by Ryan Graudin
Luka balled up his uniform (pins, brown shirt, black tie, and all) and tossed it among the trash bags. The two Iron Crosses—a culmination of over forty thousand kilometers, five years of Luka’s life—were next to go, landing beside food bits and torn paper. The victor retrieved his jacket, slung it over his shoulder.
“How’s this?” he asked.
Yael gave the boy a quick study. No party eagles, no swastikas… He’d worn his motorcycle boots to the Victor’s Ball instead of the standard Hitler Youth footwear. Not, Yael reminded herself, that Luka Löwe has ever been a boy prone to convention. His trademark jacket (stitched out of vintage brown leather, where every other Axis Tour racer’s jacket was standard-issue black) was evidence of that. He’d worn it for the past three races. There were years’ worth of Reichssender footage with Luka Löwe sporting this very article of clothing.
“The jacket?” She nodded at it.
“Stays.”
Funny. She’d expected more of a fight over the Iron Crosses. Not this worn piece of leather. But Luka’s grip on the jacket tightened, as if daring her to rip it from his grasp. Yael could have. She might have, if the victor’s face weren’t so Nordic and his hair weren’t as blazing as a high-noon sun.
“Fine. Use it to cover your head again.”
Luka obeyed, positioning the leather so it hung over his hair, shadowing his face. Not the most subtle of disguises, but (Yael tried to reassure herself) it had gotten him this far.
—LEAVE HIM—
She had to.
She couldn’t.
“If you get yourself caught,” Yael told him, “if I think you’re going to betray me in any way, I will leave you. Understood?”
“Aye, aye, Fräulein.” Luka nodded under his jacket. “Lead the way.”
—LEAVE HIM LEAVE HIM NOT SAFE—
Yael’s instincts kept screaming, but she pretended not to hear. She pretended not to remember that they were usually, almost always, right.
CHAPTER 5
When Felix was younger, his favorite place in the world was his father’s auto shop. Every day after school, when Martin was off at Hitler Youth meetings and Adele was playing football with the Schulers, the younger Wolfe boy sat cross-legged on the auto shop’s floor, listening to his father narrate the ailments of Volkswagen engines while he picked through their grease-smeared guts.
“The spark plug’s been fouled in this one. See all the oil corroding the tip?” His father held up the part, wiping his spare hand on his navy coveralls. “Keeps the engine from starting properly. All we have to do is replace it, and the car should run like new.”
Things in the auto shop made sense, the way his father explained them. There was always a solution. Through the eyes of a nine-year-old child, there seemed to be nothing his father couldn’t fix. It was only three years later, standing on the edge of the Nürburgring racetracks that Felix learned the terrible, terrible truth: This was a lie. Some things were too broken to be fixed. Martin’s crushed neck vertebrae couldn’t just be swapped out with replacement parts.
The auto shop was gone now, too. Its towers of tires, its cinder-block walls papered with engine diagrams, its rows of wrenches arranged by size and type… Felix had sold all of it to Herr Bleier for enough Reichsmarks to bribe his way into the Axis Tour, to keep his sister from getting too entangled in the resistance plot Hans Schuler had warned him about.
But Adele wasn’t just at risk of being in the plot’s path. She was the plot. Felix had tried his best to stop her, to fix just one more irreparable thing. He’d tried his best, and the garage was gone and so was his sister, leaving him to deal with the consequences of her mess.
Very, very painful consequences.
SS jackboots—with their hobnailed soles and iron heel plates—were tailor-made torture instruments. It took Bulbous Nose only three kicks at Felix’s side before he felt something crack.
There was no fixing this.
Felix knew he was a dead man. He knew the moment he looked into Baasch’s eyes, saw his lack of future there. All he could do now was bear this agony, buy his sister the time she needed to make a clean getaway.
Another kick. Another crack. The fire in his side was spreading, coal hot and ember deep. A thickness in Felix’s breath made him choke. There was something sticky on his lips.…
“Herr Wolfe.” SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s own jackboot tapped against the floor. “Time is not a luxury we can entertain this evening. Where did the girl go?”
