by Ryan Graudin
This would be a real escape. A real game of life and death.
“We might not be friends, but we don’t have to be enemies. If we work together, we can escape. All of us.” Yael looked at Ryoko as she said this. A mayfly smile flickered over the girl’s face as she turned to translate.
Takeo said nothing. When his own ropes were cut free, he waved Yael’s knife off in a different direction, pulled his Higonokami from his boot, and flicked it open. The knife’s edge had been sharpened so many times that its slightest touch melted through the next racer’s ropes. He gave Yael a pointed look (much, much blunter than any of Katsuo’s) and passed his prized weapon to Yamato. Brass hilt first.
Both blades made their rounds through the room, slicing racers free. When Yael’s knife finally reached her again, she stood and walked to the door. The lock between them and the guards was simple enough. It would take only seconds to pry open.
“If you want to stay, fine. I’m leaving,” she told them. “If you want to live, I suggest you do the same.”
Every single racer stood. Yael waited until they were all pressed close to the door. She sank the blade into the wedge with all her strength.
Splinter, pull, pop.
Felix flew, shoulder first, into the wood.
CRASH.
Aleksei didn’t even have the chance to yell before Luka was on top of him. Pulling the guard down in a flash of leather and speed. (Those abdomen muscles, it seemed, weren’t all for show.)
Adele’s brother handled the other guard. Two uppercuts later, the soldier was on the ground. Gunless.
“Let’s move!” Yael hissed. Both guards were out. Luka bent over Aleksei’s still form, the Mosin-Nagant tucked under his arm, fingers dancing through the unconscious guard’s pockets.
True to Vetrov’s word, this section of the village was empty: littered with abandoned, crumbling houses. The transport sat at the bottom of the hill, a few odd meters past the last forgotten building. Yael led the way—knees jarring down the steep slope. Her boots slid through layers of gravel as she tried her hardest not to fall.
They were halfway down the hill when the first shot sounded. No yells, no warning. Just a rifle’s thunderous cry. Ripping through the crown of wild mountains. Tearing Yael’s breath out of her throat.
The wail that followed it was thin in comparison. “They’re escaping!”
Another shot. The wall by Yael’s head cracked and cratered. She stopped worrying about the gravel, ran faster. Until her feet weren’t even touching the ground. She was skidding down the hill, tumbling on a riptide of rocks.
Above her, behind her was all noise. Luka swearing. Boots and boys skidding. Shouts and shots.
Finally, finally she reached the bottom of the hill. Another few lunges brought her to the truck’s cab door. Yael threw it open, saw the scene behind her.
Vetrov’s squad gathered like a storm at the hillcrest. Pouring over. Their rifle muzzles flared lightning bright in early dusk. Raining lead core and pain on the escapees below.
Boys were already piling into the back of the transport. Bursting through their own dust cloud. Ralf, Lars, Masaru, Iwao, Karl…
Felix ran up next to her. “Hurry, Ad!”
Taro, Ryoko, Isamu…
Ten. That’s how many had made it to the truck. Ten out of thirteen. There were no more silhouettes breaking through the thick, thick dust. Just rifle cracks and men running down the hill.
“We have to go! Now!” Adele’s brother screamed. Vetrov’s soldiers were halfway to the transport. Tumbling at the same speed as the rocks.
—HE’S RIGHT GO GO SAVE WHAT YOU CAN—
Number eleven appeared: Takeo, Higonokomi blade in hand, throwing himself into the back of the transport. The cloud behind him was starting to thin, enough so that Yael could see the final two. One: smaller and stumbling, hurt. The other: just behind, trying to hold back the deluge with his own single rifle.
And an army pouring down the hill.
They weren’t going to make it.
Not alone.
“We have to leave them!” Felix was already inside the cab, fumbling with the dashboard, searching for the keyless ignition.
—GO GO SAVE WHAT YOU CAN—
The lines in Yael’s soul dug deep as claws. Her third wolf howled (all guilt, all regret), and the road in front of her was full. Too full. With the boys who would not make it. With the army behind.
Did it matter?
