Within a week of the Potsdam demonstration—within a week of the Empress driving a Muscle Motors B-Class straight into the palace lake and emerging furious, drenched, and somehow more alive than she'd been in years—the cars had spread through the Empire like a fashionable illness.
They arrived by rail in guarded crates.
They arrived by convoy with escort riders.
They arrived in ministerial courtyards, in General Staff gardens, at the private gates of men who loved to claim they were above "new trends" right up until a chauffeur cranked the engine and the machine purred like a tamed predator.
And everywhere the same ritual repeated:
The recipient smiled.
Then drove it once.
Then demanded another.
One car was never enough for people who collected status the way poor men collected coins.
A minister needed one for his office and one for his wife.
A general needed one for Berlin and one for the country estate where he pretended he was humble.
A business lord needed a dozen so his directors could arrive in matching machines like a private army.
The only "problem"—if it could be called that—was that the B-Class still wasn't on the market.
It existed. It rolled. It impressed. It humiliated horses.
But it hadn't been released.
So Germany did what Germany always did when it wanted something and couldn't have it immediately:
It began to wait aggressively.
Orders were "informally" promised. Courtiers "casually" asked Karl whether they could reserve production slots. Ministers who would rather swallow a nail than beg a prince suddenly remembered Oskar's name with alarming warmth.
By the time the first civilian sale date was even whispered, half the Empire had already spent the money in their minds.
And Oskar—sitting now behind closed doors in a meeting room with his father—could not deny the quiet satisfaction he felt when the reports came in.
Even his father looked… not happy, exactly. Wilhelm II did not do happy the way normal men did.
But he looked pleased in the imperial sense: a predator who had found a new advantage and was already imagining how to use it.
The room itself was a fortress of polished wood and managed silence.
A long table. Coffee. Ink. Paper stacks high enough to build a small wall between men and reality.
The Chancellor sat with his own pile, frowning at numbers that refused to be intimidated.
A few ministers murmured in low voices.
Somebody had brought maps.
Someone always brought maps.
And Oskar—youngest in the room by far, broad-shouldered enough that older men instinctively straightened when he moved—read his documents with the calm focus of a man inspecting an engine.
On paper, his machine was growing.
Train cars were warmer. Streets were cleaner. New housing rose where rot and crowding used to live. Factory accidents fell. Wages stabilized. Pump World had turned softness into shame and strength into fashion. Even the landscape—slowly, stubbornly—was being forced back toward green: roadside trees, drainage ditches, ordered fields, the first hints of a nation deciding it would not poison itself just because smoke looked like progress.
It wasn't charity.
It was strategy.
A healthy workforce worked harder. A fed population panicked less. A nation that could breathe could also fight.
And buried under the neat stacks of reports—under procurement lists, sanitation summaries, railway schedules, and AngelWorks orders—there it was: the one page Oskar cared about more than all the others, because it had been a promise spoken aloud.
And promises, in an empire, were dangerous things.
Land acquisitions: completed.
Not "in progress."
Not "nearly."
Completed.
His signature program—buying out the people who wanted to sell and leave—had reached the point where his agents were sending back final receipts, stamped, signed, and filed with the crisp finality of spent cartridges.
Oskar let himself breathe out once, slowly.
He had done what he said he would do.
That mattered to him more than the ministers understood.
With that land, he could tear down what was unfit and build what would last. Modern blocks with light and air instead of mold and coughing. Roads that didn't turn to sludge. Farms that produced more food with fewer dead backs.
And the agricultural acreage—especially the larger parcels—flowed straight into Greenway, into tractors and crop rotation and storage, into a Germany that could feed itself with fewer prayers and fewer imports.
But even as he read the word completed, a colder truth sat beside it like an uninvited guest.
Not everyone had sold.
Some had refused out of pride. Some out of fear. Some because the land was the only thing they had left that still felt like theirs.
And in those cases, the state did what states did when they were convinced they were right.
It took.
No long hearings. No slow compromises. No polite bargaining to preserve dignity.
Just a choice delivered like an order:
Leave. Submit. Or be removed.
Exile. Re-education. Or bullets—efficient, final, and brutal in the way only a modernizing empire could be brutal, because it believed speed was morality.
Oskar kept his face still as he read.
He did not flinch.
He simply felt that familiar, unpleasant pressure in his chest—the knowledge that building the future often meant stepping on someone's throat to clear the ground.
And whether he liked it or not, the machine was running now.
Across the table, his father turned a page and made a sound that might—might—have been approval.
"Your roads have been well received by the people," Wilhelm said without looking up. "And your housing blocks… Berlin is less volatile than it should be."
