1944
'Everything's fine,' she says. Her voice is shaking.
The doctor is watching him. He holds the gun perfectly still, and he watches Erik; as if the weapon in his hand is a small thing, incidental; so utterly unimportant compared to what Erik can do.
Erik would love to think that the doctor is right.
The coin is so small. Erik thinks of the gates, the way he could feel them singing through him, and it was suddenly the obvious thing to do: to reach out his hands and pull -
'Everything's fine,' his mother whispers.
'Three,' the doctor says, rolling his eyes, and the coin won't move, Erik pulls and pulls and tries to feel the metal again but it won't move, and the doctor's eyes are steel-hard in their resignation. And then something snaps inside Erik, just as there is a shot.
It is disappointing, but perhaps this will teach the boy to try harder in future.
Sebastian sighs, and then just as he pulls the trigger something yanks his hand to the side. The bullet narrowly misses hitting one of the guards in the shoulder, and Sebastian is vaguely aware that it strikes the back wall. The woman half-collapses, gasping in terror and shock, and the two guards holding her pull her back to her feet.
'Fantastisch!' Sebastian exclaims in genuine delight. The boy is breathing heavily and looks incredibly, pathetically confused by what he has just done, but before Sebastian can say anything else Erik closes his eyes and extends a hand again, only one this time.
The coin rises, jerkily, off the table; it hovers about four inches off the wood and stays there, wobbling slightly.
'Ausgezeichnet, Erik!' Sebastian says, grinning. 'Wirklich, fantastisch - '
He is interrupted by a clink as the coin abruptly drops to the table, and Erik visibly flinches; almost immediately and, Sebastian thinks, involuntarily he whips round to look at his mother, and then, pleadingly, back at him.
Theatrically, Sebastian puts down the gun, rolling his eyes. 'Beruhige dich, Erik,' he says impatiently, and turns his attention to the two camp guards. 'Lassen uns ins Ruhe, bitte.' He looks the woman up and down - the bones of her face stand out, her clothes hang off her - and adds, 'Holen ihr etwas zu essen.'
She goes quietly, attention fixed immovably on her son; her eyes follow him until the moment the door closes.
'Es tut mir leid, Herr Doktor,' Erik rushes, almost stuttering, the second the door is shut. 'Ich kann es wieder bewegen - '
'Beruhige dich, Erik,' Sebastian says again. 'Sie wird nicht verletzt werden.' He smiles at the boy again - such a gift, if Sebastian can only help him control it; what a wonderful thing to have found, in this dull, muddy, quietly hellish place, this extraordinary talent! - and adds, 'Ich bin sehr stolz auf dich.'
The boy bites his lip, and nods. The fear does not leave his face, but Sebastian is confident that, with time, it will.
Erik has been given food and drink and a change of clothes. He has been shown to a small room where he slept for a few hours, sinking straight into a blank unconsciousness in a way he never has before. He has seen his mother again, briefly: she hugged him and sobbed and then, bracketing his face with her hands, she thanked him, over and over, for saving her.
Erik remembers the way that the doctor looked at him when he pushed that gun to the side, when he lifted that coin from the table, as if this power made him more than ordinary, more than just an unremarkable child among the millions brought to this terrifying place. His mother has always told him that he is special, but she is looking at him now in a slightly different way.
It takes Erik a long time to figure out what the strange humming sensation is, the one that he can feel if he concentrates and looks for it and that, if he doesn't, goes away. When the guards come in and say that he has rested long enough and Doctor Schmidt wants to see him again, his eyes fall on the metal door handle, and he knows.
They take him to the same room as before, but this time a curtain has been drawn over the glass wall that Erik couldn't stand to look at even as he couldn't help but see what was behind it, the line he prayed he would never be made to cross.
The doctor is still smiling. 'Erik,' he says. 'How nice to see you. I trust you're feeling better?'
'Yes,' Erik says hesitantly. He pauses, and then adds, 'Thank you?'
The doctor grins. 'You're a very talented child, Erik,' he says. 'One in a million.'
'The metal,' Erik says quietly, because it seems to be what the doctor wants to hear. 'I can feel it.'
'You can do more than that, Erik,' the doctor says, chiding. 'You know that. Much more.'
There is an array of metal objects on the desk in front of him, neatly lined up in size order: paperclips, pens, a spherical steel paperweight, a metal tray full of papers. On the floor beside the desk, where the line ends, is a filing cabinet.
'What do you think you can do with these, Erik?' the doctor continues. The smile hasn't left his face, not once, but it isn't the flat, static, masklike smile that Erik has seen on too many faces; the doctor has an energy to him as if he can barely contain his enthusiasm.
