by Ryan Graudin
“We now join our beloved and honored Führer on the eve of the Axis Tour for a very special Chancellery Chat,” a generic male voice droned.
It felt as if ants were marching up and down Yael’s arms. Henryka loved her television; it stayed on for hours straight, lighting up her office into the evening hours with news propaganda from all the Axis territories and stilted shows about perfect Aryan families. But even Henryka couldn’t stomach a full Chancellery Chat.
The Führer was known for his speeches. His voice turned words into living, breathing things that snaked under skins, lit fires inside even the dullest minds. Many years ago—before the Great Victory, before the war stretched its long shadow across the world—he’d spoken everywhere. Pubs. Theaters. Stages. Letting his bright red words wash over a whole nation.
He didn’t appear in public anymore. He didn’t have to, when his words could be transmitted through wires and speakers from the comfort of his own Chancellery. After forty-nine assassination attempts, the Führer hardly ever stepped past the threshold of his hermitage.
There were two exceptions to this rule. The beginning of the Axis Tour. And the end.
“Ten. That, my fellow countrymen, is the number of years we’ve dwelt in a land of peace. A world of purity. The Aryan race has risen to its God-granted station. We have tamed the wilds of the East and Africa, scoured the filth of lesser races from the crevices of our own continent.”
Words from a monster’s mouth. Aged, but still evil red, intoxicating the masses like some potent wine. They made Yael hot and twitchy and ready.
It was time. Now or never.
Yael pulled her P38 handgun out of her jacket, flicked up the safety, and stepped out of the closet.
Adele stood in front of the television, watching the old man behind the glass—his silvering mustache quivered as he spit out words, words, and more words. “The Axis Tour is how we remember our Great Victory. We see the drive and resilience of our race in our prized young racers. We watch them travel through the lands we’ve conquered and purified. We are the audience to our own progress.”
Progress. Yael steadied her gun hand. She swallowed back the anger. Deep, deep in her bones. Where it had to stay.
Adele still hadn’t turned. Hitler’s words were too loud, too enveloping for her to notice the danger. Yael crept—closer, closer.
A loose floorboard betrayed her, letting out a noise when Yael stepped on it. Victor Adele Wolfe snapped around to face her.
Though she still wore Mina’s face and form, Yael felt as if she were staring into a mirror. It was all so familiar. The platinum hair barely long enough to pull back, tied into a twig of a ponytail. The eyebrows so pale they were nearly invisible, afterthoughts over her dagger-blue eyes. A bone structure that belonged to a Viking queen.
They looked at each other for a long, still second. The gun between them.
“Sit on the couch.” Yael’s pistol flashed against the lamplight as she waved it toward the dark red upholstery. She tucked her free hand into her pocket, where the tranquilizer pills nestled beside the doll and the thumbtack. “Now!”
Adele’s eyes weren’t shirking or scared. Just… wary. They never left Yael as she stepped around the coffee table, plowing through mountains of discarded clothes. When she got to the couch, she stood. Her stance was the same as her brother’s. Wide, ready for a fight.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Even though these words were true, Yael regretted them as soon as they left her mouth. They made her sound weak, less-than, out of control.
Everything she could not be. Refused to be.
“Sit,” Yael barked again.
The girl’s movements were lightning quick. She grabbed a half-empty mug of coffee, threw it at Yael’s face, and lunged.
The liquid was cold, harmless. But the mug was not. It clipped past Yael’s jaw, shattered against the far wall. Fifty-nine kilograms of fingernail and kick barreled into her chest. Sent her world flying.
The pistol tumbled to the floor. Adele dove for it with hungry hands. Yael’s limbs lashed out. They seemed to move apart from her, guided by hours and hours of Vlad’s combat training. Painful, sweaty, bloody years all culminating in this single chop to Adele’s half-bent wrist.
The other girl’s cry turned into something savage as Adele’s elbow met Yael’s rib cage. Hurt sang under her skin—fresh and winter-bright. Yael didn’t scream. She gathered the pain close, harnessed its energy, and hit back.
