Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  Yael tapped on the handbrakes, shaving a kilometer or two off her speed. At the same time Luka fed his own fuel line, herding Katsuo in. The chrome of his handlebars flared. Yael could see it perfectly—the place her hand was supposed to clench, push, let go—so bare and silvery.

  Luka kept pushing, closer and closer.

  Air carved into her cheekbones. The road ripped beneath them: skin-shredding fast. Kilometers, cool darkness, and speed threaded through the gaps between Yael’s fingers as she reached out. Out…

  So many things happened in one moment. Her fingers wrapped around the handlebar’s chrome. Luka’s brakes squealed, and the hiss of burning rubber filled the air. Katsuo’s head turned and his eyes found hers.

  There was no more blade in his gaze. No more hunter’s stare. What Yael saw when she looked into his eyes was something far more animal… far more human: fear.

  And it cut her—bone deep, marrow deep—all the way to the little girl belted on the gurney, her eyes white with terror as the needles burned through her, one after the other after the other. Who walked under floodlights and stood in a river of blood and heard every one of her heartbeats. Who had her sleeve grabbed, her life exposed by the National Socialist who was not a National Socialist.

  The girl who was hunted. The girl who was afraid.

  She’d wanted for so long to be the hunter. The predator. The Valkyrie—chooser of life and death—above it all.

  But not like this. What was she doing? Dancing between the lines, forgetting them altogether.

  They rode for another two seconds. Side by side. Paralyzed and flying.

  Two seconds too long—the raw in Katsuo’s eyes reloaded into something desperate. Something dangerous.

  The commandments of tooth and claw were kicking in. Kill or be killed.

  This was not a world for lines.

  He grabbed Yael’s wrist. Fingers clamping down, trapping her. If she pushed Katsuo’s handlebars now she’d be dragged off her own Rikuo. Twisted into the pretzel wreck of metal and flesh. If she let go, backed off, Katsuo would shove her anyway. Send her off the road and ride on.

  Another second ripped between them. A bend was coming, leaping into their headlamps, only moments away. They couldn’t go on like this for much longer. Katsuo’s grip loosened. No longer gurney strength, but enough to hold her. Unless…

  Yael twisted her hand, as if she were trying to jerk open a lock, and pulled. Katsuo’s fingers clenched, but too late. Catching all glove, no skin. He pulled so hard the leather lost its cling, snaking off her hand, snapping free, flying—hollow, empty—away. Katsuo watched the formless leather fall into him, his eyes shifting through so many emotions: ferocity → disbelief → fear again →

  The glove kept falling. He kept falling. So far back that Yael lost sight of his eyes.

  But she saw everything else in full, agonizing twenty-twenty detail.

  The laws of physics took over. Gravity, momentum, force… boy and bike meeting ground. Sparks fizzed across the pavement, and the light of Katsuo’s headlamp spun wild. Stabbing too-bright light into the lump of road that was not road but a body. Splayed and stilled in a way she knew only too well.

  He would not be getting up from that.

  Katsuo was stopped, but the laws of physics kept on. The bend in the road came, and Yael swung into it. Seeking out the centripetal force, trying to stay even, fighting against the change. The curve was sharp, and by the time she rode it out and looked back, there was nothing behind her. Just the outlines of trees, stark against Luka’s headlamp.

  Wind howled up her gloveless wrist into her jacket’s sleeve, biting the skin of her left arm. Rushing at her, again and again, until she couldn’t feel it anymore. Until she was numb.

  CHAPTER 31

  NOW

  MARCH 29, 1956

  SHANGHAI CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 18,741

  1st: Adele Wolfe, 12 days, 10 hours, 37 minutes, 5 seconds.

  2nd: Luka Löwe, 12 days, 10 hours, 37 minutes, 10 seconds.

  It was hard for Yael to tell if she was awake or in a dream by the time she reached the Shanghai checkpoint. The race markers guided her through the city’s hazy post-dawn roads—teeming with electric streetcars and teetering rickshaws, the smells of fresh fish and salt—all the way to the splintering wooden docks that zigged and zagged into the sea. The finish line was a ramp onto a boat named the Kaiten. The profile of the ship’s command deck was warlike, sketched by a sun not yet high. Its hull—all fresh paint and smooth rivets—dwarfed every other ship at the dock, rusted fishing rigs and houseboats.

