by Ryan Graudin
The desert continued, all flat. Luka found himself racing not just to keep up with Katsuo and stay cumulatively ahead of Yokuto, but also to get to the evening, when he could exhale words and smoke and feel his insides lift in a way that wasn’t tangled with adrenaline or nicotine.
He didn’t smoke as much the next night. This was the Valley of Thirst—the stretch of race that cut through desert so deserted it had no wells to refresh their canteens. Rationing sips of water was necessary in this two-day stretch, and too much smoke scratching Luka’s throat always made him thirsty. Two cigarettes was plenty, but Luka stayed up talking long after the embers went out. He thought (feared?) they might run out of things to talk about, but the silences between them didn’t stand a chance. Adele shot them down with rapid-fire questions. Some importantly strategic: “Will you help me guard the washroom in Baghdad while I get this road gunk off?” “Does the racing path always have so many potholes?” Others not so much: “Do you know what that star is called?” “Got any more cigarettes?” “What’s your middle name?”
Hers: Valerie. Pretty. Fitting, seamless, into the rest of her. Adele Valerie Wolfe.
His: Wotan. Odd. Antiquated. The name of a grandfather who had probably inherited it from his grandfather before that. When Adele heard it, she laughed so hard that a piece of dried chicken/beef/cardboard got stuck in her throat and Luka had to smack her on the back until the offending meat slipped out.
Adele kept laughing until she cried. “Wotan?”
“You laugh now,” Luka told her. All too aware that he was sitting next to her, close, close. Shoulders touching. This slight contact shot through him with all the heat of the desert day. “Just wait. It will make a surging comeback in baby names once I become double victor.”
“A world full of little Wotans. God help us.”
“Shhh!” Luka held his hand up.
Adele’s laughter evaporated. The light on her face went hard, rage bright. A change so fast, so jarring, that Luka’s breath rattled his throat. “Don’t you shhh me—”
“No,” he said, trying to keep his voice low as he reached for his Luger. “Listen.”
Both Luka and Adele stared into the desert.
All was dark. All was silent. The Mediterranean was gone, along with its hush, hushing waves. There was no shift-slide of sand that meant footsteps. Had Luka’s mind been playing tricks on him? He could’ve sworn he heard movement.…
After several minutes Adele stated the obvious. “I don’t hear anything.”
They were still shoulder to shoulder. An odd pairing, if anyone was eavesdropping. Luka moved away, even though he wanted to do anything but. (Amazing, how such a small point of contact could pin you so heavily. He really had to pull to get the brown jacket away from the black.)
“Could be nothing,” he said. “I’ll take the first watch tonight.”
Adele opened her mouth to respond when the desert screamed back. Luka leapt to his feet—pistol pointed forward. The darkness didn’t budge, but the yells kept coming from some distance on, in the direction of Yokuto’s or Katsuo’s camp.
No gunshots. No death shrieks. Just Japanese.
“Sounds like a sabotage gone south,” Adele said.
“You understand Japanese?” That could be helpful when it came to eavesdropping on Katsuo at checkpoints.
The fräulein shook her head. “Just the curse words. Whoever’s shouting is using a lot of them.”
Curse words: the most essential part of any foreign language learning experience. Now that she mentioned it, Luka could hear a few kusos and baka kas being tossed around. He wondered if Takeo’s knife had slipped. Could be that it wasn’t one of Katsuo’s cronies at all. Maybe Kobi Yokuto had an ally no one had accounted for and was trying to sabotage his way into first.…
The shouts faded. The desert plunged back into silence.
Luka and Adele stood apart. Listening.
Swish, swish! Darkness streaked in darkness, disappearing just as quickly as it came. Whoever initiated the attack had survived in enough shape to retreat, which was more than some racers from previous years could say (if the dead could talk). Luka kept his Luger high, in case the steps backtracked, but they didn’t. And they didn’t. And they didn’t.
Katsuo and his Zündapp were still intact, as Luka was disgruntled to discover the next morning. They were better than intact. They were fast. Last night’s events had thrust a bunch of stinging nettles beneath Katsuo’s Arsch. His driving was daring, leaving no room for mistakes. It was an unprecedented pace. The Japanese victor was trying to shave off a half day of driving (and the night’s camp along with it), risking life and limb to reach Baghdad by nightfall. Luka strained to keep pace through the constant screen of dust.
