“His real name is Efim,” Maslov said to Kennet. “The diminutive is Fisha.” He spoke again to the boy in Russian, punctuating the words with an index finger on Kennet’s insignia. “Fiskare. Rybak, da? My zovem yego ‘Fish.’”

“Fisha,” the boy cried, and wrapped arms around Kennet’s legs.

“Good to meet you,” Kennet said over his pounding heart and roiling stomach.

Fisha looked around eleven, although Kennet knew by now that conditions in Mauthausen had unnaturally aged the adults and stunted the children. Every reference point, along with every rule, was blown to shit. It was impossible to get your mind around the camp, let alone the arms of practicality to bring order out of this heinous chaos.

The lucid inmates reported that only the day before, most of the SS guards had fled the camp, leaving the prisoners guarded by unarmed Volkssturm soldiers and an absurd unit of retired police officers and firemen. The balance of power had just begun to tip in favor of the inmates when the American tanks rolled in, beneath a great stone gate emblazoned with a banner:

¡Los Espanoles Antifascistas Saludan a Las Fuerzes Liberado!

“Ralph, what’s it mean?” Kennet said.

Ingle stopped swearing long enough to answer: “Anti-fascist Spaniards salute the liberation forces.”

He resumed cursing under his breath. Florid combinations of shit and whore and mother, while Kennet stared stupidly at the flapping sign, unable to comprehend its existence. First the words being in Spanish baffled him, then he couldn’t understand how the triumphant banner was made in the first place. Where? How? When?

Little by little, the GIs grasped how the camp’s staggering mass of filthy humanity comprised an international crossroads of dissidents and unwanteds. Jews, of course—Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Balkan and Dutch. But there were large groups of Spanish Republicans. French political prisoners, too. Unwanted “-ists” of all kinds: socialists, communists, anarchists. Romani. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Intelligentsia. Boy Scouts. (Boy Scouts?!) The ethnic undesirables: Poles, Slovenes, Slovaks and Serbs. Soviet prisoners of war.

From every corner of Europe they’d been crammed into this place, their sole purpose to be worked to death in the mines, quarries and munition factories. Killed by starvation, disease, exposure. Or killed for sport. Those too weak to work and too resilient to die were gassed and cremated.

No more, Kennet thought. Not now. Not ever.

No past. No future. No rules.

He walked around in a sort of functional fugue state, Fisha trailing behind him. Everything fragmented and surreal, mixed up with the past and present, reality and folk tale, life and death.

Hildur, what have you done? he wondered over and over, simultaneously horrified and detached. Even the murderous elven Queen knew she went too far with this glut of killing. Like a contrite child who’d lost utter control of a situation, she put bloody hands behind her back and hung her head, hoping someone else would clean up the mess.