by Ryan Graudin
“I have to.” Miriam took the smallest doll, pressed it into Yael’s palm. “You can’t take all the dolls. They’re too big to fit in your pocket. I’ll keep the others safe for you.”
The wooden pea baby was so small, nearly lost in the folds of Yael’s hand.
“If you feel lonely,” Miriam went on, “you can look at it and know I have all the others.”
So small by itself. It would get lost if she dropped it.…
But she wouldn’t. Yael’s fist closed. She held it close to her heart and thought of all the invisible eyes. Watching.
“They’ll all be together again someday.” Miriam’s voice crumbled. It was a promise both of them knew would never hold.
Nightfall. A time when the ugliness of the camp shone only in patches of electric light. Darkness oozed between the barracks, pooling into all the cracks the spotlights could not reach. These cracks were Yael’s trail, her breathless path from Barrack 7. She walked them quickly, her shoulders stuck close to the barracks’ walls.
The fence was her first obstacle—lacing electrified metal and barbed teeth that faced the railroad tracks. Yael had crossed it many times, in the wake of guards. It was the only path to the medical block. Her way out.
Two guards stood in front of the gate, their stares drifting through rows of bread-box barracks. Its bars crossed with giant, bracing X’s of metal.
X’s barred her from freedom. But it was an X that would let her pass, open the way to Dr. Geyer’s office.
Yael filled her lungs with ashen air and stepped into the light. Her arm was turned outward so the scroll of numbers shone clearly. All the way down to the X.
—WALK STRAIGHT HEAD HIGH WORDS STRONG—
“I need to see Dr. Geyer,” she told the guards.
Both men stiffened. Ever since the change, the camp guards eyed her the way the barrack women once had: their irises embroidered with fear.
“I’m feeling funny.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, where Miriam had flattened and bound the new shoes to her ribs. The yellow dress and sweater were hidden under her baggy workdress. “He told me to come and see him if that happened.”
—COUGH FOR EFFECT—
The guards shrank back as if she were contagious.
“He’ll be angry if you don’t let me through.” Yael spilled out all the lines Miriam had fed her.
The guards looked at each other, nodded some silent agreement.
The gate opened.
Yael could not breathe as she walked over the tracks. Every piece of her lit bright by the floodlamps. A perfect target for the rifles in the watchtowers, following her exposed frame. Even the hairs on her arm flared. Stolen clothes and shoes lumped under the sheer fabric of her workdress. It was a miracle the guards did not notice what she hid.
She could not see the stars from here, consumed as they were by lamps and smoke, but she felt the watchings. Yael imagined the Babushka just above her, showering magic and miracles.
—WALK STRAIGHT HEAD HIGH BE BRAVE—
Another miracle—she walked alone. Taking her path to freedom with small, uncertain steps. Crossing the tracks, back through the second gate.
Here she faltered. The gate closed behind her with a clang.
The gatekeepers kept their posts as Yael veered left. Toward the infirmary. The lamps were lesser here—strung along an empty walk of poplars and bricks—maintaining the illusion of a town. When she drew close to Dr. Geyer’s office, she stopped.
This was as far as she could go as Yael. Jewish daughter. Experiment. Subject. Host. Inmate 121358ΔX.
Monster.
Yael tucked into the shadows, shed her workdress, doffed her wooden shoes, changed her skin. She pulled down the sweater sleeves Miriam had so carefully folded. Her numbers swallowed up by fragile, cashmere threads until even the X was gone.
She was Bernice Vogt now. With rag roll curls, a father who treasured her picture in his wallet, a mother who baked chocolate cake.
Yael looked into the glow of the infirmary window. Tried to imagine a whole piece of cake smoothing through her throat. Swelling her belly with velvet, cocoa rich.
This thought carried her up the steps of the medical block. Through the door.
—WALK STRAIGHT—
The hall’s air felt thick, warm. Clotted with smells of salt, red, and iron. Her sweater itched against her skin.
The doctor was in. So was the sour-faced nurse. Both had their backs to the door. They stood over the gurney, over a small, unmoving lump. Red was in rivers on the floor. Veining along the grout. Staining the edges of Yael’s stolen shoes.