Kobi Yokuto—also intact—wove ahead of Luka, following Katsuo’s line of drive: in, out, around, about. Yokuto’s driving was jerky. There was a rage to his engines, one that built up and up as the afternoon pulled into the evening’s golden hours.
Just as Baghdad’s lights began blinking to life on the horizon, Yokuto made his move for first. His scarlet taillight swung to the side; his motorcycle bellowed up the road—faster, faster, furious—until he was even with Katsuo. The victor matched the frenzy of Yokuto’s engines, refusing to let the other Japanese racer pass. Rpm for rpm. Grit for grit. Luka could keep up, but three years of racing this track warned him not to.
Rash speed + rough road = road rash.
Yokuto’s taillight snapped up, as if the night had swooped down and snatched the bike in its talons. Luka clenched his brakes, swerving to the left as Yokuto’s rear wheel arced impossibly high. The pothole kept the Zündapp as a prize, hurling its rider forward in a bomb cloud of dust.
It wasn’t the worst wreck Luka had ever seen. Kobi Yokuto would live. If he was wearing his riding gear properly and landed just right, he might be spared the painful ooze of road rash.
Luka swung around the wreck, falling in line behind Katsuo’s taillight. The other victor had slowed; the wide road next to him begged to be seized—heavy with dusk and dust and the promise of go, go, win and be worthy.
Pride before the fall. The proverb of lesser men, ones who had nothing to be proud of. Stupidity before the fall were the words Luka lived by, and he had no intention of being stupid enough to repeat Yokuto’s fate. There were far smoother roads ahead, and so like any good predator, Luka Löwe would wait.
Chapter 7
There were two things Luka appreciated about the cataclysmic racers.
1. Someone had to be last on the scoreboard. Their slothy times ensured it wasn’t Luka.
2. The longer it took for them to drag their wheels through the desert, the longer Luka got to sit on his Arsch in the Baghdad checkpoint—guzzling mineral water, making ashes of cigarettes, and watching March 20’s sun drift up through latticed windows.
In many ways, days off were nice: sleeping in, taking showers to wash off the stink, eating actual food, using toilet facilities that weren’t just a hasty dig in the side of a dune. Today, though, Luka didn’t want to stay still. It wasn’t because of his time on the scoreboard. (LUKA LÖWE, 5 DAYS, 12 HOURS, 2 MINUTES, 46 SECONDS. Eleven seconds behind Katsuo. Ten seconds ahead of Felix Adele.) It wasn’t because Katsuo’s stare was fixed back on him. Nor was it because his at-rest muscles were undergoing lactic acid mutiny.
It was because of Adele.
He wanted to talk more, but they couldn’t do that here. At least, not the way they did in the desert. There were too many ears around, and whenever Adele spoke, it was with a boy’s voice from a girl’s throat: strange, husky.
Luka couldn’t even really look at Adele without giving something away. His Reichssender interview was more distracted than most, because he could see Adele past the ends of Fritz Naumann’s wiry hair, making a snowman out of the leftover mushed chickpeas on her plate. The sight (almost) made him smile, and not in the propaganda grimace/cameras are watching kind of way. This was an I feel happy and my mouth wants to show it reflex. One
Luka had spent his entire childhood learning to iron out.
Don’t show emotion. Don’t you ever show emotion. Kurt Löwe’s own voice had been flat when he said this, colder than the Christmas Eve snow falling around them. I won’t have any son of mine being weak.
When Adele caught his eye, she smashed the sculpture with her fork and jerked her head to the camera. Don’t waste Fritz Naumann’s precious film! He imagined her saying this in her real voice, complemented with a laugh and a puff of smoke. It made quelling his smile that much harder.
What the hell was happening to him?
Luka was not weak, but it took all his strength to tamp down the edges of his mouth. He used thoughts of his father like nails. When Luka stared into the camera, he imagined Kurt Löwe watching the clip on the television—blue eyes as detached as the rest of his face.
Smile: deceased.
