The World Asunder Read online

  The World Asunder

  Book Two of The Psyche of War

  By

  Kacey Ezell

  PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books

  Copyright © 2019 Kacey Ezell

  All Rights Reserved

  * * * * *

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Acknowledgements

  Once again, I could not have brought this book to you without the help and support of an entire cast of characters. First of all, this time, I’d like to thank my father, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Coacher, USAF (ret), who first told me the story of the Berlin Airlift and took my nine-year-old self to meet Colonel Gail Halvorsen (aka, The Candy Bomber.) If you don’t know Col. Halvorsen’s story, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a fantastic one. Secondly, I’d like to thank my publisher, Chris Kennedy, for continuing to believe in my psychics, and for encouraging me to do the same. Even more thanks are due my editor, Tiffany Reynolds, for making my work shine. I couldn’t do it without you. Thanks also to my myriad coauthors on all my various projects. Marisa, Mark, Griffin, Chris, John, Speaker, Doc, Josh, Nico, thanks for your patience and willingness to work with me. I’m truly honored and in awe of your talents, all of you. Same with The Badasses and the Cabal. You ladies and gentlemen inspire me daily. I am so thankful that you’re my friends…and DONE! :) Special thanks also to the Sunday and Monday crew at Silver Diner in Waldorf, MD. Thanks for giving me a place to write and feeding me delicious food in the process.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one particular research book this time around: Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen. This book is a fascinating and enjoyable read and it takes an unflinching look at one of the murkier chapters of our recent history. I recommend it.

  Last, but never least, to my husband and my girls. Thank you for everything. Without you, there is no me.

  –Kacey Ezell, April 2019

  * * * * *

  Cover Art by Elartwyne Estole

  * * * * *

  For EZ. Still the coolest guy I’ll ever meet.

  * * * * *

  Contents

  Chapter One – Awakening

  Chapter Two – Fugitive

  Chapter Three – Operation Confiscate

  Chapter Four – Captive

  Chapter Five – Retrieval

  Chapter Six – Travel

  Chapter Seven – Integration

  Chapter Eight – Immigration

  Epilogue

  About Kacey Ezell

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of the Kin Wars Saga

  Excerpt from Book One of The Fallen World

  * * * * *

  Chapter One – Awakening

  On a sticky summer day in June of 1948, Adalina Sucherin remembered who she was.

  She’d been walking home from work, but she hadn’t really been paying close attention to her route. There was no great reason for her to hurry home to her solitary flat. It contained only a creaky bed and the few meager possessions she’d been able to scrounge after the war. Her neighbors, perhaps, might have looked for her, but they knew her habits, and it wasn’t unusual for her to walk for hours each night. There was solace in movement, in the illusion of action that exercise provided. Standing still gave the horror an opportunity to creep in, so Lina preferred to walk.

  It was the sound that did it. She would remember that, later. That deep rumble, just at the edge of her hearing. It started in her chest and built to an audible roar…but distant. A sudden flash of fear brought her head up from her unseeing study of the broken concrete road. Bombers? An air raid?

  No. Stupid, stupid, she chastised herself. The war had been over for three years. Three years since the Reich had fallen, taking with it all her illusions, all her fire. Three years since the Soviet soldiers came ravening through the streets of Berlin, looting and raping everything in their path. Three years since she’d last torn a man’s psyche apart, watching him bleed from his eyes and nose as his brain hemorrhaged in response. Three years since she’d killed to keep herself and three little girls safe, then locked her power away behind shields thicker than concrete, stronger than steel. Three long, uncertain, fear-tainted years.

  Those weren’t bombers at all.

  She glanced around, looking for the hand-lettered signs that sometimes indicated the names of streets in this corpse of a once-great city. Wilhemstraße. She hadn’t realized she’d come so far south. She was right next to the border of the American zone, just north of the airport. A glance at the sky showed her a line of aircraft darkening the horizon. She watched them as she continued walking.

  “I’m sorry, miss. You can’t go any further without a pass.”

  Lina blinked and focused on the man, who spoke in harshly-accented German. She pressed her lips together and fought not to recoil in revulsion. A Soviet soldier, standing next to one of the borderlines the so-called allies had set up when they’d drawn and quartered Berlin after the armistice. She gave him a nod (one must be polite, else one invited more attention!) and started to walk away, when a thought stopped her. These “allies” did have men with guns stationed on the borders of their claimed territories. That didn’t seem like a particularly warm alliance to her.

  “Sir,” she asked, “why are there so many aircraft?”

  He gave her a smile, a sweet one. It made him look young.

