Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  “You want me to race as her?” Yael stared at the picture.

  “And win.” Reiniger nodded.

  Adele stared back. Eyes black and white and daring.

  “But why her? Can’t I just take any girl’s face? Create a false identity?”

  “It has to be Adele. Any new girls entering next year’s race will be subject to Gestapo scrutiny, which we simply can’t risk. Adele already has established qualifying times, plus she’s acquired the Führer’s blessing. The Gestapo won’t touch her. If she wins the Axis Tour next year and attends the Victor’s Ball, she’s guaranteed to be able to get close enough to Hitler to execute him.

  “You have eleven months to memorize Adele’s life and learn to race motorcycles. You’ll have to come back to Germania, so you can observe Victor Wolfe up close. Also, we have a man who works on Zündapps. He’s agreed to teach you mechanics and riding techniques.”

  Back to Germania. Yael looked over at Vlad. Her trainer’s good eye was nearly as slit as his empty socket. He sat dangerously still. Watching Reiniger. The National Socialist general was staring at her. She realized he was waiting for an answer to a question he’d never actually asked.

  Behind Vlad the teakettle whistled, spewing white-hot steam. Shrieking and shrieking and shrieking like a trapped beast. Like the answer inside her.

  —SOMEONE HAS TO CHANGE THINGS KILL THE BASTARD YOU ARE SPECIAL YOU YOU YOU ARE A MONSTER A VALKYRIE—

  “I’ll do it,” she whispered.

  Vlad’s chair clattered—hard—as he stood. He turned to the stove and silenced the kettle’s tinny screams.

  “Yael stays with me one more month. Then she can return to Germania.”

  Reiniger’s eyebrows rose up to his receding hairline. “That’s time we can’t spare, Vlad. She has to learn to be a completely different person. That’s thirty days of study time down the drain.”

  “She has to learn to be who she is first.” Her trainer poured their cups full. “She won’t be ready for this mission otherwise.”

  Reiniger looked so, so tired. As if he were the one who’d run sixteen kilometers under the alpine dawn. He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “What do you think, Yael?”

  She thought she always wanted to shoot with her right hand. Even now her left arm was swaddled in sweater and tucked by her side, like a broken bird’s wing. The other was strong and capable and ready.

  But it was not all of her.

  Vlad was right. There would be a day when she would have to shoot with her left, fight with her weak. That day would come on the Axis Tour. It could even be the day she had to face the Führer.

  On that day Yael wanted to shoot straight. She wanted to be ready.

  Yael shut the folder. “I can study here. Nothing will be lost.”

  “One month. Thirty days. That’s all you’re getting, Vlad.”

  “That’s all I need,” he said.

  Day 3

  There were no more survival scenarios. No more identifying bottles of poisons by smell. No more flinging knives at long-dead tree stumps.

  What Vlad tasked her to do was harder than all these things. He had her sit at the farmhouse table, her left arm stretched out over water stains and coffee rings. All sleeves gone. He made her stare at her own skin.

  121358ΔX

  …

  121358ΔX

  …

  121358ΔX

  Vlad sat with her during the long, silent hours. He watched not just her arm, but her fingers, her eyes. Yael knew he was looking for tremble and tears. She tried her hardest not to give them to him. (What kind of Valkyrie cries?)

  “When you look at those, what do you see?” he asked on the third day.

  It wasn’t so much seeing as feeling. Feeling the tattooing needle pressed to her skin. Feeling Dr. Geyer’s eyes on her as the final X marked her as his. Feeling the deep and dark of the crematorium’s endless smoke inside her, waiting for the day it would face other monsters. Devour them.

  She told Vlad this.

  “I didn’t ask you what you feel. I asked you what you see.”

  What did she see? These numbers—they were hasty, scrawled things. Full of crooked imperfections. The eight slanted too far. The ones were different lengths. Three was on the prowl, with tips like fangs.

  “I see someone else’s writing,” she said finally.

  Vlad kept looking at her, waiting for more.

  “I—I see what they did to me.”

  Still silence. Pulling answers out of her.