  Yael wheeled her way on board, let her engine shudder and die. Twenty-four hours and seventeen minutes. That was how long she’d been on the bike. It should’ve been shorter—but after the crash she just couldn’t keep going. She’d pulled to the side of the road and tried to breathe. She took the glove off of her right hand and slipped it onto her left, but it was all wrong. She threw it into the bushes just as Luka passed, driving into the heavy dewed air without looking back. She waited a few more minutes (she wasn’t really sure what for… Takeo? Iwao? Felix?) until she couldn’t stay still any longer. She had to keep moving, stay ahead, win.

  She had to make all their deaths matter.

  Even Katsuo’s.

  His name was already crossed out when she got to the board. (The supply caravan found him hours ago, the timekeeper told Yael when she asked about it. There was nothing the medics could do but radio the fatal wreck in.) Yael stared at the chalked line until her eyes smeared with sleep, and it all became one big white blur. As fuzzed as her thoughts.

  Tsuda Katsuo. (No: Tsuda Katsuo. I should think it without the strike. What use are lines anyway?) Seventeen. Born in Kyoto. Victor of the eighth Axis Tour. Dead. Like so many others. So, so many others…

  Five seconds. Not much of a lead. But there’s just one more stretch. One final stretch.

  Where are my gloves? Oh, right, back there on the road. Lost. Gone.

  Gone, gone, gone.

  There was no dormitory on board the Kaiten. The racers were provided with their own cabins for the voyage. They were utilitarian quarters, not much more than a washroom and a bed. When Yael reached Adele Wolfe’s room, she crumpled into the fresh linen sheets and slept like the dead. Unmoving, dark, and dreamless.

  This time when she woke there was no daylight. And there was no Felix, smiling at her, waving her over to see colors. Her tiny porthole window was crowded with gloom. (Dusk maybe? Or dawn? There was no way of telling.) And Felix… he would be shut away in his own room, if he was even on the boat at all.

  At first Yael thought her head was spinning when she sat up, but she soon figured, as she stood on rubbery legs, that it was the movement of the boat. They were already at sea. The other racers must have made it on board during the time she’d slept.

  All except Katsuo.

  The thought, the name, hit her with the cold, terrible clarity of morning. No more blurring, no more numb.

  The memory of him, hitting the road so hard, dashing limbs and joints and life, seemed like a nightmare. Larger than life, clinging to her like an oily film, making her feel sick, dirty.

  Too many of her nightmares were real.

  “Tsuda Katsuo is dead,” she said aloud to the crackless, metallic wall. The words echoed back to her faint, fainter, faintest.…

  The reasons inside her grew frenzied. Dancing around her lines. It was either my life or his. It wasn’t my fault. Not in the end. If he’d let go, if he hadn’t pulled back so hard, he wouldn’t have lost his balance. I did not choose his death. But I caused it.…

  And the voice that whispered loud, louder, loudest—the oldest whisper of all—said only a single word: Monster.

  She feared it was right.

  The sea grew worse, its waters writhing, bucking, lashing every which way. The Kaiten’s crew seemed unfazed, walking around the corridors with mountain-goat surety. But Yael and the other racers spent much of the time off their feet, trying t
o keep the contents of the messdeck from painting their cabin floors. The messdeck itself was sparsely populated when Yael made the wall-clinging journey for sustenance. She was more than thankful for it. She didn’t think she could stand the other racers’ stares—real or imaginary—stabbing her just as Katsuo’s had. One hundred times over.

  The stare she dreaded most was Felix’s. (According to the scoreboard he had reached the ship, in the twelfth and final place.) But Adele’s brother and his frostbite eyes were nowhere to be seen. Lars (who looked a little green faced) and Ryoko were the only diners, nursing bowls of kake udon and clinging to their bolted chairs.

