by Ryan Graudin
“Don’t forget to take this.” He tossed a chloroquine tablet to Adele along with her cigarette. “Tastes like tinfoil, but it keeps the disease away. You don’t want to end up like Adolf Schäfer. Poor Saukerl won the race in 1952, but then he up and died of malaria just a few weeks later because he forgot his tablets.”
“That’s… anticlimactic.” Adele opened the tablet, swallowing it in a swift silver-wrapper movement.
“He was a decent guy, Schäfer.” Luka settled back down. They sat outside of their standard-issue mosquito nets, close enough to make Luka think of the almost kiss. “It was my first race, and I had no idea what I was doing. He took the time to give me some pointers in Prague.”
They lit their cigarettes in silence. The evening’s conversation had been sparse, mostly due to sheer exhaustion, but Luka couldn’t help but wonder if the wordlessness between them held more. Was that tension in the air between them? Or just mugginess?
The sweat on Adele’s face glowed bronze bright whenever she brought her cigarette to her lips. She had to be sweltering, but she didn’t take off her jacket.
“Aren’t you warm, Adele?” Luka asked, desperate to keep talking.
“Aren’t you?” She eyed his own jacket—still half zipped, despite the sweat stains on his torso.
“I’d rather roast than become a bug buffet.”
“No.” Adele shook her head. “That’s not why you wear the jacket. It’s not because of mosquitoes, and it’s not because you look better in brown. You swagger around in your unofficial jacket and smoke for the same reason I try to pass as a boy.”
The logic was bendy. Luka couldn’t follow it. “To enter the Axis Tour?”
“To show you’re untouchable. Nothing can get to you. Not even the official rulebook. Cigarettes and leather are just pieces of the armor.” Adele’s cigarette wasn’t even half finished, but she stubbed it out in the dirt anyway. “If you take them off, if you seem vulnerable, then people will try their best to own you. Devour what’s not theirs.”
She wasn’t far off. There were no crowds in the middle of the jungle, but Luka could still hear the chant of a thousand Sieg heils drumming his ears. He could still feel his father’s rough palm on his arm, pressing too hard, trying to mold Luka into his own image.
“But sometimes the armor just gets too verdammt heavy,” Adele went on, unzipping her own jacket. The white undershirt beneath was just as dirty as his, but it wasn’t the sweat stains that drew Luka’s eyes. He tried his best not to stare, faking sudden interest at the embered end of his cigarette.
“The thing is”—Adele shifted closer, until they weren’t just elbow to elbow, but arm to arm—“no one’s untouchable.”
Luka was still staring at the dying fire when she kissed him. The whole of it—motion, speed, flavor—caught him completely unawares. Her lips tasted of salt. They stung against his: warmth and movement, edged with teeth. She kissed him with fervor, a hunger Luka knew.
For a moment he was frozen, but the more her lips moved, the more he broke, until, finally he kissed her back.
Adele did not smell very much like a garden. Her scent was wild: sweat and sun and road-worn leather. No one would be rushing to make a perfume out of it any time soon, but Luka hardly cared. There wasn’t much time for smelling when Adele’s lips were pressing into his as if she were a drowning girl and Luka was oxygen. Hungry, hungry. They’d both been so hungry for something….
Turns out it was each other.
When Adele pulled away, she shoved her short hair from her eyes and smiled. “Not bad.”
“Not bad?” Luka’s eyebrows flew up. “I’ll admit, it wasn’t a peak performance. You caught me off guard.”
“Kissing’s not a sport,” she told him. “It’s an art. It’s all in the spontaneity, going where the inspiration takes you.”
“I’ll have you know that art is very technical. Good art anyway. Not that there’s much of that left in the Reich to judge by—” Luka cut himself off, watching Adele’s face with care. It was well and good to talk about lemmings, but directly critiquing the Reich was a dangerous pastime. Though Adele had spilled her own doubts, he wasn’t sure if he should say something so shadowed in her presence.
The tilt of her head was more curious than condemning. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a connoisseur.”
