Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  Yael followed his gaze to the cuff of her left sleeve. Her gauze wrapping had been too hasty. Its netted white tail peeked out from under the leather.

  “A bandage,” she told him.

  He leaned in. Closer, curious. His breath was stale with smoke. “Let’s have a look.”

  Flash, thud, verdammt, went Yael’s heart.

  Yael could manipulate her appearance the way other people might change clothes. These skinshifts could modify many things: her height, weight, coloring, the length of her hair, the sound of her voice. But some things could not be altered: gender, wounds, tattoo ink.

  These things stayed.

  The wolves were her constant, the single thing about her that was solid and sure. Months ago, when Yael had returned to the resistance headquarters with her first, fresh wolf, Henryka had several peevish words to offer on the matter (the foremost among them being “dead giveaway”). The Polish woman even went so far as to point out that the religious laws of Yael’s people forbade the practice.

  But what was done was done. Ink had been under Yael’s skin for more than a decade. By adding the wolves she’d simply made it her own. These new markings were far, far better than the National Socialists’ numbers. Their presence alone was not enough to condemn Yael, but they would raise questions if the patrol saw them. Enough suspicions to get her detained.

  The only thing that would raise more questions would be for Yael to refuse the soldier’s request. Slowly, slowly she lifted her sleeve. The gauze went all the way up her arm. Flecked in rust spots and frayed at the edges.

  The soldier squinted at it. “What happened?”

  Yael’s heart was louder now (FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT. FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT), pumping hard with the knowledge that only a few threads stood between her and disaster. All the soldier had to do was reach out and tug. See the ink and the raw and the blood.

  What then?

  There was always a way out. Vlad had taught her that, along with so many other things. These two men and their two rifles were no match for the skills she’d learned, even in this seventeen-year-old girl’s body. She could knock them out cold, disappear in twenty seconds flat.

  Yael could, but she wouldn’t. An incident so close to the resistance’s headquarters, on the eve of her first mission, was far too risky. It would draw the eyes and the wrath of the Gestapo to the neighborhood. Expose the resistance. Ruin everything.

  There was always a way out, but tonight (tonight of all nights) it had to be clean.

  “It’s a dog bite,” Yael answered. “A stray attacked me a few days ago.”

  The soldier assessed the bandage for another moment. His stance slacked from aggressive to conversational.

  “Was it bad?” he asked.

  Was it bad? Yael would take a thousand and one of Mina’s dog bites in place of what had really happened. Trains and barbed-wire fences. Death and pain and death.

  “I survived,” she said with a smile.

  “Stray bitches make good target practice. Almost as much as commies and Jews.” The soldier laughed and slapped the butt of his Mauser. “Next one I see I’ll shoot in your honor.”

  Yael kept her lips drawn up in Mina’s meek, demure fashion. The mask of a good little Reichling. It was only in the unseen places she raged. Her toes curled hard inside her boots. Her fingers slid back to her jacket pocket, where her trusted Walther P38 handgun nestled.

  The second soldier shut the book, so all Yael could see was the Reich stamp on the front. The eagle’s wings were rigid: a double salute. The wreath and twisted cross hung effortlessly from its talons. All as black as that monstrous smoke. The same blackness that grew inside Yael if she let the memories billow back.

  “Everything seems to be in order, Fräulein Jager.” He held Mina’s book out to her.

  The lining of Yael’s throat tasted sooty. Her toes were cracking—pop, pop, pop—tiny, quiet gunshots inside her boots.

  There was a time and a place for remembering. There was a target waiting for her rage, her revenge. This evening, this street, these men were not it.

  Her touch slipped off the gun. Yael reached out and grabbed the papers instead.

  “Thank you,” she said as she tucked the pages of another girl’s life deep into her jacket. “I must go. My mother will be worried.”

  The second soldier nodded. “Of course, Fräulein Jager. Sorry to delay you.”

  She started walking, her fist shoved into one of the jacket’s normal pockets, clenching the talismans she kept there: a blunted thumbtack, a pea-sized wooden doll with its face worried off. One by one her toes uncurled. Bit by bit the blackness retreated, back to its uneasy sleep.

