Nearly a month after it began, the evacuation of western Europe had gone surprisingly, even stunningly well, given the colossal scale of the undertaking and the conditions under which it was carried out. Under the codename "Operation Bifröst" and the protection of the Kaiser's Reichswehr, virtually the entire civilian population of Karlsland flooded out of the doomed country. Some went north through Daneland to Baltland, some southwest to Helvetia, but the vast bulk of the survivors went west, through Gallia, picking up that equally doomed nation's populace as they went.

Seaports all up and down the Atlantic coast received orderly convoys of trucks, buses, trains—anything that could carry people and what few possessions they'd managed to carry with them. Under the watchful eyes of the Royal Navy, what remained of the Reichsmarine, and a detachment from the Imperial Fusōnese Navy, and air cover from the surviving Allied witch forces, virtually all the hulls in the North Atlantic—merchant, military, even private recreational—flowed through those ports, arriving empty and leaving laden with fleeing, frightened humanity. This was Operation Dynamo, which would go down in history as the most famous of the many moving parts of the larger operation.

In a matter of weeks, the Kaiser's forces and their allies had evacuated tens of millions from the center and west of Europe, emptying the cities and the countryside before the irresistible advance of the Neuroi... but somehow there always seemed to be more, and as the Neuroi pressed ever closer to the coast and Gallian resistance crumbled, the orderliness of the evacuation started to fall apart. Last-ditch rearguard actions, some of them of heartbreaking nobility and courage, bought time, but only so much.

Just off the coast at Boulogne-sur-Mer, the captain of one of the Allied warships charged with protecting the evacuation knew in his bones that today was the last. Of the operation; of any meaningful human presence in continental Europe; very possibly of their lives. They were out of time. The Neuroi were upon them.

The port of Boulogne was jammed with one last desperate wave of humanity, struggling to escape however they could. The large ships had gone, but the beaches were alive with smaller craft. The boats of the Royal Britannian Lifeboat Service had come across from Folkestone and Dover, braving the unfavorable tide and the advance air units of the Neuroi spearhead. So, too, had a legion of private vessels—motor launches, speedboats, even sailing yachts, all taking as many as they could.

Standing a short distance offshore, unable to dock for lack of anywhere to do it, the captain of the Imperial Fusōnese Navy destroyer Kagerō surveyed the nearest beach through binoculars, his face grim. These people, Commander Hideyoshi Tanaka knew, had come the farthest, and were the most exhausted and desperate of all. Most of them were Ostmarkers, who had come halfway across Europe in the aftermath of their homeland's fall. They were the best part of 700 miles from Vienna as the witch flew—probably a far greater, more circuitous distance on foot over what few roads remained.

Now they had run out of land. They stood on the beach in little groups—families, acquaintances made on the road, who knew—gazing out to sea or looking back in fear.

"Sir," came the voice of Tanaka's XO at his elbow. "Signal from Command: 'Situation untenable. All ships prepare to withdraw.'"

Tanaka grunted acknowledgement, not bothering even to waste words acknowledging that non-news. Smoke was rising from the last band of inland fortifications, and even now the crimson flashes of Neuroi plasma beams could be seen flickering in the distance. He filed that information away and returned his attention to the people on the beach. Some of them had realized that the flotilla of small craft, working its way down the coastline from the north, had begun to turn back.

The captain's fingers tightened on his binoculars as the full horror of the situation arrived for him. These few dozen people, survivors of who knew what dangers and privations in their odyssey to reach the sea, had come within sight of rescue, only to watch as it turned away and fled before reaching them. The Neuroi had pursued them to the very edge of the continent... and would now kill them.

"Mr. Kondō," he snapped. "Man all boats. Volunteers only."

"Sir?" asked his XO, puzzled.

Handing the binoculars to the younger officer, the captain told him, "We're going to take those people off."

The Kagerō shore party hit the beach mere minutes later, having manned and launched the ship's four boats in record time. Tanaka himself was the first to arrive: brandishing his sheathed standard-issue katana to make himself more obvious, he leaped out of the captain's launch into knee-deep water and waded ashore, bellowing for his men to follow.

Working as fast as they could, conscious of the approaching peril, the Fusōnese sailors drew their craft as far up the sand as they dared, then herded groups of startled refugees to them. Ranging up and down the beach, shouting direction and encouragement to his men, Captain Tanaka scanned the crowd of those still waiting.

