by Ryan Graudin
“Consider it a gift.” Luka’s eyes darted to the other boy’s knuckles. His lips twisted as if he’d just read something that humored him. “You really should have Nurse Wilhelmina look at your face. She does a wonderful taping job. Tender fingers.”
“I’ll gift you with another broken nose if you don’t get out of here. I’ve got all the hour penalties in the world to spare.” Felix jerked his head over to the scoreboard, where the timekeeper had just finished chalking his official time: 6 days, 19 hours, 40 minutes, 16 seconds. Last place.
Luka’s smile stayed, but a dangerous tightness overtook his jaw. The desert air between the boys swam with testosterone and the smell of the bike’s hot motor. Rubber and diesel and fight.
This time, Yael promised herself, she wouldn’t stop it. Both boys were too much of a threat to her mission. She’d be better off without them.
But Luka Löwe had no hour penalties to spare, and the timekeeper was watching. The victor dug his fists deep into the pockets of his brown jacket and shrugged. “Far be it from me to ruin your little family reunion. Nice chat, Fräulein. Let’s do it again sometime.”
Luka strutted back to the door, into the barrack’s bright electric lights and the clouds of insects glittering around them. “Nighty-night, Wolfes,” he called before he vanished altogether.
The fight was left to Yael.
She thought back to the last night in Germania. How the twins stood just feet apart, facing off in their ram-horn CLASH. Adele’s arms had been crossed. Yael crossed hers. Tried to imitate that unfeeling, icy stare as she looked back at Felix.
The anger was still there (lurking in the clench of his fists, flushing pink across the uninjured half of his face), but it wasn’t the same temple-throbbing rage that had threatened to dismantle Luka. It was changed and checked. Safety on.
Sister mode.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
Yael crossed her arms tighter. As if the extra pressure could soothe her now explosive heart. What should she tell him? How much of Adele’s face had he seen in the market? Enough to make him get off his bike, trail her.… Had he seen the scarf purchase?
Crack, crack went Felix’s knuckles. Popping as he waited for her answer.
Lie by omission was the hardest to catch. Yael decided to risk it. “I took a walk through the market to get some air. Then I ran into Luka—”
“No.” Felix cut her off. “No. That’s not what I meant. Where is my sister?”
Locked in a Germania beer hall basement. Probably getting fat on plates of Henryka’s chocolate crullers and cups of cocoa. Plotting a useless escape. Yael’s heart pounded—full, full, full—with this knowledge.
“What are you talking about?” she snapped back, the way she supposed Adele would: yell for yell. “I’m right here, you dummkopf!”
“Flirting with Luka. Wearing perfume. What you did in the desert… This isn’t you, Ad.”
Flirting? Perfume? Felix wasn’t even talking about the market or his real sister. He was talking about her Adele-ness. The widening gaps Yael was trying not to fall through, clutching to a fraying string of an alias.
“I wasn’t flirting with Victor Löwe.” She scowled at the thought.
“Fine. Being chummy with him, then.” Felix’s good eye narrowed. “You should’ve been dancing for joy when I broke that Saukerl’s nose in Prague. But you stopped me. Why?”
Because I thought that’s what Adele would have done. Obviously not.
Instead Yael stammered, “I—I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Clearly that’s not your top priority.” Felix snorted. The motion wrenched his tender face, made him wince. “I’m not a dummkopf, Ad. There’s something missing. Something you’re not telling me.”
Felix glanced behind his shoulder at the timekeeper, who’d gone back to sleep in his chair. His voice dipped to a hush. “What’s going on?”
No, Felix Wolfe wasn’t a dummkopf. Far from it. He was close. Too close to the truth. Too close to her truth. There’s something missing.
Yael had to steer him away.
So she stared straight at Felix and that terrible, terrible bruise. She did not flinch. “What’s going on is I’m trying to win this race. And I can’t do it with you clinging to my tailpipes.”
“Clinging to your—I’m trying to protect you!” A third knuckle cracked. And a fourth. And a fifth.
