, his throat a desert of pain. “I want to promise you something. Both of you.”

  “Is that right?” Jerry smirked, but his eyes narrowed with a hint of uncertainty.

  “I will repay your kindness,” said Doom. “I will see that you are among the first to die.”

  And though he was in chains, and unarmed, they took a step back, color draining from their cheeks.

  Thirteen

  Adrenaline and rage burned away Verlak’s fatigue. She vibrated with the impulse to storm down the castle’s moat bridge, gun drawn, transformed into a fury of wind and fire, to destroy the cowards who struck at her country.

  But she was human. Anger could not transform her. She was not the wind.

  She was not Doom.

  She turned to Elsa in agony, about to do the very thing she had dragged her wife away from. No rest, no recovery, straight back into the fray.

  Elsa understood. Verlak saw it in her eyes before she spoke. She understood because she was Elsa, and she always did.

  Elsa held Verlak by the shoulders. “Go,” she said. “Latveria needs you right now, not later.”

  Verlak glanced toward the castle gate. Beyond it, in the region of Old Town, a column of smoke and dust rose.

  Elsa squeezed Verlak’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be safe. I’m not going home.”

  Verlak gave her wife a sharp look. “Where will you be?”

  “In the lab.”

  “But…”

  Elsa touched a finger to her lips, shushing Verlak. “I’ll be good. Boris installed a cot for me, so I’m going to use it. Cross my heart. I’m going to rest, and then I’m going to find the solution to tracking these fascist scum.”

  “You promise?”

  “Both things. On my honor.”

  Verlak smiled, holding on to a shared moment of levity that would warm her in the struggle to come. “On your honor, my lady?” she said.

  Elsa grinned back. “On my honor. Now go, brave knight, and smite our foe.”

  They kissed, and went back into the castle, and parted at the door to the security center. The brief interlude with Elsa had been enough for Verlak to channel her energy away from a pointless charge, and into learning everything that she needed to know.

  The center hummed with tension when she entered, but also with the low murmur of disciplined activity. Her guards were as focused on a battlefield of keyboards and readouts and screens as they would be in physical combat.

  It took less than a minute for Verlak to get up to speed, and to see the extent of the latest attack. The enemy had come in much greater numbers. As with the last time, the Red Skull’s soldiers attacked on multiple fronts, seeking to spread as much chaos and fear as widely as possible. They came not to seize and hold territory, not yet. They came to destabilize, to break down the fabric of Latveria, to shatter its social order.

  The Skull wanted Verlak’s forces spread thin, attempting to put out dozens of fires, and to be demoralized by the sense of being unable to make any measurable progress against a foe that could strike anywhere, at any time.

  Verlak scanned the illuminated map of Latveria, its face covered with pulsing lights like so many lesions, each glow another attack. She looked at the screens. Surveillance cameras fed the carnage on livestreams to the security center. Here, now, Verlak was everywhere at once. In the field, she could not be. She had to pick her battle, and delegate the rest.

  Once she saw everything, the choice was clear. The largest enemy force was advancing down the Avenue of the Scholars toward the Werner Academy. Bombs had already gone off outside the institute’s main gates, no doubt planted by an advance team. The gates had fallen, and the courtyard outside the academy’s main entrance lay open. It was not, though, undefended. Security forces had taken up positions at the mouth of the courtyard and at the doors. They could not fend off what was heading their way. The enemy had heavy armor this time, transports and tanks that carved a path of carnage down the avenue.

  Wounding her city. Killing her people.

  And attacking in force.

  This isn’t just an attack. This is an invasion.

  “The tanks came from outside Doomstadt,” said one of the surveillance officers. “They landed in a region we don’t have eyes on, at least not constantly. The larger enemy formations are all emerging from the countryside.”

  That made sense, and it was also a small mercy. If the Red Skull had been able to drop major formations into the Doomstadt without warning, then war would be over quickly.

  Things were already bad enough. Where was Doom? Why hadn’t he been able to stop this? What had gone wrong?

  She couldn’t let those questions matter. Doom had put the protection of Latveria in her hands. She had her orders, and she saw the shape of her task ahead.

  She issued orders of her own, mobilizing troops to twenty different conflict zones. She would lead the biggest detachment to the Avenue of the Scholars.

  The Werner Academy was a target of massive symbolic importance. The Skull had set his sights on one of the great centers of Latverian learning, one named for Doom’s father. Verlak envisioned what the Skull intended. She saw the academy in ruins, its libraries in flames. She saw humiliation, fear and despair rippling out from the epicenter of that loss.

  She saw what she would give her life to prevent.

  •••

  Verlak let them have the Avenue of the Scholars. She let them have their revolting revel. She let them because she had to. She even had to let them pound the homes and shops that lined the avenue with shells, and rake the windows with machine-gun fire. Two of the tanks, one at the head of the column and one at the rear, fired energy beams instead of shells, and the blasts cut through walls like a scythe through flesh.

