by Ryan Graudin
Right. They’d never actually switched motorcycles back after Cairo. The Zündapp she’d started the race with—the Zündapp Felix had limped into the third checkpoint—was long gone. Traded in for one of the few replacements each checkpoint city was stocked with.
“Want it back?”
“After you went to all that trouble?” Felix shook his head. “Fenrir’s all yours. Where’d you learn to throw a gun around like that anyway?”
In an alpine valley at a farm that was no farm at all. “Where do you think?”
“Dark alleys? Hidden attics?” His slender shoulders hooked into a shrug. “I don’t know. Where do resistance members usually commit sedition?”
The way Felix said this—with tight lips and a snake-slit eye—made it clear he wasn’t resistance himself. He must’ve stumbled across a leak of information.… Yael tore the ration packet open with her teeth and tried not to think of how much intel was puddling all across Europe. Drip, drip, dripping from ear to uncleared ear.
It was time to lay down some crumbs. Divert his suspicions with close enough truths.
“Shisha cafés,” she answered.
“I knew it!” Felix clenched his fists. Jabbed at some phantom enemy in front of him. “So that was you.…”
“Not me,” Yael lied. “A double. I saw you following me and had a girl in the café swap clothes. Take my place. I hoped you’d think it was a mistake. Let it go.”
Something like anger dawned on Felix’s face. “Do you know how much danger you’re putting yourself in? Our entire family?”
Yael slipped a piece of chicken into her mouth, buying a few more seconds of silence. Chew, chew, chew. Swallow chicken down, spit answer out. “Why do you think I haven’t been home? I’ve been distancing myself on purpose, Felix. To protect you and Papa and Mama. That’s why I brained you in the desert. You were supposed to go home,” she explained. “I didn’t want you getting caught up in this.”
“Too late, Ad. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Frankfurt or a thousand kilometers away! If the Gestapo even caught a whiff of what you’re doing, they’ll skin you alive. They’ll skin all of us alive. Whole families have been carted away for less.”
Felix’s eyes were grave, like he expected her to be surprised. But they’d already carted her family away. Already taken her skin. Alive. She’d watched it slough off like autumn leaves. Everything she was falling away…
“What’s the resistance making you do?”
If he thought the race itself was too dangerous, he’d balk at the idea of what Yael had to do in the end. She could not tell him. “They’re not making me do anything.”
“Then what are you choosing to do?” he asked.
She thought of the file Reiniger had given her. The sound of all those thick papers sliding across Vlad’s scarred farm table. Adele’s life. The Führer’s death. Spelled out in no uncertain terms.
A choice.
Was it ever a choice? When every turn and bend of her life twisted to it? When the Babushka told her she would change things? When death let her walk away, time and time again? When the stars gave her sandstorms? When she could be anyone, felt like no one?
Yael shook her head. “The world is wrong.”
Would Adele say that? Probably not. But Adele wouldn’t have joined the resistance in the first place. And it was too late, the words were out now. “We’ve known it our whole lives, haven’t we? But we never say anything because it’s easier not to, because someone might be listening. People disappear overnight and are never heard from again. Women are being bred like livestock for the Lebensborn. Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons are all dead—”
She choked on the last word, made herself stop. Because that subject was endless. It held too much of herself. “The world is wrong. I’m just doing my part to fix it.”
Wind, still hot and gritty from the desert day, beat against the old fort wall. Accenting their silence. Yael watched Felix from the corner of her eye. He gripped the beef packet, his fingers tight.
“How’d you find out about the mission?” she asked.
“It was the Schuler boy.” Felix ripped his package nearly in half as he said this. Dried beef spilled out of the torn plastic. “The one from Wolfsgang Street who always fancied you. He thought you were in danger, so he warned me that something was going to happen on the tour.”
“It wasn’t his place,” Yael said.
“And who says it’s yours?” Felix was too flustered to pick up his beef. Instead it just sat in the dust. “For God’s sake, Ad, you’re just a seventeen-year-old girl! The resistance has no right to ask you to risk everything. Why does it have to be you?”