—STOP—
She halted in the door, unable to peel her eyes off the blood. It looked so different fresh. Still clinging to life and bright.
Most of the children who go into his office do not come back again.
He’s saving you.
Passing you over.
The Babushka’s miracle, magic words spun in her head. The blood smell crept through her nostrils, clung to her insides. It made her words sticky and hot.
“Is my papa here?” she asked, and tried not to look at the hand that hung limp off the gurney. Its fingers wilted and blue and so, so small.
Dr. Geyer and his nurse looked up at the same time. Mirrored expressions: wide, frozen, horror. There was a scalpel in the doctor’s fist and scarlet—dashed and dotted and crackling like radio code—across his lab coat. Only his face was pure white—drained, as if the blood soaking everything were actually his.
Staying Bernice was almost impossible. Imaginary chocolate cake roiled in her stomach, rotten bits of soup scaled her throat. She looked at the gap in Dr. Geyer’s teeth and could not forget how much she hated him.
“B-Bernice? What are you doing in here?” It was the fear in the doctor’s voice that helped her hold on. She was Bernice Vogt, the camp kommandant’s daughter, standing in a red sea, seeing what no child should. These things seemed to upset Dr. Geyer more than cattle cars of families he shredded apart while standing on his apple crate, more than the blood that dripped from his hands.
So Yael stood straighter, ignored the quease in her stomach. “They told me Papa was in the medical buildings. I was sent to fetch him.”
“Kommandant Vogt?”
She nodded. “What are you doing?”
Dr. Geyer tucked his scalpel behind his back—as if that could hide the tiny sliced body on the gurney—and scowled under his breath at the nurse, “Take care of her! And be certain she doesn’t mention this to her father!”
The nurse set down her clipboard. She approached Yael with careful steps over the slick of tile-blood.
“Come with me, darling,” she cooed as she tucked Yael’s hand into hers—there were no bones, only the squish of fat. “Let’s get you back home.”
Yael wondered if she’d been this gentle with the hand from the gurney. Before the lab-coated angel harvested its life… sliced and spread. She didn’t look back as the woman tugged her away. Out into the night where the poplars’ leaves rustled against a spring wind. So loud it almost drowned out the song of the barracks. So fresh it almost made Yael forget the sanguine stick in her throat.
Almost.
It was so easy—the nurse’s way out. No gunshots. No sizzle of wires and smells of charred flesh. Gates swung open for her without a word, and she walked on through, pulled Yael with her.
“You mustn’t tell anyone what you saw in there,” the nurse said over her shoulder as she led the girl down the gravel path. A house sat at the end: glowing, cheery windows, a chimney spouting deathless smoke. The whole property was hedged in by a forest. Thick-trunked, glossy-needled pines. Perfect for disappearing into.
“Dr. Geyer, he tries very hard to fix people,” the nurse went on. Tugging Yael behind her. “He looks for ways to make things better.”
Progress.
But why, why, why? So much blood demanded an answer. Yael was hungry for it. Hungry enough to push one question further: “If h
e was making that person better, why was there blood everywhere?”
The nurse stopped. Those sausage-link fingers clamped around Yael’s arm. Cushy fat crushing into those hidden numbers. The sugarcoating the nurse had tried so hard to keep on her face washed away, revealing the stone of a woman Yael knew so well. “Sometimes people have to die to make things better. It’s a sacrifice for the good of everyone else. Do you understand?”
Yael understood these were easy words to say when you’re the one standing over the altar. Plunging the knife. She also understood that Bernice Vogt would nod, because the seven-year-old with yellow hair and dimples would never be the sacrifice.
So that’s what she did.
“Good,” the nurse said.
Blood swam in Yael’s memories, clung to her mouth. Her arm was still itching beneath her sweater, under the nurse’s tight grip. She tugged her hand away. “I can walk by myself from here.”
The nurse didn’t argue or linger. She left the girl alone. Standing in the middle of the wide, fenceless road. Yael stood rooted there for a moment, a stump of disbelief, staring at the place that had just spit her out. Death had unhinged its jaws, let her tumble away.
