by Ryan Graudin
Push, push, jostle, push, screams. There was a sea of wool and shuffling. Everyone seemed lost. Moving and pushing and crying and not knowing. Yael’s fingers clenched the edge of her mother’s coat, so tight they could have been seams of their own.
—HURRY HURRY MOVE—an iron voice inside Yael fought and pushed and cried —DON’T GET WASHED AWAY—
They were all flowing in one direction. Away from whiplash and dog fangs. Toward a man who stood on an overturned apple crate, looking out across the platform’s dark, milling crowd. A floodlight bathed him. The pure white fabric of his lab coat glowed and his arms were stretched wide, like wings.
He looked like an angel.
Every face that passed he measured and judged. Male and female. Old and young. The man in the glowing lab coat plucked and sifted and pointed them into lines.
“Too small! Too ill! Too weak! Too short! Too old!” He barked out characteristics like ingredients for some twisted recipe, sweeping away their offenders with a wave of his hand. Those he approved of received a passing nod.
When he saw Yael, he neither barked nor nodded. He squinted at first—eyes serpent sharp behind his glasses.
Yael squinted back. There was a sharpness in her eyes, too, whetted by three days of fear and too-bright lights. Her knees ached and wobbled, but she tried her best to stand straight. She did not want to be too small, too weak, too short.
The man stepped down from the crate and walked toward Yael’s mother, who shifted just-so against her daughter as if to shield her. But there was no defense from this man’s gaze. He saw all, staring at Yael and her mother as if they were suits that needed tailoring. Taking measurements with his eyes, imagining what a few stitches and tucks might do.
Yael stared back, taking measurements of her own. The man looked different up close. Out of the light, with the shadows pressed in. (They seemed extra dark on him, as if making up for that first glowing impression.) He smelled different, too. Clean, but not. Harsh, peeling scents Yael later learned to associate with bleach and blood and uncareful scalpels.
This man did not trade in heralds or blessings or miracles.
He was an angel of a different kind.
Yael’s knees ached, ached, ached. Her eyes stung and watered. She kept standing. Kept staring. Clenching her mother’s skirt with stubborn fingers.
The man in the white coat glanced at the guard next to him, who was busy inscribing notes onto a clipboard. “Reserve this girl for Experiment Eighty-Five. It’s long-term, so she should be housed in the inmate barracks. And make certain her hair is only cut. Not shorn. I’ll need strands for samples.”
“Yes, Dr. Geyer.” The guard grabbed Yael’s hand, snapped his pen across her skin in two quick strikes. X marks the survivor. “What about the mother?”
The man shrugged. “She seems strong enough,” was all he said before he walked back to the crate, back to the light that made him dazzle and glow.
Yael never did find out why Dr. Geyer chose her. Why she—out of all the young children who stumbled out of the train cars and clung to their mothers’ coats that night—was placed in the line of the living.
But it did not take her long to discover what she’d been marked for.
This was Experiment 85: Every other morning, at the end of the four-hour roll call, a guard shouted out Yael’s number. Every other morning, she had to follow him through two sets of barbed-wire gates and over the train tracks, all the way to the doctor’s office.
The nurse always strapped Yael down to the gurney before the injections. She never really looked at Yael, even when she turned the girl’s arm over to check the numbers stamped there. Those water-weak eyes always focused on the inanimate. Things like the not-quite-dry bloodstains on the floor tiles or flecked across the pristine white of her apron. The shiny black leather of her shoes. The clipboard she scrawled Yael’s information on.
INMATE: 121358ΔX
AGE: 6 YEARS
EXPERIMENT: #85 MELANIN MANIPULATION
SESSION: 38
Dr. Geyer was different. From the moment he stepped across the threshold, his eyes never left Yael. He sat on his rolling stool, arms folded over his chest. Leaned slightly back. Examining the little girl in front of him. There were no wrinkles on his face—no weary frown or weight of the world sagging his skin.
