The explosion took the room like a lung collapse. One instant the palace was gilded and rehearsed, the next a terrible, hot wind rolled through chandeliers and ivory panels. Plates flew. Wine glassed into cut diamonds. People screamed and the screams became a single animal sound as the roof began to give.
From every doorway, through every shattered window, men and women lurched into a Paris night that smelled of cooked meat and smoke.
Reichenau
Reichenau's hands were steady until they were not. He had been halfway through a sentence with Brenner when the world folded inward. For a long heartbeat he only felt the shock in his chest, that odd immediate clarity that comes before pain: this is war, he thought, and then: this is treachery.
He moved as an old soldier moves — practical, exact. He grabbed Brenner by the sleeve and dragged him away from the nearest collapse. Marble screamed and the ceiling bucked. Men nearby were thrown like rag dolls; one aide's head cracked on a brass rail. People crawled, coughed, hands cupping their faces as blood streamed from noses and mouths, flakes of tile dust in the red.
Reichenau saw a man in a silk waistcoat groping desperately for a shoe; a woman with lipstick smeared in a mask of panic; a young aide with a splinter driven into his cheek, eyes glassy. He forced himself to step over a body and keep moving. The press of panic made thin men scream, made stout men drop to their knees. He had commanded divisions; he knew how to move a crowd. He barked orders, then realized his own throat was full of smoke and tasted iron.
When Brenner slid under his arm and whispered, "Generaloberst, the entrance is collapsing," Reichenau's jaw went hard. He would get to the street. He would organize a cordon. He would not let this be a riot. Not in his town.
Karl Brenner
Brenner felt the heat on his face like an accusation. He hauled Reichenau in a fireman's grip, ignoring the sting of splinters in his palm. The crowd around the staircase was a tangle of uniforms and gowns; a pair of photographers stumbled, camera straps whipping. One of them lay motionless, a smear of red across his temple, film dangling like a ribbon.
Outside, Wehrmacht and SA tried to reconstitute order. Brenner shoved and shouted until his voice broke the hysteria. When a squad came for them, he collapsed Reichenau into the arms of a medevac orderly and barked for a radio. "We marshal law this block," he told the first officer he found. "Lock it down. No press. No footage." He saw the way a paparazzo fumbled to raise a camera, flash to catch the dying light; Brenner moved like an animal and shoved him back. "Get out!" he roared. "Give me that camera! Destroy it!"
The man obeyed. Another kicked a lens into the gutter. Brenner didn't breathe until Reichenau was in an ambulance and the radio man had been ordered to transmit their location and demand reinforcements. He felt the itch of a thousand newcomers' gazes—curiosity, opportunism, hunger for a scoop. He had not come to Paris to watch his command become a spectacle.
Leni Riefenstahl
Leni's fox coat caught a smear of ash as a ceiling tile came down. Her first impulse was the vanity that had always been her survival: maintain the photograph, the frame, the image. A thread of terror braided with frustration — this would ruin the sequence, the shots, the careful choreography of spectacle. Yet for half a second the old reflex to move, to stage, to compose, flared like a camera shutter.
A waiter yanked at her arm, shouting that the doors were jammed. She felt a finger press hard into her back and for a shaky moment she tasted blood and perfume. Around her, people hiccupped and coughed, spitting dark flecks. She had a glimpse of a young man whose face was gone under a shock of smashed glass, a woman whose dress was torn away from her shoulder, red blooming at the collarbone. The sight did not stop her hands from trembling; it simply made her demand faster assistance.
When an SA man reached to help her into a car, she let him. Lucy's face appeared in the doorway: a smear of dust, a thin line of blood from the nose, eyes enormous and asking. For a second Riefenstahl's expression softened, and then the survival instinct — the pure, metallic, self-preserving calculation — returned like a mask.
"My safety comes first," she said, as if the words were a scripture. "You are… expendable." Her voice was small but final. She did not intend to soften them. She slid into the car and the door slammed. The engine turned and the car swallowed her away. Whatever photo op she'd been promised, whatever power she felt in the gilded room, it would be preserved if she rode back into the world whole.
