by Ryan Graudin
Yael didn’t bother waving.
She kept inching furiously ahead, chasing those two hours, ten minutes, twenty-eight seconds. The storm’s breadth was massive; its waste stretched on and on. Sand stuck to her wheels and drowned the motor. Yael’s only comfort was that Katsuo and Luka were fighting the same forces. Plying their way down the roadless path. Centimeter by centimeter.
And, finally, the road. Yael’s goggles fogged with tears of joy when she saw it: the spine of rocks and solid that rose from the sand. When her wheels reached it, she shot forward. No dust clouds, no silhouettes, no well-meaning brothers…
The way was clearer than ever now.
CHAPTER 14
NOW
MARCH 18, 1956
CAIRO CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 5,742
For two days Yael rode alone. Every town she passed was empty, with the exception of the Axis Tour refueling stations, which housed a few sunburnt Aryan faces. Sand pushed against the dwellings’ doors like snowdrifts. No one had lived on this coast for years. According to Reiniger, the villages’ native populations had been deported to labor camps within a year of the Great Victory. She was driving through a dead land.
Yael’s pace through this final stretch of desert had been a hefty one, fueled by Luka’s gleaming stare. Katsuo’s knife. Her night camp had been short. She’d stayed on the road until the last traces of light had left, and packed up her broken tent before the dawn-glow lined the eastern dunes. Fuel and water were her only day stops, precious minutes spent in skeleton towns. Every time she refilled her gas tank and her canteens, she studied the road behind her. Scanning the horizon for dust and motion.
They were coming. She felt it in her bones. The urgent need to stay ahead. And she was ahead. Hers was the very first Zündapp to reach Cairo. This city, at least, was thriving. Its air swam with the heady smells of diesel and incense. Dried dung and heat. Its streets were tangled and alive: carts heavy with pomegranates and figs, kneeling camels, impatient jeeps. Yael wove through these as best she could, all the way to the checkpoint.
The Axis Tour officials weren’t expecting her. The timekeeper slouched, asleep, in his chair. The Reichssender staff and Japanese journalists sat around a weathered card table, with cooling scarves wrapped around their heads, bottles of mineral water sweating by their elbows.
When Yael rolled into the compound courtyard, their expressions looked as Luka’s had: stunned, then resolved as they scurried for their cameras. The timekeeper nearly fell out of his chair as he rushed to record her time.
Adele Wolfe: 5 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, 28 seconds.
Yael wiped days of dust from her still bandaged face and took in the numbers. Under a week, road time, from Germania to Cairo. It was a good pace. Excellent, actually.
But would it be enough?
She had two hours, ten minutes, and twenty-eight seconds to find out.
Yael’s answers to the Reichssender’s questions were halfhearted, breathless things. (Yes, the storm was bad. Yes, of course, it felt good to reach Cairo first. No, she’d had no idea her brother would enter the race.) Her attention was on the road as she took off her jacket, replenished the beads of sweat along her brow with swigs of mineral water.
An hour passed.
She watched the street from the card table, making wet O’s in the wood with her bottle. Picking at the bowl of dried figs and dates. Twisting the ends of Adele’s fair hair (this might have soothed Adele’s nerves but did nothing for hers). Anything to make the seconds go faster.
Every engine sputter, every peel of distant wheels, revved Yael’s heart. She kept expecting to see Luka’s bike rounding the corner. Or Katsuo braced on his Zündapp, determined to keep the number one in front of his name. But it was not them… not them… not them.… The minutes crept by. Hope hitched higher and higher in Yael’s throat.
The compound’s gate stayed empty. For two hours, ten minutes, twenty-nine seconds.
I’m ahead! All those months training on the autobahns, collecting kilometers and road rashes… they were not for nothing. These thoughts fizzed bright as Yael watched the timekeeper chalk Adele Wolfe’s name in the top slot. She raised her empty bottle of mineral water, toasting a cloudless sky: Cheers to that!
Luka rounded the corner first, the whole of him coated in dust as his bike skidded to a stop. His face was lopsided with hair. He’d never finished shaving.
