Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  Reiniger only asked for her name, which she gave him.

  Henryka fed her.

  Life beneath the beer hall was three glorious, fatty-fresh meals a day; a strawless bed she did not have to share; warm-water baths; and a toilet that flushed.

  Yael’s sleeves stayed down. Her face stayed the same. The mонстр, monstre, monster inside curled up for a long, long sleep.

  She set herself to learning. When Henryka was not busy clattering away on her typewriter or talking in hushed tones with visitors, she taught the girl how to read. Their school was at the steel card table in the middle of Henryka’s office. Its tiny surface cluttered with textbooks, cocoa, and laughter. Aaron-Klaus grumbled about something called calculus and ate more than half the plate of chocolate crullers Henryka sometimes baked. The radio in the corner hummed, always on.

  It took Yael only four months to master reading German. She started choosing books from Henryka’s library and teaching herself what was inside. From there the world was hers.

  But not really.

  The world belonged to the Third Reich.

  This fact was easy to see, plastered across the office wall in the form of a map. It looked so very different from the old atlases Yael sometimes flipped through, the ones that showed a mosaic of countries: Britain, Italy, France, Egypt, Iraq. Orange, purple, green, yellow… dozens and dozens of kingdoms and hues. Republics and shades.

  All of these were scarlet now. Territories of the Third Reich, ruled by ruthless Reichskommissars who answered unwaveringly to Germania. Even with the multiple coded thumbtacks that clustered around its borders, the capital city looked so small. Yael found it hard to imagine how the tiny, dark fleck could hold so much sway over the continents.

  “There are so many territories, so many people getting shipped to camps.… Why doesn’t anyone fight back?” she asked Aaron-Klaus one afternoon. The young man was hunched over the table next to her, twiddling a graphite pencil, scowling at a string of numbers.

  “Hitler and his henchmen are the guards of this world. They have the guns. They have the power. If a single territory tried to secede on its own, the Reich would crush it,” Aaron-Klaus said. “Everyone is afraid. No one wants to die.”

  “What if someone killed the Führer?” Yael asked. “Do you think that would change things? Make people less afraid?”

  Aaron-Klaus tucked his pencil behind his ear, where the saffron roots of his hair were starting to show. (Yael often found herself wondering what he would look like without the biweekly bleach. Handsome—to be sure. The thought was always followed by a blush.)

  “Many people have tried. Valkyrie—” The word had scarcely left his mouth when the door slid open. Henryka, as short as she was, seemed to fill the whole doorway with her crossed arms, her explosive hair.

  “Have you finished your worksheet, Klaus?” she asked.

  “Almost,” he lied. Yael knew he’d spent most of the past hour making faces at the equations and eating crullers.

  “Reiniger stopped by this morning.” Henryka let out a sigh that was… sad. “It’s been decided that you’ll be going to Vlad’s farm.”

  Vlad’s farm. Yael had only been at Henryka’s for a year, but the name held a tinge of legend. Tucked away in the Alps, it was the place you went to learn to fight. To master the art of marksmanship and cracking a man’s skull with a single kick.

  “Really?” Aaron-Klaus’s entire face lit up. As if all this time he’d been a lamp sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, and someone just remembered to plug him in. “Vlad’s farm?”

  Henryka nodded, but the motion was heavy. “I still think you could use another year here, but Reiniger insisted.”

  The thought of Aaron-Klaus leaving scrabbled inside Yael. Who would toss wads of graphing paper into her hair while she studied? Who would come and sit by her bed at night when black smoke nightmares made her shake and sob? Who would eat all the crullers?

  “I want to go, too,” Yael said.

  “Absolutely not.” Henryka sounded as if someone had hit her. Yael looked closer and realized the older woman was almost crying. “You’re far too young.”

  “I’ll come back, Yael. I promise.” Aaron-Klaus’s voice buzzed electric. “And when I do, I’ll teach you everything I know.”

  Valkyries: Maidens in old Norse mythology. They are choosers of the slain, who appear on battlefields to decide which soldiers die and which live. Though many paintings depict Valkyries riding to war on horseback, a verse inscribed on the Rök Runestone describes a Valkyrie named Gunnr using a wolf as her steed.

