Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf)

by Ryan Graudin

  Why couldn’t he have both?

  There were no cameras, no prying eyes, and so Luka let himself smile. “We ride together.”

  “So.” Adele leaned closer. “Tell me about all these sweethearts you don’t have.…”

  They kept talking—long, too long—into the night.

  Katsuo did not strike the next day. Or the next. Luka stayed the course—through the last of the flatlands, into the mountains that eventually tore themselves off the horizon and swallowed the road. He stayed the course even when the road whittled down to a series of cliffside paths barely wider than his motorcycle. He stayed the course through bare rock valleys and curves that couldn’t make up their verdammt mind. More than a few times he lost sight of Katsuo’s fender gleam—and whenever Luka checked his mirror there was a fifty-fifty chance that he wouldn’t see Adele. That’s how twisty the roads were. Too twisty, really, to be stealing rearview glances. The chance of straying off road was far too high.

  But this was part of the reason he had to look. The mountain rocks echoed all sorts of noises. Pops, revs, shrieks… loud violent things that made Luka worry Adele had gone accidental lemming on him. (Later, he found out via the Reichssender’s dramatic recap, a racer had lost his bike off a cliff. Himura Kenji of Tokyo managed to cling to the ledge as his Zündapp slipped, shattered into a dozen pieces below. Since the supply vans were taking their regular detour around the mountain range, the fourteen-year-old was doomed to wander the race path on foot for a day and a half until officials sent a search party.)

  The mountains began petering off—raggeder to ragged. The road tossed this way and that. Luka’s brakes began to reek of burning rubber from overuse and, though not normally one for prayer, he willed them to last through New Delhi.

  On the fourth morning they reached the Seventieth Meridian. The line itself wasn’t marked, but the space around it was decorated in as much patriotic flair as a wilderness outpost could muster. Standards not yet faded by the south Asian sun fluttered from buildings. Swastikas claimed the first half of the settlement, shifting abruptly into flags with rising suns. Border guards—Reich on one side, Imperial Army on the other—watched the racers cross into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  The day stretched on with the road, and the land started changing yet again. Colors other than the duochrome blue sky–dirt brown bled into the landscape. Green piled onto green: a tree here, a bush there, palms spiking every which way. Though the racing path had straightened out considerably, Luka’s habit of checking his rearview mirror was unabated. Adele stayed just two meters behind him, hunched against winds created by her own speed. She commanded her stretch of pavement with ease, keeping cataclysmics and hopefuls at bay with quick swerves of her bike.

  One racer in particular kept edging up. He wore a Japanese band around his arm and kept tailing Adele’s tires with tireless persistence. Luka wouldn’t have thought twice about the sight if not for the glint of metal in the racer’s hand: a sharp fang of folded carbon steel that didn’t belong to the bike. Takeo’s Higonokami knife.

  The sight of the blade catching sunlight cut Luka’s breath. Next, next, already? But Takeo wasn’t going for Luka this time; Adele was in the way, veering off to Luka’s right, her arm in perfect swiping distance. A one-handed, drive-by stabbing took talent, but Watabe Takeo seemed well practiced in the maneuver. He pulled next to Adele, his knife slashed out, catching—

  Adele didn’t yell so much as bellow. The sound punched through Luka’s back, came out of him chest-first, and seized him like a grappling hook. He slammed his brakes. Takeo drew up on Luka’s right side, blade within easy reach. Luka lunged for the weapon, hoping to knock it out of Takeo’s grasp, but the knife-fighter was too well trained. Punch, dodge, slice! Luka’s riding glove bore the brunt of the Higonokami’s edge, but Luka felt the color of pain across his palm. Red. Diagonal through his life line.

  Luka’s hand flew back to his handlebars, oozing blood on the throttle. Takeo, balance wavering, passed by, knife jutting out like an extra finger. Adele was still alive, still driving. She charged up Takeo’s right side, and was now cutting him off with a sharp veer left. The move wasn’t just daring, but completely insane—the kind of courage distorted by pain. Adele’s rear wheel spun only centimeters from Takeo’s front tire, forcing the boy to brake and drop back to a safer distance.

  Luka gunned his Zündapp forward. The throttle was slick and hard to grip, especially with an injured hand, but Luka seized it anyway, shoving his conscious mind away from the electrical impulses that told him he was hurting. HURTING.