—SAVE WHAT YOU CAN—
I can save them all, Yael thought back. Against herself.
“Start the truck!” she screamed at Adele’s brother, and tore away before he could stop her. “I’ll be back!”
She ran back toward the gunfire and saw Nagao Yamato’s mouth knotted tight in pain, his steps limp and uneven. When Yael drew closer, she saw why: His right foot was bent, twisted. Every time his weight fell on it, he screamed, but he kept pushing.
Just beyond, yelling the injured racer forward, was Luka. The victor was a terrifying sight. Wild and torn; his face smeared in red like war paint. He had his back to Yamato, the stolen rifle pressed into his shoulder. Aim and BOOM. A soldier above them crumpled, fell still on the hillside.
One out of a dozen.
“Move your ass, Yamato!” Luka screamed in clumsy Japanese as he twisted back the bolt, slid in a second cartridge.
The earth spit around her: rock, metal, death. But Yael kept running, straight to Yamato’s side. She threw his arm over her neck, started to pull him forward.
Six meters. Five. Four. Yael could see all the faces of the other racers—pale and anxious, strung like misshapen pearls. Exhaust spilled out the truck’s tailpipe.
Luka’s gun went off a second time.
Three meters. Two. The other racers’ hands reached out from the truck. White arms. Ghost fingers. Reaching, reaching…
One meter. None.
Yamato’s weight rose off her shoulder. Yael clawed onto the transport’s bumper. Already it was moving, pulling away under Felix’s lead foot as she heaved herself up. Yamato slid in beside her, dragged by Takeo and Taro.
Luka.
Yael pushed up on the truck bed’s rough floorboards and saw him running, face grim through the mask of exhaust. Arms windmilling. Behind him, the first of the soldiers. So close Yael could see the stars embroidered on their uniforms—as red as Luka’s bloody face.
Luka was fast, but the soldier behind him was faster. Closing the ground between them with black-booted lunges. His arm outstretched with hungry claws of fingers.
He’s not going to make it.
Yael reached into her jacket, pulled out the pistol Vetrov had returned to her. She held it high, lined up the sights, tried to ignore how the truck was shaking beneath her. Yael held her breath and pulled the trigger.
She was done leaving people behind.
There was an explosion of fabric and red by the soldier’s knee. He fell screaming as Luka ran, ran, ran. Launched himself into the back of the transport. He landed so close to Yael that she felt his bristle and scruff brush her cheek. Smelled the stick of his blood.
She lifted her gun again and peered down the sights. But there was no need. The truck’s engine howled in the octave of highest gear. Wheels churned faster than any mortal could run. Vetrov’s men became silhouettes, blurred shadows, then nothing.
Yael tucked her pistol away. Her hand still shook, but this time it wasn’t the truck’s fault.
They were all here, not one left behind: Yamato in the farthest corner, cradling his twisted ankle. Ryoko next to him, already examining the injury. Takeo, Isamu, Lars, Masaru, Ralf, Taro, Karl, Iwao—all sprawled and breathless on the flatbed’s boards. Felix in the cab, foot on the pedal and hands gripping the wheel.
And Luka, still leaning hard against her. With heaving breaths and a face full of blood. His cheek smeared red all over Yael’s clothes. She didn’t have the heart to push him away.
“They’re going to follow us! They’re going to follow
us and kill us!” Lars watched the dark road behind them. The terror in his eyes was fresh, startling. The fear of the never-hunted.
Yael envied it.
Takeo, who sat next to the German boy, shook his head. “They won’t.”
“Like you’d know!” The panic had spread from Lars’s eyes to the rest of his face.
Takeo lifted his Higonokami knife. He handled the blade like a sacred thing; there was an art to his movements as he guided it through the air. Too fast for Yael or any of the other stunned riders to react. But Takeo was not cutting, or stabbing. Just showing.
“I would, actually.” He looked at Lars down the length of the blade and spoke in perfect German. “There were only two other transports, and they were parked quite close to our prison. I slashed their tires.”