  Yael kept her head down as she retrieved her own bowl and sat at a separate island of a table. The rock of the boat made tiny waves in the broth, rippling through Adele’s sad reflection. Yael stared and stared at the tangled noodles, trying to work up the stomach to eat. The last leg of the Axis Tour was just over twelve hundred kilometers from Nagasaki to Tokyo. Twelve more hours of driving in highest gear. Twelve hours of Luka coming after her with everything he had… trying to close that five-second gap between them.

  Yael needed all the strength she could get. And though she was not full, she wasn’t hungry either.

  Just empty and sick.

  She was still staring when the chair beside her rattled. It was Ryoko, joining her table. The girl’s short, satiny hair brushed her jaw as she bowed. “Hello. I am called Ono Ryoko.”

  “I’m Adele.” Yael nodded back, dared to meet the girl’s gaze.

  There was no glare behind Ryoko’s eyes. No cutting accusation. Dimples appeared on her cheeks instead. “Thank you, for helping us get away from the Soviets. And for helping Yamato. He is very grateful.”

  Yael did not know what to say. You’re welcome seemed like a heresy. Saying nothing would be an insult. So she latched on to the final subject. “How is Yamato?”

  “He is happy to not be driving anymore. Yamato is skilled at racing, but that is not where his heart lies.” Ryoko’s cheeks reddened: rosy to plum. She went on quickly. “He wishes to study literature and become a teacher.”

  Yael thought of the boy’s worn book. How he read the haikus aloud in the perfect tone and tempo. “He’ll be a good teacher.”

  Ryoko nodded. “I think so.”

  Yael shoved her hand into her pocket, drew out the paper sculptures. The star was squashed flat and the crane’s neck was bent back, broken. “Thank you, for these.”

  “You did not open them.” Ryoko frowned and fished the papers from Yael’s palm. Her deft fingers pulled their crumpled shapes apart, smoothed out the creases.

  Both slivers of paper held handwritten notes—neat cursive woven between German propaganda and Arabic newsprint.

  On the star: Katsuo is planning a roadblock with Hiraku, Takeo, and Iwao. Get ahead of them as soon as you can.

  On the crane: Katsuo is planning to drug your water. Keep your canteens close.

  The truth was inside. Always inside. (And it made Yael wonder, if she unfolded herself, what she would find. The monster of Dr. Geyer’s making? Or the Valkyrie of her own design?)

  She did not know.

  She did not know.

  How could she forget her own self?

  “You were trying to warn me,” Yael thought aloud, because this question was easier to face: “But why?”

  “I watched you race last year. You rode very well. Better than the boys. It made me glad. It gave me…” Ryoko paused, searching for the German word she wanted. “Hope. Hope that I, too, could race, even though I am a girl. And in Prague, when I sat alone, you smiled at me, gave me hope again. I wanted to give some back to you.”

  Hope. Gottverdammt hope. Yael really needed some right now. She looked down at the wrinkled papers. They’d never be smooth again. Too much had happened to them. But perhaps they could be refolded.…

  “Do you think you could show me how to make the star?” she asked. “And the crane?”

  The girl across from her smiled. “Of course.”

  Ryoko was a good teacher, too. They spent an hour leaned over the table, creasing paper with their thumbs, talking about motorcycles and boys. (The conversation somehow kept steering back in Yamato’s direction. Each time Yael mentioned the boy’s name, Ryoko’s face dipped into another shade of red.) When the lesson was over, Yael could craft a steady star and a crane that actually looked birdlike.

  It is, she thought as she pocketed the two papers, a good start.

  When the seas finally calmed, Yael found that her stomach did not follow suit. It was still turning, tumbling previous meals of kake udon, rice, fish, and dried plums inside her gut. She went onto the deck for air, a trick she’d learned from the seafaring heroes on Henryka’s shelf of banned novels.

  She wasn’t the only one. The whole boat had turned itself inside out: racers and crew alike draped themselves over the railings, basking in sea breeze and morning.

  Yael scanned for Felix as she moved up to the Kaiten’s bow, but he was nowhere to be seen. She hadn’t seen him at all during the voyage. She lacked the courage to knock on his door, and she didn’t really know what she would say if she did. What did twenty-four more hours matter anyway? The good-bye that was not a good-bye was still best.