“I don’t need your help,” Yael told him. “Go home, Felix. Go back to Mama and Papa before you end up like Martin.”
Flinging the dead’s name like a weapon was a low move, but it worked. Their conversation was done.
Felix had no more knuckles left to crack. He turned and slammed his fist into the card table instead. Wood splintered. The bowl of figs and dates went flying, their shriveled sweetness scattering in the dust by Yael’s boots as she walked away.
CHAPTER 17
NOW
MARCH 18, 1956
CAIRO CHECKPOINT
There was another paper token beneath Yael’s pillow this evening. A tiny crane made out of Arabic newspaper. Yael sat for a moment on her bunk, admiring the handiwork of the bird nestled in her palm. It was the same size as the smallest doll. Whoever folded it had taken time, care.
Yael tucked the crane into her jacket pocket alongside the star (now a bit crushed from her desert wreck). The motion edged her sleeve close to her nose. Yael froze. The dread in her stomach stretched and grew.
Wearing perfume. This accusation had made no sense when Adele’s brother had said it. But now… now Yael understood.
Her jacket smelled like flowers and smoke. It smelled like shisha.
And Felix had noticed.
A great fear vised Yael’s chest. Crushing down and in, until not even the empty spaces mattered. Her lungs were frozen.
No air.
Memories of the wreck returned. No air. Gravel in her skin. Felix cleaning her wound, spilling secrets he had no business knowing. Adele’s brother was here to protect his sister. Not turn her in. He wouldn’t go to the racing officials unless he learned the truth: Who she was. Who she was not.
The file was evidence of this secret. It had to be memorized and destroyed before Adele’s brother could confront her again. So off to the washroom Yael went.
Its door was latched shut when she arrived, choking sounds seeping through its wood. Uneven breaths, a severe, stifled sniff. Yael’s heart panged at the noises, for she knew them well.
Behind the door, someone was weeping. Someone who was trying very hard not to.
Yael had half a mind to slink away. But this washroom was the only place on the compound where she was guaranteed privacy, something she needed if she was going to be reviewing the kilo of pages weighing down her jacket.
She rapped on the door.
All sounds of crying stopped. Replaced with scuffing boots and the rush of a faucet. Nearly a minute passed before the water cut off and the door swung open.
Yael had imagined many different faces—splotched in red, streaked with tears—inside the washroom. Ryoko, perhaps. Or maybe one of the younger first-years: Rolf or Taro. She’d even, for a fleeting second, pictured Felix bracing himself against the sink. Pale hair, jagged face.
Not once had she considered that the sounds might have come from Tsuda Katsuo.
At the sight of Yael, the boy paused, just long enough for her to pick out the faint pink swell beneath his eyelashes. The rest of his face was damp, not with tears, but faucet water. He’d scoured it clean.
Why would Katsuo, of all people, be weeping? He was a hunter, a victor.…
A victor with an entire empire’s expectations crushing down on his shoulders. The hope of a people. The need to win. It was a lot to carry, even without the added weight of an impending putsch. Enough to make anyone falter.
But there was nothing faltering about Katsuo now. His eyes, bloodshot though they were, snapped back into the vicious courtyard stare as he shoved past Yael, disappeared down the hallway.
Tsuda Katsuo: Not so easy to read after all.
But Yael had other people to read about, so she pushed her shock aside and entered the washroom. She crouched on the covered toilet by the steady stream of masking incense smoke and opened the envelope. It held sixty-four pages in all. Introduced by Henryka’s short note:
VOLCHITSA,
THIS IS ALL THE INFORMATION WE COULD GATHER. I HOPE YOU FIND IT USEFUL.
--H
This was what she was dealing with.
There were dozens of pages on Felix Burkhard Wolfe. Yael kept peeling them back. Fact after fact after fact.