She slipped her hand into her pocket, cradled the wooden pea baby in the crease of her life line, and tried not to think of all the pieces she had to leave behind, even though they left her heart gaping. Were they flesh or wood? Did it matter? Both could burn.…
Bernice Vogt’s face slipped away. The ghost girl whispered to a smokeless sky, “I’m Yael. I’m alive.”
The heavens—full of the dead’s eyes and stars—whispered back: You are special. You can live. You are going to change things.
—NO MORE WALKING STRAIGHT RUN NOW DON’T LOOK BACK—
Yael turned and vanished through the pines.
CHAPTER 12
NOW
MARCH 16, 1956
NORTH COAST OF AFRICA
The desert was a thing of beauty. Powder and earth yawned out under a canopy sky. Caramel dunes rippled, edges shimmering under the wind. The air swam—never still—with granules and heat.
The road (if one could call it that) ran along the coast, where sands stretched and slid into a glistening sea. The path they drove along was narrow, pitted, strewn with rocks. Speed was not an option here. The sand was too slippery, and potholes gouged the road. Yael’s Zündapp shuddered over rocks, rattling her bones until she feared they might shatter. After several days on the bike, every part of her body was sore: calves, gluteus maximus, thighs, shoulders, back, arms, neck, face, even her fingernails and teeth. The day of rest on the ferry crossing the Mediterranean Sea had, in Yael’s opinion, only made the pain worse.
She’d made up for it since. Three days of vicious riding with little rest. Rarely stopping, never slowing. It felt like an impossible pace, but even this wasn’t enough to overtake Katsuo and Luka. The pair forged ahead. First and second. Neck and neck. Dust clouds spun behind them like angry jinns, clotting Yael’s nose, lodged between her teeth. She rode with her armband as a makeshift scarf, straining to see the biggest potholes and swerving to avoid them.
But no matter how hard she swerved, how much she flirted with dangerous speeds, Yael stayed a solid third.
Two hours. Ten minutes. Twenty-eight seconds. The gap between herself and the leaders was growing dishearteningly large. (She’d lost another five seconds on the road to the ferry.) Time Yael was beginning to believe she’d never gain back. Not at this rate—weaving and rattling and choking on Luka’s tracks. Yael kept waiting for a slip, a mistake, but Katsuo and Luka were flawless.
And so she must be.
The kilometers rolled on. Sand flayed Yael’s goggles, scrubbed her cheeks raw. Thorny thirst twisted around her throat. It had been hours—a high sun—since her last break. And that was only long enough for a few sips of water and a fresh canister of gasoline from a coastal village.
Even the evening did not bring relief. When the sun fell, the sands embraced its fire. The whole world melted amber—trapping Katsuo’s and Luka’s silhouettes. The pair had slowed. Only whispers of dust peeled off their tires as they tried to navigate the stretching shadows. Darkness washed in fast, flooding the desert and paving the road. The motorcycle’s headlamp was useless. It lit the dust—bright golden fog. Hazing everything until all Yael could see were her handlebars and Katsuo’s and Luka’s taillights. Still riding.
She could not slow. She could not stop.
Now was the time for reclaiming time. While Luka and Katsuo crawled, she would fly. Even tired. Even scoured. Even parched. Even blind.
She could not lose this race.
Yael’s bike bucked down, writhing as its front tire clawed up the jagged side of a pothole. Her sand-gagged scarf caught most of her curses as the Zündapp’s engine roared. Strained. In the sickening space between heartbeats, she feared it might stop, fall back into the hole. But the tread of her tire held true.
Katsuo’s and Luka’s taillights kept fading. Away, away. Yael wrenched the throttle. The Zündapp’s engine bellowed, and the bike shot forward into the too-bright dust. Her front tire caught the next pothole with a twist. For a moment Yael was flying, through dust and air and dark. Arms stretched wide as wings.
And then she fell.
The road clamped onto her, sliding its rocky teeth along the soft of skin. The tough of leather. Pain. That was all there was, for seconds. The road’s bite sank—deeper and deeper—into Yael’s body. She tried to cry out, but her lungs wouldn’t move. No sound. No air.
No air.
No air.
When she finally gasped again, it was a thick, nothing breath. Clotted with dust. Too much like smoke.
Pain.
