Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

  Until the day of Martin’s racetrack accident. The day the Wolfe family broke in a way that could never be fixed. The day Adele’s parents swore off racing altogether—banning their remaining children from even watching the Nürburgring races.

  But Adele’s fear of the road was no match for her fear of being lost. Swallowed into the Führer’s breeding systems to mother a whole nation of blonds. Doomed to years of swollen ankles, a body run down, and breasts sucked dry.

  That would not be her fate. So, five years after her older brother’s death, she took Felix Wolfe’s papers, entered the largest race in the Reich, and won.

  As if on cue, the most popular film clip of Adele Wolfe’s racing career flickered across the bubble screen. It was from the Victor’s Ball of 1955—a party held for the winner of the Axis Tour, attended by Tokyo’s high society and the Reich’s highest officials. Adele had shocked the world at the finish line by revealing her true identity as a girl, but what happened during the ball stunned some Reichssender viewers even more.

  Adolf Hitler—a man notorious for being a stick-in-the-mud at parties—asked Adele Wolfe to dance. The Führer, who left the Chancellery’s great iron-bolted doors only twice a year (and when he did, swarmed himself thick with the crisp black uniforms of the SS), let Adele’s skin collide with his for a five-minute, televised waltz.

  It was one of the many reasons Reiniger—the National Socialist general and secret leader of the resistance—placed Adele Wolfe’s file in Yael’s hands. Hitler had the girl close enough for her to slide a knife blade between his ribs. If he did it once, he’d do it again.

  And this time, the weapon would be ready.

  But to attend the Victor’s Ball in Tokyo, Yael had to win the race. To win the Axis Tour, she had to enter as Adele Wolfe. To enter as Adele Wolfe, she had to take the real girl’s place. To take the real Adele’s place, she would have to carry out the kidnapping and retrieval before curfew set in. Soon.

  Yael glanced around the office. It seemed too small, too quiet for everything that was about to happen. “Where’s Reiniger?”

  “Erwin wanted to be here to see you off, but he had… other obligations.” This was Henryka’s code for National Socialist duties. Yael knew that even when Reiniger was with the National Socialists, he was doing the resistance’s work—infiltrating the party for its secrets, converting officers whose sense of horror and morality was somehow still intact after all these New Order years, preparing great chunks of the army for the upcoming putsch—but the thought of him sitting in meetings with men who danced in her people’s ashes and blood always twisted her stomach.

  “He wanted me to give you this.” Henryka plucked a folded sheet from the new papers and handed it to Yael. It was a list of addresses and contact protocol, written in code. There was one for each of the nine checkpoint cities along the dotted black line.

  Prague. Rome. Cairo. Baghdad. New Delhi. Dhaka. Hanoi. Shanghai. Tokyo.

  “If you need anything on the road, these cells should be able to help you. Just be certain you’ve lost any tails before you pay them a visit.”

  Yael refolded the paper into eighths and put it away. “Anything else?”

  The older woman’s lip trembled. Even her fingers were shaky as she tucked her bleached hairs behind her ear. When she shook her head, the wisps sprang back to their wild selves.

  “I’ll be watching you.” Henryka nodded at the screen. Her eyes were wet and there was a weight in her whisper. A sadness full of the years they’d spent together: baking and reading and spying on beer hall customers through a knothole in the old headquarters. Years where Yael had almost felt like a normal adolescent.

  “Do what needs to be done, then come back.” The way the older woman said this made Yael think of all the operatives who hadn’t returned. The pins that were taken off the map. Leaving trails of tiny holes all over the crimson paper world.

  Yael hugged Henryka, burying her face in the woman’s blouse. Its thin fabric held an odd mixture of smells: butter and flour, old papers and typewriter ink. Henryka’s arms were much stronger than their scrawniness suggested, vising Yael’s ribs until a mist sprang in her eyes. Yael rested in the tears and the holding for several seconds. Then she took one final, deep breath—libraries, bakeries, home—and pulled away.

  Neither of them said good-bye. It was too hard a thing to voice. Too final and damning in times like these.

  Yael walked to the door and gave one final glance at the far wall. Where hole-riddled continents bled red, smoked gray.

