Luka seemed doubtful. “The girl who races motorcycles and breaks out of a Soviet compound hates trains?”
Yael glanced over her shoulder, to see if Felix had heard, but Adele’s brother stayed asleep on the boxes. She looked back at Luka. There was still blood on his face. Dried, flaking into its own jagged design. “You’re not looking so stellar yourself.”
“Verdammt! It’s the hair, isn’t it?” Luka spit into his palm and slicked back his hair. It was a vain motion—doing nothing to unknot the tangle of matted blood. What it did do was give Yael a view of his wound.
“Your ear!” she gasped. The top lip of his cartilage was gone. Torn off and sealed with clumps of dark blood.
“Commie clipped it when we were running. I’ll live.” He shrugged, his stiff hair flopping back over the site. “Symmetry’s overrated.”
“Maybe, but infection isn’t.” Yael studied the boy again. He didn’t look feverish. Yet. His face was cool blood and moonlight. “You should’ve had that looked at.”
“There will be better medics in New Delhi.” The boy’s hand fell to the dog tag around his neck. His thumb polished over its letters. An absent, habitual motion. His Iron Cross was nowhere to be seen. Yael suspected that—like hers—it was a wilderness away, tucked in his lost pannier.
“Like Nurse Wilhelmina?”
There were quirks all over Luka’s face: eyebrows, nostrils, half smile. His dog tag flashed as he let it fall back to his chest. “Is that jealousy I detect in your voice?”
“You should probably have your hearing checked,” she quipped back.
Luka’s smile became a full one. He said nothing.
“You’re incredibly skilled at pretending to be an Arschloch,” she said.
The victor laughed. “Who says I’m pretending?”
“You went back for Yamato,” Yael pointed out. “That was selfless.”
“Just trying to get even with the commie who ruined my looks. An ear for an ear.” Luka’s response was as fast as the train, lying speed. “But let’s talk about you for a minute, Fräulein.”
“What about me?”
“I suppose”—his voice dropped to a whisper only she could hear—“I could talk about how you knew exactly where the transport would be. Or how your pistol magically reappeared in your pocket.”
Yael took a deep breath. The P38 pressed hard against her rib cage. Its metal met the frantic flash, thud, verdammt of her heart.
“But the thing that interests me most… the thing I can’t figure out… is why you saved me. The girl I knew last year, the girl who tore my heart out with her bare teeth… that girl would have driven away. No looking back.”
The train clattered and swayed. Luka’s eyes tried to pin her, but Yael wouldn’t meet them. She looked out the door instead. At the empty, moonstung wilderness.
“I’m not the only one pretending to be someone else.” Luka was still whispering, but his words were so, so loud. So close. He was closer, Yael realized when she looked back. Close enough to stab or toss her out the door, onto the tracks.
He kissed her instead. A motion made of the same fluid lion-grace that had felled Aleksei.
She’d been trained to survive many things: Starvation and bullet wounds. Winter nights and scouring sun. Double-tied knots and interrogations at knifepoint. But this? A boy’s lips on hers. Moving and melding. Soft and strength, velvet and iron. Opposite elements that tugged and tore Yael from the inside. Feelings bloomed, hot and warm. Deep and dark.
Yael pulled against them. Back and away. Every part of her body was awake, her skin glaring with goose bumps.
Luka exhaled, more sigh than breath. It sounded like a note in a tragic symphony. He was still close, leaned in so his dog tag dangled between them. Yael could see the story punched into the metal: 3/KRADSCH 1. 411. (Kradschützen, his father’s old war unit.)
“You’ve changed,” Luka said. It was eerie. How clever, cunning, and close he was. It was as if she weren’t wearing another face at all.
Now it was Luka pulling back. The dog tag beat against his chest as he jumped to his feet. “You may have saved my life, but I never asked you to. You still owe me a favor.”
Before Yael could answer, Luka disappeared behind a stack of crates. Kiss and run.
She sat motionless for a long moment, watching everything else move and streak and rattle around her. The mountains on the long horizon peeling back. Dry, cracked earth pulling out like yards of fabric. The boys on their boxes. Still sleeping.
Except one. Felix’s eyes were open. Staring in a way that suggested he’d seen. His arms were tense and bare in his white T-shirt. Clenched like his fists as he sat up from his jacket pillow.
