Blood for Blood

by Ryan Graudin

How… was he… feeling? The absurdity of the question almost made Felix laugh. Not so much the query itself, but because she asked it. Did she care? Did it matter to her that he felt utterly ruined, that she was his ruination? His family was probably being tortured to death, hanging from piano wire in a Gestapo dungeon, getting carved to pieces, fingers, ears, nose, and toes whittled slowly away, because this girl had stolen his sister’s face.

  The girl’s new face was just a few bruises short of terrifying. Broken in, framed by features too perfect, too bright to be real. Felix tried his best to focus on the eyes, expecting to see evil there, some sort of darkness to balance out that brilliant tracer blue. But all he saw was a girl and her sadness. A great and intricate sorrow, long past emotion, made of hundreds of parts…

  Did she care?

  Did he care if she cared?

  No, Felix decided. He’d cared too much already. Look where that had landed him.

  “I’m going to check your wound, okay? Try not to move. You lost a lot of blood last night, and I don’t need you spilling more.” The girl began unwrapping his bandages. Whatever she saw beneath them made her breath sharp, scratched harder edges around her lips. “I tried to set the fingers… but…”

  Some things are too broken to be fixed. This was what Felix told the girl back in Tokyo, when he thought he was trying to save Adele from herself. This was what he felt now, all the way to the dust of his shattered bones. His injuries had gone too long without proper medical attention—the SS-Standartenführer had refused to dress his injuries beyond a splash of antiseptic, telling Felix the resistance would patch him up once they landed outside Germania.

  The wound can’t look too clean, the SS-Standartenführer had said. We don’t want Inmate 121358ΔX getting suspicious.

  The wound was not too clean. It was infected.

  And the girl was not suspicious. She was sorry.

  She muttered this word—over and over—as she splashed more vodka-fire onto his wounds, as she rewrapped them, as she tried to spoon-feed him some of that awful jar-muck, as she pressed dirty snow to the heat of Felix’s forehead. “Sorry, sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” she kept saying. As if one word could erase everything she’d done. Make everything right again.

  It would take so much more than a single word for that.

  Felix screwed his molars tight. The rest of his head was starting to feel swimmy. Nightmares skittered along the borders of his conscious thought, darkening everything—the cabin’s shadowed corners, the bruises on the girl’s face, the rot inside him.

  The faraway ax kept thudding. The pocket watch felt ten ounces heavier over Felix’s heart, jealous of every breath he took. The girl’s eyes stayed on him as she packed more ice against his face. How did they still look so much like Adele’s? Wrong shade, right stare. Sister-to-brother strength.

  Felix couldn’t stand it. He shut his eyes, let the darkness take him.

  CHAPTER 16

  This village was giving Luka the creeps. It wasn’t so much the collection of bones as the stillness. The emptiness where life should be. It was the same feeling he had when they drove through North Africa’s skeleton villages and Baghdad’s gutted streets. The same unsettling sensation he got as a child when he caught the Führer’s fireplace portrait staring at him: seeing nothing, seeing all. They’d spent two nights in the haunted town, waiting for Felix’s fever to flag. No such luck. The boy was no longer spitting delirious insults, but his skin was still furnace hot. Faucets’ worth of sweat soaked through his Hitler Youth uniform, and as far as Luka could tell, there was no shutoff valve. Yael barely left the boy’s side. Luka kept himself busy splitting wood, scrubbing the bloodstains out of their clothes in the river, scouting the rest of the cabins for anything of use. The spoils? A dozen more jars of vegetables turned into tasteless mush, three more bottles of liquor so strong it had the potential to blind you, and a lone hunting knife. He didn’t find a single cigarette.

  The nights were just as still as the day. They should have been more disturbing, with the darkness everywhere, but Luka found himself enjoying the evenings around the fire. It was warm, there was food, and there was her.

  Conversations with Adele had never been easy. Luka likened them to sparring matches—filled with witty words, cutting remarks, insults disguised as fondness. He was always, always on the offensive. Always looking for the best worst way to say something.

  But as Yael had so effectively reminded him, she was not Adele. Luka found himself telling Yael things. Things that mattered. Things he didn’t even know mattered until they’d spilled out of his mouth.

