by Ryan Graudin
“Hold him down.” A mess of tears and frantic saliva mixed with the sweat on the boy’s face. There was no way Yael could treat those fingers by herself.
Luka cocked his head. “It wouldn’t kill you to ask nicely.”
Yael felt too exhausted, too close to tears, to argue with him. “Luka. Please.”
The victor took a swig of vodka, handed the bottle to Yael, and did as he’d been told. In prime form, the boys were an equal match in strength, but after Felix’s beatings in Tokyo, there was no contest. Luka pinned Adele’s brother down through the screams, “devildevilmonsterdevil,” steady enough for Yael to clean the hand, set the fingers, and wrap them in a makeshift splint. At some point in the process, Felix fainted.
When she was finished, she stared at Adele’s brother—looking so much smaller than himself in the stuttering candlelight—and couldn’t help but think it wasn’t enough. The vodka trick was something Vlad had used solely on smaller cuts. Not only that, but the boy had lost a lot of blood—it was everywhere but inside his blanched body. Yael wished she could give him some of her own, but her makeshift medical resources had been tapped to their fullest extent. All she could do now was wait, hope that the night was merciful and that the vodka did its work.
“Don’t die,” she whispered, prayerlike, into Felix’s ear.
Luka let out a hard, exhausted breath as he flopped onto a pile of blankets. The victor spread his jacket out to dry by the wood-burning stove and stretched himself out as well, his lounge lionlike. The smooth of his Victor’s Ball shave was gone, a shadow of stubble in its place. Felix’s blood slashed across his undershirt; Baasch’s burn wound marked the end of the scarlet line—a raw exclamation. Despite all this, the boy seemed… unfazed. As if all the past hours and days had not happened. As if they were right back in the middle of the desert, sharing a cigarette and a canteen and all the tensions of Adele and Luka. All their history and secrets…
The tension was different now. Different, yet not. Luka was still looking at her with the same flinting gaze. As if she were a riddle to be solved. As if they were still engaged in a dance Yael did not know the steps to. As if something between them could spark and detonate at any moment.
“You owe me some honest talk, Fräu—” Luka caught himself midword, switched to a term that was so much less familiar coming from his lips. “Yael.”
Yael. That’s who she was now. Yael. With her own history, her own secrets…
“I—I don’t even know where to start,” she told him.
“Beginning’s always a good place,” he said.
The beginning. Grainy ghetto, clattering train, barbed-wire fences, smokestacks black and billowing. First, second, third wolf…
Yael’s hand wandered into her jacket pocket, found the tiny lump of wood there. The smallest doll. The Babushka of Barrack 7 had carved an entire matryoshka set for her, but this was the only piece that remained. The others—the ones Yael left behind with Miriam (savvy, smart, sincere Miriam) the night of her escape—were just as gone as her real family.
So long ago, so close. Gaping, splintered loneliness. It wasn’t something Yael could bring herself to share, so she squeezed the smallest doll tight and shook her head. “Not there.”
The victor gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Fine, then. The middle. Or the end. Start anywhere you want, just give me something.”
The middle. Chocolate crullers. Calculus problems. Fourth wolf sorrows. Fifth wolf sweat. Making herself ready, ready, ready for… the end. It should have been at the Victor’s Ball. It should have been the fall of everything—the death of a Führer and his empire of bones.
What now? Where to start?
The starting line—inside Germania’s Olympiastadion, beneath the rain and the eyes of thousands—made most sense to Yael. It hadn’t been her beginning, but it was a beginning. Several beginnings, actually. The beginning of the tenth Axis Tour. The beginning of her life as Adele. The beginning of her and Luka.
“I’ve been using my… skill to impersonate Adele Wolfe since the start of this race,” she began.
“Your skill,” Luka repeated with a tilt of his eyebrow. “You mean switching out your faces?”
“I call it skinshifting.” She’d come up with the word not long after her escape from the death camp. Dr. Geyer probably had a different term for it.
“Was it something you were born with?”