  “I see what they did to all of them.”

  The Babushka kneeling in filthy snow. The small blue hand on the gurney. Her mother’s fever eyes and faded whimpers. Miriam clutching all the other dolls. (For years Yael had held out hope that her friend had somehow lived, that the dolls would be together again. She’d even been deluded enough to start planning a rescue mission until in her research she discovered the unbearable: Barrack 7 had been gassed not long after her escape.)

  All of them. Dead.

  Yael’s jaw clenched so hard she thought her teeth would break. Her empty-hole heart echoed, so hungry. Full of gone.

  The past was always there: running the trail beside her, ringing through her gunshots, searing through her skinshifts. But there was always another kilometer to run, another target to hit, another face to perfect. Things Yael could cram the pain and anger into. Fuel herself forward.

  But Yael’s arm on the table, so sacrificial, so bare—this was different.

  Alongside, she could stay a step ahead.—KEEP RUNNING DON’T LOOK BACK—

  Face-to-face, all she could do was step into it. 121358ΔX. Remember and be rended.

  She was in pieces as it was. How much more could she be torn?

  —TOO MUCH—

  Yael pulled her arm off the table. She was shaking.

  Vlad did not scold her or tell her to put her arm back. His voice was strangely soft, so unlike the gruff of his face. “This is the final stage of your training. It is the hardest and the most important.”

  “Why?” Yael felt winded, broken. As if every kilometer she’d ever run had collapsed back on her body all at once. “What good does this do?”

  Vlad put his own arm on the table. Hand splayed. Scar up. It was a shiny, punched thing. As if a nail had been driven through the center of his palm.

  “This I got the same day I lost my eye. The same day my wife and daughter were killed because the Gestapo discovered I was double-crossing them.”

  In her three years at the farm, Yael had never asked about Vlad’s scars, and he’d never offered. But she knew they had something to do with the gold ring he held in front of midnight fires and the sad sting of vodka on his breath. (All this when he’d thought she’d been asleep.)

  “I’d just returned from a mission in Moscow, and I found”—Vlad’s palm closed into a fist—“SS men waiting for me. My girls were dead. I was supposed to die, too.

  “I lost everything that day. My family. My name. My life. I was only half blind. This eye had crystal-clear vision, but I couldn’t even look in a mirror for two years. Every time I tried, I saw my scars. I saw their faces: my Therese and my little Katja. Asking me why I stood there and they did not. Why I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t answer their questions.”

  He opened his palm again. Let the old hurt show.

  “But the more I did not look, the more I knew I had to face them. The more I did not hear, the more I knew I had to listen.”

  “Why?” Yael asked again.

  “Because I woke up one morning and realized I’d become a man who wouldn’t walk into rooms with mirrors. Who wouldn’t use polished spoons or look through windows at night, when I might see myself staring back. By pretending the pain was not there, I had let it root. I’d given it power over me.

  “I decided I couldn’t be afraid of my own life. My own reflection. So every morning I make myself look in a mirror for five minutes. Face it all.”

  Yael looked down at
her lap, her trembling arm. “So I’m just supposed to make things better by staring?”

  “Better?” Vlad choked on the word. “It never gets better. It just gets less. It becomes something you can face. If only for five minutes.”

  “But what about compartmentalizing?” It was a word Reiniger used a lot. A word Aaron-Klaus had sworn by. A word Vlad himself had said during their early training sessions. A word Yael had come to write her own definition for:

  Compartmentalizing: Taking something full of pain and burn and pushing it back to the darkest place of yourself. The place even you’re afraid to go.

  “Compartmentalizing is good. Especially when you do what we do. But it isn’t a permanent solution. If you keep pressing things down, never letting out any true feeling, you turn into a volcano. BOOM!” Vlad’s scarred hand became a fist again, slammed down on the old battered wood.

  “Like Aaron-Klaus…” Except that hadn’t been a BOOM but a pop. Too quiet. All for nothing.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Like Klaus. I made a mistake and didn’t teach him how to vent. All his pain came out the wrong way. Sloppy.”

