Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  She was still staring at it when Henryka walked into the room. The older woman frowned at the screen.

  “What’s wrong? Did it break?”

  For the first time since she’d gotten it, Henryka turned the television off.

  There was a death in front of the Reichstag that day (May 16, 1952). But it was not the Führer’s.

  Three bullets to the chest (though Das Reich reported it as four, to make the crime more heinous, the recovery more miraculous) + the finest Aryan surgeons in Germania = a life saved.

  Not calculus, though it seemed just as hard to understand. Yael’s head swam every time she tried to think about it. Aaron-Klaus was dead, and the world had not changed.

  No, that wasn’t true. It had changed. A night curfew had been imposed on Germania. Fear of discovery—which had only been a lurking thing before—was thick. Arrests had been made, Reiniger told them. Most of them false connections. Necessary scapegoats, sacrificed on the altar of the Führer’s demand for vengeance.

  The Gestapo had taken a picture of Aaron-Klaus’s dead, unchanging face. They flashed it all over the Reichssender and plastered it all over Germania’s alleys and shop windows.

  It was only a matter of time before someone recognized him. Before things were traced back to this basement. So they packed up their possessions into empty barrels (boxes would look too suspicious) and moved to another beer hall. Henryka stripped her office barer than a corpse. Shredding piles of encoded letters. Files. Old transcripts. She tore the map off the wall in one furious, fell swoop. Pins went flying: A1, L52, R31… hundreds scattered across the floor.

  Yael picked them up. When she found Aaron-Klaus’s pin (K15), she slipped it into her pocket. It rattled and poked at the smallest doll as she moved on her hands and knees, gathered up the others. There were tears in her eyes and a burn in her chest. New, yet so, so old.

  They left the television off. A lonely, one-eyed prophet in the corner.

  “You’ll have to leave it,” Reiniger told Henryka when he finally arrived. His face was more than severe as he took in the empty room. “Stupid, foolish boy.”

  Henryka was crying, too. “You should not speak of the dead so.”

  “He just wanted to change things.” Yael exhumed his words, realized how familiar they felt as they left her lips. Change things.

  You are going to change things. Not Aaron-Klaus.

  If only she’d remembered. If only she’d told him. If only she hadn’t tried so hard to be normal, to hide the monster inside…

  Reiniger’s expression curdled. “The only thing he’s changed is our chances of a successful operation. We were so close. Weeks from executing Valkyrie. Klaus has unraveled everything. The SS and Gestapo are on a witch hunt. I’ve told all the cells to lie low, but I have no idea when it will pass.”

  “We’ll wait it out,” Henryka whispered. “We’ll try again.”

  “There might not be another chance,” the National Socialist general said with a sigh. “There have been too many attempts on his life. The Führer has decided to cease public appearances to minimize risk. He’ll address the Volk solely over the Reichssender. Even if he does go out in public again, the security around him will be impregnable.”

  “What about his inner circle? Are there any candidates?”

  Reiniger shook his head. “Any who showed signs of wavering or weakness were weeded out after the first failed attempt to execute Operation Valkyrie. The Führer only lets the loyal ones close. The ones who would die for him. No one involved in the resistance made that list.”

  Henryka stared at the television screen—as dead and glassy as her eyes. “There has to be some way.”

  “For what you’re talking about, Henryka, we’d need a doppelgänger. And a sympathetic one at that.” Reiniger shook his head. “I’m sorry, but it’s over.”

  Yael’s hands were in her sweater pockets, squeezing around the smallest doll and Aaron-Klaus’s thumbtack. Its sharp end dug into her palm. She knew there would be blood when she pulled her hand out. But she did not care, she was too busy with other pains. Everything was flooding back—

  Chosen by an angel of a different kind.

  Marked with an X.

  You are special. You can live. You are going to change things.

  Yael, but not.

  Mонстр. Monstre. Monster.

  Someone has to do it.

  —WAKE UP WAKE UP NOW IT’S TIME—

  It wasn’t just about staying alive anymore, or being normal. All things were leading up to this.

  “Me,” Yael said. “I can do it.”