“Not me. My mother used to haunt museums when she was younger. It was her dream to go to art school.”
“What happened?”
“She met my father. He didn’t approve of the notion. They got married. Enter, stage right, baby Luka. She never really gave up drawing. We used to do it together, when my father was off at the war. We’d practice in the margins of newspapers when good paper became scarce.” Nina Löwe’s touch was so different from her husband’s: gentle fingers guiding Luka’s over the pen, coaxing something out instead of beating it in. “It was like racing to her—something to strive for. Something to make living bearable.”
“Did it help?”
Not when his father came home and found the sketches. Kurt Löwe hadn’t yelled; he rarely yelled, which only made his words more frightening. Any of them could be hiding his anger. Instead, Luka’s father had gathered up the drawings and shoved them, silently, into the fire. There were too many papers for his lone fist to hold. Five times he did this as Nina Löwe held a hand to her mouth, trying her hardest not to let a sob out. Luka did the same, biting his lip until blood seeped through. The papers were dry and their end was quick. They burned like so many of Europe’s great masterpieces had at the stake of Goebbels’s whim. Beauty into orange into ash.
The art lessons stopped after that. Nina Löwe kept drawing—in the shadows, in the dawn, in the edges of her life that Kurt would never see. As soon as her pen left the paper, she crumpled it up, tossed it into the flames herself.
These things were scorched into Luka Löwe’s soul. Always remembered, never spoken of. He found himself telling Adele the story anyway. She flinched at the part about the fire, as if she, too, could feel it, eating away at so many futures, too many pasts.…
Did it help? Luka did not know; he did not want to know. Thinking about the cinders his mother swept from the hearth every morning just reminded him of his own hollowness. The feeling he hadn’t felt when their lips were pressed together.
He leaned forward. She leaned in.
This time when they kissed he was ready. Luka tossed his cigarette aside, brought his good hand to her face, explored all its angles with tender-brush fingertips. Their lips melted into a single motion: no clash of teeth, no too-hurried tongue. This kiss was about tasting; this kiss was about technique. This kiss was about being filled.
Warmth rushed down his throat, down his stomach, down…
Luka’s hand fell, too, grazing the swan-slope of Adele’s neck all the way to her shoulder, pushing aside the leather there. The skin beneath was so soft. His fingers couldn’t touch enough of it.
It hurt this time when Adele leaned back, her lips parting from his, flesh drawing out of reach. Luka’s whole body ached in a way that had nothing to do with the kilometers he’d driven.
“Much better,” she murmured. “Too much better.”
The jungle sweltered around them, yet Luka felt cold. Were his fingers shaking? Was Adele that strong of a drug, that he was already experiencing withdrawal? “Wasn’t that the goal?”
“I don’t need any… female lemming complications. If you know what I mean.” Adele tugged her jacket back over her shoulder. White flesh vanished under the leather. “It’s—it’s not like I prepared for this.”
Luka hadn’t either. Fräuleins had been the last thing on his mind when he was packing his panniers. Now his brain was scrambling, a hormonal stew à la sixteen-year-old boy. “We could… we could just keep kissing!”
Those lips—the ones he needed so badly—twisted. Adele looked up to the sky instead of him, where the dark was crowded with leaves, stars dusting their edges. “It’s late. Tomorrow. May
be tomorrow.”
Luka paid no attention to the constellations. She was all he saw. Adele, painting of a girl, mythic as she stood, her black jacket ascending, blending with the midnight sky. It was as if she pulled pieces of Luka up with her. A heartstring here, an extra breath there.
“Tomorrow, then,” Luka managed. He wished he had a better argument.
Adele ducked down to her pup tent, pushing aside the mosquito net. She looked back over her shoulder at Luka. For a moment hers looked like any other pair of jungle eyes: luminescent against the electric lantern light, harboring some primal eeriness.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she said.
Chapter 12
Lips.
Skin.
Warmth on warmth.