Lucy
Lucy's lungs were full of smoke and her head rang with the explosion's aftershock. She staggered outside into a courtyard that had become a ruin in minutes. Bodies littered the steps; someone was moaning and a hand flailed as if still trying to climb. She searched the faces by sight — Imel's table, the musicians, the dancers — and found none of the names that mattered. Then, like a sudden cruel bright bulb, Riefenstahl's car eased away in a convoy and a lean SA trooper helped the director into the back seat. Riefenstahl glared a glance that Lucy took for an order and the trooper slammed the door.
Lucy called after her, a single desperate word: "Leni!"
Riefenstahl turned but the mask was back on her face. "No!" she said, loud enough for Lucy to hear. "My safety comes first. Get away. Don't follow me." The agent's hand closed on the handle and locked it. The car moved, a dark beetle deviating from the chaos.
Lucy felt the world separate from her in that instant. Two people she had counted on—Imel's favor, Leni's attention—slid from her grip. Her throat closed with something that was not just smoke. She sank to the curb; dirt cut into her palms. People clamored. An officer shoved a microphone away and cursed at a cameraman who was still trying to hold his ground to shoot.
Alone and stunned, Lucy watched the convoy swallow Riefenstahl. Her chest felt hollow, as if the room inside her had been pulled out. She had given up something for a promise. The promise had left.
Alfred Meyer
Meyer's world narrowed to pain and the metallic rain of panic. He had taken a shard of glass in the side of his face and could taste blood. His right hand clung to the marble railing as he was shoved down a corridor. Around him, his brown uniform was smeared with dust. He watched men he had admired suddenly fall into animal fear. The party wanted order, wanted ritual. Now the ritual lay in shards around their feet.
He stumbled into the courtyard and watched a woman crumple, her shoes cracked from the fall. He was almost glad for the bluntness of pain; it silenced the thought that the world they had built — and that he had helped administer — might crumble into ash and ruin.
SS-Brigadeführer Schöngarth
Schöngarth moved like a predator through the throng. The explosion had not surprised him; in every structure of power, targets existed. But the way the crowd screamed, the way personal dignity was stripped in an instant, irritated him. He barked orders at anyone nearby, seizing a bolt-cutting tool, dragging corpses aside if they blocked an exit. Emergency doctrine was a second language to him.
He watched the photographers with contempt. One man crouched like a stray, trying to reload an antique camera; Schöngarth grabbed him and broke the film canister over the cobbles. "No footage," he growled. "Burn it." The photographers gaped; a few tried to run. The brigadeführer's hand was big around the back of a throat and he shoved them away until order was an impression he could control.
Heinrich Müller
Müller had not expected tenderness in a burning hall; he had expected treachery, knives behind curtains. As the blast tossed debris into the courtyard and the shouting rose to a high keening, he moved with a stillness that made the hyperventilating look foolish. He had a job. He would make the investigation quick, ruthless, and correct.
In a side corridor his path crossed with a familiar figure: Martin Luther of the Foreign Ministry, trapped beneath a collapsing support beam, cursing and whining as the weight pinned him by the shoulder. Martin's face was pale and a little frantic; blood bubbled at his lip. He apologized between wheezes, eyes wide.
"Help me," Martin gasped, voice small.
Müller looked down at him and felt no sudden surge of pity. Over the past months, report after report had drifted past the Gestapo desk — irregularities around Martin's file, old censuses with anomalies. Müller had the kind of memory that kept human scraps catalogued and searchable. Under the gloss of Martin's respectable suit, Muller had unearthed a lineage traced to a Jewish ancestor. The man had hidden it under forged papers and careful lies. It was treachery to keep such a thing—an offence, a blot.
"After the banquet," Müller said flatly, as if reading a program aloud. "I was going to take care of you." He spat, careless and cruel; the tiny glob of saliva hit Martin's cheek. "You will not ruin what we build. Not tonight. Not ever."