The boy next to her was so unlike Aaron-Klaus. Aaron-Klaus, who’d found her. Aaron-Klaus, who’d believed in a better world. Aaron-Klaus, who’d left her, forever, because someone has to do it.
No, Felix Wolfe was more like a burr. The kind that stuck to your socks after a walk through long grasses. Hooked, stubborn, along for the ride, jabbing if you tried to remove it.
He was jabbing now. Eyes on edge: watching, asking, needing an answer. A reason.
Not her reason (four + one + ink + pain).
What would Adele fight for? What would make Felix fight for her?
Yael shoved her hand into her pocket. Felt Aaron-Klaus’s thumbtack, the crumpled paper sculptures, the smallest doll. The answer Adele’s brother needed to hear wasn’t so far from her own. Lost family. Missing pieces.
Snap, snap, snap, safe. That was what would drive Felix Burkhard Wolfe where Yael wanted him to go. “This world will tear our family apart. Even if I don’t get caught on this mission, you and I will get sent to different Lebensraum settlements. Mama and Papa will have no one.
“If we help the resistance, we can change that. We can stay together. Be a family again.” These words ached inside Yael as she said them. She gripped the talismans inside her pocket so hard the long-blunted edge of Aaron-Klaus’s thumbtack broke skin.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” she said. “You can drop out and go home. Or you can help me win this race. Get to the end.”
Felix set down his packet. The winds from the wall dipped down, lifted it out of the dust. It danced and fluttered and spun like a living thing through the lamplight. Yael waited for him to ask what the end would be, but it seemed not to matter.
“Remember what Papa said to us the morning of Martin’s funeral?”
The old thumbtack dug into her palm. She didn’t want to let it go. “I don’t like to think about that day.”
“Makes two of us,” he said, voice changing as he quoted the twins’ father, “‘There is iron in our blood, and it binds us together. We are Wolfes. We are stronger than this.’”
Felix reached out and touched her arm. There were so many layers—hand over jacket over sleeve over bandage over skin over inked wolves—yet they felt like nothing at all.
“We’re Wolfes, Ad. I trust you. And I’m on your side. No matter what.”
So many words said through so many more layers—love over the biggest lie of all, over anger, over abandoned, over scared little girl alone on the road. Yet for a moment Yael heard these words skin to skin. She turned her eyes to the crevasses of the night sky—its pits of stars—and imagined that Felix had said them to her, Yael. (After all, there was iron in her blood, too.) That this boy was really on her side. No matter what. That they would get to the end of the race together and that he’d somehow understand why she’d stolen his sister’s identity, used it to kill the world’s most powerful man. That she would somehow survive what was coming. (Life or death.)
It was a nice thought. A nice moment.
But she knew in her heart that Felix would fade like all the others, become nothing but ink in her skin and fragments for nightmares.
He would not walk away. Not like Aaron-Klaus. No—she’d have to tear him out herself, like the burrs on her socks. Show him who she was. What she’d done. What she was about to do.
And
it would hurt.
Two days passed. Three riders were wiped off the road in a nasty wreck. (Rolf’s front wheel caught the sharp side of a rock. The resulting blowout took down Dolf and Norio in a tangle of metal and merciless dust.) Felix stayed at her side, just as he said he would. Together they kept a good pace. Katsuo and Luka stayed in sight, never quite swallowed by the hazed blue horizon. The other ten riders kept on Yael’s tail. Hungry engines, famished stares. Every time one of them revved close and tried to clip her, Felix pulled in, edging the offender off the road.
Then came the mountains. They were not as grand and jutting as the Alps, but the roads writhed through them like an angry serpent, edged with fangs of rocks. Sometimes there was no road, only ledges barely wider than their wheels. Felix stayed behind Yael, stalwart and grim-faced as she balanced her bike along the path. Prayed into the heights of the sky that she would not fall.
She didn’t. Felix let out a scuff of a breath when they reached the other side, bikes intact, bodies whole. His shoulders shook when he looked back at the drop they’d just skirted. Well over twenty meters. Bone-dashing at best.