“No. I was… made.” It wasn’t the right word. Made implied there was some sort of caring creator behind the process, instead of a madman with an endless supply of syringes. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Luka gave a gruff nod. The light of the woodstove scattered across his face.
“Anyway it is—was—my assignment. Race as Adele Wolfe, win the Axis Tour, attend the Victor’s Ball, get Adolf Hitler in front of the cameras, and kill him. There are resistance cells all across the Reich. They’ve been recruiting and stockpiling and planning for years. The Führer’s death was supposed to be a signal for the partisans to revolt.”
Luka Löwe took all this information in stride, his expression decidedly unchanged. Yael marveled at the composure of it. Grim jaw, lax lips, equally keen and flippant, as mixed up and hard to read as his kisses.
“You said ‘supposed to be.’” The victor tilted his head. His free hand moved up to his neck, catching the dog tag there, running his thumb over its engraving: 3/KRADSCH I. 4II. “What went wrong?”
Yael took a long breath and said, “Hitler isn’t dead.”
This information at least seemed to rattle the boy. He straightened. Dog tag dropping back to his breastbone. “What? But you shot him. I saw him fall. There—there was a body. We were in the same verdammt room with it!”
“I killed the wrong person,” she whispered. “He was someone like me. Impersonating the Führer.”
“Scheisse,” Luka swore at the fire. “No wonder the man has nine lives.”
“Forty-nine—” Yael caught herself. Forty-nine belonged to Aaron-Klaus. Her assassination attempt sported a different number: “Fifty, now.”
The victor’s jaw went tight. “Felix knew. Back in the woods he was babbling about how Hitler wasn’t dead. I thought he was just spouting off fever crazies. Never crossed my mind it was actually true.”
It was true. Too true. Impossibly true. Fifty times true.
“I was there, you know, the last time. In fifty-two. At the New Germania rally. I was standing right there in the Grosser Platz when it happened.” Luka reached out for the vodka bottle and took another swallow. “Everyone was screaming and scared and sad, and I just… wasn’t. The Führer got shot in front of my eyes, and I felt nothing. Maybe it was shock.… I don’t know. All I could do was stand there while everyone else lost their minds to panic. I almost got trampled to death.”
A piece of me was there. A piece of me died that day. Yael tasted graphite dust in her mouth all over again. Fourth wolf and Luka Löwe—two fragments of her life that never should have touched—were now crammed together in a strangely intimate way. Yael almost rolled up her sleeve then and there, almost pointed to the loping lines of Aaron-Klaus’s wolf, almost told Luka everything she was.
But Luka was playing with his father’s dog tag again, and Yael found herself wondering if Kradschützen troops had rolled through this very village, letting their motorcycles idle as the SS made it a pile of bones. She wondered if Luka had any idea how their pasts tangled and tore at each other’s throats.
“So if Hitler isn’t dead, then what’s happening out there?” Luka asked. “Are your resistance friends fighting?”
“I have no idea. The fact that Baasch felt comfortable enough to transport us back to Germania means he either had no idea about the putsch or…” It’s already over was what she meant to say, but couldn’t.
“Hitler never dances” is what Yael said instead. This fact had seemed like such a small thing when Vlad stated it, the day she first received her assignment. Reiniger had certainly thought so
. But now Reiniger might be dead. Reiniger, Henryka, Kasper, the thumbtack operatives scattered across the map… they could all be dead. “I should have known it wasn’t him. I should’ve—”
“We’ve been down this road before. Back on the Kaiten. You did what you did, Yael.” The metal disk glimmered between the boy’s fingers. Luka kept twisting it; the chain tightened around his throat. “You did what you had to.”
Did she?
“I killed the wrong person.” Did she have to?
“You made a mistake,” Luka said. “A few drops of blood doesn’t make you a devil.”
How much blood did it take?
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Yael asked.
“Not that I know of… Might’ve shot one of those commies a few weeks ago.” The victor fell silent for a moment, twisting the dog tag until he couldn’t anymore. The letters of his father’s fight and pedigree spun when he let it go. “I’ve known quite a few devils, though. You’re nothing like them.”
