She drank her milk, then flashed Jörg a smile. “Really, they’re more like teachers than friends. They tell me to call them my friends, though, so I do.”
“I see.”
“What did you think hearing what they had to say, Mr. Huber?”
“I didn’t know things had gotten so bad in Germany. None of the letters I got from home mentioned anything like that.”
“Do you want to help?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should do what you think is right. It’s a problem your country is facing, Mr. Huber.”
“The Count stopped me. He said I need to be your bodyguard.”
“Can’t you just ignore that?”
“Well, if you help those women, then as your bodyguard, I’ll be able to help everyone, too.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Lila replied flatly. “I have zero interest in helping Germany. The best way to solve the food shortages is to have the Central powers surrender. If they do that, then Poland will one day return to the Polish.”
“Yes, I understand that. But the decision to end the war would take a considerable amount of time and many arduous steps.”
“Can I tell you what I think?”
“Please do.”
“On June 4, the Austrian Army started fighting the Russians in southwestern Ukraine. Some Polish people also live there. The German Army arrived to help the Austrians, and they did horrible things to the Polish and Ukrainian people. Why should I help a country like that? Even if they’re facing hard times.”
Jörg didn’t respond. There was no way to justify something like that, just like when Lila had brought up the attack on Belgium.
“If you want to help your people, then resign as my bodyguard, Mr. Huber,” Lila continued. “You should either work in Berlin to help the citizens or go back to the front lines and help Germany win the war. It’s your life. Do with it what you want.”
“You’re saying I should go back to my corpus? But I just got used to this simulacrum.”
“Remember what I said before? If you stay here, you’ll become an actual monster. You should rest as much as you can, then leave. While you’re still human.”
“But I want to see you happy. I want to see that before I go back home.”
“You take things way too seriously. None of this is your fault, so there’s no point in thinking about any of it. Instead, focus on saving your own soul. That’s what you should do when you can no longer see God or hear his voice.”
If you can’t see the path ahead, then you need to make it yourself. That was essentially what Lila was telling him to do. She had a point, but it was a hard thing to achieve. To forge a new path, you need willpower, stamina, and luck. And sometimes, you need to make sacrifices. That’s why people hesitate to do it.
If Jörg was going to do that, what could he sacrifice? What could he offer? And after he surrendered whatever was required of him, could he look back and smile without any regrets?
Lila studied his face. “Do you want to help your countrymen, no matter what?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll need money to buy vast supplies of food. How do you plan on getting it?”
“I’ve considered a lot of options, but I haven’t come up with a solution yet. Camille’s suggestion just doesn’t sit right with me.”
“Mr. Huber, you really are way too serious.”
“Do you think so?”
“If you want to earn money selling information, there’s a better way.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll become a spy and steal information from the German Army. Then I’ll sell it to the British and give all the money to you, and you can give it to women in Germany. We’ll use simulacrums to become the world’s greatest spies.”
Jörg looked stunned, then after a moment, he burst out laughing. He’d been wrong to think Lila was so mature. Only a child would dream up such an outlandish idea.
Lila immediately looked upset and puffed out her cheeks. “Why are you laughing?”
“It’s just, I really appreciate how hard you thought to come up with all this.”
“You don’t look very appreciative. You look like you’re making fun of me.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“So? What do you think of my plan?”
“I can’t do it. No matter the circumstances, I don’t want to make money betraying Germany.”
“Okay, then what if we make up a story about you getting back information I stole so the higher-ups in the German Army give you a reward for retrieving stolen information? In other words, we scam them. That way, the information doesn’t leave Germany, and we still get the money.”
Jörg folded his arms and pressed them into his stomach, struggling to hold back a smile. “I wish the German intelligence bureau was that stupid and trusting.”
“So it won’t work?”
“First of all, if you don’t know anything about the army, then you won’t know what information is valuable, let alone what the Allies might find useful. Something like that is hard even for me to figure out.”
“We could ask Milos.”
“Milos?”
“I didn’t say I’d do it alone. We should have him help us. He’s part of the Serbian Army, so he’ll know what sort of information we should be looking for.”
The glimmer in Lila’s eyes told him she was serious. Those weren’t the eyes of an innocent child. Jörg felt like he was looking at a mysterious creature he’d never seen before, whose passion was fueled by her curiosity in the face of this new situation.
Milos and Lila working together spelled trouble. Milos’s seriousness and his contempt for the Central powers ran deep, so he would happily help the young girl if it meant dealing a crushing blow to the German Army. If anything, with Milos in charge, Lila might find herself in over her head.
The smile disappeared from Jörg’s face. “This is bound to get serious if Milos is involved. He’s a staunch supporter of the movement for Greater Serbia.”
“Good. That way, it’ll be more like real information warfare. We’ll definitely be able to fool German intelligence.”
“Once he becomes a part of this, it stops being fake. He’ll be serious about stealing a lot of intel. And once we hand that information over, people could really start getting killed.”
“I have no problem with that, especially if it means the Germans end up losing. Don’t forget, I’m Polish, so I have absolutely no obligation whatsoever to be on Germany’s side.”
Just when Jörg had thought that Lila was beginning to open up to him, she’d distanced herself from him again.
Seeing Jörg fall silent, the young girl continued. “Mr. Huber, you probably don’t believe that a child can do much. But war changes people—not just the adults, but the children, too. We can’t live as kids with the day-to-day hardships of wartime. We skip our childhood and suddenly become grown-ups. Do you understand what I mean? To you, I may sound like a heartless monster, talking about such cruel things even though I’m still a child. But if that’s true, then it was war that did that to me. The winds of war don’t distinguish between adults and children. They turn everyone into monsters. I’m sure you understand that as well as I do, Mr. Huber.”