The first shell fell at three minutes past midnight. Klaus Richter felt it before he heard it—a deep, tectonic shudder that traveled up through the concrete of his basement shelter and into his bones. Then the ceiling collapsed. Then the world turned to fire and thunder.

He woke in darkness, dust filling his mouth like ground glass, the taste of pulverized brick and something sweeter—burning rubber, burning flesh, he could not tell which. His hands were clutching something against his chest. He uncurled his fingers and found blueprints. Still dry. Still intact. The jet engine design, his life's work, compressed beneath his body like a child shielded by a mother.

Above him, the city of Berlin was being erased.

Klaus dragged himself from the rubble with hands that bled through bandages he could no longer feel. His right knee, damaged in the last war—the real last war, not this one—locked for a moment then released. He crawled onto a street that was no longer a street but a canyon of shattered masonry. Where a cathedral once stood, there was now a cone of smoke rising like a prayer answered by the wrong god.

"God isn't answering anything tonight," a voice said.

Klaus turned. A woman stood in the doorway of what had once been a bakery. Her face was wrapped in a gray scarf. She held a bucket that was already full of water and would be useless no matter how many times she filled it.

"Who are you?" Klaus asked.

"Someone who knew the cathedral had a weak foundation. I told them to reinforce it." She set down her bucket. "They said it was a fifty-year-old building. Why spend money on a building that won't last fifty more years?"

Klaus looked at his blueprints. The jet engine. Two hundred pages of calculations, wind tunnel data, metallurgical specifications. If the war had six more months, he could have built a prototype. If the war had six more months, none of this would be happening.

"I know how to build something that changes everything," he said.

The woman looked at him with eyes that had stopped seeing wonder a long time ago. "Everyone says that. The man on the corner claims he invented a bomb that sinks ships from the bottom of the ocean. The boy in the next street says he can fly. They're all right. They're all lying. The sky falls the same way for everyone."

She walked away, bucket sloshing, and Klaus stood in the rubble and held his blueprints like a dead man holds a rosary.

---

Three weeks later, Klaus found himself in a factory that was half-burned, half-functional, surrounded by workers whose hands were raw from metal and whose eyes were dull from sleeplessness. They were building parts for a machine that would never fly. He knew this because he knew the future, and in the future, the war ended before the prototype was ready. But knowing the end doesn't make the middle any easier to endure.

The factory manager, a woman named Grete who had lost her son to the Eastern Front and her left arm to a lathe, stood beside him and said, "The Minister wants the jet fighter by spring. He says it will turn the tide."

"It can't," Klaus said. "Even if we finish it, there won't be enough fuel to fly it. Even if we had fuel, there won't be enough trained pilots. Even if we had pilots—"

"Then why are we building it?"

Klaus looked at the half-finished fuselage on the assembly floor. It was beautiful, in a terrible way. Sweeping wings, a turbine engine that sang even in stillness, a cockpit glass that caught the gray Berlin light and fractured it into rainbows. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever designed, and it would die on this floor, never to taste air.

"Because," he said, "it's the only thing we have left to build that isn't a grave."

Grete nodded. She understood. She went back to her lathe, and Klaus walked through the factory listening to the machines, counting their rhythms like a heartbeat, each one a small defiance against the chaos outside.

In the evenings, he sat in a room above the factory and looked at his blueprints and thought about engines that would never turn. He thought about the young pilots who would fly machines like this one—if there was a if, if, if. He had seen their faces on the training base, boys of seventeen with uniforms that hung loose on their frames, eyes bright with a certainty that the world had not yet earned the right to crush.

One evening, a pilot came to visit. Seventeen years old, blonde, with a face that belonged to a poster more than to a war. He stood in the doorway and looked at Klaus with something between reverence and terror.

"Are you the one who designs the machines?" the boy asked.

"I design what I can."

"Will it fly?"

"Yes."

"Will it win?"

Klaus looked at the boy's face—so young, so sure—and felt something break inside his chest, a hairline fracture too small to see but devastating in its consequences.

"It will fly," he said. "Whether it wins is not in my hands."

The boy nodded, satisfied with an answer that satisfied no one, and left. Klaus sat in the dark for a long time after, listening to the distant rumble of artillery, wondering if a man who knows the future can ever truly call himself free.

---

The prototype was finished on a Tuesday in March. It sat on the assembly floor like a sleeping predator, wings folded, engine silent, waiting for a dawn that would never come with the glory it deserved. Klaus ran his hand along the fuselage, feeling the smooth metal beneath his palm, and thought of all the hands that had shaped it—Grete's calloused fingers on the lathe, the young machinist who could read tolerances to the thousandth of a millimeter, the old foreman who had built biplanes in the First War and now built jets in the last war, whatever you wanted to call it.

They moved it to the airfield at dawn. The sky was pale gray, the color of wet slate. Klaus stood beside the machine with a wrench in his hand and a throat full of words he could not speak. He wanted to tell the pilot everything—about the weight of knowledge, about the years he had spent in a future that hadn't happened yet, about the machines that would one day fly higher and faster than anything humanity had ever imagined.

But he said nothing. He handed the wrench to the pilot, who smiled at him with the bright, untroubled smile of a young man who believes in victory.

The engine started. The sound was unlike anything Klaus had ever heard—a scream that wasn't human, not mechanical either, something between a animal and a force of nature. The jet taxied down the runway, gaining speed, and then it was airborne. It rose like a bird learning flight for the first time, wobbling, uncertain, then steadying into a graceful arc against the pale sky.

Klaus stood on the ground and watched the machine climb, and he felt the most beautiful and the most terrible thing a creator can feel: pride, immediately followed by grief, because he knew—knew with the certainty of memory—that this beautiful machine would never see combat. The war would end before it was ready. The Allies would take it, study it, improve it, and use it against enemies Klaus couldn't name in a world he couldn't imagine.

The jet disappeared into cloud.

Klaus walked back to Berlin alone. The city was a skeleton of itself, every building scarred, every street lined with rubble. He walked past the cathedral, past the bakery, past the man who claimed to invent submarine-sinking bombs, past the boy who dreamed of flying. He walked until he reached his room above the factory, and he sat down at his desk and opened a fresh sheet of paper.

He began to draw again.

Not for this war. Not for any war he could see. He drew for the future he knew would come—a future of faster machines, higher flights, machines that crossed oceans in hours and continents in minutes. He drew for a world that would use his designs for things other than killing, or at least he hoped so, because hope was the only thing left.

Outside, the wind blew through the ruins of Berlin, carrying dust and the faint smell of rain, and Klaus Richter, the last iron knight of a dying age, drew engines that would fly long after he was gone.

--- OTMES-v2-95C0F4-09-M10-061-10R455-10DA E_total: 19.80 | Dominant: M10(Epic)|M1(Tragedy) | Angle: 45.0 | Irreversibility: 1.0 | Rank: T1(Despair)