Less volatile.
In Wilhelm's mouth, that was praise.
Oskar gave a small nod and kept his face neutral, as if he hadn't just been rewarded in front of half the state.
"Thank you, Father," he said, because it was the correct answer and the safest one.
The Chancellor's eyes flicked up at the word Father—a brief flash of irritation at intimacy in a war-room—then he buried himself in his papers again like a man trying not to envy blood.
Oskar turned another sheet.
His eyes caught a line that made the corner of his mouth weaken.
Population estimates: nearly sixty-three million.
And beneath it—written with the same dry clinical indifference as a tariff code:
Ethnic composition: approximately ninety-nine percent German.
Oskar held his gaze on that number half a second too long.
He already knew the Empire had changed. You could feel it in the streets: flags in windows that hadn't held flags before, men standing straighter, women speaking with sharper pride. The nation was… unified.
But unity, he had learned, was never free.
The reports were clean. They were always clean.
Relocations.
Departures.
Public incidents.
Enforcement actions.
Words scrubbed until they shone—sanitized phrases that still smelled faintly of smoke if you read them closely enough.
Oskar read them closely.
He didn't like what he could infer.
He had built mechanisms—money, buyouts, administrative machinery—because he believed it would drain pressure, reduce chaos, prevent panic.
But the state had teeth.
And once you gave it a reason to bite, it rarely confined itself to polite targets.
He flipped to outward migration figures.
The numbers were immense: tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Late 1906 had been the worst—the peak of fear and fury. After that it steadied into a grim rhythm, as if the country had simply decided what it was and would not tolerate argument.
By the end of 1907 the flow was slowing.
Not because mercy had returned.
Because the decisions were finished: people had either submitted, or left, or been dealt with.
And there—halfway down the page—was the line that tightened his stomach:
Jewish emigration: near total. Destination: Ottoman Palestine (majority).
Oskar's fingers stopped on the edge of the paper.
He had expected many to leave. He'd even planned for it in the quiet, pragmatic way a man plans for storms—without saying the word storm out loud in rooms like this.
But "near total" wasn't an economic statistic.
It was a scar forming in real time.
Partly his father's brutal law.
Partly the Zionist movement's relentless pull.
And partly the ancient, predictable human truth that when a nation decides it wants to be one thing, the people who don't fit become an unacceptable complication.
His mind jumped forward the way it always did—cursed with memory.
Palestine.
Ottoman collapse.
British mandates.
Riots. Massacres. Wars without end.
He could almost taste the future like ash.
Oskar forced himself to keep reading.
The report noted—in the calm, bloodless voice of bureaucracy—that the Ottoman court was "reluctant but financially amenable," and that incoming settlers were already investing in irrigation, housing, and agriculture.
In other words: the land was changing, rapidly.
Oskar's jaw tightened.
He wanted to believe it could be peaceful. That with more time, less foreign meddling, and honest labor, people might learn to share ground instead of fight for it.
But he also knew people.
People carried fear like a second bloodstream.
They carried revenge like inheritance.
And when two peoples claimed the same earth, history rarely ended with handshakes.
He set the page down with a slow exhale.
Across the table, Wilhelm was speaking again—tone brisk, satisfied, imperial.
"The departures have reduced internal friction," the Kaiser said. "The nation is steadier. More disciplined."
Oskar met his father's eyes.
There was no softness there now.
Only the cold pride of a ruler who believed order justified the means.
Oskar kept his voice even.
"Order bought too harshly," he said, "creates enemies that don't stay inside borders."
A brief silence.
The Chancellor looked up sharply, alarmed by the faint scent of disagreement.
One minister pretended to adjust his papers while listening like a rat in a wall.
Wilhelm II's gaze sharpened.
"You worry too much, my son," he said, patient in the way a powerful man was patient with a useful subordinate. "Be glad it will be over soon."
Oskar didn't lower his eyes.
He chose his words carefully—because in this room, the wrong sentence could end careers, marriages, and sometimes lives.
"I worry about what the reports don't say," Oskar answered. "And I worry about what happens when the hatred we create begins to follow Germans abroad."
His voice stayed calm, but the meaning was a knife.
"In the future, will our merchants be safe in foreign ports? Will our engineers be safe in foreign cities? And if war comes—when war comes—do you think our enemies will show mercy after watching this?"
He glanced down at the paper again, then back up.
"If we ever cross borders, Father, the civilian population will not welcome us. They will resist us. And if the resistance is fierce enough, men like Moltke will demand extremes—because armies always demand extremes when they can't advance."