He even smiled when he asked his questions. Yael could see all of his white, white teeth, cut apart by the tiny black gap where his two front incisors didn’t quite meet. It was this part of his face she always focused on when he spoke. The gap. The not-quite-fullness of his soft words. The single break in his paternal mirage.
“How are you feeling?” he’d ask her, leaning forward on his toadstool seat.
Yael never really knew the answer to this question. What exactly it was that Dr. Geyer expected her to say when the bunk she shared with her mother and Miriam and three other women was infested with lice; when the night temperatures dropped so low that the straw in their mattress stabbed her skin like knitting needles; when she was hungry, always hungry, even though the Babushka in the bunk across from her snuck her extra bread rations every night.
—DON’T LOOK AT THE KNIVES TELL HIM WHAT HE WANTS TO HEAR—
She wanted to be strong, brave, so she offered the one word a strong, brave girl might say: “Fine.”
The doctor’s smile always grew wider when she said this. Yael wanted to keep him happy. She didn’t want the bloodstains on the floor to be hers.
Every session he examined her skin. Shone a dazzling penlight into her eyes. Tugged out a few of her stubby hairs for color analysis. When the string of questions and answers ended, Dr. Geyer took the clipboard from the nurse stationed in the corner. Always he flipped through the pages, his brown hair tumbling to his eyes as he deciphered the nurse’s crude writing.
“‘Melanin production seems to be on a steady decline.… Note paler patches on skin as well as slight change in subject’s iris pigmentation. Eumelanin is also decreasing—as can be seen by subject’s hair coloration.’”
They never called Yael by her name. She was always subject. Or if they needed to be more specific: Inmate 121358ΔX.
“We’re making progress.” Dr. Geyer’s smile stretched, as if his lips were being held open by tenterhooks. He handed the clipboard back to the nurse, rolled his seat to the sterling tray table, where the needles sat in a neat row. Straight silver fangs, waiting to sink poison into Yael’s skin. Fill her with another two days of fire and agony. Change her from within. Take all the colors and feelings and human inside. Drain, drain, drain until nothing was left.
Just a ghost of a girl. A nothing shell.
Progress.
CHAPTER 2
NOW
MARCH 9, 1956
GERMANIA, CAPITAL OF THE THIRD REICH
The sun was a low orange threat in the sky as Yael stepped out the flat door onto Luisen Street—an asphalt artery at the heart of the city once called Berlin. She’d lingered too long in the tattoo artist’s chair, bearing the needle and the sting and the memories. Watching him put the final black touches on the final black wolf.
It had been her fifth and last visit to the tiny back closet, with its ink bottles and cracked leather chair. Five visits to cover up the crooked numbers on her left arm. Five visits for five wolves. They swooped and jostled and howled up her arm, all the way to her elbow. Black and always running, striving against her skin.
Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad.
Five names, five stories, five souls.
Or, a different way to do the math: four memories and a reminder.
But Vlad’s wolf needed to be as perfect as the others, which meant Yael pushed her luck to the edge, watching the clock on the far wall tick its way toward sundown. In the end Vlad’s wolf was a flawless open wound—throbbing under hastily wrapped gauze.
Yael was late.
Germania was a dangerous place after dark. Official curfew was not for a few more hours, but that didn’t st
op patrols from lurking on the capital’s street corners. Checking the papers of random souls who passed. Ready to arrest at the slightest aberration.
Nothing good happened at night, the National Socialists reasoned. Honest Volk had no reason to be out once the shops and beer halls locked their doors. The only people desperate enough to do business under high moon and heavy shadows were resistance conspirators, black-market scoundrels, and Jews in disguise.
Yael happened to be all three.
The resistance leaders were going to have her head. Henryka especially. The tiny Polish woman with too-bleached frizz springing from every direction of her scalp was far more fearsome than these features credited her for. Yael would’ve preferred Reiniger’s stern National Socialist army commander voice to the whirlwind/Mama Bear/spitfire that was Henryka.