“I d-don’t know.”
Baasch leaned over and muttered something to Bulbous Nose, who uncuffed Felix’s wrists and splayed his right hand flat on the floor.
“You’re a mechanic, are you not? Engines are made up of so many small pieces. The coordination you must need in your fingers to get it all right…” The SS-Standartenführer’s pause filled the room. “Tell me who the girl is working with.”
The resistance. Start with the Schuler boy from Wolfsgang Street. He knows—no. Felix caught himself. Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.
At least one Wolfe had to survive. Adele’s life depended on his silence.
Baasch’s jackboot lifted over Felix’s ring and pinky fingers. Its heel plate landed with a sickening crush. The pain inside Felix became a living thing—rising, roaring. The heat in his side met the shatter of his fingers and took animal form, tearing from his mouth in a scream.
Baasch did not lift his foot. He sounded almost bored when he spoke. “Tell me. Why do you feel the need to protect this girl? After she tied you up, left you for us to find?”
“I will not”—even Felix’s teeth felt broken as he cobbled these words together, blood rusty inside his mouth—“betray my sister.”
“Your sister?” Baasch’s laugh shimmered off the floor’s bare wood. His heel lifted. “You were watching the television. Didn’t you hear what the girl screamed before she pulled the trigger?”
“Volume’s on zero, Standartenführer.” Bulbous Nose jerked his head at the screen. “No sound.”
“Ah.” The commander walked over to the volume knob, twisting it until the speakers emitted a long, low buzz. “It’s noble of you, Herr Wolfe, to bear so much pain for the sake of your family. You’re a fine example of ‘blood and honor.’ But I’m afraid your suffering has been in vain. The girl who fired the gun in that ballroom was not your sister.”
The pain in Felix’s fingers mixed poorly with the officer’s declaration. Not (splintered fingernails) your (blood, sticky, on the floor) sister (Was that a piece of bone sticking out?).
He couldn’t believe any of it.
“You shouldn’t feel so bad,” the SS commander went on. “Inmate 121358ΔX fooled quite a lot of people. Racing officials, Reichssender press, even the Führer. She must have studied Fräulein Wolfe for quite a long time to impersonate her so well. The girl was one of the initial test subjects in the Doppelgänger Project. She can manipulate her appearance at will. Look like your sister one minute and a complete stranger the next.”
These words did not make sense.
But… they did.
They made perfect sense, Felix realized, because he’d seen this change. Back in Cairo, he’d followed the girl he thought was his sister through the night market, down dark and winding streets, all the way to a shisha café. When he’d walked in to confront her, he’d found an Egyptian girl—dressed in the same clothes. Later, Adele had explained to him she’d known he was coming and traded garments with a girl in the café.
She’d lied. It wasn’t clothes she’d traded, but faces.
The girl he’d ridden over twenty thousand kilometers with, the girl who’d twice bashed his face with a pistol, the girl he’d tried and tried to reconnect with, the girl he’d given up everything to save… was not his sister.
“There must be blood to pay for what happened on television, Herr Wolfe. I’m sure you can appreciate what a delicate situation this puts us in. The world watched your sister shoot the Führer. If we fail to reta
liate in kind, then people will begin to question our resolve—” Baasch broke off in a cough. He brought his handkerchief—still pure, spotless white—to his lips.
Retaliate in kind. Words to match the SS-Standartenführer’s handkerchief. First-class fancy, covering a much more sinister meaning: shooting Adele. No, Felix corrected himself, if they executed his sister publicly, it would be in the traditional manner: guillotine blade. Rolling heads made much more of a statement than bullet holes.
“You can’t!” Felix rasped. “What about the girl?”
“What about her?”
There was so much Felix wanted to ask. He found the idea of this girl shifting from face to face fascinating. How did she make her eyes match the exact blue of Adele’s? How did her skin replicate the finest pattern of his sister’s, all the way down to freckles and scars? How was it even possible for a human body to piece and re-piece itself together like that?
But pain flared through these curiosities, bubbling with the blood in Felix’s mouth, seeping into the roots of his teeth, burning up all but the basest emotion: anger. Funny how only minutes ago he’d struggled to comprehend such a fury. One that consumed every centimeter of a person’s being.