  “Do not be frightened, miss,” he said. “The war has not begun again. The British and Americans are flying supplies into the other sectors of Berlin in an attempt to bribe the population with their decadence and corruption. But it won’t work. No ground transportation from the west is permitted into Berlin at all. No one has ever supplied a city this size by air alone. It cannot be done! The city will be reunited under the rightful rule of the workers soon enough. Have no fear.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured, and stepped away. He touched the fingers of his free hand (the one not holding his rifle) to the brim of his cap and gave her another smile. She barely noticed, as thoughts began to tumble one over the other in her brain while she resumed her walk home.

  Berlin was cut off from the west. The Soviets were trying to starve the population of the British and American sectors out.

  The British and Americans were airlifting in supplies. Why? Did they know what kind of hell the Soviet occupation of Berlin had been?

  If they knew, why had they allied with such monsters?

  Lina did not like the British. The Americans were worse. During the war, the Americans had bombed her hometown and killed her family. Then, just when love had ignited in her life amidst the dreariness of war, another American, a woman, had destroyed everything she held dear. Lina had carried the woman’s name in her heart as a talisman against fear, and as fuel for the fires of hatred she nurtured inside. One day, she’d promised herself, one day Evelyn Adamsen would pay for what she’d done…

  And then the world had ended, and the Soviets had come.

  Amid the fires and the screams, Lina had hidden with her neighbor’s three daughters in a cellar under a bombed-out building. They’d heard the cries and laughter, the crashing of glass, the sharp coughs of rifle fire, and the distant booming of the field guns. For three nights and days she’d hidden with those girls, drinking water from a leaky pipe, eating the crumbs from an old crust of bread. Until the night a group of soldiers had crashed drunkenly through the hidden cellar door.

  For the first time in three years, Lina didn’t flinch from the memory. She forced herself, instead, to examine it. To replay it in her head, just as it had happened.

  Something heavy hit the door. It cracked near the hinges, along the lock. Something hit it again, and it slammed open, banging against the far wall. The girls screamed and fled for the corner behind Lina. So young, all of them. Nine, seven, and barely three. Mere babies.

  Lina interposed her body between the girls and the soldier. He reeked of alcohol, sweat, and gunpowder. He leered at her, craned his neck to see behind her, his pig-like eyes glinting in the light of their single lantern. Behind him two more crowded in, then stopped, drunk and confused.

  “Take the woman,” the first soldier slurred. Lina was fluent in Russian, and she barely understood him. “I’ll take the girls.”

  “No,” Lina said, her voice cracking like a whip.

  “Shut up, cunt,” he said with a laugh, “You’re too old and ugly, especially when there are pretty little girls—”

  Lina heard no more. She took two steps forward and jabbed her fingers into the man’s throat before he could marshal his drunken reflexes to react. The moment her skin touched his, she reached out with her mind, in the way she’d been taught by the Reich’s best scientists and theorists, and she ripped his natural, latent psychic shields away. And then she, the most powerful student to ever graduate from the Reichschule, st
abbed her power deep into his brain.

  His cranial capillaries exploded. All of them. All at once. Blood flowed from his eyes, ears, nose. She watched him stumble toward her for a step, and then crumple to the ground. Then she turned and looked at the other men in the room. One raised his rifle halfway to his shoulder. She stared at him, wondering if he would do it.

  He didn’t. Neither did his partner. They just turned and left. The corpse of their friend stayed crumpled in a heap on the cellar floor.

  Lina blinked away the memory and looked skyward once more. She didn’t like the British, or the Americans. But they were crazy enough to try to airlift supplies into her city rather than see it all in the hands of the Soviets. Evelyn Adamsen had been an American aircrewwoman. Perhaps…perhaps there was hope.

  For the first time in three years, Lina felt a spark of interest ignite in her mind, and the coals of her burning need for revenge began to smolder once again.

  * * *

  In the past three years, Lina’s neighbors, the Thanhousers, had all but adopted her into the family. Rolland Thanhouser had been a respected chemist during the war, and his wife Isa had been from a well-to-do Berlin family. Their fortunes hadn’t survived the war, nor the sack of Berlin that followed. But thanks to Lina, their three daughters had, so Lina found herself an honorary auntie.

  After the chaos of the initial occupation, the Thanhousers had joined thousands of Berliners, doing their best to rebuild their homes and lives. Rolland took a job working in a soap factory, while Isa cared for the girls and Lina. After the episode in the cellar, after the pain that reverberated through all of Berlin as it burned, Lina had closed herself off. It had saved her mind, but to be so head-blind had made her basically nonfunctional. Isa and the girls had kept her safe and hidden, made sure she ate and drank water, and basically kept her doing the bare minimum of human tasks necessary to survive until the ravening Soviets had vented all their fury on the broken corpse of the city.

  Slowly, Lina had become more and more self-sufficient as she learned to cope without using her gifts. She couldn’t feel the world around her, but she was eventually able to care for herself, and then to obtain her own apartment and a job as the whole city struggled to rebuild. The Thanhousers prevented her from retreating back into herself and slowly, Lina realized, despite everything, she’d managed to find herself once again part of a family.