  He stole a look at Adele’s arm as he drew close. The knife had gone straight through her jacket, but Luka couldn’t see much beyond the tear. Her jaw was set, white with pain. The colorlessness blended with the zinc oxide still streaked across her cheeks. Several times Adele caught his stare. Those eyes… they were starting to get addicting. Hooking him again and again. The asphalt ripped beneath them, the wind thrashed, and despite his right-hand fire, Luka was soaring.

  Road high. Her high.

  They drove side by side. Far enough away not to wreck each other, close enough to prevent Takeo from barreling through their center. Every time their attacker tried to move up one of their sides, they drifted apart, blocking him. After several attempts, Takeo eased off their rear, slipping his knife away just in time for the fuel stop and its accompanying press cameras.

  Threat averted. For now.

  Luka’s high—adrenaline mixed with Adele—throbbed against his palm as he pulled into the refueling station. These stops were always short, five minutes or less, as the officials siphoned fuel from gasoline barrel to Zündapp tank. Racers had to choose which necessity was most pressing: a swig from the canteen, a hurriedly chewed protein bar, or nature’s calling. Luka went straight for the first-aid kit, whirling through its contents: Iodine! Morphine syrettes! Gauze! Teeny-tiny bandages that looked more suited to patching up baby dolls than sixteen-year-old boys! The cut wasn’t deep, but it was still oozing. He splashed the wound with iodine and wrapped it in gauze.

  “Need anything?” he asked Adele, who stood by another gasoline drum, guzzling water and examining the tear in her jacket’s black leather.

  “It’s just a nick.” She screwed the cap back on her canteen. “I’ll live.”

  Luka wasn’t so sure, but before he could press, the official refueling his motorcycle began pulling the hose out. Time to go! He shut his med kit with such haste that several of the miniature bandages twirled out. Luka left them in the dirt.

  Chapter 9

  1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 9 days, 26 minutes, 8 seconds.

  2nd: Luka Löwe, 9 days, 26 minutes, 23 seconds.

  3rd: Felix Wolfe, 9 days, 26 minutes, 34 seconds.

  4th: Watabe Takeo, 9 days, 29 minutes, 19 seconds.

  The knifing incident cost Luka a few seconds and a tablespoon of blood. Nothing he couldn’t reclaim over the next few days.

  Katsuo dismounted at the courtyard of the New Delhi checkpoint with ease, standing just long enough to watch his name get chalked into first before heading inside. Takeo, on the other hand, looked skittish. Especially when Luka marched up to the boy’s bike, bloody hand first. There were too many officials and camera lenses floating around for the Higonokami blade to make an appearance without Takeo’s name getting struck off the list, but the boy’s eyes darted to his sleeve, as if he was thinking about using it anyway.

  Luka held his cut palm up, words cold: “You use that knife on me again, and I will use it to cut you to pieces.”

  He didn’t have to ask if Takeo understood the German. Luka could see his threat being weighed and settled behind the boy’s dark gaze.

  “Same goes for Felix Wolfe,” Luka added. Just on the other side of Takeo he could see Adele favoring her left arm as she pulled off her helmet.

  Not just a nick, then.

  Takeo followed his stare. “No more thinning the field?”

  “Just stay away.” Luka
didn’t quite snarl, but the animal signal was there, bristling between them long after he turned away.

  Reichssender press crowded around, eager for updates, but Luka pushed them away as he followed Adele into the checkpoint. She walked fast—through the dining hall already fragrant with curry spices, down one of the building’s many twisting corridors until she found the first noncommunal toilet. Thud, click went the door before Luka could reach it.

  “A—” He started to say her name, but caught himself. “Open up! It’s me!”

  Her voice came, faint through the wood. “I’m fine.”

  Luka didn’t believe her. “I want to see it.”

  A pause. Faucet water started flowing. And flowing… and flowing…

  She wasn’t going to let him in.

  “Let me see your arm, Felix.”

  Finally, the door opened. Adele’s jacket was off, slung over the sink. In her plain white undershirt she looked small, though not small enough in certain anatomical places. It suddenly made sense why she wore the jacket at all times, even when she slept.

