The city breathed differently now.
Once, Berlin had been a theater of frenzy, where Hitler’s shrill voice cut through the air like a knife, his words whipped into the populace through rattling loudspeakers and torchlit parades. But since the coup, that chaos had been replaced by a strange, unsettling calm — a calm too precise, too mechanical to feel natural.
Now, the city pulsed like a vast engine.
From every square, brass-framed propaganda screens glowed with steady light, their letters etched in stark clarity: Ordnung. Fortschritt. Ewigkeit. Order. Progress. Eternity. The words appeared in perfect rhythm with the hiss of steam valves hidden beneath the cobblestones, so that the very streets seemed to breathe the message in unison. Where once Berliners shouted and saluted in unbridled ecstasy, now they walked in silence, eyes lifted briefly toward the screens before lowering again, as if afraid to look too long.
Albert Speer’s voice carried through the fog like the purr of a velvet engine: measured, urbane, promising efficiency, stability, destiny. It was a voice without frenzy — and that was its power.
The city itself reflected his new order. Along Unter den Linden, the great linden trees had been replaced by steel pylons bearing electric filaments that crackled faintly, their light tinged with cold blue rather than fire’s warmth. Automaton patrols marched in perfect cadence, their brass joints glinting beneath gas lamps, exhaling little sighs of steam into the night. Behind their mirrored visors, no human eyes betrayed cruelty or fatigue — only the hiss and clank of obedience.
At Alexanderplatz, the colossal clockwork tower had been remade. Its gears no longer marked the hour with wild chimes, but with measured, metallic pulses that sounded like a heart of iron keeping time for the city. Above it, Speer’s new insignia turned slowly — a stylized cog entwined with the Reich’s eagle — as if to remind Berliners that they themselves were now components in a grander machine.
In the cafés, people whispered, but only between the grinding of the espresso-automatons and the hiss of steam from brass samovars. Some claimed Speer was his own man, a visionary who had saved the Reich from Hitler’s madness. Others said he was but a marionette, his strings tugged by Göring’s corpulent fist of industry and Himmler’s black-gloved web of spies. Most did not care. The trains arrived on time. The factories roared without pause. Food, though rationed, was regular.
In one such café near Friedrichstraße, a woman sat in the corner, her gloved hands wrapped around a porcelain cup she had not sipped. Her auburn hair caught the lamplight like burnished copper, though her gaze was fixed beyond the rising steam. To the casual eye she was just another Berliner savoring the order of the new world. Only those who lingered long enough to meet her gaze might have noticed the calculation behind her eyes — the quiet defiance.
She listened as Speer’s voice, amplified by hidden brass cones in the walls, declared: “We are not a people of chaos. We are a machine of destiny. Each of us, a gear in the eternal Reich.”
The patrons nodded absently. The automatons hissed. And Isla Voss smiled faintly, her lips curving around a secret no one else in that room would ever guess.
Berlin was no longer wild. It was precise. And precision, she knew, could be broken.