Yael was afraid to move. Afraid of what she would discover when she did. All her nerves were on overload, frayed. It was impossible to tell where the hurt was coming from. Her leg could be shattered. Her collarbone, bowed. Her wrist, snapped…
It was the sound of another engine that finally stirred her. A roar, then a purr, then a sputter. A bright headlamp. Fourth place was pulling to a stop, leaping off his bike, coming for her. Yael’s reflexes worked through the agony. Vlad’s training kicked in, twisting her up, drawing her gun, switching off the safety. Yael stared down the sights with a rattling breath.
At least her wrists weren’t broken.
The silhouette swept toward her, paper-cut sharp against the glare of the headlamp. She held the pistol steady, aiming it at fourth place’s chest. But the boy didn’t stop.
“Oh, Scheisse!” It was Felix. Kicking breathlessly through the sand. Yael’s instincts stayed strong. She held her P38 higher. Adele’s brother froze at the sight of the gun, terror glared across his face. His hair was bright and fractured against the glow of the Zündapp’s headlamp.
“Ad.” He spoke slowly with his hands out. “It’s me. Felix. You’ve had a bad fall. Put the gun down.”
There were sparks in Yael’s eyes, swimming like her thoughts. Would Adele keep the gun pointed at her brother? No? Yes? Maybe?
Her gun hand shook.
So many sparks. No air.
—KEEP BREATHING—
Maybe? Yes?
No.
She dropped the gun with a gasp.
Felix knelt down in the sand, arms still outstretched. Hovering over her. Frantic but never touching. “Are you hurt?”
Her breaths were coming easier now. In, out. In, out. The sparks faded, but the pain—it was everywhere. Gently, gently Yael tested each limb. Arms, legs. Feet, hands. Left, right. Nothing was broken. It was just pain. And it would pass. The kind that settled in skin always did.
She was shaken, bleeding, raw. But she could still race.
“I’m f-fine.” The words crumbled out of Yael. All her strength she saved for pushing against the sand, managing a stand on wobbly legs.
One step. Two. Her knees felt like tinfoil: crumble, bend, crunch.
“Fine? Fine?” Felix’s white eyebrows flew into his hair-
line. “Scheisse, Ad. You don’t just get up from something like that.”
I do. Yael clenched her teeth and kept walking.
Felix matched her pace easily. “Where is it, exactly, that you plan on going?”
“My bike…” Where was it? All Yael could see was light and dust and Felix. She must’ve been thrown a good distance from the motorcycle. Her unshattered bones were becoming more and more of a miracle.
“No!” Adele’s brother snapped, then immediately softened. “No. Look at yourself. You’re an absolute mess. We need to clean those wounds before they become infected.”
He was right. But Luka and Katsuo were still on the road, and the seconds were turning into minutes.…
She kept walking.
Felix kept up, step for step. “These riding conditions are Scheisse. Nil visibility, potholes every other second—you wouldn’t make it a hundred meters in your condition.”
I will. But even as Yael thought this, she was starting to doubt herself. Her tinfoil knees were crumpling fast, and her motorcycle was nowhere in sight.
“Ad, please… don’t…” Felix swallowed. His brow furrowed into something sad. “Don’t end up like Martin.”
No wonder Felix looked so fearful when he first ran up to her. He’d seen that scene before: sibling flung off a bike, lying broken on the road.
The mention of the other brother’s name—the history she did not fully know behind it—made Yael frantic. The bike, it had to be somewhere. She stopped, did a 360-degree survey of the dusk-crowned road.
Sand. Dark. Sand. There! Seventy degrees back. A lump that was too large, too sharp, too twisted to be a desert formation.
One good look and Yael’s heart fell. Her motorcycle had not fared quite as well as her body. The Zündapp lay sideways in the road, contorted, wheel up. Its chrome was fuzzed with scratches, slate paint dented and chipped. One side of its leather seat was shredded. Motor oil oozed like blood into the sands.
Felix walked over to the wreck. “It’s probably a good thing you never got around to naming it. I haven’t seen you go through a bike that fast since the one you wrecked in ’51. You hadn’t even had it twenty-four hours, and you cracked the axle. Papa was so mad.”