Martin's eyes registered the words a split second too late. He coughed; blood came up into his hand. Müller gripped his shoulder, not to help but to press as if testing the give of the injury. Then, with a coldness like a blade, Müller turned away. "Move them," he ordered toward a pair of nearby aides. "Clear a passage. We'll not have gossip spread by the mob."
Martin's pleas echoed down the corridor, swallowed by the crush of men until only the great organ of command remained.
Outside, chaos organized itself into force. Wehrmacht squads held a tight ring; SA reinforced the lines; medics tended to those who could still be helped. The photographers still lifted lenses with shaking hands until Schöngarth's men broke or took the reels.
Brenner's radio voice cut through an anxious sky: "This block is under martial law. All civilians—clear. Medics—priority to the injured. Arrest any suspicious persons. Cameras—confiscate. All press—submit film."
The ambulances moaned into the square. Reichenau's men were placed under guard. Brenner watched the scene with a soldier's fury: an attack had been made on his gathering and the implication ran like acid. If the SS had conducted a strike on their own people—on state functionaries and party officials—the fall would not be simply political; it would be war within the Reich's own machinery.
Imel's Run
Imel's car ripped through Paris like a blade. The last-minute message had been enough to send them into a different gear. The driver swore as they cut through secondary streets, a staccato of gunfire answering them as three black cars slid out of a side alley and chased after them. Men leaned out from the windows, weapons glittering. For a breath Imel's world narrowed to the muzzle flash and the smell of cordite.
"Die not here," he hissed. "They are not to stop us." The men with him were lethal and trained; they returned fire in a controlled burst more meant to clear a path than to kill each striker. One of the pursuing cars bucked and spun; the second and third, shuddered but kept pace. The driver of Imel's car found a narrow lane and forced the bend. One of the black cars clipped a lamppost and rolled, metal screaming. The last pursuer kept on, glass peppering Imel's face.
Imel's mouth moved in silent prayer and calculation. Whoever had set this trap had the nerve to come for him in a hurry. Whether the plan had been to kill him or to drive the Reich into panic, the result would be the same: fractures. He barked orders, pistol tapping his thigh; men moved like a single organism around him.
Jack and Sarah — Two Kitchens
Sarah arrived home with the curfew hour heavy on the city. The Nipplin building's lights still glowed on the hill like a watchful skull. She opened the apartment door to the smell of yesterday's stew and the metallic tang of tension.
Jack was already at the counter, hands fumbling with keys. He didn't look at her when she asked, voice raw from the day. "When are you going to talk to me?" she demanded. "You can't possibly blame me for what happened to your family."
Jack slid on a coat without meeting her eyes. "I don't blame you," he said in a voice like gravel. "I blame them. The Japs. I'll make them pay." He stepped out into night that now tasted like cinders.
He met Samuel at the old garage, palms rough, eyes dull with his own private grief. "I need your welding kit," Jack said, simple and urgent.
Sam's hands hesitated. "What exactly—" he began, but Jack cut across him.
"Doesn't matter. I need something to make. Just lend me the gear." Sam, who had seen too many men try to burn their sorrow into metal, nodded slowly. "Alright. You do what you need, friend. Don't let it make you worse."
In the basement, Jack put on a welding mask and began to shape metal. There were no schematics on his table, nothing precise and no instruction from me; only the rage that made each arc of light under the hood feel like a small act of reclamation. He hammered and bent and fit, thinking of the Crown Prince's smile, the servants who packed trunks, the polite announcements over the radio about parades and peace. His hands skinned and bloodied; he kept working until the mask fogged with his breath.
He did not know whether violence would answer his grief. He only knew he could not sit still and do nothing.
By the time the sun rose, Paris had been swept and cordoned, but the memory of flame and of smoke clung to every man's boots. The Reich would quickly set about fingerpointing and investigation; the press would parrot the official line; the parties would scaffold blame into advantage. In the ruins, men licked their wounds and counted their enemies.
And in a small basement in San Francisco, a man welded in the dark and imagined a placeholder for the pain he could not otherwise name.