  Blood and static everywhere. Thumbtacks on the floor. The wrong death.

  “I can’t watch that happen again. Not to you, Yael.” His scarred, daughterless hand grabbed her marked, fatherless arm. “This is what you are stronger than. But you must learn to see it that way. And you will only see it if you let yourself look.”

  “So what? I’m supposed to just stare at it? Every minute of every day?”

  “You remember where you came from and what you came through. But you stare straight. Down the sights. Even if you’ve only got one damn eye left.”

  Yael looked, yet again. Her arm shook less, now that Vlad held it.

  “The ghosts will stay. Just like your numbers. Just like my scars. Just like our pain.” Vlad pulled his hand away. “But you don’t have to be afraid of them.”

  Remember and be rendered.

  She put her arm back on the table.

  Day 29

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Stare down the sights. With two damn eyes.

  See the ghosts lined up in a neat little row.

  Between the numbers that cannot be erased.

  12, BABUSHKA, 13, MAMA, 58, MIRIAM, ΔX, AARON-KLAUS.

  You must never forget the dead.

  Remember and be rended. Be rendered.

  Look straight, where the danger is.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Reach the bottom of the breath

  And shoot.

  Day 30

  Good-bye. It was always good-bye, wasn’t it?

  She never could say it out loud.

  CHAPTER 25

  NOW

  MARCH 25, 1956

  BAGHDAD TO NEW DELHI

  There had been a flash flood during the Axis Tour of 1951. Just on the outskirts of Dhaka. A wall of muddy water had raged over the leaders of the pack, taking one racer’s life and drowning the bikes of five others. One rider—future victor Kobi Eizo—salvaged a farmer’s rickshaw and pushed on, making it to the sixth checkpoint with only a thirty-minute loss. The move was contested by some (could you compete in a motorcycle race without a motorcycle?), but in the end the officials praised Eizo’s resourcefulness. The Axis Tour was about strength, survival under even the worst of circumstances. In scavenging the rickshaw, hadn’t Eizo displayed these very traits?

  Thus, Rule 27 was added to the Axis Tour’s conditions: “In the event of undisputed motorcycle loss due to external forces out of the racer’s control, said racer may finish the leg of the race by alternative means of transportation.”

  According to Rule 27, the race was still on.

  Felix certainly drove as if it was, pressing the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The truck’s headlamps carved through the wilderness, kilometer by kilometer. Yael, who’d climbed into the cab through the rear opening, navigated with her head out the window. Trying to make sense of the star instructions that streaked over them.

  “Gas isn’t going to last.” Felix nodded at the fuel gauge, where the needle sloped dangerously to the left.

  Yael studied the light-speckled sky. They’d been driving—mostly south, a bit east—for hours. It was only a matter of time before they came across a settlement. The question was, would the needle hold out? Or would they sputter and die on the side of the road, become sitting ducks for any men Vetrov sent after them once they’d patched their tires?

  “Keep going,” she said.

  Felix obeyed, throttling the steering wheel. “Luka wouldn’t have gone back for you. You know that, right?”

  She did. Didn’t she?

  The whole thing surprised Yael now that she thought about it—so many kilometers away from the adrenaline and heroics. Luka Löwe was one of her strongest threats. Logically, tactically, she should have left him behind. Eliminated the risk. (After all, he—blond-haired, blue-eyed National Socialist—deserved it. Didn’t he?)

  Yet there he was, curled in the back of the truck with his undershirt wadded against his ear. Yael’s own undershirt was smeared with his blood; her gun was another bullet lighter; and her hand still shivered from another brush with almost-death.

  Neither of them—it seemed—was invincible.

  Yael looked back out the window, where the stars flickered like dying cigarettes.

  Felix guided the truck around a hairpin bend, and suddenly the night was broken. City lights shimmered against the far hillsides. An electric wildfire eating away the base of the mountains.

  No, Yael realized as they pulled closer, not a city—a camp: laced in barbed-wire fences. Studded with watchtowers. Webbed with train tracks.