More than likely they would both give her a talking-to. (Henryka: How could you stay out so late! We thought you were dead or worse! Reiniger: Do you realize how selfish you were being? You could have compromised the resistance. We’re close. So close.) If the patrols didn’t catch her first.
Luisen Street was empty as Yael walked under its brightening streetlamps. A long row of Volkswagens—identical but for their plate numbers—fortified the curbs. The grocery down the block was already locked tight, windows dark. Propaganda posters—some tattered and curled, others still fresh with paste—lined the walls between flat doors, reminding strong blond Aryan children to attend Hitler Youth. Reminding their mothers to produce more strong blond Aryan children to attend Hitler Youth.
Yael did not have far to walk, just a few blocks to the safety of the beer hall’s hidden basement. But all it took was one encounter. One too-hurried answer.
The necessity to move quickly and avoid detection beat high in Yael’s throat as she tore past the rows of posters, turning a corner onto a sequestered side street.
And came face-to-face with a patrol.
It was a standard unit: two young men with Mauser Kar.98Ks strapped over their shoulders. The soldiers were leaning against a wall, trading a single black-market cigarette between them. Illegal smoke curled from their lips like dozens of phantom tongues. White—not black like the billows of Yael’s childhood. The ones that poured, day and night, out of tall smokestacks. When Yael was very little, she’d thought a monster lived inside those sooty brick walls. (She knew the truth now. Saw the photos and endless lists of the dead. Rows and rows of numbers like the ones her wolves hid. There was a monster, but it didn’t live inside the death camp’s crematorium. Its den was much finer—a Chancellery full of stolen art, and doors with iron locks.)
This smoke, the white smoke, vanished quickly when the soldiers caught sight of her. The first tossed the cigarette down, crushing it under his heel. The second called to her in a rough voice, “You there! Fräulein!”
There was no turning back now.
—WALK STRAIGHT SHOW NO FEAR NO FEAR—
When Yael reached the pair, she offered a mandatory, unflinching salute. “Heil Hitler!”
Both soldiers mumbled it back. The first pulverized the tobacco further into the cracked sidewalk with his heel. The second held out his hand.
It took Yael an extra beat of a moment to realize what he was asking for. She’d been through this dance with patrols before (more than she’d ever admit to Henryka and Reiniger), but the sight of smoke, plus hours in the artist’s back closet, had rattled her. Sessions under the needle always left Yael feeling raw. It wasn’t the ink and pain so much as the needle itself. The memories of needles. What they could do. What they did.
Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away. The tattoo artist’s needles took white skin and numbers, gave her wolves. Dr. Geyer’s needles had taken so much more. But what they gave…
Yael had many faces. Many names. Many sets of papers. Because the chemicals the Angel of Death had crammed into Yael’s veins had changed her.
“Papers,” the second soldier demanded.
Yael knew better than to argue. Her fingers fluttered to the pocket of her leather jacket, pulled out the tattered booklet that belonged to today’s face.
“‘Mina Jager,’” the soldier read aloud. Looking from picture to face to picture again. He flipped to the next yellowed page, taking in Mina’s unremarkable history: Germania-born. Blond. Member of the Hitler Youth. The rough biography of every adolescent within a sixteen-kilometer radius.
“What are you doing out so late, Fräulein Jager?” the first soldier asked while the other read.
The real answer? Getting a black-market tattoo to hide my Jewish numbers before I go on a top secret mission for the resistance to bring an end to the New Order. A truth so absurd the soldiers might even laugh it off if Yael voiced it. A small, contrary sliver of her wanted to try, but she settled with the best answer. The boring one. “I was hoping to reach the grocery before it closed. My mother ran out of eggs and sent me to fetch more.”
“Eggs…” The first soldier frowned and nodded at her arm. “What’s that?”
Yael followed his gaze to the cuff of her left sleeve. Her gauze wrapping had been too hasty. Its netted white tail peeked out from under the leather.
“A bandage,” she told him.
He leaned in. Closer, curious. His breath was stale with smoke. “Let’s have a look.”