  “Stop ogling.” Adele didn’t sound angry when she said it, just pained. Her left arm was smeared in blood, as if her swastika armband had seared through her sleeve, branded into her skin.

  Once Luka looked past the blood, he realized the cut wasn’t as deep as he’d feared. There was no visible muscle mass or fat, only a red that made Adele hiss. It needed a thorough cleaning, certainly. Maybe even stitches. “You need to go see Nurse Wilhelmina.”

  Adele jerked away. “I can’t go to the nurse, dummkopf! It will take her twenty seconds to realize I have breasts, and another twenty seconds after that to tell a racing official. I’d be out of the Axis Tour before you can say, ‘Heil Hitler!’”

  “You want that to go gangrene central on you?” Luka asked. “Trust me, getting an arm amputated is not worth seeing this rat race through to the end.”

  “Rat race?” Adele’s incisors flashed against the vanity light. Her question—as sharp as those teeth—caught Luka off guard. “Is that all this is to you?”

  Words often had a habit of spilling out where Luka was concerned. Ones he didn’t always mean, but usually did. Rat race: running in circles—around, around—just for show. What use was being the prize rat if you were still just a rat?

  Would two Crosses really make his father see that Luka had bled, was bleeding? Just not in the way Kurt Löwe wanted…

  “No,” Luka said. His hurt hand throbbed against an uncertain pulse. “But I’ve seen what losing an arm can do—”

  “Quite the one for melodrama, aren’t you? The wound won’t get infected. I’ll clean out the cut myself.” Adele went on, “You already have a future, Luka Löwe. One that matters. Not all of us have that luxury. This is my chance to live my life the way I want it to be lived. I’m not going to toss that away because of some playground scratch.”

  “What kind of playgrounds do they have in Frankfurt?” he asked as she moved to the sink. Her blood flowed down the drain—bold to pink and away. “Let me get some proper disinfectant. I need to go see Nurse Wilhelmina anyway.”

  Nurse Wilhelmina—a pretty woman in her early twenties with sun-colored curls—made quick work of bandaging Luka’s wound.

  “You boys and your knives,” she tutted. “If all of you just followed the rules, there would be a lot less blood.”

  “But a lot fewer visits to the infirmary. I wouldn’t want to cheat you of that!” Luka winked.

  It took only a bit more flirting to wheedle an extra bottle of disinfectant, some gauze, and a handful of teeny-tiny bandages from the nurse. By the time Luka returned to the washroom, Adele had mopped up most of the extra blood. She sat on the covered toilet; wads of pinkish toilet paper littered the floor by her biking boots. Luka kicked these aside and knelt close to the wound. The sight of it—six centimeters of parted flesh—made him wince.

  Adele didn’t, even when the disinfectant cut into her exposed nerves. Her tolerance for pain was higher than most boys’. Including his own.

  “Another few centimeters and that knife…” Luka thought aloud as he applied the bandages. “Adele, what if Takeo had hit an artery?”

  “You sound like my brother.” Adele gave an irritated grunt. “If Takeo had hit an artery, then I would’ve bled out on the road, and you would’ve gone on to avenge my death by winning the race.”

  She was right. But now all Luka could imagine was Adele sprawled on the road she loved so much, anchored in a pool of her own blood. The image made him shudder.

  “I can’t lose you,” he said.

  Adele’s arm stiffened beneath his fingers. It was an instantaneous reflex: there and gone. Luka’s touch responded in kind, pulling away to fumble with another tiny wrapper. Wrong. He’d said something wrong. It was too soft, too feeling. If she were any other fräulein, he might’ve been able to wink it off, but all the suave coolness Luka had channeled in the infirmary was gone.

  “I can’t lose you,” he backpedalled. “Our plan to sabotage Katsuo on the ferry takes two.”

  Adele leaned down. Her eyes flowed straight through him.

  “We’ll get Katsuo.” These words were formed by lips so close that Luka could count the lines etched in them—a delicate pattern traditionally hidden by lipstick.

  Adele lingered. Had she been some Germania sweetheart, Luka wouldn’t have thought twice about kissing her. But this fräulein was something else entirely.…

  He wrestled the urge back.

  Nothing happened.

  Adele pulled away.