Wilhelm's nostrils flared.
For a moment it looked like he might answer properly—might argue, might justify, might admit the cost.
Then he did what Wilhelm II did when challenged in front of witnesses.
He turned the page.
Dismissal—his favorite imperial weapon.
"Your vehicle gifts," the Kaiser said, as if they'd been discussing nothing deeper than horse feed, "were well received."
That, at least, was safe ground.
Oskar allowed himself a small nod.
"Yes," he said. "Especially abroad."
The population question bothered him greatly, but he decided not to argue with his father pointlessly yet again, and possibly lose his position as acting crown Prince. So instead he flicked to another sheet—foreign correspondence summaries, polite court language reacting to German machines.
And there, the detail that had made him grin like a boy earlier that morning:
Archduke Franz Ferdinand has accepted the vehicle gift with enthusiasm.
Household and close circle also using the vehicles.
Oskar felt a private, almost absurd wave of relief.
Franz Joseph, according to the report, had refused entirely—preferring carriages and horses "as was proper," like an emperor determined to die in the century he'd been born into.
But Ferdinand had taken the car.
Driven it.
Shown it to friends.
And in Oskar's mind, one ridiculous thought rose again, stubborn as prayer:
Maybe reverse gear saves the world.
Not because a car could stop a bullet.
But because a car could avoid the wrong turn.
Because a roof could block a bad angle.
Because in history, sometimes the smallest mechanical detail decided whether millions lived or died.
It wasn't comforting.
It was terrifying.
Still—he took it.
He needed something to take.
The meeting rolled on.
More reports. More praise for Oskar's programs, delivered in Wilhelm's clipped language.
Housing blocks reducing disease.
Road projects lowering transport costs.
Greenway's agricultural expansion becoming a pillar—tractors where horses used to strain, hygiene on farms, selective breeding already showing results.
Slightly bigger chickens.
Better yields.
More storage.
The Empire feeding itself more efficiently.
Still importing grain from Russia, yes—but less exposed than it had been.
On paper, it was an astonishing success.
And for a moment—just a moment—Oskar let himself feel it.
He'd wanted a Germany that did not starve.
A Germany that did not choke in its own slums.
A Germany with engines instead of manure in the streets.
A Germany that could survive the future.
He had pushed, built, bullied the century forward with both hands.
And now the machine was moving.
But machines did not care what they crushed along the way.
At last the meeting drifted toward its end, the way such gatherings always did: men gathering papers, murmuring, scheduling the next meeting where they would pretend they controlled the world rather than reacted to it.
Wilhelm stood.
That meant everyone stood.
The Kaiser's gaze swept the room—satisfied, hard, bright with control.
Then, as if remembering something more personal, he looked at Oskar again.
"You have done well," Wilhelm said, quiet enough that only those nearest could hear.
Oskar held his father's gaze.
He wanted to accept the praise.
He wanted to feel proud.
Instead, what he felt was heavier.
Because he knew—deep down—that every time a nation became "stronger," someone else paid the cost.
And he was no longer sure he could always see who.
"Yes, Father," Oskar said.
Then he gathered his reports, stacked them neatly, and rose with the practiced discipline of a prince who understood that in the Empire, even victories had shadows.
Another meeting ended. Another bundle of numbers declared success. And yet Oskar left the room not satisfied so much as… contained—like a man forced to wear calm over a mind that never truly stopped moving.
Still, he carried the same stubborn habit he'd carried through every crisis since waking up in this body:
Hope.
Not the soft kind. The useful kind.
The kind that said the future might still be steered, if he kept his hands on the wheel long enough.
He was halfway down the corridor when the Imperial Chancellor caught up, quick-stepping with the smooth urgency of a man who could smell opportunity through oak doors.
"Your Highness," Bernhard von Bülow said, smiling as if this were a friendly chat rather than procurement politics, "the ministers are extremely satisfied with the vehicles you gifted to the government."
Oskar's mouth twitched. In Berlin, "extremely satisfied" meant: We want more. Immediately. And we want it to look like your idea.
"The government has decided to purchase a batch for official use," Bülow continued, voice pleasant. "We would appreciate it if Your Highness could offer… a modest discount."
Behind Bülow, the Foreign Minister—Kiderlen-Waechter—watched with a faint smile, the kind diplomats wore when they were already imagining the headlines: Germany modernizes. Government adopts national motorcar. Empire accelerates.
Oskar's eyes brightened despite himself.
This wasn't just money.
This was legitimacy.