Luka Löwe: 5 days, 6 hours, 21 minutes, 2 seconds.
“You look ridiculous.” Yael, still soaring on her triumph, couldn’t help but tease the boy as he approached her table with stiff, saddle-sore steps.
“Says the girl wearing more bandages than a mummy.” Luka collapsed into a chair and rested his feet unceremoniously on the tabletop. Boots, dust, and all. “Where’s brother-dear?”
Yael fished a spare date out of the bowl. In those long hours when there was nothing but her, sky, and road, she’d tried her hardest not to think of Felix. How he’d crumpled without a fight. How she’d just left him—adrift in a sea of sand, with a throbbing temple, and a broken bike.
The memory was nagging at her. More than it should have. But he was out of the race now. Yael only hoped that he hadn’t overheated inside the tent.
“I’m not his keeper,” she said, and bit into the date.
“Well, he certainly seems to be yours.” The tape was gone from Luka’s nose, but he still traced it gingerly. His fingertips raked away lines of dust, showed the bruised purple beneath. “It’s fortunate my looks are handsome enough to afford some ruggedness.”
“I can keep myself just fine.” Yael nodded at the board, where Luka’s time was being chalked. Second place.
There was a chorus of horns from the marketplace. A spray of seeds and color as crates of fruit went tumbling to the ground. All this laced with vendors’ curses as Katsuo rounded the corner and blew past the timekeeper. His bike cut to a halt at the last possible moment, its front tire shuddering just centimeters from the table. Flooding Luka’s and Yael’s faces with dust and exhaust.
Tsuda Katsuo: 5 days, 6 hours, 24 minutes, 11 seconds.
Katsuo didn’t look at his numbers. His eyes honed in on Yael as he stepped off his bike. It was a hunter’s stare: thirsty and grim through his goggles. Yael met it, held it, biting down on the date pit so hard she feared her teeth might break.
Finally the boy turned. Walked away without a word.
“You’re in the crosshairs now, Fräulein. You might be able to keep yourself, but no one gets through this race alone.” Luka uncrossed his legs, leaned over the table. Closer, closer. Until Yael could feel the bristle of his unshorn jaw, smell the rich leather of his jacket. And although the sun broiled hot above them, Yael felt goose bumps singing just under the surface of her skin, threatening to break out. Adrenaline. Fear. Something else.
Something more.
The victor’s lips were so close to Yael’s ear all he had to do was whisper, “Soon, very soon, you’re going to need me.”
CHAPTER 15
THEN
THE FOURTH WOLF: AARON-KLAUS PART 1 AUTUMN 1949
Yael was alone.
There were months spent in the forests, where she ate berries and mushrooms and listened to real wolves howl. There were nights tucked away in haylofts, where she munched on horse oats and fell asleep to the lullaby lowing of cows. And weeks of walking, walking, walking. The food was better in the cities—loaves of bread, sausage links, apples as shiny as spit—but it was guarded by so many eyes. Nearly impossible to steal without getting caught.
She stole money instead. Yael found that she liked picking pockets. It wasn’t hard, especially in Germania. She was blond and small and went unnoticed in crowds. She hunted by the river Spree, where couples walked hand in hand and flocks of schoolchildren ran amok.
Yael always leaned by the river barrier, her fingers worrying the edges of her sweater sleeve as she watched and waited for money to saunter toward her in the form of gold watches and wallets.
&nb
sp; It was best when schoolchildren dashed past. Yael could pretend she was one of them. Misstepping, bumping into some Germanian’s shoulder, using that shocked second to fish her fingers down their pockets, cry an apology, and run off. Reichsmarks richer.
She always got rid of the wallets downriver (splash, sink, gone). The bills and coins she tucked in her pocket, alongside the smallest doll. She would change her face and her clothes in a nook under a bridge and go buy bread.
It was a good system. Yael rarely went hungry.
But one day she made a mistake.
The young man was an obvious target. His arms were full of parcels and envelopes. He walked so fast that his overcoat billowed to the sides. Too hurried to notice the beauty of the Spree’s currents or the boats that bobbed like hunched gulls along the river wall.