  This was the last time she’d see the map like this.

  Because tomorrow the end began. She was going to race from Germania to Tokyo. She was going to win the Axis Tour and earn an invitation to the Victor’s Ball. She was going to kill the Führer and spark the death of the Third Reich.

  She was going to cross the world and change it.

  Or die trying.

  CHAPTER 4

  NOW

  MARCH 9, 1956

  GERMANIA, THIRD REICH

  Adele Wolfe lived alone on the outskirts of Germania. Hers was the highest flat in the building, with a brilliant view of the capital’s winking lights. It had been bought and paid for in full a year ago, with a chunk of the prize money from her Axis Tour victory.

  Just one of hundreds of facts from Adele’s file. Though Yael knew every meter of the victor’s living space through surveillance and studying the old building’s blueprints, she’d never been inside the flat herself.

  That was about to change.

  Yael crouched in the back of the shiny laundry truck (the one the resistance never actually used for laundry, just stakeouts and courier errands), watching the entrance to the building. It was quiet, weighted with the stillness of almost curfew. In the past five minutes only one middle-aged man had been out, tugging a reluctant bulldog, urging it to relieve itself as he stamped and grumbled under the orange lamplight. Now he was gone and the way was clear: empty streets and Gestapo-less cars. High, high above, the windows of Adele Wolfe’s flat shone bright.

  “You ready?” Kasper, driver and fellow operative, looked at her around the cracked leather headrest.

  A laugh bubbled in Yael’s esophagus. Ready? Her readiness was years in the forging. What had started in the death camp as stubborn survival had bloomed into something far more lethal. Vlad’s training left her brutal in hand-to-hand combat. Bull’s-eye deadly with every weapon she fired. Henryka’s books left her with a buffet of languages and information at her disposal. In the camp she’d picked up Russian to add to her native German. Japanese, Italian, and English came later, along with smatterings of Arabic. She’d learned all she could about Zündapp KS 601 motorcycles. She’d studied the other qualifying racers, memorizing biographies and favorite cheating tactics. To cram all this into a word as short and simple as ready seemed… well, funny.

  Hence the laugh.

  “More than,” she told Kasper. “I’ll signal from the window when the target is secured. Be ready to help load her up.”

  Kasper nodded. “Don’t push it too long. Curfew’s in an hour. I want to have Victor Wolfe back at Henryka’s well before then.”

  Yael made certain her face looked like Mina Jager’s again. After one last sweep of the street (still empty, eyeless), she slipped out of the truck, through the cold night, and into the building’s marble foyer. At the end sat a shiny brass lift gate, covered in a lattice of bright X’s. It was the easiest way up, but too much like a cage. Too many X’s to cross over her face. Cross her out.

  Never again.

  She took the stairs instead.

  Yael wasted no time when she reached the door to Adele’s flat. Her heart rattled in time with her knock. Tap, tap, tap, tap…

  …

  There was no answer. Just the flat’s heavy silence leaking out into the hall. Accenting the sharp of her own heartbeat.

  Adele Wolfe was not home.

  Yael’s fingers flew up to Mina’s hair, fished out two bobby pi
ns, and bent them straight. It took only seconds to coax apart the lock, swing the door open, and enter.

  Inside held a mess that put Henryka’s office to shame. Yael was, admittedly, not the cleanest person (it had taken Vlad three months to break her habit of leaving dirty glasses in the sink when she lived on his farm), but the state of Adele Wolfe’s flat made her cringe. Clothes were everywhere. Strewn over armchairs. Crumpled against the baseboards. The walls were cluttered with Reich-approved art and photographs of Adele at the Victor’s Ball, dressed in an elaborate kimono and sandwiched ceremoniously between the Führer and the Emperor. Giants of the East and West, smiling at the camera.

  Yael’s skin crawled, drawing tight over her bones. She couldn’t look at their faces for long, so her eyes skated to other pictures: the ones in frames scattered between long-standing, half-finished mugs of creamless coffee.