And then she remembered: Acrophobia: an intense fear of heights.
He faced it for her, without so much as a word.
“You okay?” Yael didn’t have to fake the concern in her voice.
“Yeah.” He shuddered when he said this. “How do you think the Reichssender crew and the supply vans will get past that?”
“They must be taking a longer route. Around this mountain range.” Which meant they were alone this stretch. No room for error. Poisoned rations or mechanical breakdowns during this leg could mean the end of things.
“Lucky them.” Felix’s eyebrows twitched under his goggles. “We should go, before Luka and Katsuo get too far ahead.”
But there was no fear of that. A few curves and slopes later they found the pair, stopped in the middle of the road. Their engines were off, as were their helmets. Yael brought her own Zündapp to a halt.
They’d reached a dead end.
The craggy brown mountains that rose on either side had collapsed, swallowing the road with dirt and boulders. Some of these were far bigger than Katsuo, who was scaling the mass. Luka leaned against his motorcycle, watching with lazy eyes as he plucked a new cigarette out of his silver case. Yael parked her Zündapp a good distance from his and kept one hand shoved into her P38 pocket as she tore off her goggles, got a clear view.
There was no way past it. It was so steep that Katsuo had to use his hands to steady himself as he climbed. By the time he reached the top, he was in miniature.
“Landslide,” Luka grunted.
“We can see that, dummkopf,” Felix muttered under his breath as he pulled up next to Yael.
“It looks recent.” Yael slipped off her bike. The debris in the road was still churned up. Not pounded down by the elements. Her eyes followed it, scanning the hillsides.
Adele’s brother picked up a handful of the loose dirt and let it sift through his fingers. Katsuo crouched on the mountain above. Luka wedged the cigarette between his lips and hunted for a match.
And then Yael saw it. Her breath hitched.
“Someone did this on purpose,” she said. “Look.”
Felix followed the plane of her finger. To the high, high mountainside, where the earth had been scooped in chunks that reminded Yael of the bomb scars that pocked Europe’s buildings. The signature of explosives.
“But why? Who?” Felix asked.
Yael pulled her pistol out of her pocket. Kept her eyes on the hillsides. There were shadows in the pockets of stone. Too many places to hide.
Luka wasn’t leaning anymore. He dropped his cigarette case and reached into the back of his trousers, producing a gun of his own. “Scheisse,” he muttered, and aimed his Luger into the wounded hills.
But the dark places of the mountains were already rising, pulling apart. Men spilled out, swarming their valley, arms full of Mosin-Nagant rifles (7.62 mm). Soviet-made. More accurate than Yael would like to think with their barrels aimed at her chest.
“Drop your weapons!” This was the solid German command from the man at the front of the pack, followed by a clattering stream of Russian. “Track the boy from the hillside. Make sure he doesn’t get away. We can’t afford any loose ends.”
Two men broke off from the rest, started to climb the unsteady earth. A glance up showed Yael that Katsuo was gone. Only a wisp of dust in his place.
“Put your gun down, Fräulein Wolfe.” The commander spoke German again. “It is our preference to keep you in one piece.”
Two pistols stood no chance against so many rifles. Yael knelt down, placing her precious P38 in the middle of the ruined road, alongside Luka’s gun. They looked so small and useless between the rocks.
“On your knees,” the commander barked. “Hands on your head.”
She knelt down, studying the group as she did so. There were nearly twenty in all, including the men who had gone after Katsuo. Their uniforms had seen better years (some were not wearing them at all), but it was easy to tell they were what was left of the Soviet army. Specters from the white space on Henryka’s map.
Though the Soviet Union had been crumbling before the Axis’s double-border invasion, Hitler’s Great Victory completely shattered it, claiming every piece of land just beyond the Ural Mountains. Moscow. Leningrad. All the cities and their surrounding farmlands were claimed for the Lebensraum—the necessary eastward spread of the Aryan race. The rest, the Reich claimed, belonged to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But Emperor Hirohito had his sights set to the Pacific, so the wilds of Siberia went untouched. It was a wasteland stripped of infrastructure and export, reduced to feudal living.
