by Ryan Graudin
What were the Soviets doing with so many new-old Japanese guns?
What were the Soviets doing here at all?
Comrade Commander Pashkov had refused to talk to Yael after he returned from his radio session. His only words had been for his men: “Keep Volchitsa under observation at all times. We mustn’t have her swapping faces on us.”
A trio of armed guards had whisked her away into one of the more intact cabins. They sat and watched Yael. They did not let their fingers slide from their triggers. They did not speak.
What were they waiting for?
There was little question they were waiting. The guards had the telltale signs of restless men: twitching feet, eyes flickering to the doorway. Outside, Pashkov paced the path between the cabins, from the caravan of parked ZIS-5s to the bones and back again. Every few steps, he craned his neck up to the cloudy sky. It looked almost as if he was praying.
At noon, the heavens brought their answer. Airplane engines droned through the sterling clouds, passing over the village once, twice, thrice before circling a final time and disappearing over the horizon. Comrade Commander Pashkov stopped pacing, his stare fixed on the woods.
It wasn’t a what the men had been waiting for, but a who. A woman emerged from the trees, dressed in the full garb of a Soviet commander: coat, cap, a colorful collection of badges. She was far from old, but there was nothing young about her. She moved in a way that conveyed authority—clipped steps, set shoulders. Her greeting to Pashkov was perfunctory—an exchange of nods and a few words—before he pointed her toward Yael’s cabin.
Yael couldn’t help but notice how the guards shrank when the woman entered the room. All three took a subconscious step back.
“Out,” the woman ordered them.
The middle soldier swallowed. “But Comrade Commander Pashkov said—”
“Leave us,” she cut him off. “I will not ask again.”
The guards shuffled through the door, leaving the unarmed newcomer with an unbound Yael. This situation should have read to Yael’s advantage: tackle, knock out, change her face, change her clothes, make a break for it. But the evenness between them only made Yael uneasy. There had to be a reason this woman was fearless.
“You are Volchitsa?”
“I am.” There was no use in Yael denying it. Not with one hundred eyewitnesses and their lives on the line.
“A very interesting name.” The more this woman spoke, the more Yael could tell Russian wasn’t her first language. Her words rose and fell in a cadence that did not quite fit. “How did you acquire it?”
It was a strange question to open an interrogation with. Yael had expected something along the lines of What are you doing here? or Who are you working for?
Those might have been easier to answer.
Volchitsa. Russian for “she-wolf.” It was Yael’s code name within Reiniger’s resistance, but its origins went deeper than that. It was another one of the Babushka’s gifts, handed to Yael along with extra crusts of bread. Volchitsa, the old woman used to call her. The girl who was special. The girl who would change things. The girl who was as fierce as a wolf.
Yael had never been able to put these memories into words. She tried, but found only eleven: “A friend gave it to me. A very long time ago.”
“Your friend spoke Russian?”
Yael nodded. “We were in a camp together.”
“You had different names on the television. Inmate 121358ΔX. Yael.”
“I have a lot of names.”
“That must explain why you’re so hard to find. I’ve been looking for you, Volchitsa.” The woman’s accent suddenly fit her words; she’d switched languages to German. “For many, many years.”
Yael’s heart beat—faster, faster, faster—until the rest of her could not keep up. The woman drew so close that Yael could see the tiny ridges of her incisor teeth, the peach fuzz hairs on her earlobe, the premature strands of silver threading through her dark braid. HAZEL was the box the Soviet commander might check on an eye-color questionnaire, but even that wasn’t broad enough to cover the gold—dusted and glittering—inside the woman’s irises. Her skin lacked the scars most soldiers bore. It smelled like powdered lilies.
When the Soviet commander held out her left arm and lifted her uniform sleeve, these finer details faded. Yael’s vision tunneled, erasing everything except the numbers on the woman’s skin.
121048ΔX.
Numbers as crooked and dark as Yael’s had once been.
Numbers she knew.
Numbers that belonged to Miriam.
CHAPTER 19
THE THIRD WOLF: MIRIAM
PART 2 SPRING 1945
Yael’s disappearance was discovered at roll call. The women of Barrack 7 stood straight while the guards counted their frail and failing bodies. One, two, three, four… as the stars above drowned in morning light. Again and again the guards counted. Again and again they came up with the same result: They were one short.