If Erik closes his eyes and thinks of how it felt when he moved the gates, the gun, the coin, he can catch a glimpse of that same feeling in the objects in front of him. He is beginning to recognise and to like it, this feeling of metal: so strong, but with a strange flexible quality to it, as if with the right pressure it will bend to Erik's will.
Erik picks an object at random, a fountain pen, and he can feel the metal of the pen and it's all there, ready to move, if he can just…push…
Erik moves his hand unthinkingly as he sits there and thinks up, move up; he lifts it automatically a few inches off the table and there, the pen rises up in the air. Nothing is touching it, nothing is lifting it except for Erik and his power.
Erik looks at it, suspended over the table, and something like the doctor's excitement floods through him. This is Erik's power. This is what he was always meant to do.
Without thinking too hard about what he's doing Erik twists his fingers slightly and the cap clicks off the pen. He moves his hand downwards and the pen mirrors it, drops down to the paper lying in the tray to draw a long looping black scrawl over the doctor's papers: a random configuration of lines which Erik thinks with some work and some finesse might be persuaded to form a word.
He looks up, biting his lip, to see whether he has done the right thing.
He must have. The doctor is smiling.
Sebastian thinks it would be prudent to leave Auschwitz as soon as possible. He will never gain Erik's trust if Erik sees too much of what has gone on here, what he will in his childish simplicity think Sebastian has condoned.
Regrettable. It truly is. The brutality of which humans are capable is ceaselessly astounding, as if they are engaged in a constant effort to outdo their last moral atrocity with one even more impressive. Nazism, Sebastian thinks, will be a tough one to beat.
But ultimately it is not his concern. The victims and perpetrators are all of them alike in their inferiority to the new people coming; the sketchy line between Jew and Aryan will blur and disappear soon enough beside the clear delineations of Sebastian's master race.
He has got what he came to Auschwitz for, and far more: a talent beyond what he hoped for, with the potential to be second only to his own. Time to leave.
Perhaps it is also time, Sebastian thinks, that he got in touch with Azazel.
'We're leaving this place,' the doctor tells him briskly. Erik has now been here for four days; he barely leaves his room except for the hours he spends with the doctor, who sits and watches as Erik makes everything from paperclips to furniture move around the room, or bends wire into new configurations, or aims and fires a gun without touching it. He is always delighted with every new skill Erik masters, but this pales in comparison to the feeling of Erik simply using this strange ability. It comes easily, now; the dam has broken and power is flooding out with a speed that surprises him. 'You're not safe in Poland.'
Erik blinks. 'But, my mother - '
'I've made arrangements to have her transferred out of the camp.'
Erik has heard the word 'transferred' before. He can't leave if Mama has to stay here; he has to make the doctor save her. Surely the doctor can save her.
'No. No, no,' the doctor says quickly when he sees Erik's face. 'She'll be freed. She can come with us.'
'Where are we going?' Erik asks. His voice comes out as almost a whisper; something else, something more important, is caught in his throat. We're leaving. She'll be freed. The words are the most beautiful he has heard in a long time. Perhaps his whole life.
'We're looking for other people like you,' the doctor says. 'People who are gifted. I think we'll start in Argentina.'
Gifted. The word doesn't have the immediate, visceral relief that comes with 'free', but Erik turns it over in his head, the soft silver sound of it, and he thinks it's a label that, after so many others, he'll finally be glad to wear.
'Herr Doktor?' he says tentatively. He has been trying not to think about this, but he has a half-formed knowledge that if he doesn't ask this question now he never will, and he will never forgive himself.
'You don't have to call me that any more,' the doctor says cheerfully. 'I'm not a doctor and my name isn't Klaus Schmidt. That was a…a false identity, if you will, that I used to get in here and find you. My name is Sebastian Shaw.'
'Herr Shaw?' Erik tries. The man who is not a doctor, but who nevertheless saved him, nods for him to continue. Erik glances reflexively around. Outside these four walls, there are things happening that he doesn't want to think about, and, if not for the slightest chance, they would be happening to him. 'Why don't you…Why can't you save all of them?'
Herr Shaw, abruptly, is no longer smiling. 'I wish I could,' he says easily. 'But they're not like you, Erik.'
Erik says nothing. He knows what the man means, but a part of him which does not dare to speak is nevertheless convinced that these people are just like him; or rather, that he is just like them. Only luckier.
Herr Shaw reaches forward, and puts a hand on his shoulder: a gentle enough, but oddly weighted touch. 'One day, Erik,' he says, with a confidence which is hard not to believe, 'you will understand.'