  This was what the yellowed pages of Henryka’s encyclopedia told Yael about the word. There was even an illustration: Beautiful women made of bare breasts, feathers, and curves stood in the middle of ruin. Deciding. Who lived. Who died. Their gazes combed through fields of snapped spears, broken axes, shattered bodies. The skies above them were inked with battle smoke. Black and etched, line by careful line.

  They looked like angels, with those wings. Beautiful, monstrous, something to be feared.

  Yael did not think this was the Valkyrie Reiniger had referenced. The one Aaron-Klaus managed to spit out before Henryka interrupted. But the picture sang to Yael anyway. (It was a sad, savage ballad. One that howled angry inside her, stirred the monster’s restless sleep.) She liked to imagine the scene: a powerful woman with wings unfurled, looming over the Führer. Making a choice.

  Life or death.

  CHAPTER 16

  NOW

  MARCH 18, 1956

  CAIRO CHECKPOINT

  Riders leaked in: first a dribble, then a pour. The gap between the leaders and the rear of the pack was widening. At this point in the race, names started dropping off. Vanishing with a strikethrough of chalk.

  Now she was responsible for two lines. Yael couldn’t bring herself to look at the names she knew would be crossed out. Shiina Hiraku. Felix Wolfe.

  Besides, she had other things to worry about. Such as retrieving the files. Felix might be a problem solved, but Luka… he and Adele seemed magnetized. Pulled together, propelled apart. Polarized or fused, depending on the day. There seemed to be no escaping him.

  Soon, very soon, you’re going to need me.

  As much as she wanted to hate the boy, Yael didn’t doubt his words. Katsuo’s stare still haunted her, hours later. Alliances weren’t uncommon on the Axis Tour, but there was no way she’d walk into a blind agreement with someone like Luka Löwe.

  She needed to know that history first. She needed the files.

  Even at night Cairo thrummed with life. It wasn’t National Socialist patrols Yael was worried about (though there were plenty of those, rumbling about in jeeps, lounging outside cafés), but the sheer number of eyes. There were no curfews here. Night vendors lined the sidewalks, hawking produce and linens under strings of glaring bulbs.

  Yael pretended to be shopping. Sifting through crates of shriveled pomegranates and apples—crop leftovers that the territory’s Reichskommissar decided weren’t worth exporting. She bought a scarf and wrapped it over her head so that the fabric hung low, covering her profile as she waded through the night market crowds. She changed faces while she walked, borrowing features from the people she passed. The falconlike nose of a grain merchant, the dark hair of a boy sweeping a café floor, eyes like all the locals: brown, hungry, resigned to dust.

  This kind of changing—last-minute patchwork girl, stolen pieces, angry stitches—always made Yael feel slippery. At least when she was someone like Mina or Adele, she had papers, a backstory (no matter how cobwebby). But when she was this… a bit of every stranger in the street…

  What was left, besides the wolves? Apart from memories and pretending?

  Emptiness.

  These hollow spaces were the darkest. Yawning open like Cairo’s many alleys, twisting into places Yael did not like to go. Where the whispers of dead women echoed: mонстр, monstre, monster. Where the rage she always swallowed down smoked and roiled. Waiting, wait
ing…

  Usually Yael ignored it. Always she feared it. Because she knew exactly what this place inside her was capable of. It was the part of her that needed lines. The part—if Yael chose to listen to it—that could so easily become like the National Socialists.

  But this time Yael did have something solid as she wove through Cairo’s maze of streets. The paper of coded addresses in her undershirt. This took Yael all the way to the city’s fringes, where dogs roamed in packs and the desert’s lonely sands hazed across streetlamps. The address Reiniger had given her belonged to a café, she realized when she stepped up to the door. Tables lined the open sidewalk, cast in an ill, flickering glow. All empty.

  Had she read the address wrong? Yael stood for a moment, eyeing the storefront. Inside, a girl washed tables with a dirty rag.

  “Can I help you?” A man—older and balding, with sandstone skin—stretched out of the shadows by the door. So suddenly that Yael braced herself. Feet flat, fists tight, ready to fight.