Felix’s school records. (He’d been much more studious than Adele.) Physician’s notes. (He struggled with acrophobia. And had been admitted to the hospital twice for a broken nose. Otherwise he was a peak specimen of the Aryan race.) Hitler Youth logs. Records of all the cars and motorcycles he’d repaired in his father’s auto shop. Yael could see by the flux in dates and the absence of grades that he’d dropped out of school two years ago to run the business. He’d been excused from regular Hitler Youth meetings to tend to this duty and had no social life to speak of. (Which was why Adele had gotten away with posing as him for so many weeks. There was no one to miss the real Felix Wolfe.)
There were enough facts to beef up any future conversations with Adele’s brother, which was something. But the information Yael needed most wasn’t there. Resistance activity: unmentioned, unknown.
Yael set these papers by the sink, moved on to the next stack: Luka Löwe & Adele Wolfe. It was considerably thinner than Felix’s file.
No known contact existed between the two before the ninth Axis Tour. They rode in close proximity from Rome all the way to Osaka, where Adele finished the final leg alone. Luka’s time was over two hours off, though in the interviews he never said why. There was no known contact between them after the race.
Everything that happened started in Rome. What you did ended in Osaka.
And between?
Yael tossed the files to the ground. So much ink and white and nothing spread across the washroom floor. She raked her fingers through Adele’s silky hair and stared at it all.
There were too many blank spaces. Luka and Felix. Neither boy was what she’d read on paper. Watched on archival films. Expected from swastika-wearing Aryan youth. Things were so different face-to-face. Flesh-to-flesh. So complicated.
Both were so much more.
There was a tightness inside Yael’s chest that had nothing to do with pain or fear. She’d trained for ice storms and starvation. Torture and long stretches of desert thirst. Lying with a blank face. Looking straight into the Führer’s eyes as she slid a knife into his ribs.
She thought she was ready for this mission. Ready for anything.
But not this. Not relationships.
This wasn’t something she could fake.
CHAPTER 18
NOW
MARCH 19, 1956
CAIRO TO BAGHDAD
There was more desert ahead.
The road was just as weather-worn as it had been on the tour’s third leg. And although she was still in the lead, Yael’s pace felt painstakingly slow as she wove her bike through potholes: all crawl, less race. The scenery didn’t help—Yael had never been in a place so empty as the wilderness beyond Cairo. Endless horizons, sheer length and grand nothingness. On the first night when Yael cut the Zündapp’s engine and set up her camp, there was nothing. Just silence and a heavy dark—the noise she carried inside her. Always.
This was how she knew she was not alone.
The footsteps outside her tent were soft. Not even whispers over the sand. Yael sat up when she heard them—heart strung, gun in hand.
The noise stopped.
She grabbed her electric lantern and slid out of the tent. A pair of eyes gleamed—eerie sea-green stars. Yael raised her pistol, dropped the light. The eyes darted. A glimpse of sandy fur flashed across Yael’s patch of illuminated desert. Just a desert fox. Probably drawn to her camp by the tin of beef and prepackaged crackers she’d devoured hours earlier.
Yael clicked the P38’s safety back, slid the gun into her pocket, and bent down to get the lantern. That was when she saw them: human footprints, strung across the sand. Spaced too far apart to be her own.
Every single one of Yael’s senses ratcheted up as she wheeled around and took in the camp. The smell of cool sand, her tent haloed in lamplight, the shadows stretching long around it… melting into a lonely, lonely night. No sound.
Nothing.
Yael was the only soul left in her camp. But this knowledge hardly calmed her. No racer would go to the trouble to hike all the way to her camp (and forfeit hours of precious sleep) to leave only footprints.
Something was wrong.
She turned to her bike. The Zündapp was where she’d parked it, sporting the normal scuffs and dents. Its tires were full, unpunctured. (Her visitor probably wasn’t Takeo, then.) The fuel line was intact. The engine untampered with, starting on the first try.
But the footprints-not-her-own were here, too. Planted just by the rear tire and…
Her canteens.
Yael turned to them with a deflating heart. All four were where she’d left them, lodged by her panniers, but crooked. One of the caps was too loose. When Yael unscrewed it and lifted the open container to her nostrils, she knew.
This was Iwao’s work. Katsuo must have sent him to put his fondness for drugging food and drink to good use.