CHAPTER 24
THEN
THE FIFTH WOLF: VLAD APRIL 1955
“You are thinking too hard.” Her trainer’s words shot straight past Yael’s shoulder. Over the long alpine field, to the row of empty vodka bottles. He spoke Russian this time—a language he tended to favor. “Squeeze the trigger on the bottom of your exhale. The P38 will do the rest. Try again.”
Yael lifted the pistol. One-handed, fencing stance. Her arm was sleeveless, and the April air was still a bitter thing in the mountains. A minefield of goose bumps washed over her bare skin and the numbers lined there.
She was shaking too hard. There was no way she’d make the shot.
“You know”—she let the gun fall to her side and faced Vlad—“if you’d let me use my right arm, all of these would be gone in thirty seconds.”
Vlad smiled, and the crags of his face softened. (Even the deep knife scar that ran over his empty eye socket. The one he never talked about.) It was a genuine paternal expression. So unlike the way Dr. Geyer had looked at her… “And then what would we use for targets? Even I can’t drink that fast. Besides, the point of this exercise is for you to use your weak side. There will come a day when you’ll need to shoot with it.”
Yael knew he was right. Reiniger was the one who sent her here, but it was Yael herself who first asked about learning how to shoot. She liked the idea of power in her hand. The same power the guards at the death camp carried every day, the same power Aaron-Klaus had tried to use against the Führer.
The power of life and death.
She wanted to harness it, make it her own.
But it was harder than it seemed. It wasn’t just finding a shiny gun. Point and shoot. It wasn’t just hours standing in front of fence posts, aiming at imaginary enemies. It wasn’t just the mornings of sixteen-kilometer runs through the woods. It wasn’t just afternoons of martial arts and knife work and skinshifts. It wasn’t just evenings of language study and lie-craft.
It wasn’t just becoming strong. It was about becoming not weak. And this process was something else entirely.
“It’s cold,” Yael said. “I need my sweater.”
It wasn’t the cold making her shake. Yael knew it. And Vlad knew it, too. (After three years of continual lessons, Yael often suspected that her trainer understood her better than she did herself.)
“No,” he told her. “Shoot.”
Yael aimed at the vodka bottle again. The numbers on her arm were so close: 121358ΔX. She couldn’t not look at them.
“Look down the sights. Straight ahead,” Vlad growled. “That’s where the danger is.”
Yael breathed in the mountain-fresh air, breathed out—to the end of breath itself—and squeezed the trigger.
She missed.
The pistol shot echoed around them. Off in the distance an avalanche answered, cracking down thunderous, spiny slopes.
“Better.” Vlad switched to Japanese. As always, it took Yael’s brain a half second longer to register the change. “You were actually looking this ti—”
Her trainer stopped speaking and held up his palm (this, too, was scarred, struck through the center), shorthand for silence. Yael held her breath and listened: gravel grumbling under tires. She turned to look down at the valley’s only road. A battered Volkswagen churned along, working up a cottontail of dust.
Someone was coming.
No one came to Vlad’s farm. Most people had no reason to—it was too far in the Alps for idle country drives or hikers—and the few who did were preceded by an elaborate series of radio signals.
“Change faces. Get to the third arsenal,” Vlad ordered her. “Wait for my signal.”
The third arsenal was the far wall in the barn loft. Behind stacks of last season’s graying hay. The two cows Vlad kept for milk nosed their stall doors as Yael rushed in, switched her face to match the papers of a girl named Liesl Gehring, climbed the ladder, chose the Mauser Kar98K, and lay by the loft’s open window. She watched the road and waited.
Vlad stood at the edge of the drive, hands shoved into his pockets where his own gun sat. Ready.
The Volkswagen pulled up, its engine wheezing from the long climb up the mountains. A man in a long, dark coat stepped out. His face was shaded by the brim of his hat.
Yael took a long breath. Her index finger hovered just above the trigger.
“Where is she?” The man slammed the car door shut.
Vlad took his hands out of his pockets just as Yael exhaled.
They were empty. No gun.
“What are you doing up here, Erwin?”
Reiniger! Yael’s finger slid off the trigger, but she stayed where she was.
“We have an assignment for Yael.”