  The weapons, Verlak thought, as she crouched in an alley a block from the Avenue of the Scholars, were meant to terrify even more than they were meant to destroy. Beams and shells and bullets, a cornucopia of death to haunt the waking nightmares of Latverians. The citizens of Doomstadt knew how to respond to nightmares at least. The civilians had fled the region. Most would be making for the castle, the most secure refuge in all of Latveria. Others would be in the underground shelters Doom had had constructed throughout the city. Latveria had too many enemies for it to forgo that precaution.

  And Latveria knew how to fight back. Already, those refugees in the castle able to fight would be being armed. They would not stay at the castle. When the time came, they would join in the struggle.

  The tanks and armored cars were more specters from bad dreams. They had no wheels or treads. They floated a few feet off the ground, propelled by silent energy fields. The Red Skull was showing off the technology at his disposal, boasting of his means.

  He thinks we’re all peasants, helpless without Doom.

  Latveria’s greatest technology might reside with Doom, and him alone. But the country was not defenseless without him. In the wake of the Skull’s brief reign, Doom had made sure no one could walk over Latveria like that again in his absence. The guard that Verlak commanded was proof of that.

  Strut and puff your pride. I’m going to show you what Latverians can do.

  The enemy column’s full length was engaged on the Avenue of the Scholars. Rubble smoldered along the entire length of the road. Guns roared, shells burst, beams sizzled and flashed. The front of the column was less than half a mile from the Werner Academy.

  “Now,” Verlak radioed her forces.

  She had stationed them in side streets and alleys on both sides of the avenue, staggered so they were not facing each other directly, all a block off from the enemy, sheltered from the worst of the mayhem unleashed by the Skull’s fascists. The guard surged forward at her command. At the same time, one of the Doombots assigned to the guard streaked up from behind the academy and came down, concussive blasts striking the lead tank.

  Infantry charged over and between ruins, beam rifles strafing the flanks of the column, taking out soldiers on foot and those foolish enough to ride in the hatches of the vehicles.

  Two tanks made up the heavy armor of Verlak’s contingent. They went at the forward and rear thirds of the column. They, too, rode the magnetic fields, and hovered up and over the destroyed buildings, the obstacles irrelevant.

  Verlak and nine other guards piloted ground interceptors. Lightly armored, their advantages were speed and agility, and their guns still packed a punch. They were sleek, night-black, with raptor noses and smooth, stubby wings and fins. Designed to fly a standard ten feet off the ground, soaring over any traffic, they could also shoot higher for short distances.

  Verlak punched the interceptor’s vertical thrust and took the vehicle twenty feet into the air. So did the other pilots.

  The guard attacked the enemy from above, from the side, and from either end. No doubt the Red Skull had warned his underlings of the existence of Doombots, but knowing about them and processing the apparent presence of Doom were two different things. The Doombot’s attack shattered the tank’s turret, and then blew up its power plant before the crew of the one behind recovered from the shock of its arrival to fire back. And though they did manage to score a direct hit and destroy the Doombot, by then a second one was attacking the rear of the column.

  Verlak cut back and forth across the column, holding the triggers down for sustained bursts from the particle beam guns. Return fire sought her out, and a few shots scored the armor. One hit the interceptor hard enough to jolt the controls from her hands for a moment, but she recovered quickly and took the interceptor down behind a heap of rubble before turning around and coming at the column a second time.

  The enemy’s formation disintegrated. The discipline of the Skull’s forces was fiction, a tissue created by the hate that bound them to their master. They had training, in that they knew how to use their weapons, but they had no experience, and they did not have the training of the guard. The Skull’s troops outnumbered the guard two-to-one. Verlak routed them in a matter of minutes. They did not advance another yard closer to the Werner Academy.

  And when the outcome of the battle was clear, and the guard closed in to start taking the first prisoners, the enemy soldiers died, all at once, fallen puppets.

  In the aftermath, Verlak walked among the bodies, cursing under her breath.

  “Why do they always die?” asked Joachim Arendt, one of the sergeants flanking her. “Why is that necessary? Just so they can say nothing?”

  “Not just that,” said Verlak. She stopped beside a gutted tank. “It could be punishment for failure. It definitely makes rebellion impossible. I think it’s a message to us, too. The Red Skull is telling us that he has so many troops, he can throw them away. He can kill them himself.” His willingness to engage in such casual slaughter of his troops repulsed her, and it worried her. He’s telling us our victories mean nothing, she thought, but did not say. She could not express such an idea in front of her troops, even to dismiss it.

  The trouble was, she couldn’t dismiss it. She feared the Red Skull was right. If he could throw soldiers away like this, then he could set a thousand fires of war across Latveria, too many for the guard to extinguish them all. At length, the flash burns would create the great conflagration, and Latveria would fall.

  Stop it. Stop being defeatist. She couldn’t afford to think in such terms.

  Where is Doom?

  No way not to ask herself the question over and over. And she could not hold off the fatal truth that lurked behind it. If Doom did not return, all was lost. If the Red Skull could defeat Doom, then nothing Verlak did mattered.

  He will return. He must.

  “I’m going back to the castle,” Verlak told Arendt. “Stand by for new deployment instructions. Our work today is not finished.”