  The Führer got shot in front of my eyes, and I felt nothing.

  He’d never told anyone that.

  Adele would’ve punched Luka’s arm (a little too hard), called him a traitor in a way that was teasing (but not really). His father would have gone empty-eyed, throwing a punch that hurt twenty times worse than Fräulein Wolfe’s. But Yael had listened to him. She’d more than listened. She’d understood.

  He had… feelings… when he was with her. The same ones he’d experienced on the streets of Tokyo. Carbon-copy emotions spilling over from his days with Adele. He’d loved Adele as Adele. He’d hated Adele as Adele. He’d hated Yael as Adele. He’d loved Yael as Adele. But now Yael was Yael, and his whiplash emotions were still a step behind. Giving him a verdammt headache.

  It was tempting to blame everything on the vodka. But Luka hadn’t drunk that much, and he was sober now as he walked through the frigid noonday forest, checking the parachute rope snares Yael had set. The first two were empty. Wolves had already reached the third trap—the bloody remains of a feast on four legs was all that was left. The fourth trap’s rope held a sable. The creature twisted at the sound of his footsteps, its sleek coat glinting under a bare-bulb sun.

  Luka reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the hunting knife. All it took was one quick flick and the animal stopped twitching. The sable’s fur blended perfectly with the pine needles on the forest floor. The longer Luka stared at the body, the more his skin prickled, until all his arm hairs stood on end.

  The stillness had followed him.

  The woods were leaden with silence. The birds had gone songless, Luka realized, as he picked up the animal’s body. He could hear every snap of vegetation under his boots as he walked toward the fifth trap.

  When Luka heard the engine, he froze, trying to reconcile the vastness of the wilderness around him with the sound. A truck… people…

  The dead sable beat against Luka’s shoulder as he ran for a closer look, careful to keep a screen of trees between himself and the road. He recognized the truck instantly: a ZIS-5 transport. The same vehicle they’d stolen from the Soviet guerrillas after their Axis Tour ambush.

  It was the first of many. A whole line of transports rumbled down the road.

  When he was younger, Luka had spent many afternoons imagining the Soviet army. He’d killed hordes of commies with an invisible gun, screaming a series of BANGs and POWs as he kicked the pedals of Franz’s rusty bike. The odds were always against Luka and Franz—hundreds to one—but the boys never failed to emerge victorious. They fought and shot a bloodless war and were never afraid.

  Fear was getting the better of Luka now, as he crouched behind the vegetation watching truck after truck after truck roll past. Their beds were lined with Soviet soldiers, men and women alike, twenty to a transport. All were dressed in uniform. All carried rifles. All were headed in the direction of the village, where a thin stream of smoke rose into the sky.

  How many of them, Luka wondered, had spent their childhood afternoons shooting imaginary National Socialists? How many would shoot the double victor and Felix Wolfe on sight once they discovered the two German boys?

  Luka didn’t even take the time to swear. He burst into a run, sprinting all the way back to the village.

  “Put it out!” he gasped as he crashed through the cabin door. “Put the fire out!”

  Yael knelt at Fel
ix’s side, a palmful of snow dripped through her fingers, onto his face. She frowned at Luka. “What’s going on?”

  Luka dropped the sable, grabbed the snow from her hand, opened the woodstove, and tossed the melting heap in. It did nothing but fizzle against the heat. “Soviets. Coming. Up. The. Road.”

  If Yael was surprised or afraid, she did not show it. “How close?”

  “Half a kilometer.” Less now, with the way those transports were rolling.

  “They’ll have seen the smoke,” Yael said. “They’ll know someone’s here. You’re certain they’re Soviets? Not Wehrmacht?”

  Luka nodded. “No swastikas in sight, and they’re driving ZIS-5s. They’re Soviets. At least a hundred of them, all armed.”

  Felix groaned in the corner. Mumbling and kicking and very much not ready to make a run for it. They were as trapped as that sable.

  “You’re a better fighter.” Luka pulled out his hunting knife and offered it to Yael. The blade hovered between them: sharp, small, still wet with the sable’s blood. Everything about it was a bad joke.