  The largest picture sat by the turntable. It sported a much younger Adele: face sullen and arms crossed. Her hair was the brightest thing in the picture, done up in pigtail braids. Her brothers each held one; their expressions full of tease. Felix and Martin were handsome (Yael had noted this fact long before, when she first opened Adele’s file), though it was hard to tell in this photo.

  The crawling. It wasn’t in her skin this time, but her heart. Yael looked at the faces of Adele’s brothers—her family—and thought of the wolves on her arm. That lonely, lost pack.

  Yael turned her back on all this and pushed the door shut. From the looks of things, Adele was still packing. A quick glance into the kitchen showed her that a kettle of water sat on a lit burner. (Had she stepped outside to meet someone? She must have used the lift.) She’d be back soon—or else the place would burn down.

  Sure enough, the kettle was howling steam when the front door rattled open. Yael hung back, out of sight in the scratchy fabric shadows of the coat closet.

  “Scheisse!” was the first word out of Adele Wolfe’s mouth. Yael watched through the crack in the closet door as the girl dashed across the flat. She flicked the flame off, muttering more curses and a loud yelp as she tried to yank the hot kettle off the burner.

  The girl was distracted and frantic. Waving her burned fingers in the air. Her curses had disintegrated from Scheisses to verdammts to other colorful verbiage.

  Now was the time to strike.

  The crawl of Yael’s skin met the crawl of her heart. Her fingers latched on to her gun. She started to step out of the closet.

  “I see some things haven’t changed,” a voice—deep and male—spoke just a meter from her, freezing Yael midstep. Her free fingers hovered over the closet door’s wood, too stunned to pull back.

  This isn’t right. For months Yael had staked out the victor’s flat. Watching her go in and out. Sometimes Adele lugged armfuls of brown grocery bags; other times she was dressed in biking gear, ready to ride. Always she was alone.

  But not tonight.

  Yael gritted her teeth and sank back into the forest of winter coats. The strip of door light darkened as the visitor stepped past. His back was to the closet, but Yael could see he was tall, lean, strong, with muscles that made themselves known even under his jacket’s bulky fabric. He stood like a fighter—legs planted apart. Even if she caught him unawares, she didn’t think she could overpower him and Adele.

  Not quietly. Not bloodlessly.

  Besides, if this strange boy went missing (last seen in the company of Adele Wolfe), the authorities would get suspicious. Something this mission could not afford.

  “Scheisse, that hurt!” Adele hissed, blowing on her burned fingers.

  “So I’ve gathered.” The boy moved to the freezer and pulled out a handful of ice. “Germania’s done wonders for your vocabulary.”

  Adele’s swears drifted off. She accepted the ice warily, as if she expected the boy to lunge at any moment. “We both know you didn’t come all the way here to criticize my manners.”

  The boy said nothing. His shoulders had gone strangely tense, as if he was expecting her to lunge.

  “Let’s have it, then,” Adele sighed.

  “You can’t race tomorrow,” the boy told her.

  Adele’s glare could have cut steel. She crossed her arms and set her jaw to one side. Her hurt fist crushed tight over the ice cubes. “Why not?”

  “I can think of about a thousand reasons: motorcycle sabotage, dehydration, road rash, flooded river crossings… Luka Löwe.”

  The girl’s jaw tightened along with her fist. Melting ice seeped through the cracks in her knuckles like tears.

  “And for what?” The boy’s voice sounded as hot as the kettle. Hissing syllables. Boiling consonants. “Another Iron Cross? More profiles on the Reichssender? More money?”

  “I sent most of my winnings back to Frankfurt. You know that.”

  “We don’t need your money, Ad. We need you. Please. It’s time to come home.”

  Home. This wasn’t just any boy, Yael realized. This was Adele’s brother. Her twin brother. Of course. His hair was the same silk-fine, bitter-blond as that of the girl who clutched the ice. There were other similarities: their stance, their fists curled to the same tempered tempo.

  Adele shook her head. Her arms crossed tight.

  “We’re almost eighteen, Felix. The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll be conscripted as a mechanic for one of the Lebensraum settlements. But I’ll be married off or put into the Lebensborn.” Adele’s fist grew even tighter when she talked about the breeding programs. An ice cube she held slipped out, spinning across tiles and floorboards. It came to rest by the closet door. “This race is my last chance to escape that fate. To prove that I can serve the Reich as well as any man.”