Miriam and the rest of the women had been standing for three full hours when the doctor swept in. His physician’s coat was aching white in the dawn light. His face lit with fury as he spoke with the guards in a low, hurried voice. Miriam watched his lips moving, trying to pick out words. When the doctor caught her staring, he stiffened, eyes going sharp behind his glasses. Miriam’s own eyes snapped down to her clogs, but it was too late. Dr. Geyer was walking over.
He stopped an arm’s length away. She could almost smell the anger on him, mixing with vicious cologne and morning coffee. The laces of his dress shoes were twine-fine, knotted in a tight hurry.
“How old are you?”
“F-fourteen.” Miriam hated the tremble in her answer, but it couldn’t be helped.
Dr. Geyer swallowed this number, considered it.
Miriam’s heart fluttered—far and away—from her chest.
“Go stand over there.” He pointed to the guards, who stood by the fence, holding their roll sheets and rifles.
Miriam’s feet felt heavy in her clogs, every step throbbing. She clenched her palms (still crusted with fresh dirt) and kept on.
Escape from the camp was practically impossible, but it had happened. Whenever the guards discovered someone was missing, they forced the inmates to stand for hours upon hours until the prisoner in question was found. If the person wasn’t, the executions began. Inmates were selected at random, made examples of.
Those left behind always paid the price.
Miriam had known this when she smuggled the ruffled yellow dress, sweater, and shoes from the sorting house. She’d known this when she instructed Yael to change her face and lie her way out of the gates. She’d known this when she rose from the straw mattress that morning and hid the matryoshka dolls in a safer place.
I am going to die. Miriam had known this and accepted this.
But that didn’t mean she was ready.
Dr. Geyer kept walking through the rows, plucking girls like daisies, tossing them out of the line with a point and a wave. Go, go. All were young. Bodies breastless and malleable. Eyes wide with fear. By the time the doctor was done, ten girls stood in front of the rest of Barrack 7.
We are going to die. Miriam looked at the guards’ guns, slung so casually over their shoulders, and wondered which one would shoot her.
But when Dr. Geyer came back to the guards, all he said was, “Take these girls to the medical block and place them in the first observation cell. The rest of the barrack must be sent to the showers. They have lice.”
“Yes, Dr. Geyer.” The foremost guard nodded. “What of the missing inmate?”
“No need to worry any further about it. I’ll make the report to Kommandant Vogt myself.”
Every day Dr. Geyer stabbed Miriam and the other girls with his needles. He kept all ten of them confined to the medical block. He took notes on their progress; his scribbled paragraphs grew longer as their skin began to flake and their hair paled. Each and every session ended with the same question: “Can you
change?”
Sometimes it was worded in the form of an order: “Change, Miststück!” Other times a plea: “Please change. It would make an old man like me very happy.” A few times it was a threat: “If you don’t change, I’ll send you to the ovens!” Very rarely it was a bargain: “Change, and I’ll give you extra rations.”
Every day he stabbed them. Every day he asked this without fail.
None of the girls changed in the way Dr. Geyer wanted. Not in the way Miriam had seen Yael do. They sat in the observation cell day after day after endless day, picking at patches of loose skin, exchanging stories of before to pass the time.
Then the fevers came.
Six fell ill within the first month. All but two were dragged out of the observation cell, lifeless heels sliding over the tile floor. The doctor did not look particularly distraught when he found their bodies. Instead he took notes on the discoloration that seized the girls’ features postmortem. Albinic skin and hair, eyes stripped of their natural color—the very same paleness that had washed out Yael after her sickness.
The pair who survived the fever carried these same shades. Snow white, egg white, cream white. There was an offness in the way they carried themselves. One girl ranted only in rhymes. Another started pulling out her hairs one by one. “I don’t want them, don’t want them,” she said. Dr. Geyer took notes on them as well.
The first girl died two days later. The lone survivor went madder and madder. Plucking hairs, picking skin, staring at the same mildewed spot on the ceiling for hours. Ignoring all of Dr. Geyer’s threats, orders, pleas, cajolery to “Change, just change!” Her scalp was half raw, cleared of stubble, when she was taken to the operating room, where the corners shimmered with surgical knives.