He said this as if he knew her. Yael wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe him. But there was blood all over this room, far more than just a few drops: on Luka’s shirt, on Felix’s parachute, on Yael’s face. Aryan and Jewish. All red. All her fault.
Yael glanced to where Adele’s brother moaned restlessly against the parachute. She grabbed the vodka bottle. “We need to save it for Felix’s wounds.”
“Might want to use some on your own.” Luka’s expression went a notch darker as he nodded at her face. “Baasch bashed you up pretty good.”
This was true. Yael had been able to block out her pain with the adrenaline of sheer survival, but all that was thawing now. The hurt had settled deep, lacing her every word and movement.
“I was expecting worse,” she said. (This was also true.) “It would have been. If you hadn’t distracted Baasch.”
“What can I say?” Luka shrugged. “I really wanted that cigarette.”
Yael’s eyes went to the boy’s own twilight-purple knot of a bruise, trailed down to the glistening burn on his collarbone: marks of loyalty, far more meaningful than any swastika armband. “You could have told the Standartenführer you had nothing to do with it. You could have let him keep hitting me. But you didn’t.”
“You should have left me at the docks. But you didn’t,” the victor said. They stared at each other for long seconds. Bruise to bruise. Blue to blue. “I wanted to keep things even between us.”
Even. But there were so many things swirling through the gap their bodies made—the woodstove’s heat, motes of dust kicked up by Felix’s struggle, hurts and victories, distrust and kisses. Memories, so many memories, Yael + Luka mixing with the past of Luka + Adele. Gossamer feelings strung between them, as sticky, fragile, complex, and beautiful as a spider’s web silvered in morning dew.
So many things belonging to so many people… it was impossible to keep track. What was Luka seeing when he looked at her—girl in the fire’s glow? Who was he reaching for when he leaned through the amber light, brought his fingertips to the barest edge of her face?
A prickle ran through Yael, one that did not belong to pain or loneliness.
She wasn’t completely sure it belonged to her either.
“I’m not Adele,” she said, soft but firm. “You know that, right?”
Just like that, some of the threads between them snapped. Luka’s touch dropped—away, down to the vodka bottle.
“It’s a good thing, too,” he said while he dashed some alcohol onto one of the blanket’s corners. “Or else we’d be a wolf buffet right about now. Adele’s a good racer, but I don’t think her wilderness survival skills are quite up to par for this type of situation. Which is why”—he held the soaked cloth up, waiting for Yael’s nod before padding the disinfectant against her wounds—“we don’t need you getting infected and going all fever crazy, too. You’re the best chance Felix and I have at staying alive.”
Alcohol hissed into her cuts and scrapes. Healing hurt. Yael clenched her teeth and cast one eye at Felix. Still breathing. Keep breathing. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
In the other half of her vision, Luka Löwe cracked a smile. “Here I was thinking I was the only one who could make terrible puns.”
Yael, despite her aching, on-fire cheeks, smiled back.
The nightmare had returned, pressing down on Yael—bloody, thick, suffocating. It was worse this time. Yael knew she was dreaming, but this did not stop the death. Felix stood next to her—face sour, hand dripping blood as he watched her shoot those she hated, those she loved.
Adolf Hitler (BANG), Mama (BANG), Aaron-Klaus (BANG), Tsuda Katsuo (BANG), the Babushka (BANG), Miriam (BANG), Adolf Hitler again (BANG).
The crowd was still there, but this time it was silent. The only noises apart from the endless BANG BANG of her P38 was Felix’s haunting hiss: “devildevilmonsterdevilmonstremOHcmp.”
Yael woke with her heart thrashing, wild-animal frantic against her rib cage. The woodstove’s fire was still simmering, casting a low glow throughout the room. Luka was curled in the blankets, deep in sleep of his own. Felix lay on his parachute, the rise and fall of his chest slow but steady.
Yael listened to the cadence of their breaths as she rolled up her left sleeve and looked at her five wolves. Stark black, fleeing from the woodstove’s dying light. Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus. Her constant, her cost. All the pain Vlad had ordered her to capture and keep. For the longest time, Yael had pressed the ghosts close and let them become a part of her. The part of her that never changed.