  Yael shook her head. “I won’t need a weapon.”

  Her face began to change. It was the third time Luka had seen her skinshift, but that made it no less jolting. Yael’s hair shrank to a wiry shortness, a touch grayer. Fifty years’ worth of life folded into her skin. Her eyes went dark, as did a few of her teeth. The only thing that remained the same was the signet-ring split and bruises wreathing her healing nose. In the end, she stood before him an old, hunched, disarming woman. Even her movement was elderly and unoiled as she picked up one of the blankets from the floor and wrapped it over her shoulders, covering her more obvious warrior-wear.

  “Stay with Felix,” she instructed him. “Do not make a sound. Do not leave this house.”

  CHAPTER 17

  It was only when Yael stepped outside into the clean air that she realized how much the inside of the cabin reeked of rot. Despite the vodka cleanings, Felix’s fingers (and accompanying fever) had taken a turn for the worse. The SS had crushed the life out of those bones. If Yael didn’t do something about it soon, the death would spread.

  But there was a more immediate threat to worry about. Yael could hear the engines as she shuffled to the side of their cabin and grabbed the ax Luka had been using to split firewood. She started swinging, bringing its rusted edge down onto a piece of wood. Yael swung and split, trying not to think of Felix’s hand. Trying not to think of what would happen next, when the first truck rolled into the village.

  Luka was right—they were Soviets. Not Wehrmacht. Whether this was a good thing or not remained to be seen. Yael’s experience with Comrade Commander Vetrov—the Soviet officer who’d kidnapped the Axis Tour racers between Baghdad and New Delhi—had been questionable at best, and the guerrillas who often raided the Urals were notoriously merciless when it came to National Socialists. If they discovered Luka and Felix in the cabin…

  Yael brought the ax blade down a final time, resting it on the ground and double-checking to make sure her blanket covering was secure. The transport drew to a stop. And another after that, and another after that, and another after that…

  These aren’t dart-and-run guerrilla fighters, Yael thought as the fifth transport rolled up. This is an army.

  A man wearing the markings of commander leapt out of the first truck. He was younger than Vetrov, with a fuller head of hair and eyes that had seen fewer years of bloodshed. This did not stop him from staring warily at Yael and her ax.

  “Good afternoon,” she greeted him in Russian. (Another gift from the Babushka, passed to her word by word during Barrack 7’s frigid nights. Honed into perfect accent and syntax, years later, by Vlad. In this moment, Yael thanked both wolves for it.)

  The sound of his mother tongue from an old woman’s lips put the officer at ease. His hand slid off his holster. His eyes ranged down the pitiful row of houses, taking in their caved roofs and sagging window frames. “Are you alone, Grandmother?”

  “Da.” Yael nodded. “For many years. The National Socialists killed my family and my neighbors while I hid in the cellar. Then they left this place and forgot it.”

  The Soviet commander kept staring down the main path. Was he noticing Luka’s faint, too-large footprints along the borders of the cabins? Was he questioning the depth of her wrinkles against the harshness of the surrounding wilderness?

  Yael’s hands tightened around the ax handle.

  The officer’s stare turned back to her. Yael became all too aware of the military-grade boots and leather jacket under her blanket. One flutter of breeze is all it would take for her story to unravel.

  “What happened to your face?” he asked.

  My face? Oh, right, her face. In all the fretting over Felix’s wounds, Yael had almost forgotten her own. The days had been mirrorless, and she had no idea how badly the SS-Standartenführer’s fist had messed up her features. “My steps aren’t so steady anymore,” she told him. “I fell.”

  The officer’s mouth wilted into a frown. Behind him the soldiers were starting to climb out of the trucks, stretching their limbs and walking about.

  “I have a medic in my company,” the commander said. “Let him examine your face.”

  —DO NOT LET THEM GET CLOSE—

  But they already were close. The fact that the soldiers’ footprints covered Luka’s was a useless comfort as they drew nearer to her smoking cabin and its dingy windows and the two very recognizable German boys.

  “Nyet, nyet.” Yael shook her head, drew the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. “Thank you, comrade. But I don’t need your help. I’m used to being alone. I prefer it.”