  “I thought that’s what you were doing last year,” Felix said.

  Adele Wolfe’s lip twitched. “One win isn’t enough. I can’t be as good as the men. I have to be better than them. No racer has ever earned two Iron Crosses before.”

  Not, Yael knew, for lack of trying. The Double Cross was elusive, which made both participating empires salivate for it.

  Over the years the Axis Tour—officially a celebration of the Axis’s continued alliance—had devolved into what Reiniger called a pissing contest. The Third Reich and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’s partnership was tenuous, crumbling a bit more with each passing year. They were a long, long way from all-out war, but these tensions played out every tour through the riders and their victories.

  Win one race in the name of the Reich and you received cash, fame, your choice of a Lebensraum assignment. Win a second and you’d have the Führer himself in your debt. The proverbial world was yours.

  “Luka Löwe and Tsuda Katsuo will be fighting for that same privilege,” Adele’s brother reminded her. “It’s their last year of racing, too. They’re going to be out for blood, and it’s your throat they’ll go for first.”

  Adele said nothing. Her lips were pressed so tight they were white.

  “How can you do this to Papa and Mama? After what happened to Martin…”

  Martin. The other brother. The one who snapped his neck on the Nürburgring racetrack on the twins’ twelfth birthday. They were supposed to go home from the race and eat cake. They went to the morgue instead.

  All these memories played across Adele’s face: ugly shadow puppets. The white of her lips spread to her cheeks. Anger past red. “It’s not the same.”

  Felix’s hands knotted, anxious behind his back. “You’re right,” he told her. “What you’re doing is far more dangerous.”

  Cramps were starting to vine up Yael’s thighs. She shifted as silently as she could and thought of Kasper in the laundry truck, watching the window. Waiting.

  “The other riders fight dirty, but so do I.” Adele said this with her arms still crossed. “I know what I signed up for. Besides, the Führer himself gave me a special blessing to race. He even sent me a telegram that said he’d be cheering for me.”

  Felix’s head turned oh-so-slightly, so that Y
ael could see the boy’s profile. His features looked apprehensive and pressed, like his sister’s. Exactly like his sister’s. But for his slightly stronger jawline, her three freckles, and a few centimeters in height, the siblings were almost identical.

  “I always sat back; I always kept your secret, always let you compete under my name,” Felix reminded her. “You know I wouldn’t be asking you to drop out unless I meant it. Trust me on this, Ad. Please.”

  Adele Wolfe was silent for such a long moment that Yael started to fear she might say yes. (Then what? Burst out of the closet and say boo? Kidnap them both?)

  But Adele did speak. Her words were slow, determined. “I’m racing under my own name this time.”

  Felix’s fists gripped tighter, cracking his knuckles with his thumb. Five pops for the right hand, five for the left. The sounds made Adele scowl. “Go back to Frankfurt, Felix.”

  “Not without you.”

  Stubbornness, it seemed, ran deep in the Wolfe family. Yael would fit right in.

  Adele shook her head. “I’m racing tomorrow and you can’t stop me.”

  If the twins had been rams, they’d be clashing heads, tangling horns. Instead they just stood, engaged in an invisible battle of wills. It was silent, all in their eyes and history.

  A winner emerged. Victor Adele Wolfe cleared her throat and spoke. “It’s almost curfew. You should go.”

  Felix’s hand fished into his jacket pocket, came back with a pocket watch. It was a cheap, dented thing, making a tinny sound as he snapped it open. The time was right: almost curfew. He broke his wide-leg fighter stance and retreated to the door. Adele followed him—both moving out of Yael’s slim vision. The only thing left for her to watch was the ice cube, melting into nothing.

  The door clicked open and shut. If there was any good-bye between the twins, it was wordless. The flat fell silent and the ice chip disappeared altogether.

  Finally, Adele’s footsteps creaked across the room. The whine of a television sprang to life. Familiar sounds of the Reichssender floated through the flat.