She did not return.
Miriam’s own fever came like a wave. One moment she was standing steady. The next, dizziness was pushing her down, cheek-first on the grimy floor. Her last whole thought before the sickness? I am going to die.
She didn’t. When Miriam woke up, her skin was like the others. Scrubbed of all shading. She was not ranting, nor did she itch to pull out all her curls. (She did pluck one, just to see the color: vertebrae white.) She felt unchanged.
But she could change. It was a voluntary process, she discovered. Much like deciding to walk or speak. Learned, but controllable.
When Dr. Geyer realized she’d survived the fever with a healthy mind, he moved Miriam into her own room (no scalpels), bribed her with extra food and warmer clothes. He watched her change features again and again, making endless notes: Tattoo ink remains unaltered in host’s dermis layer. Possibly because it’s a foreign substance? Other scars, moles, freckles are removed at will. Bone structure and muscle mass also subject to change. Along with facts he gathered blood—harvesting life in ruby tubes, setting it aside for further study.
There were only so many notes and vials the doctor could take. Miriam knew it was simply a matter of time before he wanted more than just blood. A lung, a brain, a heart… Although Miriam could change, she was ultimately disposable. Another girl from Barrack 7 had survived the fever with a solid mind, and Dr. Geyer was bringing in new test subjects: children fresh from the train, with full heads of hair and clothes meant for the outside world. Every few days a group of them was herded past Miriam’s window, lined up against the hallway’s white walls, and told to stare at the camera. Their young faces were then immortalized, captured as a reference point before Dr. Geyer began testing improved versions of the compound.
It wouldn’t be long before the syringes’ change set in. When that happened, Miriam knew, her time was up.
I am not going to die. This was Miriam’s promise to herself. Death had had enough chances where she was concerned. While the doctor had been examining Miriam, she’d been making studies of her own, watching the nurse as she set about cleaning scalpels and filling syringes. She made small notes on the woman’s presentation: Green eyes, pretty but vacant. A reedy voice so at odds with her full figure. Her habit of pinching her lips and nodding at everything Dr. Geyer said. Miriam filed these things away for later.
It was this nurse who checked her vitals and prepped her for injections. It was this nurse who brought Miriam breakfast in the mornings. It was this nurse who discovered Miriam lifeless on her bed—hair spilled milk white over the sheets, glassy eyes to the ceiling.
“Scheisse!” She unlocked the door. “Not another one.”
When the nurse came to the bed, Miriam sprang back to life. She was not a fighter, but neither was the nurse. One lunge from Miriam smacked the woman’s skull against the floor, leaving limp limbs and a short window of minutes.
Miriam stole the nurse’s clothing and features, retrieved the key ring, and locked the door. She started walking. Down the hall. Out of the medical block. Through the gates. Past some soldiers who smiled and waved. Along the road.
No one stopped her. She did not stop.
Though Miriam had the perfect face (any face), she had no official papers and damnable numbers in her dermis layer. She worked her way east, as far from the center of the Reich as possible. There weren’t so many paper-checking patrols in the newly established Lebensraum territories. But there were plenty of struggling farmers looking for extra hands. They paid her nothing, but Miriam was glad for hot meals and a bed. She never stayed in any one place for long. Every few weeks she packed her bag, changed her face, and moved another town eastward. Farther and farther into the wilderness she went, where the farms grew smaller and the fear of Soviet guerrilla raids was as strong as the cold.
Miriam was fifteen and a half when she joined up with the Soviets. They almost killed her at first—bursting into the farmhouse with Mosin-Nagant rifles and a hatred for all things German. The farmer’s wife sobbed protests as they ordered her husband on his knees. Took their aim.
I am not going to die.
Miriam did not know much Russian, but she’d gathered enough from the old woman who once slept across the way in Barrack 7 to manage these words: “Prekratite! Pozhaluysta!”
Stop! Please!