  “Watch out for the strays!” the first soldier called after her.

  Yael held up a hand to acknowledge him but did not turn. She was done with soldiers and strays.

  She had much worse things to face.

  CHAPTER 3

  NOW

  MARCH 9, 1956

  GERMANIA, THIRD REICH

  Yael held her breath when she entered Henryka’s office—expecting a barrage of mother-hen clucking and pecks of guilt (Where were you? I was so worried! I thought you’d been discovered/killed/[insert disaster here]!). But the basement door swung open to a Henryka-less room.

  Perhaps she had not been missed after all.

  Yael let her breath leak out and stepped into the office. It was not the fanciest of spaces, its smallness made even more cramped by the shelves upon shelves, the military-grade desk, and the card table petaled by mismatched chairs. Paper was everywhere. Forests’ worth, covering the walls, sticking wayward out of drawers, stacked in files all across Henryka’s desk. Documents of old operations, reams of intelligence on the National Socialist government’s top officials, and rescued books. (Yael had read her way through Henryka’s library at least six times, learning about the Biology of Desert Wildlife and the History of Western Civilization and Advanced Calculus and everything else the battered encyclopedia sets had to offer.)

  But one piece of paper in particular always drew Yael’s eye: the operations map that took up the far wall. The whole of Europe was stained in red. A crimson tide rolled over the Ural Mountains, bleeding into Asia. Scarlet spilled through the Mediterranean Sea and dripped down the crown of Africa.

  Red: the color of battle wounds and the Third Reich. Bitter, bright death.

  Whenever Yael studied this map, she couldn’t help but be amazed at the scale of Hitler’s victory. According to the stories, when the Führer first announced his vision of an occupied Africa and Europe to his generals, some of them had laughed. “Impossible,” they’d said. “It can’t be done.”

  But the word impossible held no sway over a man like Hitler. He sent his armies marching across Europe anyway; his ruthless SS troops ignored all “civilized” rules of war, mowing down soldiers and civilians alike.

  Some countries, such as Italy and Japan, joined Hitler’s annexing rampage, hungry for territories of their own. Other countries, too scarred by the war that ravaged the world two decades before, refused to fight. It didn’t take much persuading for them to sign a nonaggression pact with the Axis. “Peace at all costs” was the isolationist catchphrase in the American newspapers. The Soviet Union put its pen to the pact as well, for all was not right in its lands. Localized uprisings against Stalin’s ethnic purges and dissension within the government were chipping away at the great Communist war machine. It was far from battle-ready.

  Britain was the sole great power that did not collaborate or stand by. It was also the first of the great powers to fall. Its planes and pluck could not stop Operation Sea Lion. After the National Socialists hung their flags over the stones of a broken Parliament, Hitler bided his time, solidifying his hold on the conquered countries as he kept his calculating gaze to the east.

  The Soviet Union was fracturing under the stress of itself. Stalin’s naysayers rose out of the woodwork, decrying his alliance with the Germans. Entire regions of the country splin
tered off into rebellions. By the time the Führer finally broke his nonaggression pact in 1942, Stalin’s armies were too diminished from within to fight a two-front war. The National Socialists and Italians beat down the Soviets’ European border while Japanese soldiers edged their way into Siberia.

  Once Hitler was assured of the Soviets’ defeat, he turned his sights back on his Italian allies (whose newly acquired territories happened to be in Europe and Africa). After using his spies to assassinate the Italian leader, Mussolini, and blaming the murder on Italian partisans, Hitler moved his armies into Italy and its territories to “stabilize the region.”

  They never left.

  The red lands of Europe and Africa were claimed as Lebensraum, living space for the Aryan people. Their native populations were reduced to second-class citizens; any who resisted were shipped off to labor camps. Jews, Romani, Slavs, and all others the Führer considered to be Untermenschen were rounded up. Taken to camps of a different kind.

  Crimson wasn’t the only color on Henryka’s operations map. Two distinct empires made up the Axis: the Third Reich and Japan, which helmed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Führer and Emperor Hirohito had halved the Asian continent like a Christmas pie, straight down the Seventieth Meridian. Henryka had chosen an ominous gray to color the Emperor’s territory.

