by Ryan Graudin
He’d wagered she’d had a heart. He’d begun to fear he’d had one of his own.…
A voice—not so unlike his father’s—circled his thoughts. Tricked by a girl. Again? Serves you right for being such a softhearted dummkopf.
Luka was done being chum. He tore his jacket off his head and shouldered it on, crossing over to the harbor. The docks were more extensive than they had appeared from the other side of the street, a labyrinth of industrial lamps and kanji-covered helms, branching out into dark waters. Luka walked down the main stretch—jaw clenched, heart fuming—passing dock after empty dock.
The fourth dock was not empty. A human-sized shadow skirted around islands of lamplight, pausing every few steps to study boats in their slips.
Luka’s pulse steamed into his throat as he called out, “Can’t shake me that easily, Fräulein!”
The person turned, stepping into one of the pools of light. Where Luka expected to see a black biker jacket and nostrils wide with rage, he instead found an olive-green field cap, a canvas jacket, the slender barrel of a rifle.…
Not not-Adele, but a member of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Scheisse.
The two regarded each other, a stunned moment slipping between them. Then the soldier yelled words Luka’s ears could not decipher. At least in the literal sense. He gathered the gist of them well enough. (Translation in Luka-speak: The hunter had become the hunted.)
Luka Löwe swore again (this time out loud) and started to run.
CHAPTER 7
There had been a few candidates for getaway boats along the docks, but Yael didn’t waste time weighing their various merits. The boat she chose was as good as any: small enough to be subtle on the coastline, with enough engine power to handle the chop of deeper waters, enough to get her and Luka across the East China Sea, back to the mainland.
When Yael pried out the motorboat’s starter panel, she found its wiring wasn’t so different from the setup Vlad had used to teach her hot-wiring: tangled and colorful, ultimately simple. It would take only a few seconds to get the engine started.
“He’s over here! I need backup!”
“SCHEISSE on a verdammt stick!”
Two yells in two different languages, both just a few docks over. Yael dropped the panel when she heard them, cursing Luka in every one of her six languages. She should’ve known the victor would refuse to stay put. But Yael hadn’t counted on the boy being brainless enough to blunder into a patrol.
More yells—all Japanese—rose from various locations around the docks. One a few meters northeast. Another from the west. A cry from the south. At least four soldiers, by Yael’s count. Not a manageable number of opponents to take on alone.
Not impossible either.
—LEAVE HIM GO GO GO—
The starter panel dangled from its wires—red, yellow, black. Ten seconds was all it would take to cross them and crank the engine.
Ten seconds and a life.
—DON’T BE A HERO NOTHING CAN FIX WHAT YOU’VE DONE YOU’VE CHOSEN DEATH ONCE WHY NOT AGAIN?—
Why not again?
The shouts were drawing closer. Even if Luka somehow made it off the docks by himself, he wouldn’t make it out of this city. He was too blond, too loud, too there.
She cursed Luka again. She cursed the soldiers for patrolling this exact dock at this exact hour. She cursed herself for jumping out of the motorboat and pulling the P38 from her pocket.
Yael did not run straight into the fray, gun blazing. Vlad had taught her better than that. She clung to the darkness instead, skipping from boat to boat, clambering along their bows until she reached the highest one. From there she was able to assess the situation.
It was not good.
Luka was trapped on the main dock by a trifecta of Arisaka Type 99 rifles. Their muzzles were leveled at his chest, aimed by patrolmen who looked just as shaken as Victor Löwe did. The three soldiers chatted excitedly among themselves.
Soldier one: “It’s one of the victors!”
Soldier two: “What is he doing here?”
Soldier three: “He’s the one who invited the inmate to the Victor’s Ball. He must have fled when she did—”
Luka (in frantic German): “Are you going to put a bullet in me or not? If so, I’d rather you get it over with.”
Soldier one: “Is that rice on his face?”
Soldier three: “He smells like a dog’s ass.”
The men’s dialogue spiraled into a contest of insults. None of them seemed too concerned about what to do with the German victor now that they’d caught him. There was no sign of the fourth soldier. He must’ve gone to radio in their discovery.