Flash, thud, verdammt, went Yael’s heart.
Yael could manipulate her appearance the way other people might change clothes. These skinshifts could modify many things: her height, weight, coloring, the length of her hair, the sound of her voice. But some things could not be altered: gender, wounds, tattoo ink.
These things stayed.
The wolves were her constant, the single thing about her that was solid and sure. Months ago, when Yael had returned to the resistance headquarters with her first, fresh wolf, Henryka had several peevish words to offer on the matter (the foremost among them being “dead giveaway”). The Polish woman even went so far as to point out that the religious laws of Yael’s people forbade the practice.
But what was done was done. Ink had been under Yael’s skin for more than a decade. By adding the wolves she’d simply made it her own. These new markings were far, far better than the National Socialists’ numbers. Their presence alone was not enough to condemn Yael, but they would raise questions if the patrol saw them. Enough suspicions to get her detained.
The only thing that would raise more questions would be for Yael to refuse the soldier’s request. Slowly, slowly she lifted her sleeve. The gauze went all the way up her arm. Flecked in rust spots and frayed at the edges.
The soldier squinted at it. “What happened?”
Yael’s heart was louder now (FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT. FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT), pumping hard with the knowledge that only a few threads stood between her and disaster. All the soldier had to do was reach out and tug. See the ink and the raw and the blood.
What then?
There was always a way out. Vlad had taught her that, along with so many other things. These two men and their two rifles were no match for the skills she’d learned, even in this seventeen-year-old girl’s body. She could knock them out cold, disappear in twenty seconds flat.
Yael could, but she wouldn’t. An incident so close to the resistance’s headquarters, on the eve of her first mission, was far too risky. It would draw the eyes and the wrath of the Gestapo to the neighborhood. Expose the resistance. Ruin everything.
There was always a way out, but tonight (tonight of all nights) it had to be clean.
“It’s a dog bite,” Yael answered. “A stray attacked me a few days ago.”
The soldier assessed the bandage for another moment. His stance slacked from aggressive to conversational.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
Was it bad? Yael would take a thousand and one of Mina’s dog bites in place of what had really happened. Trains and barbed-wire fences. Death and pain and death.
“I survived,” she said
with a smile.
“Stray bitches make good target practice. Almost as much as commies and Jews.” The soldier laughed and slapped the butt of his Mauser. “Next one I see I’ll shoot in your honor.”
Yael kept her lips drawn up in Mina’s meek, demure fashion. The mask of a good little Reichling. It was only in the unseen places she raged. Her toes curled hard inside her boots. Her fingers slid back to her jacket pocket, where her trusted Walther P38 handgun nestled.
The second soldier shut the book, so all Yael could see was the Reich stamp on the front. The eagle’s wings were rigid: a double salute. The wreath and twisted cross hung effortlessly from its talons. All as black as that monstrous smoke. The same blackness that grew inside Yael if she let the memories billow back.
“Everything seems to be in order, Fräulein Jager.” He held Mina’s book out to her.
The lining of Yael’s throat tasted sooty. Her toes were cracking—pop, pop, pop—tiny, quiet gunshots inside her boots.
There was a time and a place for remembering. There was a target waiting for her rage, her revenge. This evening, this street, these men were not it.
Her touch slipped off the gun. Yael reached out and grabbed the papers instead.
“Thank you,” she said as she tucked the pages of another girl’s life deep into her jacket. “I must go. My mother will be worried.”
The second soldier nodded. “Of course, Fräulein Jager. Sorry to delay you.”
She started walking, her fist shoved into one of the jacket’s normal pockets, clenching the talismans she kept there: a blunted thumbtack, a pea-sized wooden doll with its face worried off. One by one her toes uncurled. Bit by bit the blackness retreated, back to its uneasy sleep.
“Watch out for the strays!” the first soldier called after her.
Yael held up a hand to acknowledge him but did not turn. She was done with soldiers and strays.
She had much worse things to face.
Contents
Cover