  Given her history with families, it was a mixed blessing at best.

  Still, Isa and Rolland had been good to her, and the girls, Ginette, Aleda, and Johanna, adored her. They saw her as the powerful auntie who’d kept them safe. Though three years on, only Ginette, now twelve, reliably remembered the horrors of Berlin’s fall. At least, so Lina surmised.

  It wasn’t something they discussed much.

  “Isa?” Lina called out as she let herself in to the Thanhousers’ apartment. Her voice echoed through the small, scrupulously clean entryway. “Isa? Are you home?”

  “In the kitchen!” Isa called, her voice ringing cheerfully down the hallway. Lina admired her for that. Even after everything she’d been through, Isa never lost her sunny outlook. “Come on back, Lina. The girls and I are making Berliners.”

  “Where did you get jam for the filling?” Lina asked as she walked down the short hallway and into the warm kitchen. The girls, their faces dusted with varying amounts of flour, smiled up at her from their places around the central work table. Isa turned from the stove with a wide grin.

  “They had cherries in the market, and I’m stewing them with a bit of honey. It won’t be exactly what you remember, but it’ll be close. And it’s fun to experiment, right girls?”

  “Yes, Mutti,” little Johanna said, her smile impish.

  “Will you help us, Tante?” asked Ginette, the eldest. A serious twelve years old, she had less flour on her face than her sisters, though she wasn’t entirely unsmudged.

  “If you like,” Lina said and went to pump water into the sink to wash her hands. Getting the running water back a little over a year ago had been a big moment, and Lina never failed to appreciate it after so long without. She wiped her hands on a towel and joined the girls as they stirred and kneaded the dough.

  “Did you see the airplanes?” Lina asked softly after a moment. She kept her tone casual, lest she alarm the girls, but Ginette looked sharply up. Lina smiled and shook her head slightly. “Cargo planes only. Flying into Tempelhof.”

  “I heard them,” Isa said, stirring the pot, “but I didn’t think anything of it. The Amis are always flying in and out.”

  “Not in these kinds of numbers,” Lina said. “I spoke to one of the Red soldiers guarding the zone crossing point. He said something about no ground transportation being allowed into the western part of the city at all. So the Amis and Tommies are flying supplies in.”

  “Hah,” Isa said, shaking her head with a little laugh. “So first they bomb our city to rubble, and now they feed us from the sky? Irony must be an American.”

  “I wonder if they’ll be able to do it,” Lina said. “The soldier seemed to think the west wouldn’t be able to hold out, and would give in to the Soviet demands.”

  “What demands?”

  “I don’t know. Unification under the communists, maybe? The soldier said something along those lines.”

  “I’d almost rather starve,” Isa said softly, but then shook her head and smiled brightly, taking refuge in her usual positivity. Lina didn’t understand it, but she wasn’t one to judge another woman’s coping mechanisms. Especially not one who’d been as good to her as Isa had.

  “Hello, my girls!”

  Rolland Thanhouser walked in to the kitchen, his eyes tired in a smiling, careworn face.

  “Papa!” Aleda, the middle daughter, shrieked. She launched herself from her chair and flew at her father, who caught both her and her younger sister (who’d followed a breath behind Aleda) into a big, tight hug.

  “Hello, my sweet ones!” he said, bestowing kisses on the foreheads of each of his daughters after letting the little ones go. “Mmm. You really are sweet. What are we making?”

  “Berliners,” Ginette said, “only with honey-stewed cherries instead of proper jam.”

  “Sounds delicious,” Rolland said. “And Tante Lina is helping? I didn’t know you were a baker, Lina.”

  “I have many talents,” she said, with a smile for the only man she trusted anymore.

  “That’s certainly true. Hello, my love,” he said then, walking over to kiss his wife gently on her offered cheek. “What possessed you to make jelly doughnuts?”

  “I saw the cherries in the market, and I just couldn’t resist. I know it’s an extravagance…”

  “But we all need a treat sometimes,” Rolland finished for his wife with a smile. “A few cherries won’t quite beggar us.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” she said.

  “Papa, did you see the airplanes today?” little Johanna asked then, her piping voice innocent and excited to be part of the grown-ups’ conversation. Rolland looked down at her and then at Isa and Lina in turn.

  “No, darling,” he said as he slung his coat over the back of a chair and lowered himself into his seat. “What airplanes?”

  “The American and British cargo planes flying into Tempelhof,” Lina said. “The communists have blockaded the west of the city, it seems, and the Amis and Tommies are trying to supply the city by air.”

  “They’re trying to starve the west into submission,” Rolland said, his voice as tired as his eyes. “I’d heard rumblings of something like that. What an audacious move by the Americans and British, though! To supply a whole city by air. I really don’t think it can be done.”

  “At least they’re trying,” Isa said softly.