Adele’s body stretched long across the Turkish rug, fingers straining for the butt of the P38. Yael lunged for her hand, digging Mina’s nails deep into Adele’s wrist, until she felt the wet of blood seeping to the quick. She snatched the pistol from the other girl’s reach, pointing it straight at Victor Wolfe’s forehead in a swift, trained motion.
All went still. Silent except for their geyser-hiss breaths and the Führer’s spinning-silk lies from the television: “Our racers are pure. Our racers are strong. They are the next generation, bearers of light into the still-dark continents of this world.”
Adele didn’t beg. Her eyes were ice and slit. She stared past the gun, straight at Yael. “Who are you?”
Not What do you want? or What are you doing here?
Who are you? Who? Who? Who?
Why, of all questions, this one?
Yael did not answer. She held the pistol tight and brought it down in a quick, blunt move to Victor Wolfe’s skull.
CHAPTER 5
NOW
MARCH 9, 1956
GERMANIA, THIRD REICH
Germania’s night sky was not deep. Not the way it was in the mountains. Where you could stare up through the snow-stung air and feel like you were falling. Tumbling into endless voids of black and stars.
There was no black to this night as Yael stood at Adele Wolfe’s window—just a mix of orange and gray and almost-sleet. Storm lights. Adele’s reflection hovered in the glass in front of her. Staring at Yael with the same ferocity as the real Victor Wolfe.
Who are you?
Once, just once, Henryka had been thoughtful enough to ask Yael what she really looked like. Before Dr. Geyer’s needles. Before the burn and the bleach and the skinshifts. Before the many scores of other girls’ faces. (I’ll bet you had the most beautiful dark hair, she’d said. You seem like a girl who would have had curls. Long, gorgeous curls.) Yael opened her mouth to answer and realized, with a start, that she did not remember.
She did not remember.
She did not remember.
What kind of person forgets her own face?
(It’s okay, Henryka had told her. It’s what’s on the inside that matters.)
But what was inside? An invasive cocktail of chemicals. Something she did not completely trust. (Could anything good come out of those needles?) Chain reactions in Yael’s body that she’d tried to research, grasp, understand. But nothing in Henryka’s volumes on biology and organic chemistry could explain her skinshifting.
Whatever lurked within Yael was new. Revolutionary.
The sky lit bright, clouds webbed with lightning. The flash erased Adele’s face. Erased her. All Yael could see was the storm—roiling black over the flats of Germania—and the silhouette of the Volkshalle, a grand building Hitler commissioned after the Axis’s Great Victory. (Its dome, at 290 meters high, was the only thing wandering eyes saw if they looked to Germania’s skyline.) She wondered if the weather would last through tomorrow. If the beginning of the Axis Tour would be full of dripping reporters and sopping pomp and circumstance.
Drops of sleet slapped against the glass. As if to answer.
Yael pulled the curtain tight across the window and turned back to the bed. She’d cleaned up nicely. Kasper had been quick to retrieve Victor Wolfe’s unconscious form, tucking her into a laundry bag and taking her back to the truck, back to Henryka’s beer hall basement, where Adele would be held until the end of the Axis Tour.
The bloodstains were harder to get rid of than the girl. It wasn’t unti
l the real Adele had been carted away and Yael was alone in her flat that she realized how much red her nails had spilled. Enough to notice from the doorway. Even with towels, powders, and a scrub brush, it took her over an hour to hide the stains.
But now all was ready. She wore Adele’s skin, spoke with Adele’s voice, slept in Adele’s bed.
Yael sat down on the mattress, rolled up her left sleeve, and unraveled the gauze where the wolf pack lunged against her skin. Vlad’s was still raw and puffed. Too tender to touch.
She traced the others with a soft finger, let the syllables of their names linger on the tip of her tongue. “Babushka, Mama, Miriam…”
The ones the ash ate.
“Aaron-Klaus, Vlad.” Yael swallowed. Five wolves. Four memories and a reminder.
Her loss was larger than that… but four + one was a number she could remember. A number she could handle without letting the vastness of it pick her to pieces like a crab’s ragged claws. Scavenging death on the ocean floor. Sometimes (usually) there was nothing left for the grief to feed on. Yael was a bare-bones blank slate. A hanger that held a cloth of pretty skin.