  The wound didn’t look so bad once it was bandaged up. It might not even scar. When Luka told Adele this, she just shrugged and pulled her jacket back on, heading out the door without another word. Her blood was still everywhere—littering the floor in paper form and streaking the edges of the porcelain sink. Luka stayed behind to clean up, wondering if… indeed… nothing had happened.

  It felt, in a way, as if everything had.

  Chapter 10

  Just as Nurse Wilhelmina had predicted, Luka’s wounded hand grew stiff, griping against all efforts to STOP or GO as he handled the throttle and handbrake. The road to Dhaka was an easier leg than many of the ones before it. The desert’s omnipresent dust had settled, tamed by tree roots and grassy plains. The roads were well tended, allowing for the fastest speeds and longest days since Europe.

  Katsuo pushed on well past sundown. No dust meant excellent night visibility, so they were in for another test of endurance. By the time their drive hit the fifteen-hour mark, Luka’s hand was in agony. His fingers felt frozen in place by fire—hot, hotter, hottest—until it took everything in Luka not to pull to the side of the road and let it rest.

  Instead he followed Katsuo’s taillight, with nothing but his thoughts to distract him. In any other race, these would be fantasies of the finish line: rolling through the gates of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, with flashbulbs bursting, the first double victor in the history of the Axis Tour. Best of the best.

  But tonight Luka’s thoughts were trapped in the New Delhi bathroom, living and reliving his exchange with Adele. All that blood and their almost-kiss, the words flung at each other in between.

  I can’t lose you. But he would, after the Li River. Once Katsuo was out of the picture, the race would be down to him and her. First and second, neck and neck. No more laughter and cigarettes stubbed out by their pup tents. Luka thought of all the soft lines that made up Adele’s lips. The kiss that wasn’t.

  Could Luka miss something he never had?

  (It sure felt like it.)

  For now Adele was still behind him, blocking any riders who tried to advance from the rear. Most didn’t. Takeo had taken Luka’s warning to heart, and Katsuo’s pace was too grueling for most of the cataclysmic racers to keep up. The herd of headlamps that made it to Dhaka together was a small one, rolling into the city well past midnight, where a bleary-eyed timekeeper recorded their places.

  1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 9 days, 19 h
ours, 41 minutes, 18 seconds.

  2nd: Luka Löwe, 9 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes, 37 seconds.

  3rd: Felix Wolfe, 9 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes, 50 seconds.

  Chapter 11

  There was another day of rest in Dhaka, used for napping, a second visit to Nurse Wilhelmina, and more Reichssender interviews while the last of the pack reached the checkpoint, filling the board from fourth place (WATABE TAKEO, 9 DAYS, 19 HOURS, 44 MINUTES, 6 SECONDS) all the way to August Greiser’s sixteenth, followed by four crossed-off names. The road had been whittling away stragglers through accidents, illness, and sheer despair. The next few days were about to claim more.

  If the desert was boring, the jungle was anything but. The journey to Hanoi was littered with perils. The luxury of pavement did not extend far beyond Dhaka. Neither did bridges. In several places the road’s dirt vanished into riverbeds thinned out by the region’s dry season. Shallow, but still dangerous. There were always one or two boys who submerged their air intakes or got mired in mud so deep it took an entire team of men to free the wheels.

  Heat exhaustion was also common. Gone were the chilled temperatures of a European spring, replaced with humidity thick enough to swim through. The very same jackets that protected riders from road rash now clung to them with miserable sweat—black leather baking beneath the sun. Brown wasn’t much better, but Luka didn’t dare take his jacket off. He’d seen too many cases of mangled-meat skin to risk it.

  Then there was the wildlife. Snakes, monkeys, tigers, creepy-crawlies. The jungle had them all. Luka had personally never seen a tiger, but several years ago a Reichssender cameraman had managed to catch the magnificent beast on film. Monkeys were much less rare and much more likely to rip apart the motorcycles’ panniers in search of food. But by far, the worst creature of the jungle was the mosquito. There were millions upon millions of them, all starved for juicy racer flesh.

  Smoke helped keep them away, which was one more reason to keep the cigarettes coming. Luka had no problem whatsoever ripping the final pack open, if it would get the gottverdammt bugs off his neck. He could only imagine how many of them were trying to poison his blood with tropical diseases—yet another hazard of the jungle stretch.