If the imperial government designated Muscle Motors as the official vehicle, every provincial office and municipal department would follow like geese behind the first one brave enough to step onto thin ice.
Government procurement alone could keep Stuttgart sweating through the night.
And once the bureaucracy developed the habit of engines, it would never go back to horses without feeling humiliated.
"Your Excellency," Oskar said, warmth sliding into his voice like oil into a gear, "that's no problem at all."
He didn't even pretend to think.
"How many does the government need?"
Bülow's brows lifted slightly—pleased. Too easy. Oskar enjoyed making things easy when they served his machine.
"I'll have Muscle Motors give you ten percent off," Oskar continued. "And we will prioritize your supply."
Bülow nodded in crisp satisfaction, as if the Empire had just won a small war without firing a shot.
"That would be perfect," the Chancellor said.
Then he leaned in slightly, lowering his voice the way men did when they wanted to make a deal feel like friendship.
"The Kaiser will be pleased."
Oskar smiled, and the Chancellor moved on—already drifting toward his next conversation, his next lever, his next quiet theft of advantage.
Oskar watched him go, then exhaled once.
So ended another day, more or less.
The palace had become almost… peaceful in its own strange way. Productive. Controlled. Successful.
Germany, by every metric that could be measured and printed, was rising.
And yet even success had its parasites.
Bertha was pregnant again.
It was the sort of fact that sat in Oskar's mind like a loaded pistol: quiet, heavy, and capable of going off at the worst possible time.
Gustav's marriage to her, according to every whisper that reached Oskar's ears, was about as passionate as a tax meeting. Whatever "action" Gustav got, he apparently sought elsewhere—women paid to disappear afterward, women who did not bring a child into a boardroom and call him Papa with bright blue eyes.
Bertha, meanwhile, kept appearing close to Oskar and getting her fair share of action.
Other times she came with Alfried, so the boy could tumble and crawl among Oskar's six children, the tiny chaos of a family that was becoming more like a small court of its own. Those times she sometimes pulled Oskar to another room or a closet for a touching session, while the other women were left taking care of the children.
And whenever Oskar went out—concerts, theaters, public appearances—Bertha was never far behind like a polite, aristocratic stalker, always looking for some intimate action.
She was like a stalker with a baby in her arms.
A stalker with bodyguards not far behind.
A stalker whose surname owned half the steel in Germany, that now secretly was under Oskar's own control.
Anna and Tanya, being neither blind nor stupid, confronted him the moment they were certain.
Not with screams.
With that terrifying quiet tone women used when they were deciding what kind of future they would tolerate.
They even did the unthinkable:
They tried to make it easy.
Marry her or just go public, they suggested, bluntly, as if marriage were a tool you could pick up and set down. Be done with it. Stop the tension. Stop her orbiting you like a second moon.
Oskar refused.
Not because he didn't understand the practicality.
Because he understood it too well.
One more wife meant one more faction. One more set of expectations. One more public rupture with the rules of his world.
And he was already walking a tightrope over a fire.
So for now he did what he always did when faced with something he couldn't solve in a single day:
He delayed.
He hoped.
He prayed—rarely, awkwardly—that Gustav might somehow become the sort of husband Bertha could accept.
It was not a plan.
It was survival.
And worse—his own household was changing.
Tanya and Anna had been heroic, patient, loyal beyond what anyone could reasonably ask.
But jealousy was not evil.
It was human.
They had wanted a pause—time to breathe, time to be women instead of nurseries.
And now thanks to all the action he had been giving Bertha, she was pregnant again, and Oskar could feel the shift in the air: the unspoken thought that if she was allowed to claim more of him, then they would not remain quiet forever either.
Oskar loved his children.
But he had begun to suspect he might drown under them.
He needed the first six to grow a little before the next wave arrived—or else his life would become nothing but cradles, diapers, and whispered negotiations in hallways.
As if that weren't enough, Karl's household was expanding too.
Heddy was pregnant again. Durin would soon have little brothers—dwarflings, as Louise insisted on calling them with wicked delight, as if Karl's son were a myth creature rather than a very real baby who liked biting people's fingers.
And when Bertha visited with Alfried, Karl would sometimes have Heddy bring Durin as well.
With Oskar's six, Alfried, Durin—sometimes even Cecilie would arrive with her baby Wilhelm—there were moments when the baby-proof room looked less like a nursery and more like an arena.
Louise would stand on a chair like a tiny announcer, narrating the "races" as toddlers crawled, rolled, and tackled each other across the padded floor.
The mothers watched from the side, laughing and gasping and clutching teacups like women observing a battlefield that was somehow adorable.
It was madness.