Who are you? (On the inside?)
The answer to this question was something Yael had to fight for. Her self-reflection was no reflection at all. It was a shattered mirror. Something she had to piece together, over and over again. Memory by memory. Loss by loss. Wolf by wolf.
It was easy—too easy—to pretend. To fill that empty space inside her with other lives. Bernice Vogt. Mina Jager. Adele Wolfe. Girls who never had to face the smoke or watch the syringes slide under their skin. Girls who never had to stare into the eyes of the Angel of Death. Again and again and again.
It was too easy to get lost.
This was why, every night before she fell asleep, she peeled back her sleeve, traced the wolves, and said their names. Because somewhere in there—in those fragments of gone souls and memories—was Yael.
Not chemicals, but essence. The real Yael.
She’d already lost her face. She could not let the rest of herself (however dark, however broken) slip away. So she traced and she named. She hurt and she raged.
She remembered.
THEN
THE FIRST WOLF: THE BABUSHKA AUTUMN 1944
The Babushka was Yael’s oldest friend. Older than most of the women who slept in Barrack 7. Her hair was silver, and deep lines swooped past the end of her eyes. (Crow’s-feet, she called them, in that heavy, chopping language of hers.)
She was a miracle, Yael’s mother said. Her wrinkles alone should have been enough for the guards to sort her into the too weak! line. But they let her keep walking through the gates. They let her live.
She was old, but she was strong. Every morning, in the cruel cold of the predawn, the Babushka rose with the others. She slipped wooden clogs over her feet, walked to the morning roll call, where she stood under spotlights and stars for hours on end. Then she followed the others to the sorting hall. There her fingers threaded through many things: gold rings, sooty dresses, boots that would not give her blisters. The belongings of the dead (or soon-to-be) were piled in mountains and moved by the women of Barrack 7, to be looted by the SS men’s magpie greed.
After the long day, the weary trudge back (under more glaring bulbs, a callous moon), the soup of withered vegetables and spoiled meat, the Babushka sat in the corner of her bunk. Those brown eyes were drained and glazed, but she always smiled when she caught Yael peeking across the way. None of her teeth seemed the same color. They held the gray of shadows, the black of night. A very few were yellowed white. They reminded Yael of old piano keys.
“Volchitsa,” she whispered Yael’s nickname—she-wolf in Russian, a stubborn, fierce creature for a stubborn, fierce girl—and waved. “I have something for you. Come.”
Yael picked her way through the bodies of her bunkmates (her mother, an older girl named Miriam, and three other women who never spoke to her). Mattress straws raked up her legs as she slid to the floor.
The Babushka’s bunk was just as crowded. Yael climbed through the jumble of bony, inked limbs, and bristle-hair scalps. There was a small patch of mattress by the Babushka’s hip. Enough for her to nestle in.
The older woman smiled and dipped her hand into the thin fabric of her dress. Magic or miracle—somehow her fingers came back wrapped around a piece of bread. Crumbling, so hard that the edges of crust cut into Yael’s gums, but bread. Something to make her forget the dull gnaw of her insides.
“Eat,” the Babushka commanded.
Yael’s eyes fluttered guiltily across the way, where Miriam and her mother slept on. She crammed the food into her mouth anyway, a few more mealy ounces to stick to her sparrow bones.
“Did you see the doctor today?”
Yael’s mouth was too full. She shook her head.
The older woman grunted. “You’re lucky, Volchitsa. Most of the children who go into his office do not come back again.”
A sharp jag of crust caught in Yael’s throat. She thought of the instruments on Dr. Geyer’s silver tray. Not the needles but the crueler ones. The scalpels and wide knives—things he never used on her.
An angel of a different kind.
“He must think you’re special,” the Babushka went on. “He’s saving you. Passing you over.”
“I hate him.” Yael swallowed the final crumb. Her last injection was over a day ago, but her arm still felt like it was on fire. So much hot and pain in such a small body. She gathered it all up and crammed it into words. “I wish the smoke would eat him.”