Now it was Felix and Felix was it.
“She’s the one who d-did this. She’s the one who sh-should—” He stuttered on his own blood. There was too much to swallow back, so he spit it out. Flecks smeared the edge of the SS commander’s boot. “P-pay.”
“I agree.” If Baasch was bothered by the spit, he didn’t show it. He nodded at Felix’s ruined hand. “Which brings us back to my first question. Where did the girl go?”
His thoughts swirled—in fire, on pain. Adele’s head rolling, rolling, blond hair tagged in blood. More blood—his own—still streaming out, anchoring his fingers to the floor. Where did the girl go? How would Felix know? She hadn’t told him any of her plans. All she’d done was lash her pistol across his head—
Stop. Think. Go back.
There was one thing.
The last time Felix saw his sister (No! Not his sister… the inmate) she’d pinned him to the ground with the curtains and reached for her gun. The motion pulled back the sleeve of her kimono, revealing a column of running canines.
Not one thing, but five. Not said, but seen.
“I’ll tell you what I know.” Felix had to stop himself from spilling all—hot anger tongue. He still needed to defend his sister—his real sister—to the end. “But I want a pardon for Adele.”
“A pardon?” A clinical smile (turned lips, eyes still dead) slashed along the SS-Standartenführer’s face. “Quite the bargainer, aren’t you, Herr Wolfe?
“Unfortunately, the authority to pardon your sister is above my rank. So let’s start with this.” Baasch lifted his heel again. Its iron plate hovered just over Felix’s middle and index fingers. “Tell me what you know, and perhaps I’ll choose not to pulp what’s left of your hand.”
Felix looked back down at his fingers (eight whole, two crushed, more maroon now than red). He could keep his silence, watch the rest of his fingers crumble under the SS-Standartenführer’s iron heel. Or he could offer up what he knew, hope for mercy.
Felix was not going to play the martyr. Not for this… this… girl. Not for blood that was not his.
“Dogs,” he said.
The smile slipped from the SS officer’s face. His heel hovered. “What?”
“There were dogs on her arm. A t-tattoo. Five of them.”
“Which arm?”
“L-left. The ink went up to her elbow. Like a sleeve.”
The SS-Standartenführer’s jackboot hung, kept hanging. Globules of Felix’s own saliva salted the sole, close enough to count. One, two, three… no crushing… four, five, six… Baasch brought his shoe down. It hit the floor, just shy of Felix’s fingertips.
“Thank you, Herr Wolfe. That information is most useful.”
The room’s door twitched open. Another SS soldier poked his head through the gap, his face mortared with a grim expression. “Standartenführer?”
“What?” Baasch snapped.
“We finally made contact with Germania, Standartenführer. But there’s a situation—Reichsführer Himmler wishes to speak with you.”
“The Reichsführer? Very well.” Baasch turned to Bulbous Nose. “Have Obersturmführer Thiessen send out a notice about the doppelgänger’s marking. Tattoos don’t change for their kind. The dogs will be on any form the girl takes. With any luck we can use them to make a positive ID.”
Baasch started walking to the door. The heel of his right boot marked his path in Felix’s blood: C C C stamping the wood at odd red intervals. “Oh, and get Herr Wolfe some water. I have a few more questions for him when I return.”
CHAPTER 6
Wet leather smelled like Scheisse.
The stench clawed at Luka’s nostrils as he watched Fräulein cross the street. Not-Adele looked at home in the darkness, on the move. Velvet hair swung against her cheeks as she walked, blending so perfectly with the shadows that for a moment Luka found himself choked with the fear that the girl herself would melt away. But the fräulein’s form was still corporeal when she halted on the other side of the street, surveying their surroundings before calling Luka over with an old Wehrmacht hand signal.
Where had not-Adele learned the Wehrmacht hand signals? For that matter, where had Fräulein learned any of what she knew? Planting tracking diversions, scaling walls, swimming moats, tackling and besting someone with considerably more muscle mass… As far as Luka was aware, the League of German Girls did not school young women in any of these subjects.