The last of Yael’s breath left her lips. For a moment she forgot to inhale again. The hay bale prickled against her stone-hard lungs.
An assignment. Doing something. Changing things. She’d dreamed about this moment for months now—every night, lying on her bunk, staring at the knots in the pinewood ceiling, before the real dreams (nightmares, always nightmares) set in.
Vlad shook his head. “Her training isn’t complete. She’s not ready.”
“You’ve had her almost three years. That’s longer than most operatives we’ve sent here. Besides, I’ve seen her test results. What part of her isn’t ready?”
“There’s more to going in the field than just performance. I will not make the same mistake I made with Klaus. Yael needs more time here.”
Klaus. Three years and that name still carved at Yael’s heart like a potato peeler. Scraping off angry, raw, battered, bloody bits. Pain she could not fully face, so she pushed it into other things. Shooting. Running. Lying. Fighting.
Reiniger removed his hat. The face under it was weary, grim. It matched his sigh. “If I could give it, I would. But this isn’t just any assignment, Vlad. It’s the assignment.”
This time Yael’s heart froze along with her breath. Her trainer seemed just as stunned.
The assignment: Kill the Führer, resurrect Operation Valkyrie.
“All the more reason she shouldn’t take it,” Vlad said when he found his voice.
“No one else but Yael can do this. Now, where is she? I’d like to speak with her.”
Vlad signaled her. Yael sat up on the hay bale, the Mauser propped on her knee. Reiniger didn’t look surprised.
“Come.” Her trainer turned toward the house. “We’ll talk about this in the kitchen.”
Yael grabbed her sweater as soon as she arrived in the kitchen. Vlad was filling the teakettle, and Reiniger sat at the farm table, his hands folded on top of a manila folder.
“It’s been a while, Yael.” He smiled as she scuffed off her boots and shrugged the wool over her shoulders. “You look well.”
Yael sat down at the table and thought that he looked older. It had been only a year since Reiniger was last at the farm, but the time between seemed tolling. His hair was weeded thin. His crow’s-feet had spread, nearly as deep as the Babushka’s used to be.
Vlad turned from the stove. There was a vodka bottle in his hand, mostly empty. A soon-to-be target. He set it down on the table between the three of them and nodded at Re
iniger’s folder. “What’ve we got here?”
“Five days ago the ninth Axis Tour came to a close in Tokyo.”
“Propagandist bullshit,” Vlad muttered in Russian as he unscrewed the vodka cap, unleashing a smell that made Yael want to gag (it always reminded her of the nurse and her cold, cold cotton swabs). He poured it into his teacup.
“Who won?” Yael asked. There was no television on Vlad’s farm. The only radio was shortwave, meant for emergencies. Not distractions.
Reiniger slid the file across the table. “Open it,” he told her.
She did.
Name: Adele Valerie Wolfe
Age: 16
Birthplace: Frankfurt, Germany
The photo clipped to the paper showed a pretty, smiling girl. Angelic.
“I thought they didn’t let girls race,” Yael said.
“They don’t,” Reiniger told her. “She took her twin brother’s papers and raced in his name. It wasn’t until she won that her true identity was exposed.”
Yael studied the photograph more closely. There was a hardness to Adele Wolfe’s eyes she’d glossed over before. And her smile stretched just a bit too tight. Anger, maybe? Something… something strong and desperate enough to push her over twenty thousand kilometers, three continents, and two seas, past nineteen muscular boys.
Not an angel, then. Something fiercer.
Like a Valkyrie.
“The Führer took quite a liking to Fräulein Wolfe at the Victor’s Ball,” Reiniger said.
“She’s pretty and blond.” Vlad sipped from his teacup, straight-faced. “Just his type. Not that they ever last long. Geli, Eva… all the women he’s interested in have a nasty habit of dying.”
Reiniger went on, “The Führer and Fräulein Wolfe shared a dance together.”
“A dance?” Her trainer frowned. “Hitler never dances.”
“He did at the Victor’s Ball. The Führer let Fräulein Wolfe close enough to touch in a public place. Where the Reichssender cameras were airing everything on live television. It’s the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”