  At the top of the map, hanging in the high north, there was no color at all. Just a vast white stretch of winter lands, where echoes of Stalin’s army lived on. Too fractured, too underresourced, and too cold for the Axis forces to bother with.

  For over a decade these colors stayed the same. Settling in, deeper, dye strong. (Though according to the resistance’s intelligence, Hitler’s ambitions for the National Socialists and the Aryan race were on a global scale. It didn’t matter that he’d signed nonaggression pacts with the Americas or that he was sworn allies with Emperor Hirohito. Intrigue and political backstabbing were Hitler’s specialty. Besides, why else would the Reich’s hundreds of labor camps be dedicated to churning out war materials?)

  But as Yael stared at the map this time, she wasn’t looking at colors or the lack of them. She was not counting the coded operative pins that dotted the Reich’s major cities—Germania, London, Cairo, Rome, Baghdad, Paris.

  Yael was looking at the road ahead.

  The Axis Tour.

  The long-distance race had started its life as a Hitler Youth activity, training for boys who wanted to join the Kradschützen motorcycle troop. It was so popular it evolved into a race. Once the war was won, Joseph Goebbels—the Reich’s propaganda minister—decided to televise the competition, to show off the two Axis empires’ conquered territories, commemorate their victory, and promote their alliance. Teenagers from the Hitler Youth and the Great Japan Sincerity Association competed every year, racing their motorcycles from capital to capital. A journey that captured the attention of the Axis’s entire population for the better part of a month.

  Henryka had marked the tour’s path as a dotted black line that spanned three continents in a crooked U. Yael traced the path with her forefinger. Starting in Germania, down the boot that was once Italy, across the sea, along the Sahara’s sands, through the Middle East’s rugged mountains, into the jungles of Indochina, up to the port of Shanghai, over another sea, all the way to Tokyo. It was 20,780 kilometers divided into nine legs, traveled by twenty racers all fighting for victory via the lowest cumulative time.

  This was the journey she had to take. This was the race she had to win.

  The basement door swung open to reveal Henryka, wide-eyed, cradling armfuls of documents.

  “Yael?” The older woman always greeted Yael with a question mark when she wore sleeves. There were, Henryka sometimes complained, too many faces in Yael’s repertoire for her to keep track of. (To be fair, the faces looked very similar: oval shaped, light hair, bright eyes, long nose, straight white teeth. Yael often had trouble keeping all the aliases straight herself. They were almost, awfully, interchangeable.)

  Yael’s finger dropped away from Tokyo. She dropped Mina’s face at the same time, letting Fräulein Jager’s soft features slough away. There was a new face in her mind, just as Aryan but sharper. Yael sculpted it in practiced seconds. The process of stretching skin, shifting bone, and warping cartilage was always painful, but it was quick: snap, snap, snap. New pieces, new girl.

  Henryka watched Yael’s transformation through strands of brittle, home-bleached frizz, a scowl growing on her face. “Where have you been?”

  Here we go. Yael could feel the rant whipping up in the woman’s tiny body. It almost made her smile—Henryka still fussing over her like some sort of ugly duckling, even after years of the girl’s own scrappy survival and Vlad’s intense operative training.

  “You were due here over a quarter of an hour ago! Kasper has been waiting with the truck, and I’ve been half out of my mind with worry! I was five minutes away from notifying Reiniger and sending out a search party! He could have canceled the mission altogether! So much depends on you.”

  This lecture held too much truth for Yael to smile at.

  “I’m sorry, Henryka.” She paused, trying to think of what else to say that wouldn’t add another worry line to the woman’s aging skin. “I am.”

  Henryka’s anger wilted in a heart’s space. Ten seconds of yelling seemed to be all she had the energy for. Yael wondered how long she’d been awake. Stretches of sleepless days weren’t rare for the older woman, who spent most of them in this hidden office—coordinating drops for operatives and decoding messages from cells all across the Axis territories. This place and this indomitable Polish woman were the brain stem of the resistance. Collecting information, dispersing it through the many nerve endings, causing movement.

