Nipplin Building — Trade Ministry Offices
Sarah straightened her skirt as she entered the bustling marble halls of the Trade Ministry. Japanese clerks rushed past her, bowing quickly as higher-ranking officers walked by in polished boots. The banners of the Rising Sun hung across the ceiling, their crimson rays glowing under the chandeliers.
She was shown to her desk, a small wooden space tucked against the wall, just opposite another secretary's desk. The woman — Meka Sato — sat there already, crossing her legs and giving Sarah a measured glance.
"Well," Meka said, smirking. "Looks like you made the cut. Guess you'll last… if you learn to keep your mouth shut."
Sarah forced a polite smile, but inside, her stomach churned.
That evening, as the building emptied, Sarah quietly walked to the storage corridor. A janitor in a dusty brown uniform was mopping the floor. As she passed, he casually tapped the mop twice against the floor, then leaned closer as though whispering a prayer.
"Your handler," he said softly, never lifting his head. "Don't look at me. Don't stop walking. Every three days, same corridor, same hour. I'll pass along what you need. For now—be invisible."
Sarah kept walking, her heart pounding, but relief rushed through her veins. She wasn't alone.
Jack — The Shattered Man
Back at the apartment, Jack Hutto sat in silence. The walls were still scarred from the Kempeitai raid. His face bruised, his mind broken, he considered leaving — disappearing into the Neutral Zone.
But when he moved Sarah's bag to the side, something small and old slipped out.
It was a diary, worn with age, its cover soft from years of handling. He flipped it open. The handwriting inside wasn't Sarah's.
The first line chilled him:
"If they kill me, may Sarah carry the fight forward. She has the spirit of her father."
Jack froze. The diary belonged to Sarah's mother — someone Sarah had never spoken of in detail. The entries were full of resistance activity during the early days of occupation. Smuggling, sabotage, betrayal. And one entry mentioned a name Jack had heard only whispered by resistance prisoners in Kempeitai cells:
The Voice.
His hands trembled. His fiancée had been born into this.
Vice Admiral Arimoto — The Shadow Player
At the Nipplin Building's war room, Vice Admiral Takeshi Arimoto studied the plans for the Imperial Family's arrival. Around him stood state governors, Kempeitai commanders, and ministry liaisons.
"Admiral Yamamoto has entrusted me with the preparations," Arimoto said firmly. "And I have taken every precaution. The Crown Prince and Princess will arrive safely — and the world will see the glory of the Japanese Pacific States."
The officers nodded. After a pause, Arimoto gave a sharp command.
"Release the announcement to the press. The people must know their Imperial Family will grace these lands."
Aides rushed to deliver the message across the Pacific States. Posters, broadcasts, and rumors would spread like fire within hours.
But as Arimoto sat back in his chair, sipping tea, his eyes darkened. He served the Emperor, yes — but there was something else behind his calm exterior. A private mission. A loyalty whispered only in backrooms and smoke-filled chambers.
Did Arimoto serve Japan… or his own designs?
Berlin — A Directive from the Shadows
At the Chancellery, Imel stood alone in a dark-paneled office, the wax seal broken on a set of orders. They bore both Hitler's and Himmler's signatures.
The language was cold, clinical, but its meaning was clear:
"The Pacific States must not only be secured politically but tested biologically. Ensure the Reich's future superiority through trials upon the weak. The Japanese may remain ignorant — but the results must serve us."
Imel folded the papers carefully. He had his next orders.
Paris.
Paris — A Gathering of Monsters
Imel left Berlin under a slate-gray sky, Lucy at his side. Tempelhof folded away beneath them and, for the first time in months, his mind felt the hollow drift of travel — purpose-propelled, hollow. Lucy watched the countryside blur beneath the plane; she was here on two orders: to accompany Imel for the Paris meeting, and to assist Leni Riefenstahl with editing and staging footage of the new Nazi Olympics — the grand spectacle the regime would use to wash brutality in light and ribbons.