There were stories of border raids in the Lebensraum east of the Urals, but Yael had never heard of guerrilla fighters this far south. What were they doing so far past the border? And why were they pointing guns at some of the Axis’s most prized youth?
Yael listened for answers as the Babushka’s language chuffed back and forth between them:
“Where are the rest of the racers?”
“Coming along the ledge. Our comrades will close in behind, make sure there is no escape.”
Our comrades. It was a whole platoon.
“Let’s get them back to base,” the commander’s Russian boomed against the valley sides. “Comrade Gromov, once the rest of the racers are detained, you’re to radio Novosibirsk. Let them know the first part of our operation is complete. Tell them we’re awaiting further instructions.”
“Yes, Comrade Commander Vetrov.”
Yael kept her face mystified, writ with question marks, as the soldiers bound her hands. Adele didn’t speak Russian. Neither did Felix or Luka—a fact that played plainly across their features.
“Up!” the soldier behind her ordered in sloppy German. “Come with.”
She stood. Started walking at the prod of his Mosin-Nagant. The rifle herded her toward the hill. The entrails of dirt and rocks they’d eviscerated from the earth.
“What about their motorbikes?” One of the men nudged Katsuo’s bike with his rifle.
Comrade Commander Vetrov turned without a glance. “Leave them. They won’t need them anymore.”
CHAPTER 22
NOW
MARCH 25, 1956
The “base” was an abandoned village. Stone box houses stacked like a child’s building blocks along a mountainside. They were a good way from the Axis Tour route, at least thirty minutes of being sardined in the back of a truck. While they’d rattled in the transport—all cussing, jabbing limbs, and dark—Yael closed her eyes and thought of the map in Henryka’s office. Officially they were in red-mapped space, Reich territory. In reality it was a no-man’s-land made of gutted villages and crumbling roads, just southwest of the white void.
The perfect place for the Axis Tour racers to go missing without a trace.
The soldiers guided them to a house in the center of the v
illage. A single, large room with barred windows. There was more than enough room for the thirteen of them. Every remaining racer except Katsuo.
According to the guards, he’d disappeared. Yael positioned herself closest to the door, where she could hear the guards gossiping in the Russian they thought none of the prisoners could understand.
It was, however, hard to hear when the room around her was crammed with fear, arguments on the brink of exploding.
“Do you think they’re going to kill us?” whimpered one of the German boys. (Ralf, maybe? A first-year, no threat.)
“I’ve heard that communists pull your fingernails out one by one and make you eat them!” Lars said next to him. Ralf’s mouth twisted, as if he were about to be sick.
Luka groaned, repositioned his bound arms against the wall behind him. “I’d give all my fingernails for a cigarette right now.”
“They have nothing to gain in our deaths.” Yamato’s Japanese flowed from the other side of the room. Even in their captivity the Germans and the Japanese sat apart. Luka, Felix, Yael, Karl, Lars, Ralf on one side. Yamato, Iwao, Takeo, Taro, Isamu, Masaru, Ryoko on the other. “Not yet.”
The German racers blinked at him, their brains jogging to translate. Though most riders took the other country’s language in secondary school, it was rare that they actually communicated with one another.
“He says soldiers have no reason to kill.” Ryoko’s German was slow—syllables stunted and grammar excruciatingly proper—but all who heard understood.
“Katsuo ordered us not to talk to them!” Takeo hissed at the girl in Japanese.
“And where is Katsuo?” Ryoko snapped back. “Some leader he is: forcing you to do his dirty work, abandoning you at the first sign of trouble!”
The other racer looked affronted. “Tsuda Katsuo is going to win the Double Cross and bring honor to our nation! I am proud to help him do it! As you should be!”
“There won’t be a Double Cross if we don’t get out of here,” Ryoko reminded him. “The Germans can help us escape.”