“Want me to punch his face in?” He slid off his box. His halo-blond hair was plastered flat with sleep. It would have been comical if not for the snarl on his lips.
Lips. The feel of Luka’s still clung to hers. The taste of sand and savage, howling through her insides like a storm.
Yael shook her head. Brought her arm to her lips and wiped.
As if a leather sleeve could get rid of it.
“I’d like nothing more,” Adele’s brother muttered.
She couldn’t help but remember the fireplace throwdown in Prague. The fury on Felix’s face, the blood and threat that covered Luka’s. So much uneven emotion… What you did against what he tried to do to you.
Whose anger was righteous? Any? All?
“I can handle Victor Löwe,” she said.
“Be careful, Ad.” Felix’s thumb began popping his other knuckles. “Luka isn’t someone you want to mess with.”
He wasn’t. Was he?
She thought she knew him. Luka Löwe. Born February 10, 1939. Pompous, proud Grade A Arschloch.
But people were more than crooked type and swastika-stamped documents. No number of bullet points and biography facts could pin the soul behind the eyes. The many versions of Luka she’d seen.
There was the Victor Löwe who swore all allegiance to the Führer, shouted, “Blood and honor!” and “Heil Hitler!” And then the Luka who sat in the sands, polishing his father’s dog tag, breathing outlawed fire and smoke, scoffing at Hitler’s policies. The Luka who stayed behind, got his ear shot off for an injured boy.
The Luka who kissed her.
The moreness of him was beginning to show. The way ruins were excavated by an archaeologist. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Bit by bit. And slowly, she was beginning to see beneath the goose-stepping pedigree. Yes, Luka Löwe was a National Socialist. But so was Erwin Reiniger (for the sake of an alias and so many lives). And hadn’t Aaron-Klaus been wearing all the trappings of an Aryan elitist when Yael met him? Wasn’t she wearing those very things now?
Yes, Luka Löwe was a National Socialist, but he was different on the inside.
Where it mattered.
“If he gives you any more trouble, any at all…” Snap, crack, pop, went Felix’s knuckles. A twisted, breaking countdown…
“Stop that.” Yael emulated Adele’s scowl, swatting at Felix’s fist the way she once batted Aaron-Klaus’s hand from her share of crullers.
“Why?”
“Arthritis. Grape-sized knuckles. My general sanity,” she added.
“Lost causes. All of them.” Adele’s brother laughed (and again Yael was reminded of Aaron-Klaus: jokes across the card table, teasing, hair ruffles, feeling like a normal child, if only for a moment). A smile broke out on Felix’s face. He unfurled his fists and patted the wooden pallet. “You should get some rest. It’s no feather bed, but it’s not too bad.”
The wood was still warm when she rested on it. Felix leaned against the crate. So close that Yael could hear the tick, tick, tick of his fixed pocket watch, see the paprika dusting of freckles on his cheeks. He stared off and off through the car door, out to the fullness of the moon.
Yael wondered, as she closed her eyes, what he was thinking about. Martin, maybe? She wondered, too, which car Luka had disappeared to. That ear
needed treatment soon.…
Tick, yah-ell, tick, yah-ell, tick…
When she opened her eyes again, it was to a clear blue morning. Sweating air and city outskirts crept outside the train car’s open door. Children and dogs and chickens. Wobbly shacks with laundry strung between them like signal flags, their tin roofs already beating back the heat of the sun. Rutted red earth roads, stirred with the hum of motorbikes.
Felix leaned against the open door, looking out on the shantytown.
Yael sat up on the crate, felt the deep imprints of the wooden slats on her cheek. She hadn’t slept so hard in—days, weeks, months, years?—Yael couldn’t remember when.
Adele’s brother looked over at her. “Ad, come see this.”
Outside was a whole crowd of people—earthen skin, even darker hair—dancing in a way that reminded Yael of sea waves. People leapt to the music and tossed fistfuls of powder into the air above their heads, where it blossomed.
Colors. Bright, bright, and everywhere. Lush purples, sunset magenta, green like lime rinds, pollen yellow, lava orange, blue as light as the Wolfes’ eyes. The sky overflowed with them.
“What do you think they’re doing?” Felix asked.