  After a pause, the officer nodded. “Forgive me, Grandmother. I know this must be a shock. My comrades and I have been pushing hard for days, and we need a short respite. We’ll camp for the night and be out by dawn. I assure you my soldiers will be of no bother to you.”

  “Thank you, comrade.” Yael—amazed at the boldness of her own lies and the ease with which the young officer chose to accept them—rested her hatchet against the cabin.

  It was at that very moment Felix Wolfe chose to scream.

  The sound was stripped of words—torturous, undeniable. Yael’s heart stuttered. She wished, very much, that she hadn’t let go of the ax handle, but retrieving the weapon would’ve done little good. A whole unit of soldiers faced her, armed to the teeth. A handful rushed toward the cabin, breaking down its door with a single kick. In seconds they returned with a foulmouthed Luka. Felix was carried out, too, still howling in his bloodstained parachute.

  One of the men nodded at Felix’s Hitler Youth uniform. “They’re National Socialists, Comrade Commander Pashkov!”

  “Not simply National Socialists,” the commander said as he stared at the boys. “They’re Axis Tour racers. The very same ones who slipped out of Vetrov’s grasp.” He turned back to Yael. “What strange company you keep, Grandmother.”

  Another pair of soldiers grabbed Yael. Her blanket twisted off, landing in a heap by her boots.

  —FIGHT RUN RUN RUN GET OUT AS FAST AS YOU CAN—

  She didn’t try to fight or run. Her thoughts grasped for an excuse that might get her and Luka and Felix out of this alive.

  “And what strange clothes you wear.” Pashkov stared at Yael as if she were some fairy-tale creature, set to vanish if he blinked. “Vetrov said the racers had a face-changer among them. A girl who called herself Volchitsa. He also said she spoke flawless Russian.”

  A dozen watered-down lies flowed through Yael’s head—I don’t know them; they’re not who you think they are; we’re seeking asylum in Novosibirsk—none of them good enough.

  She dropped the old woman’s appearance, features smoothing back to default. Not Yael’s birth face, but her barest one: blank-slate hair and skin, eyes made of the most brilliant blue. One hundred soldiers watched this shift—ancient crone de-aging into young, supple thing. Every one of them reacted the exact same way: not at a
ll. It was the same response she’d received from Comrade Commander Vetrov when she changed in front of him. Aweless, fearless, nothing.

  Luka was the only one who spoke, muttering something about a “tough crowd” before a soldier shoved him to the ground, barking “SILENCE!” in a language the victor could not understand.

  “Quiet, Luka,” Yael instructed him.

  His eyes met hers. He gave a slight nod.

  There was nothing to be done about Felix. His wail was now a whimper. His injured hand hung off the parachute. The surrounding soldiers frowned at the blood-soaked splint, noses scrunched at the smell.

  Yael turned back to the commander. “We’re not your enemy.”

  “That’s not for you to decide,” Pashkov said, then shifted his attention to his men. “Take Löwe and the sick boy back into the warmth. Watch the face-changer until I return. I must radio Novosibirsk. They’ll want to know what we’ve found.”

  CHAPTER 18

  A night passed. Dawn had come and gone, but Pashkov’s fraction of army showed no signs of moving. Through the window of her cabin-turned-prison, Yael watched as men bathed in the river and cleaned out their rifles. The door to her old cabin (the one that still held Felix and Luka) had been set back on its hinges, but even that hadn’t been able to keep Felix’s screams from tearing through the village. That morning alone the unit’s medic had crossed the threshold over a dozen times. Every trip he held something different: rolls of gauze, bottles of pills, a canteen of water, a bloodstained Hitler Youth uniform that went straight into one of the soldiers’ fires (along with the parachute). Yael tried to gauge the boy’s well-being through these clues, but the task was impossible.

  She gathered more questions than not, watching Pashkov’s soldiers. War was what these men and women were armed for. Some of their equipment was over a decade old. Relics from the first invasion of the Reich. Yet a good deal of their weaponry was newer, fresh from the factory crate. Yael spied a few men walking past with Arisaka rifles slung over their shoulders. Type 30s and Type 38s: dated in name, but shiny in appearance.