  All that pain—so fresh, so much, so angry, so old—now awake. Yael took it and wove it through her bones. She shut her eyes and thought of the Valkyrie.

  —LET THEM SEE—

  She showed them her greatest secret. Her greatest shame.

  Her change.

  CHAPTER 20

  NOW

  MARCH 21, 1956

  BAGHDAD CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 7,250

  Baghdad, a city that really wasn’t a city at all. Anymore. Its fringes were only a memory of a town, hollowed shell houses with broken windows, belongings long looted. Mosques loomed. Their walls of mosaics veiled in dust. The spires that had once called all to pray and had guided every eye up toward God now pointed for no one into an empty, washed-out sky for no one.

  There was still some life at the center. People spared the horrors of the ever-burning oil fields. Spared to be props for the Reichssender cameras. Spared to be foot servants for the region’s Reichskommissar and other National Socialist officials. To serve them iced coffee on silver trays and sweep up the dirt their jackboots tracked indoors.

  The Baghdad checkpoint was beautiful, much more so than any of the others. Its doorways arched in the most welcoming of ways. Latticed windows caught the day’s harsh light, spread it across the floor like a story. Colorful tiles—blue, white, gold—fit together in intricate patterns across the walls. The air bloomed with spices and tea, incense and heat.

  The checkpoint’s inhabitants were hardly as elegant. The scour of the road was beginning to show on even the most hardened racers. Torn jackets, dented boots, faces scrubbed raw by sand. Language eroded, becoming just as crude as the racers came in, saw their times. (There were more than a few Scheisses and kusos hurled at the blackboard.) The standings hadn’t changed much:

  1st: Adele Wolfe, 7 days, 7 hours, 11 minutes, 30 seconds.

  2nd: Luka Löwe, 7 days, 7 hours, 21 minutes, 8 seconds.

  3rd: Tsuda Katsuo, 7 days, 7 hours, 22 minutes, 6 seconds.

  Yael was still in the lead. Still a target. The bull’s-eye weighed heavy on her back, all eyes aimed at it. No matter where she took her meal of lamb and chickpeas, the stares followed. Katsuo’s was the worst: katana-slice sharp. (Yael couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that after their washroom encounter, the boy’s glares gouged even deeper.) Takeo sat on his right side, flipping his switchblade open and shut. Iwao sat on Katsuo’s left, looking particularly miserable. An extra chair sat between him and the victor. The failed drugging attempt must’ve put Iwao on the outs.

  The German boys were watching, too, more closely than Yael might’ve liked. Taking note of her bruised throat, her scabbed, ruddy cheeks.

  It wasn’t long before one (or all) of them would strike again. And Iwao had come far too close to ruining her race. Yael needed an ally. A real one—to take night watches and fend off pincer movements.

  The options weren’t promising. Yael assessed the room like a world-class bettor. Divided the racers into the camps they made themselves:

  NAME STANCE

  Katsuo. Takeo. Iwao. Lars. Ralf. Dolf. Against her. Point-blank.

  Masaru. Norio. Isamu. Rolf. Karl. Taro. Not against her, but none of them would be much help. First-year no-threats didn’t make the best allies.

  Yamato. Introverted. There was no reading him.

  Luka. Who knew, really? She’d thought she had him pegged, but now he was a wild c
ard. Nothing to put her bets on, anyway. Best to keep her distance. Keep the favors owed to one.

  Ryoko. Was she the one folding the papers? Yael suspected so. But tiny paper animals and a smile hardly an ally made.

  Hiraku. Hans. Kurt. Gone. (Hans Muller and Kurt Stark both withdrew after the sandstorm.)

  There was just one person on her side, in her camp.

  Adele’s brother sat alone at a table, hunched over the scattered silver innards of his pocket watch. Sleepless purple crescents under his eyes bled seamlessly into his pistol-whipped face. Even after a few days and Nurse Wilhelmina’s attentions, the wound looked bad. Blackish, blue, edges of green—still bright enough to shrivel up the words in Yael’s throat.

  But she needed to say something to him. She needed Felix Wolfe on her side if she was to get to the end.