If Yael was going to save Luka, she had to do it now.
She rose from her surveillance pose on the bow and crept her way to the dock, stalking closer to where the soldiers bantered. Two of them stood with their backs to her, and the third was too distracted by his comrades’ jokes to notice the shifting shadows on the far dock. Luka’s arms were propped above his head, all his attention focused on the three rifles. His jaw was set on edge.
During the course of the Axis Tour, Yael had seen Luka break noses and disarm Soviet guards with brutal, decisive elegance. The victor was a good fighter when he wasn’t hemmed in by Arisakas. He needed a distraction and she was the one to provide it.
Yael disengaged the P38’s safety, drew its hammer, and aimed at the water. Her finger cradled the trigger, waiting for just the right moment to pull.
It never came.
An O of metal jabbed into her back, followed by an order just as sharp: “Don’t move.”
The fourth soldier hadn’t gone to radio. He’d been waiting for her.
“Over here!” he called to the others in Japanese.
Yael’s heart trilled its old chorus: FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT! Her brain scrambled through Vlad’s training, against her own dread. Most people would’ve found an Arisaka Type 99 rifle pressed against their flesh paralyzing. Not Yael. She turned and lunged. The fourth soldier pulled the trigger a fraction too late. His bullet missed Yael (though she felt the graze of its breath, death almost death, passing her over once more), plowing straight into the patrol. Yael grabbed the soldier and wheeled him off the edge of the dock. Then she turned to face the rest.
The round had missed every one of them, for when Yael looked at Luka and the other Imperial Army soldiers, she saw not blood but confusion. Rifles swung, arms flailed. Luka sprang at the nearest soldier; the pair became a green-and-leather blur. The other two patrolmen lined their Arisakas’ sights on Yael’s end of the dock and fired. Their aim was sloppy, frantic. One shot splintered the wood by Yael’s toes. The other hissed over her shoulder.
Both men fumbled with the bolts of their guns—giving Yael valuable seconds to stow her P38 and jump. One abandoned his reloading efforts, drawing his bayonet instead. Yael didn’t have time to go for the knife stowed in her boot. They met: hand-to-blade combat. He was a gifted fighter: anticipating her first punch, dodging it, throwing a swipe of his own. Yael’s sidestep wasn’t swift enough; the tip of the bayonet dragged across her jacket, slicing all leather, no skin. Her second hit was more successful. Yael felt her bones connect with flesh, crack into cartilage.
The soldier spun away from her, free hand clasping his face, red leaking through his fingers. Yael was just about to put the man in a headlock when she heard a series of heart-dropping sounds.
Bad: a spent casing tumbling to the dock. Worse: a slick twist and click of a rifle bolt pushed into place. Worst: a command issued first in Japanese, then again in German so precise it was surgical: “Arms up. Or I’ll shoot.”
The second soldier’s reloaded Arisaka was aimed straight at Yael. He was too close, too ready—there was no dodging this bullet. She held her hands up. A side glance showed her that Luka’s fight had fared no better. The victor was on his back, lips snarled, the third soldier’s Nambu semiautomatic pistol shoved against his throat.
“I’m afr
aid there’s been a mistake,” she began, trying to keep her Japanese fluid. Unrushed. “I was only out here cleaning my father’s boat—”
“Check her!” the fourth soldier barked from the edge of the dock, where he was pulling himself out of the water.
Blood kept rushing down the first soldier’s face as he grabbed Yael’s left sleeve. Pulled. The fabric gave away to wads of unraveling gauze, which the soldier tore off. Beneath, a scene of ink-and-whirlwind wolves: Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad. Her pieces, her pain, herself. Stripped back, exposed for all to see.
The wounded soldier jabbed a finger at Yael’s skin. His nail landed on the bared fangs of Vlad’s wolf. “These are the markings the SS told us about. It’s her. The inmate.”
“Excellent. Let’s get them back to the palace.”
But… how could the SS know about the wolves?
Felix. The other boy she tried to leave behind. (And did.) Yael had hoped that when the SS found Adele’s brother tied up and gagged in her room, they’d assume his innocence. After all—she’d shouted her own true identity to anyone who cared to listen.