It was too early for the schoolchildren yet, and the river walk was strangely empty. There were no crowds to disappear into.
She should have let him pass.
But it was one of those rare days when Yael was hungry (the crowds had been slim all week, and she’d spent the last of her Reichsmarks on a new sweater with sleeves long enough for her growing arms). The hunger wasn’t yet desperate or bone-gnawing, but it was there, scooping hollow pains into her stomach. Desert places, missing pieces.
Yael hated feeling empty.
So, just as the young man moved past, she stepped out, into him.
The collision was harder than she’d expected. The young man’s parcels tumbled; his envelopes spun. He fell to his knees and started collecting them before Yael could stammer sorry and slip her fingers into his pocket.
She knelt next to him. Grabbing the nearest envelope with her right hand and fishing into his pocket with the other. Yael was halfway through the transaction when she noticed the stamp on the envelope she was holding.
The bird with the broken cross.
He was one of them.
—RUN LIVE CHANGE THINGS GET AWAY GET AWAY GET AWAY DON’T LET HIM SEE—
Yael tore her hand out (walletless) and tried to run. But the National Socialist had been watching. As her arm pulled away, he caught the cuff of her sweater.
Off came the sleeve. Out came her skin. Yael twisted to a stop, and time went still, frozen by the sight of her numbers. They shone blacker than ever in the twilight hour. There, there, there, under the sorrowing blue sky for all to see.
The young man grabbed her wrist, reading the ink as dark as his Reich stamp.
“I see,” he said slowly.
—GET AWAY GET AWAY—
She tried, but the National Socialist’s grip was too tight.
The young man looked around the riverbank. Still empty except for the scatter of packages at his feet. His fingers loosened—not enough for Yael to run, but enough for his next words to mean something. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
This caused her to look at him (really look, not just as a target or an enemy). Boy was still traced in his features: the nervous bob of his Adam’s apple, the acne sowed in his hollow cheeks. His eyes were blue at first glance, but not quite enough when you really looked. His stare held a softness she did not expect.
“I can help you.” The young man let go of Yael’s arm. He started rolling up his own sleeve.
This was her chance to run. Escape back to lonely.
The numbers stopped her again. But this time they did not belong to Yael.
They belonged to the National Socialist.
There on his left forearm—between braids of throbbing teal veins—115100AΔ. As black and sloppy and permanent as her own.
“Will you let me help you?” he asked.
Her answer was to kneel to the ground again and start picking up the eagle-stamped envelopes. The young man, not–National Socialist, tugged his sleeve back down and nodded at Yael’s bare arm.
“Cover up and follow me,” he said.
And that was how she met Aaron-Klaus.
Yael was amazed at how much the young man knew. About himself. About the world.
His real name was Aaron Mayer. Born in 1933 to a laundress and a tailor in a small Bavarian town. His childhood was filled with yellow stars—sewn to his clothes, pasted to the window of his father’s shop—and broken glass. He was ten when the trains took him.
His fake name was Klaus Frueh. Born in 1933 to a watchmaker and a housewife in Munich. His childhood was filled with swastikas—pinned to his lapel, draped in the window of his father’s shop—and “Blood and honor!” He was ten when he joined the Hitler Youth.
Aaron Mayer survived in a death camp for a whole year. One of the officers picked the boy out of the lines to clean his house, weed his garden. The officer’s wife grew fond of the boy, to a fault. She hid him in an empty shipment truck.
The resistance found him, fed him, gave him papers.
Klaus Frueh began to exist.
Aaron-Klaus could not be reintegrated like the other children the resistance came across. He would not fit back into a normal life: the war orphan with perfect papers sent to live with his distant relatives in the Alps. His numbers—his Aaron Mayer–ness—would not be erased, so he stayed with the resistance.
Its headquarters were in a Germania beer hall. (Beneath it, actually, in the basement.) The hall was full of brown shirts and swastikas. Yael’s numbers flamed under her wool sleeve when she saw the tables full of officers. But they didn’t seem to notice her heat, or the young man with an armful of parcels. They were too busy laughing over foaming steins.