These thoughts feasted on Luka with mosquito-needle eagerness, gorging on his concentration. It didn’t matter that the engine whirred beneath him or that Katsuo was fording every river in record time or that the actual bug bites on his neck itched until his nails made them bleed. Whenever he shut his eyes, he saw Adele, a movement away, ready to kiss him, to be kissed. Whenever he opened his eyes, he saw her, too, wheels in time with his own, driving through water with gritted teeth and steeled eyes.
Both of these things—thoughts and sights—made Luka’s insides soar. Adele was distracting, yes, but she also drove Luka forward: much faster, much further than any Zündapp had ever carried him. He doubted his father had ever felt anything like it.
Zoom, zoom.
The second day out of Dhaka was as grueling as the first. Tsuda Katsuo’s pace stretched everyone thin. Ten hours into eleven, mud splashing/gashing over everything, thirteen hours and still going, a darkening jungle blurring by, fourteen hours cramped by muscle agony, wavering wheels, exhaustion thickening the night, making the darkness impossible to pierce, even with the brightest of headlamps. Fifteen hours and they could go no farther. Hanoi was still over thirteen hours away, which was much too far to push without sleep, especially with the Hanoi Shanghai stretch on the horizon.
Both Luka and Adele were covered in mud as they set up camp, checking the overhanging branches for creepy-crawlies and driving stakes into the soil. The electric lantern lit their movements. Adele looked more beautiful than ever as she worked. Luka’s smile would not stay tamped down. He wondered, vaguely, if he was being the soft dummkopf his father had always feared he was. The one Luka had spent his whole life trying to prove he wasn’t. He was strong. A verdammt victor.
But it wasn’t enough; it was never enough.
And here was… something.
Adele felt it, too. He could see it: in the subtle shift of her hips, in the glances she threw Luka’s way when she thought he wasn’t looking. He heard it, as well: in the perfect silence between her sentences, in the way she said his name.
“Luka…” Adele let the pause stretch, until they were both taut. “This is our last night alone together.”
Already? He realized, with a start, that Adele was right. Tomorrow night, Hanoi. After that, the Li River ferry crossing. Once they knocked Katsuo out of the race, their alliance would end. The thought gutted Luka more than it should have.
He didn’t trust himself to speak on the subject. He chewed on his dinner instead, nodding to her sliced jacket. “How’s your arm?”
“No gangrene. Yet,” she added. “Your hand?”
“Getting better.”
They fell back into a muggy, not-quite silence. Ration packets crinkled. Somewhere in the distance a tiger called out—burning growl against the dark. There was something profoundly lonely about the noise.
Is this all there is?
Adele cleared her throat of the last of her meal. “I never thanked you for distracting Takeo.”
Luka looked down at his bandaged palm. He couldn’t see the blood, but he knew it was there, in crusts, entombing its way back inside of him. The wound would be completely healed by the time he returned to Hamburg.
“It’s what allies do,” he said.
“Is it?” Adele tilted her head. “You shaved seconds off your time for me. You risked the blade. I’ve never heard of a racer doing that before. Even for an ally.”
“I’m not most racers.”
“You’re not most men,” she countered. “If any other racer had come across me in that washroom, they would’ve turned me in to the officials. But you chose to form an alliance with me. You see me as your equal.”
Adele reached out, placed her hand on his. Her fingers looked as they had the first time he’d noticed them: delicate, built of bones slender enough to reach into Luka, rearrange the laws of his existence. “I don’t want this to end. I know it has to, after the river. But…”
She didn’t finish her thought. Perhaps because they both knew there was no but. The Iron Cross called to them both, and it was a strong siren.
“We can be together after Tokyo,” Luka heard himself saying. “I’ll come visit you in Frankfurt, or you can come to Hamburg. I’ll try my best to hide all the fish.”
Adele’s laugh trembled all the way through her fingertips. “I’d like that. But…”
Another but. The word felt as sharp as fear in Luka’s gut.