  Numbers and needle memories burned in her arm as Felix wheeled them closer. Her nails dug into the truck cab’s upholstery. By the time they reached the fence, she’d stabbed holes in her seat, and the truck was sputtering, choking on its final few fumes.

  The watchtower floodlights had turned their way. Seeing all. National Socialist soldiers swarmed around the Soviet-marked vehicle with guns raised. All Yael could see for a moment were the searing lights, the swastika armbands, and rifle muzzles. Her heart squeezed, and her nails dug into her seat. Scraping springs.

  But Adele Wolfe was their darling. Not their prisoner or prey. As soon as they caught sight of her face, their guns lowered, and their leader stepped forward, stammering apologies.

  The racers poured out of the flatbed—jostled and dazed. A man with a medic kit made his way to Luka. (His face was still all blood, even with the red he’d left on Yael’s clothes and his own crumpled undershirt.) The boy swatted him off to where Yamato sat at the back of the truck.

  The first thing Yael asked for was a radio. She feigned ignorance of its knobs and buttons, relaying a conversation through its operator to the New Delhi race officials. It was a short session, fuzzed with static. But the gist was this: Kidnapped. Escaped. Okay now. Is race still on? Yes. Get to New Delhi.

  Roger that.

  The second thing Yael asked for was gasoline: “Enough to get us to New Delhi.”

  “Fuel’s sparse out here.” The overseer—a squat man with a square jaw—waved at the fenced land behind him. It was not a death machine—Yael could tell that much from the smokeless smells—but a labor camp. Mining, from the looks of it. “All of it’s rationed for generators and scheduled transports. Besides, if you drive that, you’re certain to get shot.”

  “When is the next transport to New Delhi?”

  “I have some men driving out tomorrow afternoon; they’ll get to New Delhi by nightfall.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon?” Not fast enough. Not with the race still on and Katsuo still in it. Logically, tactically, Yael knew that the boy was probably still on foot with no chance of catching up. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that the victor was somehow ahead. “Is there any other way?”

  “There’s a cargo train being loaded. It leaves for New Delhi in ten
minutes. There will be room in the ration cars.”

  A train…

  dark,

  swaying,

  closed space,

  hot bodies.

  (and under it all: yah-ell, yah-ell, yah-ell)

  “Victor Wolfe? Is something wrong?”

  Her eyes were closed, she realized. Yael opened them, found the overseer looking at her. Chin tilted. Eyes narrowed.

  “It—it’s the fastest way?” she managed.

  “The shipment should reach New Delhi by midmorning,” he told her.

  Twelve hours. A time difference that could make or break the race. If Katsuo wasn’t out there—somewhere—she would’ve waited. Taken any other way. But she would not, could not, risk it.

  “We’ll take it,” she said.

  The train was mostly coal. Cars and cars of it: dark mined out of dark, piled high. There were two ration cars at the end, stuffed with empty food crates, spray-painted with labels like RICE and BEANS. Basic laborer’s rations—back to New Delhi to be refilled. The racers wedged into the cracks. Ralf and Lars throned themselves on top of the hollow boxes. Yamato and his freshly bound ankle leaned in an empty corner. Ryoko sat next to him, her head nodding into his shoulder, off to sleep. Felix curled on top of the closest stack of crates.

  He was snoring.

  Yael could not rest. She sat near the open door, where her name rushed past with the night. Yah-ell, yah-ell, yah-ell. Memories mushroomed up with the sound: the stench of urine and sweat, how her mother’s wool coat felt like sparrow claws against Yael’s cheek, how Mama’s heart thudded a terrified tattoo into Yael’s ear as the train slowed. Stopped.

  Her own heart nearly burst when Luka slipped into the corner of her vision. He settled beside her, not far enough away.

  “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost, Fräulein.”

  If only Luka knew how right he was. Not one ghost. Hundreds. Thousands. There was not enough sadness, enough anger, enough her for numbers like that.

  “I don’t like trains.” It was Yael speaking—not Adele. She realized this too late, before she could clip her words short. Her weary, wired mind started flipping through Victor Wolfe’s file. She couldn’t remember anything about trains. Maybe Adele really did hate them.