Perhaps owing to their Teutonic roots, or maybe just out of exhaustion and shock, the Ostmarkers were an orderly bunch even under these conditions. They didn't rush the boats, but waited to be called, then got aboard as quickly as possible. The oldest and youngest among them, the men helped aboard as kindly as they could, though with more urgency than grace.

"It'll take at least one more run to get them all, sir," the junior lieutenant detailed to command the third lifeboat reported, slightly out of breath from his exertions, as the captain reached his end of the beach.

Tanaka only nodded at the young officer's report, having reached the same conclusion on his run down here from his own launch's grounding point. He was ashamed to admit to himself that he couldn't remember the man's name. The lieutenant had only been posted to the Kagerō two weeks before, just before they left Folkestone to help cover Dynamo, and everyone aboard had been too busy since then to get acquainted with the new junior.

Then it came to him in a flash of memory—he had the same family name as an old classmate of Tanaka's from Etajima. No relation, and he still couldn't remember his given name, but it would do for the moment.

"Mr. Takanashi," he said. "Take the boats back to Kagerō, unload, and get back here as fast as you can. Tell Mr. Kondō to bring her in close and rig for anti-aircraft. This may get hot before we can take off the second batch."

Takanashi did not hesitate; with a salute as crisp as if they'd been on the parade ground at the academy, he replied, "Aye aye, Captain," and turned to shout departure orders to the men.

As the boats pulled hard for Kagerō, Tanaka and the handful of men left behind from each one moved up the beach, consolidating the remaining refugees and dividing them up into boatloads. This operation confirmed the captain's calculations: The second run would be a tight squeeze, but there would be no need for a third.

Above, a triangle formation of witches roared by, the exhausts of their Striker Units flaming, bound for the battle zone farther inland—but not much farther, to judge from the noise. The refugees instinctively huddled even closer together. As Tanaka had seen them doing through his binoculars earlier, some glanced fearfully eastward, but now most of them kept their gaze resolutely seaward, staring out at Kagerō while she crept as close to shore as Iwao Kondō dared bring her.

Presently, after what felt like an eternity, the boats returned. As they drew nearer to the beach, Tanaka saw that Takanashi had had the presence of mind to switch out their crews, putting fresh men on the oars—a good move, and one that had slipped Tanaka's mind entirely in the heat of the moment. There would certainly have been no shortage of volunteers. Practically every man aboard had clamored to go on the first run, in spite of the fact that the entire evolution was technically against their orders. The thought brought a tiny smile to Tanaka's face, even under the circumstances.

It makes a man proud to be a sailor, he thought, and then set to ushering the remaining refugees toward the arriving boats.

This task was given greater urgency by the appearance of many-legged black shapes on the beachside quay, crushing down the last row of buildings and making for the high shingle, perhaps two hundred meters away. Tanaka had to admire the Ostmarkers' nerve; even now they didn't panic, in spite of everything they'd been through to get this far. Neither did any of Kagerō's men.

Determined to uphold naval tradition and be the last to leave, as he had been the first to arrive, Tanaka gave his traditional place aboard the launch to one last refugee, then ran down the line, checking each boat as it pushed off. Just as he arrived at lifeboat number three, Lieutenant Takanashi suddenly ceased beckoning for him to hurry and pointed, his face taking on a look of horror.

"Captain!" he cried. "Look there!"

Slackening his pace so as not to lose his balance, Tanaka looked back, and what he saw made his blood run cold. The Neuroi ground units were halfway across the beach and closing, their stomping gait unhurried but inevitable...

... and Tanaka and his men had missed someone.

"Hell!" he spat. "Where did she come from?!"

"I'll go, sir—" Takanashi began, but Tanaka had already dug in his heels and reversed course. Throwing his sword to the junior man, he shouted,

"If I don't make it back, go without me! That's an order!"

Then, dismissing all thought of Takanashi or the boat from his mind, he lowered his head and ran as fast as he could.

The little girl—Tanaka didn't think she could be more than nine or ten years old—was twenty meters up the beach and running for the surf as fast as her legs could carry her. As they converged, Tanaka couldn't be that surprised they hadn't spotted her before now. Her clothes, little better than rags after what had to have been weeks on the road, were nearly the same color as the sand, and she wore a slate-colored cloak with the hood drawn up. She must have arrived at the seaside after the rest of them, with the Neuroi all but snapping at her heels.

Tanaka intercepted her rather in the style of the Liberion game of football, which he'd witnessed on a long-ago visit to Annapolis, scooping her off her feet in one outstretched arm and carrying her along like a parcel. Rather than try to stop and reverse again, he instead ran in an arc that would carry him back to the sea without wasting momentum.