  True, he was suspicious. He knew too much while Yael knew too little. But the situation would only grow worse if she ignored it. Like the weeds that always sprang along the borders of Vlad’s vegetable garden. She needed to yank his suspicions out by the roots. Plant them elsewhere.

  The best way to do this, Yael decided, was to tell Felix Wolfe the truth. Not the whole truth, of course. Felix would do anything for his sister, and that was who she had to stay. As for the finer details of her mission… she’d feed him the bread-crumb version. Just enough to lead Adele’s brother where she wanted him to go.

  It was a risk, betting that Felix’s love for his sister was stronger than his fear of the government. But he’d kept Adele’s secrets before, staying silent and hidden when she raced in his name.

  Why should this one be any different?

  Felix didn’t even look at Yael when she came to stand by his table. Her shadow stretched over the dozens of metallic cogs and gears. She was close enough to read the letters along the bent casing. Hand-scratched, faded as ghosts: Property of Martin Wolfe.

  Yael cleared her throat. “Is it broken?”

  “Stopped working. Too much sand,” Adele’s brother muttered. He was using the same tweezers he’d patched her up with so many nights ago to pick through the watch’s pieces. “Clogging the gears.”

  “Can you fix it?” Yael asked.

  Felix stared at her the way Adele had just before Yael knocked her out cold. Oh, how those blue eyes could burn! “Do you care? You always hated this watch.”

  Vendetta against cheap pocket watches owned by dead brothers. Another character trait to add to the list. “I—I just…”

  “What do you want, Ad?”

  “I thought I should bring you some food.” The plate in Yael’s hands shuddered as she offered it out. Boiled chickpeas rolled along the rim like lopsided marbles.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to accept food from other riders.”

  “Touché.” She set the plate down by Felix’s elbow and herself next to it.

  Adele’s brother turned his stare back to the eviscerated pocket watch.

  “I’m sorry for stealing your bike. And… doing that.” She nodded to the hurricane bruise that battered his hairline.

  Felix kept sorting through the gears with his tweezers. Eyes down, saying nothing.

  “I need to win this race,” she said again, “and you’re right. I need your help. Will you ride with me? The rest of the way?”

  He set the tweezers down (it was more of a drop, the way they clattered onto the table, landing awkwardly between the gears) and faced her in full.

  “I’m tired, Ad. Tired of sand in my teeth. Tired of having my left eye swollen shut. Tired of being so saddle sore I can barely get up for a night piss. I’m tired of you promising to come home and never being there. I’m tired of your empty apologies, your endless lies. I’m tired of fighting to keep this family together.” Adele’s brother nodded back at Martin’s watch—one hundred timeless pieces of metal and glass. “I’m tired of fixing things that always break.”

  “I’m tired, too.” This was the truth. Yael was exhausted, full of muscle ache and sun-drain. But that was nothing compared to the weariness inside her. The one that began on that train so many years ago. The one that stretched long, long, long down the narrative of her life.

  “Then stop,” Felix said. “Just stop.”

  She pictured it for a moment: running from everything. In fact, she’d imagined it before, staring at Henryka’s map. She’d decided north would be best, somewhere in the long swath of the Siberian taiga—nothing but snow, animals, pines. No people for hundreds of kilometers. No more death as close as wings. It wouldn’t take much to survive off the land, not after all that Vlad had taught her.…

  But there would be no peace, not even there. Not while the Führer lived on and ashes piled higher, always higher. Too many bodiless souls to count.

  No. What weighed inside Yael was something stopping would not fix. There was only one way to end it.

  Get to the end.

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean—” Felix stopped short. His spine grew ramrod straight and Yael saw the subtle shift behind his eyes. The knowing bursting through him, full throttle.

  There was no stopping now. “You’re right. I haven’t been myself lately, but there’s a reason for that. A dangerous, big reason.”

  Yael watched him carefully as she said this. His tow-blond hair was parted and combed, the essence of order. Its paleness bled down into the rest of his face. Until even his sunburn and bruises were washed out by shock.