Yael’s stomach swan-dived to her toes. She should’ve known better. Innocence and guilt were irrelevant in the courts of the SS. They judged with far harsher laws.
What had they done to Felix to get him to talk?
What were they going to do to her and Luka?
Yael already knew the answer to these questions. It was the reason many of the resistance operatives hid cyanide pills in the soles of their shoes. It was why after shooting the Führer three times in the chest on May 16, 1952, Aaron-Klaus swung his own pistol to his head and did the unthinkable. It was why her stomach kept falling, past her toes, into despair.
Life or death.
Yael had made her choice in the middle of that boat.
This time, the death would be hers.
CHAPTER 8
Luka’s life was marked by a trail of bread-crumb rebellions. In the early days, these were small, insubstantial side effects of an overbearing National Socialist father. A tongue stuck out at the Führer’s portrait. A cigarette inhaled (but mostly coughed out) behind Herr Kahler’s shop. Things Kurt Löwe hated. Things that made Luka feel like Luka and not a loyalist lemming.
But there was always a part of him that yearned for that shiny red bicycle. The same part of Luka that wanted his father to clap him on the shoulder and say, “Well done, my son.” The same part that made Luka dust off Kurt Löwe’s old BMW R12 and enroll in the Hitler Youth’s Axis Tour training program. The same part that made him get back on his motorcycle again and again, through heat and snow, after countless crashes.
This part of Luka wanted to be as strong as his father, stronger even: leather tough, steel hard. This part pushed him, pushed him, pushed—all the way to his 1953 Axis Tour victory.
Everything changed after he won. Luka met the real Führer without sticking out his tongue (though he couldn’t stop his neck hairs from prickling; that response was purely instinctual). The victor became not simply a part of the system that stifled him, but the very image of it. His face was immortalized on Sieg heil posters all over the empire’s streets. We are strong, the Aryan people thought whenever they saw it. We are so invincible a fourteen-year-old boy can race across continents and win.
But whenever Luka looked at these posters, he did not feel strong. He did not feel right. He felt… swallowed. People saw him—a boy wearing a black jacket, hair clipped military tight, arm planked in a high salute—but they did not see him.
So the bread crumbs of Luka’s discontent grew bigger, bolder. A carton of cigarettes a week. A brown jacket donned instead of the standard black racing uniform. An angry word—or two, or three—about the state of things, always and only in the right company. Luka’s rule-breaking was very calculated. Just enough to set him apart, never enough for a one-way ticket to the labor camps.
But after Fräulein had come back for Luka, after she fought the Japanese soldiers and lost, after their weapons were seized and their hands bound, after they were stuffed into the patrol wagon with about as much dignity as a verdammt hay bale, Luka knew he’d made a mistake.
Actually, he mused as the transport rolled through Tokyo’s streets, I’ve made quite a few mistakes. Wandering down to the docks. Chasing not-Adele out of the garden. Inviting her to the Victor’s Ball. Falling in love in the first place (and the second, for that matter).
The fräulein sat next to him, eyes out the window, as they rolled through the main gate of the Imperial Palace.
“Back so soon,” Luka muttered.
He watched her and waited. For an eye roll. A retort. Anything. But not-Adele kept staring out the truck, face eggshell white. Luka would much rather have her yelling. Angry words and accusations he could brace himself against. But silence…
He never did well with silence.
The sound of it was everywhere. Just yesterday Luka had crossed the Imperial Palace’s main gate to a storm of cheers and flashing cameras. There was none of that now. The palace grounds were strangely quiet for a place that had just seen the Führer shot. No more frantic SS men rooting through the garden. Very few lamps were lit; most windows had gone dark.