Although a relatively young man for his rank, Tanaka was still beginning to feel winded as he hurtled back toward the boat. A man didn't have all that many opportunities to exercise on a ship the size of a Kagerō-class destroyer, or at least a senior officer didn't, and he was up a little from what had been his fighting weight at Etajima; but he shoved all thought of fatigue out of his head and ran for his life.

Takanashi, the boat's coxswain, and several of the refugees were yelling and gesticulating, urging the captain on, as he covered the last of the distance. He was considering whether to try to throw the girl aboard ahead of him, or just jump for it with her still under his arm, when a flash of heat and a tremendous concussion rolled over them from behind. Knocked off his feet, Tanaka tumbled head-over-heels into the surf alongside the boat, losing his hold on the child in the process.

Shaking his head to clear it, he rolled onto his back and saw one of the Neuroi machines only meters away, a glassy streak in the sand between it and the boat marking where it had missed with its first plasma beam. Watching its sweeping red optic brighten as it approached, he wondered how many seconds it would take to get off another shot.

Between them, the little girl he'd tried to save lay sprawled at the water's edge, unconscious or dead, Tanaka couldn't tell. The blast had flung the hood of her cloak back from her head, releasing a mass of lightly curly hair that glinted flame-orange in the afternoon sun. Tanaka noticed it in an abstract, half-dazed kind of way, remarking to himself that it was one of the most beautiful colors he'd ever seen—which was fitting, since he assumed it would also be one of the last.

"Sir!" cried Takanashi, his hands on the gunwale.

To Tanaka's surprise, the redheaded Ostmarker girl was neither unconscious nor dead. Stirring, she pulled herself to her feet, facing the oncoming Neuroi.

"Not me, Kazuto!" Tanaka called, the lieutenant's given name popping back into his head like a signal flare going off. "Grab the—"

The Neuroi fired.

The beam shrieked out, blood-red and sun-hot... and fragmented an inch before the open palm of the little Ostmarker's upraised left hand. Between them stood what looked like a witch's rune-circle shield, if those had been drawn in lines of pure orange flame instead of the usual cool blue light. Tanaka saw her hair fade to pale green at the tips as bunches of what looked like feathers of the same color dropped out of it behind her ears. The rest flamed as orange as ever as it blew back in the hot wind that now rushed around her, making her ragged cloak snap like a flag. Broken into a dozen splinters, the beam curved around her and the boat behind her, slashing uselessly into the sea.

For a few endless seconds, it seemed like a standoff, the tiny witch and the enormous war machine locked in a contest of human will against raw alien power. Then, with a shrill cry that rose above even the scream of the Neuroi's beam, the Ostmarker witch seemed to double her effort, then double it again, and turned the Neuroi's beam back upon it. By the time the Neuroi realized what was going on, it had already cut itself practically in half, disintegrating into silver snow with a sound like a cracked bell.

The little witch staggered backward, a wisp of smoke curling up from her palm, and she would've collapsed into the sea if Takanashi hadn't vaulted out of the boat and caught her.

Monday, June 10, 1940
somewhere in the Atlantic

When the word came up from sickbay that the one long-term patient housed there was finally awake, Lieutenant Takanashi reported there immediately. True to the news, he found the redheaded Ostmarker girl sitting up in bed, eating a bowl of soup. At the sight of him entering, she looked somewhere between surprised and wary.

"Hello there," said Takanashi in his native language. "Can you understand me?"

The puzzled look he got back answered that question fairly effectively in the negative, not much to his surprise. He didn't speak any Karlslandic, which he recalled was the principal language of Ostmark, so he took a gamble on English. Her face brightened at that, so he went on,

"You're aboard His Fusōnese Majesty's destroyer Kagerō. It was our boats that took you and the rest of the people you were with off the beach in Boulogne. I'm the fourth lieutenant; my name is Takanashi."

She considered him for a moment with keen violet eyes, then said, "I remember you. You were in the last boat, the one the older man carried me to."

Takanashi nodded. "That was Commander Tanaka—this ship's captain."

"Did he make it?" the girl wondered.

Takanashi smiled. "Yes he did—thanks to you. He's asleep right now, but I'm sure he'll come and visit you when he comes back on watch." The young officer dragged over a metal chair and sat down next to the bunk. "What's your name?"