But it was warm madness.
The kind that almost made Oskar forget the furnace glow outside.
Even Louise, in her own way, was building something.
Her work with Tanya—children's clothing, toys, teddy bears dressed in little uniforms and fashionable outfits—was spreading fast. German homes and foreign homes alike now displayed bears in miniature military coats or bright dresses, boys insisting theirs looked like an officer, girls insisting theirs had the prettiest ribbons.
Soft propaganda, Oskar thought.
The safest kind.
And somewhere beyond the palace walls—far beyond Germany—another piece of his long plan was already in motion.
The Tolkien brothers. Edith.
Their strange, winding journey across Europe.
Oskar had sent them on that road for one reason only: inspiration. He wanted them steeped in cities and ruins, languages and landscapes, beauty and fear—until the world itself pressed stories into them. Until, one day, they would write books that felt inevitable.
Still, he was impatient.
He wanted the journey to end. He wanted to finally meet Ronald Tolkien, to place a pen in his hand and watch the work begin. He wanted their minds sharpened, their imaginations ignited—and, yes, quietly aligned with his own long vision.
Because books mattered.
Stories mattered.
A nation could be fed with bread, certainly.
But it was shaped—endured—by myth.
For now, though, he leaned back against the headboard of his bed and watched the future roll across the carpet.
The babies were everywhere—crawling, tumbling, colliding softly like living dice—laughing at nothing and everything. A kingdom reduced to motion and noise and warmth.
Oskar was dressed lightly: an open white shirt, loose trousers, bare feet planted on the edge of the mattress. The posture of a man who had, for one rare hour, put the weight of an empire down.
Anna and Tanya flanked him, close and warm, their laughter quiet and intimate as they spoke with Bertha and Cecilie at the foot of the bed. Cecilie leaned forward shyly, cheeks flushed, offering him a grape from a porcelain bowl.
The women reacted with exaggerated scandal—gasps, laughter, mock outrage—but it dissolved instantly into shared amusement. They had been together too long now for such gestures to carry real shock.
All of them wore Tanya's new designs: modern nightgowns, light fabrics, deliberate in what they revealed and what they suggested. Clothing made not just to be worn, but to be noticed, especially by the only man currently in the room who was Oskar as Karl had gone back to work elsewhere.
Oskar accepted the grape with a lazy smile, eyes half-lidded, and let himself be indulged. Anna's hands worked at his shoulders. Tanya traced slow circles along his arms. Bertha, entirely unashamed, leaned against his legs, fingers firm and possessive.
Cecilie knelt nearby, hesitant but drawn in, caught between propriety and curiosity—and losing. The women were supposed to be massaging him, but so far they were doing a horrible job at it.
Louise and Heddy sat a little distance away on the carpet, playing with the children, laughing at their clumsy games, blissfully—or willfully—unaware of how improper the arrangement would have looked to anyone else.
But this was not a normal household.
And for one brief, dangerous moment, Oskar allowed himself to feel what power truly bought.
Not speeches.
Not duty.
Not endless responsibility.
But release.
A dark thought flickered across his mind—ugly, fleeting, and immediately unwelcome. Not revenge in the crude sense of violence or blood, but something subtler. Something that would wound pride rather than flesh. Something that would remind a fallen man of exactly what he had lost.
Cecilie.
The thought carried a sharp edge, and Oskar felt it at once. He did not linger on it. He smiled faintly—an arrogant, almost cruel curl of the mouth—and then let it go, as one lets go of a blade before it cuts too deep.
Still, he was not blind.
Wilhelm was confined now—locked away in Babelsberg, unstable, dangerous, a shadow of the man he had once been. Whether he would recover was uncertain. Whether he would ever again be safe to stand beside a throne was even less so.
And Cecilie knew it.
She was young. She was intelligent. And she was not ignorant of what the world did to women whose husbands fell from grace or descended into madness. Especially women with children.
There was a reason she stood close.
There was a reason her gaze lingered a fraction too long.
There was a reason she sought Oskar's presence, his attention, his gravity.
This was not merely desire.
It was calculation braided with fear.
Oskar understood that well enough to feel no illusion of innocence—on either side. He was not the only one thinking dangerous thoughts. But he was the only one, for now, refusing to act on them.
He would not pounce.
He would not initiate.
If such a line were ever crossed, it would not be by instinct or arrogance, but by an explicit step—taken openly, deliberately, and with consequences understood.
Until then, he kept his hands still, his expression neutral, and his thoughts firmly leashed.
Power, he had learned, was most dangerous not when it was used—but when it was tempted.