Luka and not-Adele were handed over to the SS guards, dragged back to the ballroom. The place had been stripped of music, cleared of guests. Its Reichssender cameras were unmanned—six views gone blind—ringing a dance floor covered in glass. Adolf Hitler’s body lay in the midst of this shattered scene. Someone had draped a sheet over the corpse before the blood fully dried. Stains had seeped through. Red now fading…
The Führer, a man who’d always been so much larger than life—whose face was everywhere, always (above Luka’s parents’ mantel, on their television screen, inside every textbook)—was now just worm food waiting to happen. Luka—apart from the possibility of being implicated, tortured, executed—wasn’t terribly torn up about the death. Oddly enough, the SS bodyguards didn’t look too miffed about it either. The highest-ranking among them was actually smiling: a stiff expression not framed by dimples or laugh lines. It had no business on the man’s face.
“Victor Löwe,” the SS officer growled as the pair was shoved in front of him. “I expected so much more from you.”
There was no time like the present for Luka to tell his tale of woe. He’d always had a knack for talking his way out of things. (Exhibit A: Convincing the Axis Tour officials that, yes, he was wearing the brown jacket in honor of his veteran father. Wasn’t the whole point of the race to honor bloodlines and war victories?) But, Luka realized, the story of how he valiantly pursued this girl across Tokyo to make a citizen’s arrest would not work for one simple reason: The fräulein had come back for his sorry Arsch. She’d fought for him the way she would fight for an ally. A friend.
The evidence was stacked against Luka in a way no swaggering grins or loophole reasoning could erase. His fate was bound to not-Adele’s. For better or worse.
At the moment, it was looking very much worse.
He searched the SS officer’s uniform for rank. The man’s middle finger shone with a gold signet ring—engraved with double Sieg runes. Two silver-threaded oak leaves haltered his neck via a collar. The surefire symbol of a “Standartenführer—”
“Baasch.”
“Thank you, Standartenführer Baasch.” Luka nodded. “I believe you just came up with the title of my autobiography.”
Luka Löwe: We Expected So Much More. It would probably be better reading than that Mein Kampf headache.…
The SS-Standartenführer cleared his throat, his gaze sliding to where not-Adele was being held in place by an SS-Sturmmann. Her left sleeve was shoved up: wolf pack loping from wrist to elbow, beneath the chandeliers’ glow. “As for you, Inmate 121358ΔX. I would never have expected one of Dr. Geyer’s lab rats to accomplish so much. You truly had me and my men convinced you were Fräulein Wolfe.”
Inmate? Lab rat? What was the SS-Standartenführer talking about?
/>
“Even after all this time you Saukerls can’t stand to use my name,” not-Adele said.
All thoughts of Luka’s own story fell away as he watched Fräulein’s features change. The process looked different out of the garden’s dream-filled dark, under the ballroom’s light—much more brash and factual. The angles of her face shifted; all traces of Asian heritage vanished. Hair pulled—long silk, pure white—out of her skull. Her skin was just as pale, pigmentless. And her eyes… they burned. An impossible fluorescent, shop-light blue. One that put Adele’s bright irises to shame.
“I am Yael,” she said.
Yaaaaaaaaah-ell. The name had a sort of poetry to it—one that didn’t jibe with any of the German names Luka knew. It didn’t sound Japanese or Russian either.
“It’s hardly my concern what your mother called you. What does concern me is who you’re working with. I need names. Addresses.” Glass from broken champagne flutes crunched under the SS-Standartenführer’s feet as he walked toward Yael. It was the same restless stride Luka’s father used to perform. The one that created threadbare circles on the Löwes’ sitting room rug. The one that set Luka’s teeth on edge because he knew what often followed it.
The officer’s fist flashed out. There was a dull, wet noise that reminded Luka of the evenings his mother made schnitzel, when she stood over the butcher block, hammering pieces of veal until they were paper-thin.
Yael’s head twisted back, white hair streaming. A flag of no-surrender.
That signet ring had to hurt like hell, but the girl didn’t make a sound. Color spread through her pale hair, and at first Luka thought maybe she was doing her trick again. But as Yael spit the strands out of her face, he realized it was blood. The Sieg rune ring had left a split along her cheekbone. The cut flowed freely, as bright and red as any.
Her mouth stayed closed. Her eyes blazed.
“Names!” SS-Standartenführer Baasch tossed his fist again. There was another thud, just as wet and deep and sickening as the first.