Who the hell was this girl?
“You got a name?” Luka asked as he scuttled toward not-Adele.
“Why should I tell you? You’d never bother using it.”
She had a point.
Luka shrugged. “I suppose ῾not-Adele’ has a certain ring to it.”
“If you don’t stop speaking German, I will leave you in the gutter,” she hissed and kept moving forward.
Luka—half-blinded by his own sleeves, choking on the smell of damp, dead animal—trailed the nameless girl and reviewed his options:
Option 1: Overpower Fräulein. (Amendment: Try to overpower Fräulein. She had kicked his Arsch in the alley.) Call the authorities. Hope they didn’t laugh their heads off at his crazy tale of her changing skin.
Option 2: See where this goes.
Right now, this was going south at a painstaking crawl of 0.0002 kilometers an hour. Every few steps, not-Adele signaled for him to halt. Luka was forced to hang back in the shadows as she scouted ahead. Whenever people passed, the girl pulled the same stunt she had in the alley—leaning in for the almost-kiss, her nose crinkling at the wet-leather-Scheisse smell. Luka didn’t quite know what to make of her closeness. It seared him, just as it had on the train, on the Kaiten, in the ballroom. His was a body plagued with hangover feelings: love, mixed with hate, stirred with shock.
Who the hell was this girl? Why did he still want to kiss her?
Not-Adele is not Adele, he told himself, over and over again as he stood motionless, showing no emotion, waiting for the danger to pass.
They worked their way through the city. Down blocks, through alleys, past parks, over bridges, slowly, slowly. The stars were high and the night was deep by the time they arrived at the edge of Tokyo’s harbor, halting just across the street from a collection of docks. Luka was no architect, but he could tell they were a postwar addition to the capital’s waterways, with shiny light fixtures and unsplintered boards. Dozens of boats—passenger ferries, fishermen’s dinghies, sleek motorboats—sat in the slips.
“So.” Luka nodded at the docks. “We’re stealing a boat?”
The girl turned on him. Delicate nostrils flared. “I thought I told you not to speak German,” she hissed in that very language.
“I can’t speak anything else!”
“Then do us both a favor and shut it.”
L
uka’s usual response to an order was to smirk and do the opposite. But he’d already pushed his luck in the alley, and he knew it wouldn’t take much for this girl to ditch him. Without her, he’d be a poster-boy fugitive stranded in downtown Tokyo. (Translation in Luka-speak: dead meat.)
He kept his mouth shut.
“I’m stealing a boat.” The girl continued in Luka’s mother tongue, low and sure, so he’d understand. “You’re staying put.”
“Here? Alone?” Luka sucked in a breath, immediately regretting it as he gagged on the damp leather stench. “I don’t think so!”
“It’s been several hours since everything happened. The SS has likely asked the Japanese to amp up security around the city’s departure points. There could be patrols. If I’m discovered poking around the boats, I can lie my way out of it. That would be considerably more difficult if you were with me.
“I’ll come back for you when we’re ready to leave.” The fräulein stepped across the street before he could argue. This time she truly did melt away, hair, jacket, face becoming one with the shadows of the harbor.
Luka found himself alone, craving a cigarette, squinting at the docks for signs of not-Adele’s return. Harbor water glimmered, mercurial against the lamplights. Once or twice the darkness streaked with pint-sized movements that could belong only to rats.
No patrols. No Fräulein either.
Minutes passed. His urge for a cigarette gnawed and grew. The dead meat/Scheisse smell cloaking his head had become nauseating. Luka’s tally of things-not-Fräulein was up to three passing cars and five rats when the certainty hit him, as slamming as Felix Wolfe’s right fist.
Not-Adele was gone. And she wasn’t coming back.
Luka couldn’t blame her. Not-Adele’s escape was a certain thing without his face in tow. If he’d been in the fräulein’s position, juggling odds of 100 percent against no chance in hell, he would’ve done the same. He was more flustered at how he’d allowed himself to be hooked by the girl’s I’ll come back words, leaving him dangling like bait, waiting for the SS sharks to descend.