All eyes were on her: the looters’, the farmer’s, his wife’s. Miriam’s mind was wiped blank. She did not know what to say, so she changed her face instead. The Soviets swore and cried out in shock, but in the end they spared her. The farmer and his wife weren’t so fortunate. And so Miriam left the Reich filled with a holy fear. The men she was with were not heroes, and she knew that if they hadn’t been so shocked, they would have shot her, too. Some of them looked as if they still might, but the group’s leader was fascinated by the girl, and he took her under his wing.
Miriam traveled with the guerrilla band for months. By the time she arrived in the hectic newborn capital of Novosibirsk, she knew quite a lot more Russian. She could shoot a Mosin-Nagant without getting a bruise from the rifle’s recoil. She could even swallow vodka without wincing.
Word of her abilities spread. Mnogolikiy, the guerrillas called her. One with many faces. Girl turned into rumor into legend into myth. It wasn’t long before the Soviets’ skeleton government caught wind of what Miriam could do. They did not lock her up or poke her like a lab rat. They offered her a job in the army instead. Miriam was young, yes, but her face-changing talents and fluent German made her a perfect scout for border raids in the Muscovy territories. She rose fast in the Soviet army’s ranks.
Life went on. She fell in love, twice. She rented a oneroom flat in the heart of Novosibirsk. She did not sleep much, for whenever she did, she dreamt of the small girl in the yellow dress, stumbling through darkened woods, a dozen hungry wolves on her tail. Yael always ran, always disappeared into the trees, and whenever Miriam tried to find her, she discovered a stack of bones instead, picked clean by predators’ teeth. Many of Miriam’s night hours were spent walking the city’s quiet, snow-dusted streets. Every year, in the springtime, she lit a Yahrzeit candle and remembered her dead.
She thought of Yael often—willing her nightmares to be untrue. Novosibirsk wa
s brimming with refugees, its corners crammed with languages from all over Europe and North Africa. During the city’s small bursts of summer, when girls wore short-sleeved blouses, Miriam found herself staring at their arms, searching for her lost friend’s numbers. Nothing ever came of it, but Miriam never stopped looking.
After Comrade Commander Vetrov and his men botched the kidnapping of the Axis Tour racers, it didn’t take long for the details of the field report to make their way to Miriam. The mission, Vetrov claimed, had been foiled by someone like Mnogolikiy. The face-changer was posing as Victor Adele Wolfe and on her way to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The girl called herself Volchitsa.
Volchitsa, one of the first Russian words Miriam had learned. That was what the elderly woman in Barrack 7 once called Yael. Yael, the face-changer.
Miriam was not the type of person who believed in coincidences. She wasn’t surprised when the girl dancing with Adolf Hitler shouted her name and lifted her gun. I am Yael! The girl Miriam saved, the girl she lost (again and again and again in dreams), the girl she found for two and a half seconds before the television feed cut off.
Miriam tried to uncover Yael’s fate. But the Soviets’ contacts in Tokyo came up empty, and all of Novosibirsk’s energy had been thrown into the invasion of the Muscovy territories. No one had time to look for a lost girl.
When Comrade Commander Pashkov’s call came in a few days later—saying he’d found Volchitsa in the middle of the taiga, squatting in a rotting village with two National Socialist boys—Miriam did everything she could to ensure she was the sole questioner Novosibirsk sent out. (It wasn’t hard. The army had very few people to spare. And it made sense that a face-changer be interrogated by Mnogolikiy.)
So she handed off her assignments to a fellow comrade, boarded a plane, and flew into the war zone. It was a short flight, made that much longer by doubt. How can Yael be this far west? How did she escape an entire ballroom of armed guards? Why would she be with Luka Löwe and Felix Wolfe, of all people? What if this is some sort of trap? Miriam wasn’t a nervous gnawer—and it was a good thing, too—because her fingernails would’ve been chewed to the quick by the time she landed outside the village. She hid all these misgivings from Pashkov, presenting a stern face and striking features the way she always did. (For as high as Miriam had risen in the army’s ranks, she never could forget the farmer and his wife. Cries for mercy cut short, brain matter flecking the farmhouse floor. These soldiers weren’t heroes, and so Miriam kept fascinating them: hair streaked with holy-fear silver, eyes made of a color only found on autumn trees.)