The Babushka did not tell her to hush, the way Yael’s mother did whenever she said these things. Instead her eyes were sad and knowing. Flooded with smoke-monsters of their own.
“I’ve made you something.” The straw beneath the Babushka rustled as she fished through the mattress innards. Cradled in the callused, canyon skin of her hands was something that reminded Yael of a misshapen egg. A crude line wrapped through its center.
“It’s a matryoshka doll.” The old woman placed it in Yael’s hands. Now that it was closer, she could see the lump was doll-shaped. With awled, colorless eyes. A scratch of a smile.
“Open it.”
Yael obeyed. The wood split apart like a nutshell. Something spilled out. Another doll. Smaller. It, too, had a crack down its center.
Another doll. And another. Each one smaller. Each one with a different face. A half-moon smile, a shepherd’s crook smirk. Eyes both squinting and wide. When Yael got to the end there were so many pieces. Tops and bottoms piled like tiny wooden cups on her bare legs.
Yael’s fingers closed over the last, a pea-sized matryoshka. She tried to think of where the Babushka might have found wood in a place like this. Much less something to carve it with.
Magic or miracle? Whichever it was, the Babushka was full of them.
“My husband was a woodworker. Before everything,” the old woman explained. “He used to carve them for our children. They always loved the dolls. Such bright, happy things. Full of color—so many colors. Ruby red, grass green, blue so deep you think you’re looking at the sky. Yellow like butter. Or the sun.”
Yael knew red. Red was the color of the wet patches on Dr. Geyer’s floor. The color of the guards’ armbands.
It was the other shades Yael had a hard time imagining. There was no grass inside the barbed-wire confines of the camp. Sometimes weeds sprouted from the cracks in the dormitory bricks. But these were usually coated in ash and withered into quick, drab deaths. And blue—that was the color the doctor wanted her eyes to be. The reason he kept sinking needle after needle into her skin.
She supposed that when she was younger—before all the grimy grays of the camp, the train, the ghetto—she’d seen all these shades. But these memories were like photographs: rare, blurred around the edges, black and white.
The colors had been taken. Bled out.
The Babushka plucked the wooden pea child from Yael’s palm and started putting the dolls back to
gether. They swallowed each other with snaps. Yael watched with wide eyes as the pieces became whole again.
“There,” the Babushka said after the final snap. “The little one stays safe.”
“This is for me? To keep?”
The old woman nodded.
“Why me?” Yael stole another glance over at Miriam, so still in her sleep. She gripped the dolls-within-dolls to her chest, breathing light against the precious wood. She knew she should share it—but there was a hardness in her heart that kept her clenching.
“The doctor is right. You are special, Volchitsa.” She said this with a knowing voice. “You are going to change things.”
Yael squeezed the dolls even tighter and wondered exactly why the old woman sounded so solid, so sure. So full of magic, miracle words. Yael knew she was different. Dr. Geyer’s injections had already set her apart. Splotched, flaking skin stretched over Yael’s toothpick bones. Her boy-short hair could not decide what color it was (some bristled light, others dark). Even Yael’s eyes were mutt-mixed—one brighter than the other, almost glowing—such a far cry from her mother’s steady brown.
Different, yes. But special?
“Now, off to bed with you,” the Babushka tutted, and waved over the pile of her long-collapsed bunkmates. “Tomorrow will not be forgiving.”
The next day, Yael would remember those words—those last, ominous words—after roll call, when she watched the others leave through a crack in the barrack’s tired doors. They marched as they always did: strung out like dull beads on a string, wooden clogs crunching through piles of gravel and ice.
Tomorrow will not be forgiving.
Yael did not blink when she watched her old friend crumple into the dirt and snow and shoes. She watched with both eyes (the bright and the dark) as the Babushka fell. It was a strange collapse, more like a kneel: gentle, willing.
She did not get up again. Even when the guard yelled and kicked. The other women shuffled on, none daring to look back. Yael felt a hard knot growing in her chest, as if the matryoshka doll were still pressed against it.