Paris met them with weather of the same color as their uniforms. A black staff car waited; Leibstandarte guards snapped to salute as Imel stepped down. Lucy clutched a small leather portfolio of footage notes and camera angles, thinking of light and frame while behind the façade of art a far uglier commission waited.
They arrived at the farmhouse outside the city — a discreet place chosen because the Olympics made Paris bustle and noise. The chateau's façade leaned into hedges. Inside, a long table had been set up in a high-ceilinged room; maps and dossiers lay beside steaming coffee. Near a low hearth, an assistant was setting out reinforced syringes and sample trays — clinical things in a place meant for ceremony.
At the head of the table already waited SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, pale, precise, eyes like glass. Beside him sat SS-Scharführerin Herta Oberheuser, clipped, taking notes, and SS-Unterscharführer Juana "Bormann, the woman with the dogs,"
When Obergruppenführer Imel entered, all three rose and saluted.
"Heil Hitler."
"Heil Hitler," Imel replied, his voice low.
Mengele leaned forward, eyes glinting. "We have much to discuss. The Pacific States — their populations, their weaknesses. They will be the perfect ground for our next experiments. The Reich's science will rise there, while the Japanese think only of ceremony and parades."
Bormann smiled cruelly, patting her dogs. "We'll need children. Always children."
Oberheuser added quietly, "And women. The data from sterilization must continue."
Imel listened, his jaw tightening, then finally spoke.
"Paris celebrates gold medals while we plan the future of the Reich. Do not fail me. The Pacific will be our laboratory, and its people will bleed for progress."
The fire crackled in the hearth, shadows dancing across their faces. The world outside cheered the Olympic games, unaware of the horror being plotted behind closed doors.
Imel sat and folded his hands. "Himmler's directive is clear," he said. "We will not simply occupy. We will shape. Dominate. And the Reich will catalog reactions to achieve lasting advantage."
Mengele smiled, and the smile had edges. "We propose three phases: first, discreet inoculations and placebo trials among consenting civilians — soldiers, factory workers — to calculate baseline responses. Second, targeted sterilization programs under the pretense of public health campaigns. Third, extraction of tissues for comparative histology." He adjusted his cuff. "Results cataloged, samples sent to Berlin."
Oberheuser tapped her pen. "We have the personnel and the provisional sites. We will begin with small cohorts, preferably children and young women, to accelerate generational data."
Juana Bormann made a sound that might have been a laugh. "We'll need children for control groups as well. They are easy to place — orphanage transfers, schooling programs, exchange initiatives disguised as recreation." Her dogs stirred at the sound of the word "children," headlow, ears pricked.
Lucy stood at the door, silent and steady, folding the pages of a lighting diagram into a neat stack. Her work with Riefenstahl had trained her to see how spectacle could distract and recast. She understood at once the scope of what was being proposed and the role film and propaganda could play — footage of smiling athletes, parades, a "health initiative" ribboned across the frame, while in the wings Mengele and his team wrote protocols.
Imel's voice was low when he leaned forward. "We will need cover. Olympic-affiliated medical tours traveling to the Pacific — film crews, medical delegations, 'cultural exchange' — we place neutral façade in public. Behind closed doors, the Reich will supervise. We must coordinate with local Japanese officials to ensure cooperation or complacency."
Mengele's eyes gleamed. "Perfect. The Japanese will welcome prestige. We will provide expertise. The Reich receives data."
Oberheuser unfolded a small roster. "Training for local staff will proceed under the title 'maternal health improvement.' We will train nurses, standardize sterilization techniques labeled as contraception, and catalog everything."
Juana's hand went to a leash. Her dogs shifted and rose, great shoulders and claws scouring the floorboards. She looked at Imel. "Permission to make some local arrangements?" she asked. She had been at this work before; her tone told the room what would follow.
Imel's nod was curt. "Implement. But keep it under diplomatic cover. If anyone asks, we are consultants in public health and sport."