Or so she thought.
Her ghosts—both the living and the dead—were becoming more vengeful. And with every one of their nightmare whispers (You left me to die! Monster! Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?), Yael felt something inside her shifting. Not just skin, but soul.
Who was she then?
Who was she now?
How much blood does it take to create a devil?
How much red would it take to change things?
Would the world ever be even?
These questions spun—answerless—through the dark as Yael tugged her sleeve back down, feeling even more undone than before. She curled herself back into the blankets, heart crying through her pulse. The same light that had resurrected her wolves was shining on Luka. The boy slept facing her. Ember orange melted over his maskless features. Yael lay still, watching it pour across his eyelids, his Roman nose, his lips.
You’re nothing like them.
Luka had said these words the way he said so many things—with cocky confidence. Yael wanted Luka to be right. But he didn’t know her.
Not the way the wolves did.
CHAPTER 15
For nearly six years, Felix had carried Martin’s timepiece. Where Felix went, the pocket watch followed. The tick, tick tempo of its gears beat through varied fabrics: his Hitler Youth uniform, his grease-streaked coveralls, his racing gear.… It was his second heartbeat.
But now the beat was gone. Its absence was gaping over Felix’s chest as he fought for consciousness. Fluttering in, out, into fever-haze nightmares. The dreams were strange. A lifetime of pieces—shifted, rearranged in a way that didn’t work. Driving a motorcycle backward through the Axis Tour, kicking up desert sands in reverse. Adele’s rag doll (the one that sat on a shelf, gathering dust) rode beside him. Yellow yarn hair snagged his wheel, threw him out, out.… He landed on a familiar patch of earth. The one he visited every year on May 2. Grass—bright with spring—peeked out under his knees. The gravestone loomed, its gaping, granite-wound letters: M followed by A followed by R followed by A… No wait, that wasn’t right.…
The letters of his brother’s name were disappearing, rearranging. A new name appeared on the stone: A followed by D followed by E followed by L…
NO! Felix’s whole body jolted awake. He found his skin burning against cool air. The sight above him did not belong to bedsprings or blue sky, but wooden rafters: old to the point of splinters and
gray.
Felix’s heart fluttered, questioning itself. Is this real? I’m still alive, aren’t I? The pain—the one that was creeping through his tendons, into his arm, all the way to his mind—told him yes.
Somewhere outside, wood was being chopped. The sound was irregular, thud, thudding at the wrong tempo. But there was no right tempo. Not anymore. Felix reached up to his breast pocket, felt the lump of metal there. All at once, he remembered:
His mission had already failed.
According to Baasch’s timetable, the trio was supposed to land somewhere in the web of small towns outside Germania, close enough to reach the capital in a few hours. Instead, they’d jumped out of the plane thousands of kilometers away. Dumped into the snow-laden, wolf-infested Muscovy territories, not just days but possibly weeks away from the resistance’s headquarters.
Is this real? The watch sat under Felix’s palm: pulseless. My family’s still alive, aren’t they?
That question wasn’t so easy to answer.
Thud, pause, thud went the distant ax. Felix’s heart pumped so hard he felt as if his insides were sweating. Maybe he could find a radio, a telephone, some way to contact SS-Standartenführer Baasch and tell him he was still coming.
Felix’s brain fired clumsy synapse signals to his body. Get up. Out of bed. Call Baasch. But he had only enough energy to roll onto his side. The cabin floor spread out before him: empty jars, rumpled blankets, rat feces, rotting wood. It wasn’t hard to tell that the place was abandoned.
There was no radio or telephone here, and even if there were, Felix couldn’t reach it. He didn’t even think he could say a word properly, much less string enough coherent sentences together to plead for his family. Already his fever was starting to flare again, burning away at his mind’s lucid borders.…
“Felix!”
A flash of white filled his eyes. Not pain, but hair. Her hair. The girl knelt by his parachute. Out came her hand, fingers cold as snow crust against his temple.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Her touch lifted.