“If you win, I’ll want to race in next year’s Axis Tour. Everyone knows who you are, Luka. If the Reichssender sees us together, that will put me in the spotlight. I wouldn’t be able to compete as Felix without somebody noticing.”
She wouldn’t, would she?
“Let’s…” There was sadness in Adele’s smile. “Let’s enjoy this night while we have it.”
Luka’s exhaustion—the same one that had leadened limbs and lids alike while they set up camp—melted away. Kissing was an art, but with Adele it also felt like a bit of a battle. He didn’t mind letting her win. They kissed and kissed and kissed, until the bulb of the electric lantern began to dim and darkness crept out of the jungle leaves, stretching across them both. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, jackets still half-zipped, breaths tangling into each other’s hair as they gathered strength for the dawn.
The jungle had taken its toll on the Axis Tour roster. Once all the times had been entered on the chalkboard at the Hanoi checkpoint nine names were struck through. There were only eleven racers left in the lineup. Only three times that mattered:
1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 39 seconds.
2nd: Luka Löwe, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 59 seconds.
3rd: Felix Wolfe, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 15 seconds.
Darkness bunched outside the checkpoint’s open windows, pulsing with cricket song. Luka sat by his empty dinner bowl—eyes on first place, Katsuo and company lingering in the corner of his vision. Luka kept his back to Adele because he wasn’t sure he could bear to look at her without… aching.
She pushed into his sights anyway, seating herself only two chairs away, hands wrapped around a bowl of pho. White blazes of hair stabbed into Luka’s periphery. He kept staring at the chalked 1ST until the board around it bloomed: cones and rods gone stale. A blue as vibrant as her eyes…
Don’t!
Adele blew at the steam curling from her bowl. “Tomorrow?”
“The plan hasn’t changed.” Luka kept his voice low. “I’ll push ahead, get on the ferry first. Try to let Katsuo stay in second while you pull in third. When we’re crossing the river, I’ll distract him; you cut his fuel lines.”
“And then our interests diverge,” she murmured back.
Interests change. Luka’s lips buzzed with the memory of hers. All of him wanted to turn, push aside the empty chairs between them, taste the movement, the warmth, the whole of her.
You and I aren’t so different.
The Iron Cross called to them both. Iron calls to iron, and Adele called to him.
There was only one way Luka could answer.…
You already have a future. Why do you need the Double Cross so badly?
There was always something more, but what if a second Cross wasn’t it? What if th
e answer was just a glance away, slurping spoonfuls of lime-tinged broth? What if… Luka let her win?
The thought alone was close to heresy. How many worlds’ worth of kilometers had Luka ridden to get to this point? How many lungfuls of dust had he inhaled? How many ounces of blood had he spilled for a chance to make history?
Was a fräulein worth all these things?
She shouldn’t be.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t.
Adele cleared her throat. It was a sound that begged Luka to look at her, just look at her. He stared even harder at the 1ST, his vision decaying into neon around it. When Luka blinked, the staleness cleared. He could see Katsuo across the room, watching him. Why the hell was the victor smiling?
It was verdammt unnerving. All of this was so verdammt unnerving. Kisses and long games and kilometers still undriven. Luka almost wanted to go back to the starting line: where things were—well, not exactly simple, but at least they were straightforward.
Now it was more than just road jitters fraying his insides.
Luka patted his pocket for a cigarette. There was only one left in the pack he carried on his person. He took it out and lit it. Flames’ warmth prickled his insides at the first inhale, washed out with his exhale—Scheisse taste coated his mouth.
“Don’t expect me to go easy on you,” Adele spoke into her bowl, words mixing with meat bits.
Katsuo kept smiling.
Stay the course, Löwe.
“Likewise,” Luka muttered.
Chapter 13
They were an exhausted lineup, eleven racers at the end of their proverbial rope, strung out on fumes of sleep and the promise of the end. Not quite in sight, but close. At 2,394 kilometers, Hanoi to Shanghai was the final exam of endurance. To be a victor, you had to complete this stretch without camping. It was a dangerous race against sleep deprivation.