Mengele lifted his cup. "To progress," he said, and the men around the table echoed, voices flat and automatic.
Outside the farmhouse, in the near woods, two French boys chased a stray rabbit. The war had left the countryside empty in many places; this farmhouse had been noted by local rumor as abandoned since the end of the last conflict. Yet today bright chrome and polished black cars winked in the sun by the lane.
"Let's see," said the smaller of the two, adrenaline making him bold. "Maybe they left something."
His friend, older and skinnier, hesitated. "The house is supposed to be empty," he muttered. "Why would anyone be here?"
They crept up a side path and paused at a slatted barn window. Inside, through cracked glass, they could see the table and men in dark uniforms. The boys didn't understand the words, but German is a language even the young can hear as mean: the syllables were hard, the gestures vast, the men speaking as if making plans for the land itself.
One of the boys stepped onto an old wooden crate in the undergrowth. It groaned. He froze. The other nudged him to be quiet.
Behind the broken pane, a phrase fell into one of the boys' ears in a string of German words — "Kinder," "Gesundheit," "Sterilisation." The smaller boy paled. He mouthed the sound, trying to grasp it. The bigger boy, terrified now, turned to pull him away.
The crate split with a sharp snap.
Wood yawned and broke beneath their boots. The noise punched into the cleared air.
Inside, a German shepherd lifted its head. Juana's dogs were instantly alert. One of them barked a single sharp challenge; another whined, then all six were at attention. Juana's scarred face had been turned toward the window the moment the noise began. She moved like a blade.
"Enfants," she said, voice flat and cold, and rose. Her scars drew taut with a vivid hunger. She unfastened the leashes and stepped to the porch. The dogs strained, muscles coiling.
Imel came to the window at the same second, expression controlled but hard. Mengele — nearby, looked at Imel with a look that wanted little prompting. "You know what to do," he said simply.
Juana clicked her heels together once in a peculiar salute. She stepped off the porch crossed the yard, without haste, and stepped into the street light. She watched the boys through the wooden gate as she opened it, their small forms running already through a field aiming for the nearby forest; the younger boy tripped in a tangle of roots.
"Fetch," Juana said, and the dogs were gone — a dark, immediate ripple among trunks and bracken.
The sound of barking rose, a haunting, rising pack-note. Branches slashed at faces. The two boys screamed, the sound raw and short, a noise that leaves a country changed for all who hear it. The farmhouse day, once filled with papers and plans, was suddenly full of pursuit. Back Inside, the meeting's tone did not change. They talked of logistics, timetables, dossier numbers. Imel's reply was business like : "This will be controlled. No stray incidents that might draw local outrage. Use existing channels; we will compensate if needed."
Mengele, attentive only to the science, asked a clinical question about tissue handling and chain of custody. Oberheuser noted training sequences.
Lucy stood very still and calm, the staging and the horror of it wound together in her chest — film as veil, cruelty as method.
As the barking faded with distance, Juana returned with mud on her boots and no companions. She did not speak of success or failure; she simply wiped her hands and sat back in her chair, pleased.
Imel folded his hands. "We go to work," he said softly. "The world watches sports. We will make the notes that outlast the games."
They resumed, plotting sites, speakers, and cover stories — Olympic delegations, friendly medical missions, film crews that would light the parade while Mengele's teams took measurements behind curtained doors. They gave names to compounds, codename lists for transport and sample transfer. The plan was meticulous, bureaucratic, monstrous.
Lucy left the room for a moment and stepped out beneath the trees, the hush of leaves trembling after the chase still vibrating the air. She thought of the images she would be asked to shape, the way light could make atrocity appear ordinary. She thought of her family , then of the two boys who had been children that morning and now ran through the woods with teeth behind them.
She tucked the thought away and returned inside to the table. This meeting was a milestone: the Olympics would be staged; the Reich would bring its research. And Paris, for a few bright days, would be applauding medals and missing the true cost behind the ribbons.