  Henryka’s workload had been especially heavy lately, with the upcoming Axis Tour. She had to make sure the world was ready for what was about to happen if Yael completed her mission: a complete uprising. Operation Valkyrie reborn.

  Henryka moved over to her desk, tucking the new documents into the avalanche of manila folders. In the far corner, behind the mass of files and a worn typewriter, a television whined out high, grainy frequencies. Its black-and-white pictures flickered strange light off the peeling ceiling paint. Henryka paused to watch it. Old footage was playing, a montage of last year’s Axis Tour. Short clips of motorcycles filmed from the roadside were interspersed with shots of the racers’ official times being recorded on the checkpoint cities’ chalkboards. But the real meat of the coverage were the interviews conducted at each checkpoint. Conversations with the racers who’d clawed their way to the top of this list. There were a slew of Mein Kampf–quoting German boys, proud and puffed. There were glossy-haired Japanese boys, serious and honor-heavy.

  And then there was Adele Wolfe. The girl who used her twin brother’s papers so she could enter the all-male race. Who cut her hair and taped her breasts and raced like all the rest. The only girl who had ever competed. The victor of the ninth Axis Tour.

  Victor Adele Wolfe was a classic Reich beauty—pale, pale, pale—with corn-silk hair and Nordic eyes. This face was aired all over the Reichssender (the television’s only state-approved channel) just days after her victory and astonishing confession that she was not actually Felix Wolfe but his sister. (Her Iron Cross had almost been revoked by racing officials, but the Führer had taken a liking to the svelte blond. She was, he said, a perfect example of Aryan splendor and strength. No one dared argue with him.) The cameras followed her everywhere, documenting dozens of press interviews, an awards ceremony in view of Mount Fuji, the traditional Victor’s Ball at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

  Out of her racing gear and wrapped up in a silk kimono, Adele Wolfe almost appeared delicate. It was hard to imagine exactly how a girl who looked like a forest fairy straight out of the Grimm Brothers’ storybooks had beaten out nineteen burly boys under such grueling conditions. Even after ten months of studying the race footage and mastering the maneuvers and speed of
her own Zündapp KS 601 motorcycle on countryside autobahns, Yael still wasn’t quite sure how Adele had managed the feat.

  But she was about to find out.

  Henryka turned away from the screen, eyes back to Yael’s freshly changed face. “You look just like her.”

  Exact impersonations usually took days of study. Even then they weren’t always accurate. There were always adjustments to be made, minute details to fix. The exact color of eyes and hair. A missed freckle. The precise angle of the nose. Scars deep and wide and worrying over skin.

  Yael had perfected Adele Wolfe’s appearance in a single week. She was tall (175 centimeters) with white-blond hair and three very distinct freckles on the left cheek. Unreal blue eyes—like ribboning layers of glacier ice, or tropical shallows. Replicating Adele Wolfe’s features was the easy part. It was every other aspect of the ninth victor’s life that was the challenge.

  Yael had been studying Adele Wolfe for nearly a year. Breathing, sleeping, eating, living everything Adele. Observing the girl from close and far. Perfecting the way she walked (as if she were being pulled on silk strings). Noting how she twisted the ends of her hair when she was nervous. Memorizing every strange, seemingly useless fact from Adele’s past.

  Yael knew the following: Adele Wolfe had been born to a mechanic and a housewife in the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, on May 2, 1938. Her two brothers—Martin (older) and Felix (twin)—taught her boxing and wrestling. Her mother taught her knitting (not so successfully—the socks always came out warped and unraveling), and her father taught her racing (rather successfully, even though girls weren’t allowed to compete in formal races). She hated beets and fish with livid passion. Her favorite color was yellow, but she always told people it was red because it seemed fiercer.

  Adele Wolfe wanted, more than anything, to be someone.

  She started racing under her twin brother’s name at the age of ten. At first it was just a race or two. But then she kept winning. Felix Wolfe rose to the top of his age rank and even had his name and photograph printed in the newspaper Das Reich. Adele raced and won, raced and won, and there seemed to be nothing that could stop her.