"Kiara," the little witch replied. "Kiara Vögler." She glanced at the porthole, which told her nothing other than that it was daytime, then asked, "Where are we going?"

"Back to Fusō," Takanashi said. "We caught some fire from Neuroi air units on the way out of the Strait of Calais. Nothing too serious, but the Admiralty ordered us home for repairs."

Kiara blinked. "You're taking me to Fusō?" she asked, sounding astonished.

"I'm afraid so," said Takanashi, rubbing the back of his head with an awkward smile. "Since we weren't supposed to be taking anyone off the beach ourselves, the Admiralty didn't really have a plan for us carrying refugees. Eventually they decided we'd just bring you all home with us. It's a long trip... presumably by the time we get there, the Foreign Ministry and whichever other countries are involved will have figured something out."

With a thoughtful frown, Kiara mused, "I don't think I have a country any more." She turned her violet eyes to him, her gaze aged beyond her years by all she'd experienced, and added, "Ostmark is... gone."

Takanashi, who hadn't wanted to say it, decided on the spot that he couldn't bullshit this girl. "It seems so," he agreed with a nod. "Was anyone from your family with you on the beach? Anyone you know?"

That seemed unlikely, since in the week since their departure no one had come forward to claim her, but he felt he had to ask. He wasn't surprised when she shook her head.

"No," she said. "There's no one." With a matter-of-factness that he felt sure was masking tightly controlled emotion, she went on, "I don't think anyone else made it out."

"Well, these are confusing times," said Takanashi. "You never know—someone may turn up who thinks the same of you. In the meantime, we'll look after you." Then, his manner becoming brisker, he said, "I have to get back to my duties now, but I'll come and see you again soon. In the meantime, if you need anything, just ask Doc Okada."

Kiara's brow furrowed. "The man who gave me the soup? He's young for a doctor."

"Well, he's really a navy corpsman," Takanashi admitted. "A ship this small doesn't rate an actual doctor as ship's surgeon. The nickname is traditional. But he's good at his job," he assured her. "He'll take good care of you."

The lieutenant was on his way back to the chartroom when he bumped into Tanaka, who was just emerging from his quarters abaft the bridge.

"Ah, Mr. Takanashi," said the captain. "I'm told our youngest guest is awake at last."

"Yessir, I've just been to see her. Her name is Vögler, first name Kiara. It's as we feared, sir—she's an Ostmarker. No family. She thinks she's the only survivor."

"Hm," said Tanaka, rubbing a finger over his greying moustache. "Well, much can change in the time it'll take us to reach Sasebo. We'll just have to see what the powers that be come up with."

"Mm," Takanashi agreed, and then he said half-jokingly, "If worst comes to worst, she can always go and stay with my parents. I'm sure they'd love to have the company."

Friday, July 12, 1946
Gare de l'Est
Paris, Gallia

Kiara Takanashi alighted from the Métro train that had brought her down from Gare du Nord, grateful to be approaching the end of the long trip from Fusō to her new duty station. True, she still had one further lengthy train ride ahead of her, but compared with the several-week sea voyage from Yokosuka to Folkestone, what was another few hours in one of Gallia's comfortable trains?

Since she already had her onward ticket, she bypassed the ticket hall and went straight to the platform indicated on the stub. Her train from Calais had been slightly behind schedule, so the conductors were making their last calls for boarding when she arrived. She sprang hurriedly on board and made her way to the first of the second-class carriages as the staff buttoned up the train behind her. Passing up several compartments as too crowded for her liking, she spotted one she thought was empty and thrust the door open.

To her mild surprise, she found that the compartment was not empty; there was one person in it, a young woman in an ornate black-and-gold uniform she didn't recognize, sitting in the far corner where Kiara hadn't seen her through the corridor window. Her head was turned away as Kiara entered the compartment, evidently gazing out the window, so at first the Ostmarker saw only the back of her head and her long fall of straight, vividly pink hair.

At the sound of the door, she turned to see who was coming in, then blinked and looked again, her crimson eyes going wide, evidently startled by what she saw.

Equally surprised, Kiara fumbled for words momentarily and, out of sheer reflex, mumbled, "Ah, 'tschuldigung." Then, instinctively taking the stranger for a Liberion, she indicated the empty bench on the opposite side of the compartment and asked in English, "Er, is this side taken?"

"Huh?" the pink-haired girl replied, looking momentarily blank. Then she seemed to gather herself in, shaking her head slightly, and said, "Oh, uh, no, be my guest."

"Danke," said Kiara, entering the compartment the rest of the way.