The soporific’s scent was faint. It would have been undetectable but for all of Vlad’s neurotic training (Smell this! Smell that! One sip of this and you’re done!). Yael’s thoroughly schooled nose told her it was a sedative—a single swig and Yael’s ten-minute lead would be gone.
She cursed Iwao first, then Katsuo—and to think, she’d almost felt sorry for the victor!—then herself. Guard your provisions with care. She hadn’t. She hadn’t, and now all four canteens of water were compromised.
Yael might not have taken the drug, but the damage was done. Baghdad was well over a day’s ride away—all sun, through land where water was scarce. Yael’s throat cracked just thinking about it.
She poured out her canteens at dawn, watching as the water threaded crystal in the rising sun, catching glints of gold and orange before vanishing in the sand. She scavenged a pebble from the roadside, let it tumble in her mouth as she drove. It kept the saliva flowing, made the morning bearable.
The refueling stops were no help. There were no limitless wells to draw from, just men camped with drums of gasoline beside the road, guarding limited water rations of their own. (They’d been warned about this drought of supplies in Cairo, given two extra canteens for the leg and ordered to ration them, which was probably why Katsuo had sent Iwao to Yael’s camp in the first place.) She managed to beg a few swallows of water from an official at the first stop, but this only made her thirst worse. By noon there were cracks inside her, and they were spreading. Yael began to see water everywhere it wasn’t. (In the shimmer of heat just down the road. In the shadows cast by rocks.) The Luka in her head kept talking—as smug and smirking as the real one: Soon, very soon, you’re going to need me.
None of the other refueling officials had been willing to part with their precious water, and by nightfall Yael felt fractured, ready to fall to pieces. She wasn’t going to make it to Baghdad
Soon.
Very soon.
Now.
Why did he have to be so right? There was no telling how far behind Felix’s camp was or if he’d even be willing to give her a drink. But Luka… his camp was bound to be close to hers. And he would have water to spare.
It took five minutes to walk to Luka’s camp. The pebble was still clattering in Yael’s mouth, grinding her teeth. She nearly choked on it when she approached the boy’s tent, called for him.
He was out before his name left her lips—though it was obvious she’d caught him unawares. His jacket, shirt, and Iron Cross were nowhere to be
seen. The boy was raw muscle and skin under the shine of the half-moon. A silver dog tag rested against his breastbone. A Luger pistol gleamed in his hand, aimed at her face.
Yael was too thirsty, too tired to hold her arms up. She didn’t even have the energy to hate him.
“Ah, Fräulein.” Luka’s arm lowered when he registered her presence, tucking his gun back behind his trousers. His eyebrows flew high and the lines in his abdomen deepened. A not-so-subtle flex attempt. “Like what you see?”
They were very nice muscles. Worth at least a thousand German maidens’ snared hearts. But Yael would sooner pluck off all of her body hairs one by one than admit this.
“Back-k in R-Rome—” The dryness in her throat felt like rusty razors. Yael cleared it out and tried again. “In Rome you suggested we could be allies. You said we need each other.”
“I take it this isn’t a social call.” His eyes held hers for a long moment. All black, but for the irises. These gleamed—deep sea blue, water blue. Reading in his unreadable way while she crumbled into dry, dry pieces. An arm here. A rib there.
“I need water,” Yael said. “Enough to last until Baghdad.”
“Water?” Luka turned. His back muscles rippled as he retrieved his undershirt, pulled it over his wild, windtorn hair. His free fingers stroked the bristle on his jaw. “I don’t know. I was saving some for a shave.…”
“Please.” Yael gritted her teeth together, hating how much grovel and thirst crept through her voice. So much for not sounding desperate. There was her gun, heavy in her left pocket, and the knife bracing her boot, but she knew she wouldn’t be fast enough to take Luka’s water by force. Not as drained as she was.
“Beards get awfully hot out here,” he went on. “All that itch and hair makes for poor concentration.”
He had to be joking. He had to be.
“Katsuo tried to take me out,” Yael informed him. “He sent Iwao to drug my water. He’ll do the same for you.”