  She waited for his answer. The muscles in her calves clenching the same way they had in the closet of Adele’s flat. Waiting for attack/truce/retreat. Felix’s silence held for another few beats. The cramps crept up Yael’s legs, and suddenly she wished she’d picked a less conspicuous place for this encounter.

  But all Felix did was whisper, “The secret I told you at camp… it’s you.”

  Yael shook her head in a way that said (screamed), Not here. A glance over her shoulder showed her that no one was listening. Not really. Katsuo’s stare had migrated to a different corner of the room, where Yamato and Ryoko sat together, the book of poetry open between them. (It was considerably more worn than it had been in Prague: spine cracked, pages dusty and dog-eared.) This time Yamato read the words aloud as Ryoko listened, folding her napkin into quarters. Her smile had grown.

  The German boys whose names all sounded the same were archipelagoed around the edge of the room, being interviewed by the Reichssender or napping.

  And Luka… he was nowhere to be seen. Probably off flirting with the nurse.

  “Will you ride with me?” she asked again.

  Felix said nothing. A sharp, sharp silence.

  Iwao laughed, too hard, at something Katsuo said. The sound clashed against the tiled walls. Yamato kept reading aloud in a lilting voice, reciting a haiku about the change of season. One of the first-year German boys had started snoring.

  “Felix… please…” Yael didn’t take her eyes off Adele’s brother: still wordless, still pale, still elbow deep in pieces of the pocket watch. “I need you.”

  His answer?

  Felix grabbed a fistful of chickpeas. Dropped them one by one into his mouth.

  He was in.

  CHAPTER 21

  NOW

  MARCH 22, 1956

  BAGHDAD TO NEW DELHI

  Yael decided to fall behind. Not in time. She had enough of that (ten minutes was a comfortable lead), but when she kicked her engine to life and started out into Baghdad’s streets, she let the herd swallow her and waited for Felix. Luka plumed past, and true to his advice, he stayed just a few meters behind Katsuo’s tail. Not losing any time, but not gaining any either.

  Yael kept Felix at her side, Luka in her sights, and the end in her heart.

  This desert was vastly different from the dunes and sands of the African coast. Its cracked earth stretched far, a devilish, dust-filled landscape. Mountains loomed on the horizon, like the waves of the lie-detector polygraphs Vlad used to hook her up to. The roads were di
fferent as well. Less pitted, more amenable to fourth gear.

  The first night out they camped in an ancient fort, meters from the road. It was a place long gutted. Riddled with some animal’s dried pellets, hemmed by ruined walls. Stars strung across the roofless dark, burning like the oil fields.

  Yael sat with her back to the crumbling stones, watching as Felix checked the time with Martin’s battered watch (he’d fixed it!) and rooted through his panniers for field rations. He did this with his back to her, she noted, even though the side of his face was the color of spoiled mayonnaise. They hadn’t spoken a word since the chickpeas, but words only seemed to be a sliver of the twins’ relationship. There was a white flag in the air between them—high and fluttering—tensions off. (At least on Felix’s side. Yael had spent much of her time on the road reviewing facts: Felix Burkhard Wolfe. Anger issues. Lonely, lonely as her.)

  “Dehydrated chicken or dehydrated beef?” Felix broke the silence as he walked up to her, balancing two silver packages in his hands. “Honestly, I can’t taste the difference.”

  The last car he had fixed was a Volkswagen. According to the Wolfes’ neighbors, every year on the twins’ birthday, Felix visited Martin’s grave and held vigil there. Fact after fact after useless fact.

  This interaction, this being a sister… it wasn’t something Yael could fake.

  The solution was simple enough, painful enough.

  She just had to treat him like a brother. The way she had once treated Aaron-Klaus.

  Above, the starlight wavered from forces long gone, centuries past. Her fourth wolf scorched in skin and memories as Yael reached out and grabbed the closest packet. Chicken.

  “Fenrir,” she said.

  Felix’s good eyebrow arched at her.

  “That’s what I’m naming my bike,” Yael explained.

  “You mean my bike?” Adele’s brother slumped down next to her, back against the same decaying wall.