  The bow was sequestered, walled off by the command tower. The best place for her to stand and stare off into the blue-on-blue horizon.

  “Girding your loins, Fräulein?” Luka—another face she’d missed on the initial count—leaned into the railing next to her. “We’ve got quite a day ahead. Captain said we’re only a few hours from port. We should be able to see land soon.”

  He looked nice. Prepped for the horde of cameras they were getting ready to race into. His hair was freshly washed and slicked back. All the stubble had been scraped from his cheeks. His lips were no longer peeling; he’d smoothed them over with petroleum jelly. The ear tip he’d lost saving Yamato was cuffed in a clean piece of gauze.

  It made Yael all the more aware of how grungy she was. She hadn’t had the sea legs to stand under her washroom’s trickling showerhead. She’d settled instead for a few splashes of water to get the dirt off her face.

  But the oily feeling was still there. All across her scalp, soaked into her skin. It would take more than a shower and soap to get rid of it. A lot more.

  Yael stared back out at the sea.

  He took her silence in stride. “Is this about Katsuo?”

  Was she that open? That obvious? Or had he just gotten that good at cracking through her shell and reading her?

  “He’s dead.” She said this just as she’d told the wall. Only this time it didn’t echo back.

  She yelled again into nothing. “He’s dead and it’s my fault.”

  “Scheisse.” Luka swore and leaned farther over the rail, his toes balancing on the lowest rung. It struck Yael how easy it would be to push him overboard. Instead she just watched as hull winds and sunlight streaked through his hair.

  “You have changed.” He looked back at her, lips crumpling into a frown. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the new you, but I’m not sure I completely understand her.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “What? That Katsuo’s dead?” He hopped back off the railing. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.… But better him than me. Or you. And it would have been you, Adele, if you hadn’t pulled away.

  “You shouldn’t go beating yourself up about it,” he went on. “You did what you had to do. If he’d had the wits to let go in time, he’d still be here.”

  Blunt Luka words, full of ugly truths. Despite everything, despite herself, they made Yael feel a little bit better.

  The first traces of land were sprouting out of the sea. Hillsides poking up like spring seedlings. Growing and growing as the minutes stretched silent between them and the boat churned on.

  “I’m glad Felix was wrong about you,” she said to the rising hills.

  He leaned into the railing again, hanging daredevil far into h
er vision. “Apparently you gave him quite the wrong impression of me.”

  “I lie a lot.”

  “I noticed. You’re good at it, too.” He turned into her, so close that Yael had to look. Had to see how somber his face was, how tightly he gripped the railing. “Adele—was it ever real? Was there ever a sliver of a moment that you cared for me?”

  Yael’s thoughts flooded with cracks and trains and moreness. There seemed to be slivers of emotion—true and bright—tangled up in this mess of aliases. Luka + Adele. Luka + not-Adele. Yael + this boy who was a National Socialist and yet so much more.

  Was it ever real? Were any one of them ever real?

  “I’m not really sure anymore,” she said.

  Luka Löwe chuckled to himself. The corner of his lip turned tight. “You’re a torturous creature, Adele Wolfe.”

  He was going to kiss her again. She could see it in the slight five-degree tilt of his head, in the way he drew closer.

  What did it matter? The sun was shining and not everything was a lie.

  In less than forty-eight hours she was never going to see him again.

  Couldn’t she just have this? A feeling that wasn’t sadness or anger or guilt or weight? A good-bye that wasn’t all tears and silence and screaming?

  He leaned into her. She let him.

  This kiss was much like the last, with the world moving around them and his lips telling a story to hers. It tasted like one of the Greeks’ epic poems: Warring. Heroic. Vast. Full of so many loves and births and deaths.

  It tasted wrong.

  She realized it as soon as the flavor passed from his lips to hers. Silvery chemicals sliced into her taste buds, stabbed down the back of her throat.

  It was a flavor Yael knew well. Vlad had tested her with it so many times, always slipping it into the row of concoctions she had to smell and identify. She could hear him now, holding up the amber pharmacy bottle, explaining what was inside: “This knocks a person out in under a minute, keeps them under for a few hours. Impossible to wake them up. The antidote has to be applied ahead of time to do you any good.”