  It took her a moment to recover and recite the code words. “The wolves of war are gathering.”

  “They sing the song of rotten bones,” the man replied. “Your Arabic is commendable, Volchitsa. Come inside. I have what you need.”

  The girl cleaning the tabletops froze when they walked in. The man’s “Bring us a pipe!” sent her scuttling into the back rooms. The man sat down at the farthest crooked table.

  “I can’t stay long.” Yael sat as well, but her back stayed stiff. The café’s emptiness would not let her relax.

  “Business has been slow these days.” The man nodded at the quiet around them. “It’s hard for customers to appear when they’re being shipped off to labor camps. More and more people have been disappearing, stolen in the night. Many in Cairo are ready to fight, but we cannot afford the full wrath of the Reich.…” The man trailed off as the girl moved back into the room, set the pipe on the table. Yael’s contact picked up the mouthpiece, drew a long breath. Bubbles danced in the glass. The smoke he exhaled smelled of flowers and spring. Nothing like crematorium fumes. “Much rides with you, Volchitsa.”

  When he offered Yael the mouthpiece, she shook her head. “The package?”

  “Ah, straight to business. Very well.” The man placed a folder on the table. Yael recognized Henryka’s handwriting across the front immediately—mother hen scratchings—worried and illegible. The sight made Yael wish she were back in the beer hall basement, sipping cocoa with the Polish woman, talking about life and poking fun at the terrible acting on the Reichssender shows.

  She was just slipping the papers into the lining of her jacket (the same place she’d stowed her swastika armband before walking through the market) when the shop door squealed. Yael’s contact looked up. His nostrils flared, lips stiff. She stole a glance over her shoulder, through the fabric of her scarf. Quick and back. What she saw was a punch to the heart.

  Black jacket still covered in road dust. Goggles shoved high, helmet in hand. Swastika armband. Crooked nose. Adele Wolfe in reverse.

  Impossible. He… he wasn’t supposed to come back from that. He was supposed to give up. Go home…

  And now he was here, of all places.

  Hell had frozen over, and Felix Wolfe was the ice. He stepped through the doorway, movements shaking with an anger so hot it burned cold.

  “What are you doing here, Ad?” His voice stung at the back of her patterned scarf.

  Yael focused on the glowing coal on the top of the shisha pipe. He must have spotted her in the crowd, followed her at a distance, watching from a layer of market stalls and dimly lit crowds. Had he seen her change? Spotted the manila folder? There was only one way to find out.

  All too aware of the P38 against her ribs and the knife in her boot, Yael turned to face him.

  Immediately she wanted to wince. Her pistol whip hadn’t been as neat as she’d meant it. The whole side of Felix’s face was swollen: one eye shut. His hairline invaded by dried blood and bruise.

  But Yael kept her guilt hidden, her expression straight. “I’m sorry,” she said in Arabic, “do I know you?”

  Felix’s mouth dropped open, but he found nothing to say. His silence mixed with the room’s floral shisha smoke. His good eye blinked at odd intervals, trying to erase what he was seeing. Brown eyes, black hair… an Egyptian girl with a few road-rash scabs still dotting her cheeks. (Yael hoped that in this flickering light, with his bad eye, the marks would look like freckles. She thanked the stars she’d removed her bandages before leaving the compound.)

  “But—” Felix started backing away. “Apologies. I—I thought you were someone else. I was mistaken.”

  The last word wasn’t even fully out of Felix’s mouth before he melted back into the night. The door slammed behind him, as loud as Yael’s heart. She sat still, watching his silhouette ripple across the glass.

  Yael tore the scarf from her face, left it crumpled by the pipe’s base. “I have to get back to the compound before he does.”

  Whatever the contact’s response was, Yael didn’t hear it. She was already running, lurching into the street, her mind rattling with thoughts of Adele and what almost happened. She had to skinshift and get back to the compound. Quick. Change her clothes. Act like she’d been there for hours. Do anything she could to quiet whatever suspicions might be scratching Felix Wolfe’s thoughts.

  Not that he would even suspect. He would trust his good eye above all else.

  Wouldn’t he?