Yael followed the young man down into the cellar, into damp darkness crowded with dozens of beer barrels. Aaron-Klaus approached the third-to-the-last barrel of the second row and turned the spigot like a screw until the wooden face swung back. There was no flood of beer, only a passage Aaron-Klaus had to hunch over to fit in. He ushered Yael through first, pulled the door shut behind them. It was a short hallway, made of bricks and other things that carried voices. Yael heard two of them: a man and a woman.
The woman: “A message got through from London. The deportations of their population to the continent labor camps have gotten worse. They’re impatient for the new Valkyrie to fly.”
The man: “The time isn’t right. The forces are spread so far across the globe.… We have to reinforce our contacts.”
The woman: “Any news from the Americas?”
The man: “Same isolationist Scheisse as always: ‘European politics are for Europe.’ They think nonaggression pacts and oceans will protect them. They want no part in a second Valkyrie.”
They sat in a denlike room. It was a cave of books and papers, with a radio as large as Yael herself. She stopped in the open doorway and took it in: the smells of leather bindings and typewriter ink.
The man and woman stopped, too. They stared at her with misset mouths. The man wore a cross on his chest. Black. Iron. A wide-winged eagle hovered over his right breast, the rainbow chaos of pins above the other.
A real National Socialist.
Fight or flight kicked in again. Pumping hot between Yael’s toes. Itching all over her skin. But there was nowhere to run and no one to fight.
—HIDE THEN—
The something else—the monster—crawled inside her, a skinshift begging to be let out.
Yael clenched her teeth together and tried not to think of faces. She was going to follow Miriam’s instructions, no matter what. She could not, would not, let them see.
Aaron-Klaus walked past her and set his parcels down on the card table. “Here are the packages you requested, General Reiniger.”
“Packages?” The woman stiffened and glared at the National Socialist officer. “You sent Klaus to pick up a file drop?”
“He volunteered for it, Henryka.” Reiniger shrank a bit as he said this. A small, un–National Socialist motion that let Yael breathe a little easier. “My usual runners were engaged.”
“He’s sixteen and untrained!” the woman snapped. “What would happen if he’d been stopped and questioned?”
&
nbsp; “I wanted to help,” Aaron-Klaus said. “I hate being stuck down here, reading books and doing math. I want to be out there. Doing things!”
“And you will.” Henryka rolled her shoulders in a way that reminded Yael of a farmyard chicken. Fuss and cluck: “When you’re eighteen. After you’ve spent some time on Vlad’s farm learning how to handle yourself.”
The National Socialist officer—Reiniger—was looking at Yael. His true-blue eyes cut across the card table. “Now, who’s this?”
Aaron-Klaus welcomed the distraction. He waved for Yael to come into the room. “I found her by the Spree. She’s marked.”
“Marked? But—” Henryka’s voice faded. She looked at the girl: honey-gold pigtails, teeth a little too big for her mouth. An Aryan poster child. (Yael actually had stolen the face from a watercolor advertisement for the Hitler Youth.)
“Will you show them?” Aaron-Klaus asked.
Baring the numbers was against everything inside her. Yael did not even show them to herself. When she changed clothes, she never looked to the left. There were a few—few—times when she’d try to take them off. (They’d never really stopped itching after that last night in Dr. Geyer’s lab, so she scratched and tore and tried to erase things that could not be.) All she ended up with were bloody fingernails. Scabs turned to scars, wiped clean after her next change.
Aaron-Klaus pushed back his sleeve again. It looked so easy when he did it: soft rolls of fabric and arm stretched out. Numbers boldly bare under the army of tin lampshades.
Yael tried to do the same. But she didn’t feel easy or bold when she peeled back her sleeve. She still did not look at her numbers. She let the others glimpse her ink. They did so in silence. When she tugged the sweater back down, they didn’t ask to see her tattoo again. They didn’t ask why her hair was blond or how she’d escaped.