The Reichssender team usually spent twice as much time on Luka’s footage as they did on any of the other German racers’, asking questions that Felix Wolfe and Georg Rust were never expected to answer.
“Victor Löwe”—the interviewer cleared his throat—“I think many of our young female viewers are wondering, is there a sweetheart cheering you on back in Hamburg?”
This question. Luka was surprised they hadn’t asked it sooner. Last year it had popped up at nearly every checkpoint, as if Luka’s answer would change if they worded their query differently.
“I…” He looked at Adele’s eyes over Herr Naumann’s shoulder. A blue so different from his father’s stare. Voidless, holding a spark that set Luka’s whole insides ablaze.
Don’t smile!
The interviewer scrambled to save Luka’s silence. “Or perhaps there’s a fräulein in Germania?”
“No.” Luka shook his head. “There’s no sweetheart.”
It wasn’t the sweethearts that held his interest.
The interviewer was knee-deep into his next question when Yokuto strode into the main room, the whole of him patched in bandages. His face was furious through quilt-work gauze. He must’ve been in crippling pain, but this didn’t stop him from stepping straight up to Tsuda Katsuo’s table. The Japanese victor stood, unquailed by the few centimeters of height that Kobi Yokuto had on him. He did not flinch when Yokuto started yelling—a string of words bound together with a spray of spit.
Had the cameras not been on and the officials not watching, knives would’ve been drawn. Yokuto’s hands thrashed through the air, pointing at Katsuo and then waving at a first-year racer. Oguri Iwao, fifteen, seventh place. Sporting not one but two black eyes. Luka hadn’t made much of the injuries when the boy walked in. Bumps and scrapes were the Axis Tour’s signature, but now it was clear the road had nothing to do with Iwao’s wounds.
No. The first-year standing beside Katsuo had taken a beating.… His bruises were fresh, darkened just enough to match the shouts from two nights ago. Was he the saboteur in the sabotage gone south?
Probably, Luka thought as he watched the drama unfold. Katsuo did not return the yells. The Japanese victor just shook his head, his own hand held out to keep Watabe Takeo from snapping out his blade.
Kobi Yokuto reached into his jacket and drew out a small amber vial. Luka knew it on sight, if only because he had two very similar ones tucked inside the lining of his own jacket.
Drugs. There was no telling what kind. The liquid in Yokuto’s hand could’ve been soporifics—meant to knock a racer flat for hours. Or it might be a poison too weak to kill, but strong enough to turn a stomach inside out for days.
Words kept flying. The rapid Japanese was beyond Luka’s understanding, but a good deal could be inferred from the boys’ motions. If the drugs belonged to Yokuto, he wouldn’t be flashing them around so brazenly. Iwao winced at the sight of the vial—an expression so pained that Luka bet the first-year was its true owner. He must’ve been caught before he could empty the contents into Yokuto’s canteens. That would explain the fine-pulp beating.
It would also explain Yokuto’s sudden road rage, why he went for the pass on such a treacherous road. Katsuo had gotten under his skin—was still under it—judging by the way the boy smashed the vial to the floor.
Scores of tiny pieces glimmered by Katsuo’s boot. Sleep or sickness spread out between the floor tiles, now useless. The victor smirked.
Yokuto spit at the floor and turned away.
For a long minute no one spoke. Fritz Naumann switched off his camera. Katsuo, Takeo, and Iwao sat down in unison. Adele smashed her fork into her chickpeas one final time. A servant came to sweep the glass from the floor.
Luka frowned.
The flat tire he had expected. It fit Katsuo’s modus operandi perfectly. But sending a first-year to drug a racer who was technically in third place, eating Katsuo’s dust? That was a wrench in the predictable, throwing off everything Luka thought he knew about his competition.
The long game was changing.
Was Luka the hunter? Or the hunted?
For the first time since he mounted his bike in Germania’s Olympiastadion, Luka was not sure.
Chapter 8
The roads were better outside of Baghdad. They still weren’t as smooth as the central Reich’s autobahns, but this didn’t stop Katsuo from blasting fourth-gear fast into the desert. It didn’t keep Luka from following, fist tight against the throttle, teeth set on edge.