  Shift and click. She was Adele again, sliding the National Socialist armband back up her sleeve as she ran. Yael sprinted around a corner, dodging a boy dragging a cart of sad wares. Always her eyes scanned for Felix—tough shoulders, silken gait—but there was no sign of Adele’s brother. He must have taken a different way, she decided once she reached the night market, started wading through stalls and shoppers. A (hopefully) longer way.

  Yael’s lungs were starving by the time she reached the compound gates. She struggled for breath as she strode across the courtyard. Past the line of parked Zündapps. There were sixteen, still. The same number there had been when she’d left. Felix must’ve seen her from the road. Abandoned his bike to follow her. Which meant he would come rolling in at any moment.

  “Keep huffing and puffing like that and you’ll give yourself an oxygen high.” Luka sat at the table, a perfect imitation of his afternoon self: tilted chair, boots slapped heretically on the tabletop. A cigarette fumed between his lips. “Where’ve you been skulking, Fräulein?”

  “Out for some air.” Yael started walking toward the compound entrance. “Road jitters.”

  “This’ll take the edge off.” Luka offered up his cigarette.

  Yael stepped around the smoldering stub. There was no time for smoking or clever word wars. Felix would be here any minute, and she had to be ready. Ready to face his furious questions. Ready to face what she’d done.

  “I did a little digging,” Luka called out in a way that made Yael slow, turn. “Found out Hiraku’s not dead. He broke both his legs and raked half his skin off. But he’s still kicking.” The victor paused, quirking an eyebrow as he reviewed his own sentences. “Poor choice of words. Anyway, just thought you might like to know.”

  Not dead. One life spared. One life out of millions. Just a drop. But it mattered. It rolled off Yael’s chest. Made it one life lighter.

  And Luka, he’d remembered her question. He’d seen how much it meant to her… through the cracks. And he’d tried to find an answer, showed cracks of his own. A moreness—

  Felix’s headlamp swung through the compound gates, such a blinding glare that Luka threw his arms to his face and the timekeeper (who’d been asleep) nearly fell out of his chair again. Yael felt paralyzed, translucent—prisoner under the spotlight, walking past the fence, over the train tracks, through her lie.

  Adele’s brother pulled her former motorcycle to a stop. The engine cut out midsputter, all light gone.

  She could walk through this lie, too.


  —MAKE YOUR JAW SLACK BREATHE NORMAL ACT LIKE YOU’VE BEEN HERE—

  Her clothes were a problem. Her panther-black jacket. A white undershirt (more orange now with all the days of sand). Leather gloves. The boots. All the same as in the café. But it had been dark there. And she’d been wearing the scarf.

  Maybe Felix would think these things coincidence. In truth, he seemed too irate to notice. Felix’s movements off the bike were jerky. He flung his helmet and goggles to the ground on his warpath to the card table.

  “What in the name of the verdammt New Order happened to your face?” Luka’s question held more than a hint of glee as he scrunched his still splotched nose.

  Felix’s wound looked even worse under the courtyard lamps. Jagged with old blood and ooze. Left eye stitched shut at his pale lashes. Red flesh plummeting into blue into purple into a different shade altogether. As dark as what slept inside her.

  The sight made Yael sick. But she had to face it because Adele’s brother was in front of her now.

  “You fixed the bike,” she whispered.

  “I told you I could,” he said. “Only took me three hours after the supply caravan showed up.”

  Dead silence. Chipping stares. What did he want her to say? Something like this was so far past apologies, and though Yael herself was sorry, she shouldn’t be. When she got to the end of this race, she’d have to do far worse deeds.…

  “You left me stranded in the middle of a desert. Unconscious.” But this deed did sound pretty awful, the way Felix said it: his voice twisting tight, tighter, tightest until it was as squinched as his wounded eye.

  “Your own brother, Fräulein.” Luka stood. His cigarette fell to the ground, forgotten, as he stepped closer to the siblings. “You’ve always been a cold one, but this is a new brand of savage. Even for you.”

  Felix’s fists bundled into knots as he turned on Luka. A growl—pure hate, all threat—climbed up his throat. “No one asked for your commentary, Löwe.”