It might not be by blade or vial, but Katsuo was coming for him. With Georg Rust and Kobi Yokuto out of the way, there were no names on the Axis Tour roster that could possibly usurp the Japanese victor other than his own. Victor Luka Löwe—the greatest hope for the Third Reich’s Double Cross—was next. He felt it with each turn of the wheel. Next, next, next, through the dried carcass of wilderness, past the watchtowers and fort ruins of long-lost kingdoms.
Luka rode ready: clenched muscles, adrenaline almost erupting from his ears. Fifty kilometers came and went. Then one hundred. By kilometer 250 and its accompanying fuel stop, Luka’s entire body had turned into a giant cramp, muscles burning to do something.
But Katsuo was giving him nothing. The Japanese victor didn’t even look over his shoulder, much less weave or brake in a way that might cause Luka to wreck. He drove straight through the hellish-looking landscape. (The land was literally on fire in places, as if Hades had risen up and taken its rightful place by the roadside. Cracked earth, flames and all. The sight was unnerving, until you realized it was simply oil fields.)
The first day out of Baghdad came to a close. Luka remained a knot of nerves. He sat by his pup tent, Luger on his knee, gnawing the last of his jerky with a jaw that had been in perpetual grit-mode all day.
“Cigarette?” Adele offered him his own fare with an arched brow. “You look like you need one. Or ten.”
Luka dug the pack from his jacket and tapped it against his gunless knee. One lone cigarette tumbled out. He handed it to Adele and moved to his motorcycle for a refill. They’d burned through over half of his stash, Luka discovered as he dug through his panniers. Too much, too fast to last until Tokyo.
Not that this stopped him from stuffing a whole new pack into his pocket.
The cigarette he’d given Adele was wedged between her lips. Unlit. “Match?”
“The Li River is too far away,” Luka said as he handed one to her.
Adele struck the match against her boot: spark and blaze. “I thought you wanted Katsuo to get comfortable.”
“Comfortable is one thing,” Luka told her. “We’re almost halfway through this race, and Katsuo has gone beyond the defensive. He’s aggressive.”
“So what’s your plan? Sneak into Katsuo’s camp and punch a hole in his fuel tank? If he’s as aggressive as you say, he’ll be as jumpy as you.” She nodded at the gun on his knee. “You’re going to get yourself shot.”
“Wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you, Fräulein Third Place.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but Adele didn’t laugh. “It would if you cashed in your blackmail currenc
y from your hospital bed.”
He wouldn’t. Luka knew this. He almost said it, but then stopped himself. There was no need to go around baring all the dents in his armor. Let Adele think her herness was still a liability.
“Your Li River plan is a good one,” Adele went on. “You shouldn’t just abandon it because Katsuo is getting a little narcotics happy.”
“Bottlenecking Katsuo is impossible now that Georg and Yokuto are out of the picture. Even if we both pull ahead on that leg, he’d still claim the third space on the ferry.”
“Then find a way to make the space count. You’ll be a heartbeat away from his bike. Cut the fuel lines or slit his tire or something else knifey.”
“He’ll be watching,” Luka pointed out.
“He can’t watch both of us.” Adele shrugged. “One of us can distract him while the other does the deed. If you take your hit at Katsuo now, we’d have to part ways. And, honestly? I’d miss this.” She held up her cigarette, arm straight as a heil into the constellation-cracked sky.
This. Secrets, smoke, stars. This. The stir inside his chest, the way his nerves smoothed out and reconnected with new warmth whenever Adele looked at him.
He wondered if she felt it, too.
He… hoped?
“So would I.” Luka’s voice was so soft, so wrapped in layers of cigarette smoke, he wasn’t sure Adele would hear.
The Wolfe girl puffed out her own smoke so hard that the little nubby angel hairs by her forehead danced. Lamplight and movement made them twinkle, a bit like a crown of frost. “We should keep riding together, stay the course.”
Next, not yet, next, not yet.
He wanted to win. How long had he dreamt of that second Cross? How often had he imagined the look on his father’s face when he glimpsed the sight: iron proof that Luka was far from weak.
He wanted to keep riding with Adele and, more than that, keep talking beneath starlight and smoke, watching the lamplight toss dramatic shadows across her face. Striking, all striking.