Yael didn’t think. She knew. What they were seeing was Holi: a festival welcoming the arrival of spring. She’d read about it in one of the books Henryka rescued from the National Socialist bonfires. Its battered pages were full of dry English sentences describing the “native peoples in the British Empire.” The writer described Holi in only a paragraph: music, dancing, fires, and brilliant, powdered pigments. When she’d read about it, slouched in the chair in Henryka’s office, she’d tried to imagine what it looked like.
But Yael never thought she’d actually see it. So many colors all in one place. Dust that meant something other than decay and death.
“They’re celebrating.” Yael couldn’t hide her surprise. She’d thought that this day—like so many other things—had been wiped away. But they were past the Seventieth Meridian now. Out of the Reich and into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where words like Aryan and Untermensch had no meaning. It seemed Emperor Hirohito let the people celebrate their traditional festivals.
The whole city was blooming, she realized as the train kept on. Kilometers passed by their open door—colors and crowds—until the train finally started to slow, groaning along the metal tracks. Felix stuck his head out of the car. “Looks like we’re almost to the station.”
Yael stood. Her eyes were still on the powdered clouds (so bright, so beautiful!), but her mind was as tense as her leg muscles. In the corners of her vision she could see all the other racers standing. Readying themselves for the mad dash from the train station to New Delhi’s checkpoint.
The race wasn’t over yet.
“You ready to run?” she asked Felix.
He nodded. Stood beside her.
NEW DELHI JUNCTION STATION. The sign was written mainly in kanji, with tiny German subscript and an even tinier Hindi scribble (hand-etched, like graffiti). Yael’s calves cramped and screamed as they rolled past it. The freight train ground like furious teeth:
Slow.
Slower.
Stop.
She started to run.
CHAPTER 26
NOW
MARCH 26, 1956
NEW DELHI CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 11,541
The checkpoint wasn’t far from the train terminal. At least, that was what the stationmaster informed Yael when she lunged up to the ticket window. It was only a couple of kilometers south, he told her in choppy Japanese, listing off road names along with haphazard instructions: Out of the station. Down this side street. Past the bazaar. Through some square. Along another street. You’ll know it when you see it.
Men, women, and children milled so tight in the station’s front road that there was hardly any room for traffic. Yael fought her way through the jostle of shoulders. Looking, looking, looking for the right street signs. Trying to read their kanji through the butterfly haze of powder and crowd of too-tall heads.
Felix, at least, was easy to keep track of. His hair glowed white in the colored cloud as he pointed to a far-flung street sign. “This way!”
Yael pushed through the layers of revel: children’s laughter, the chime of ankle bells, “Happy Holi!” cried and crowed, fingers that smeared powder against her cheeks as she passed. There was something electric about the colors that exploded in the sky, reminding Yael that not everything was gray ashfall, yellowing weeds, withered blue hands, crimson rivers of blood.…
There was still beauty in this world. And it was worth fighting for.
So Yael ran all the faster.
The crowd thinned and tendriled into the side streets, where Yael could run without stopping. Felix wasn’t the only one running with her. Others had followed from the train. Takeo and Masaru ran furiously close to her heels. And on the other side of the street—ducking through a scatter of bazaar stalls and brilliant-neon women—was Luka. The victor’s face was swirled with dried blood, yellow powder. He looked like one of the old Norse gods from the engravings Yael used to study.
He moved like one, too: lightning fast, thunder strong. He looked over when he drew even with her, snagged her eyes, and winked.
Then he pulled ahead.
They poured back into a square thick with celebrating crowds. Yael ran as fast as she could. Her movement was silvery as she threaded Adele’s svelte form through the slim canyons between dancers’ muscular backs. Luka was not nearly as graceful. He bulled his way through, stumbling over saris and sacks full of powder.
Yael reached the other side of the square first. Through the aqua, golden, orange haze, she saw the Axis banners flying high. Japan’s brash sun. The Third Reich’s broken cross. Marking the street in even lines.
The checkpoint was close.
The crowd was clearing as were the colors. Every lunge Yael took brought the banners into better view. She could see the finish line now, stretched white across the red dirt road.
Luka loped past, trailing dust like sun motes. His words didn’t even sound winded as they floated back over his shoulder. “Don’t strain yourself too hard, Fräulein!”
He crossed the line first. Takeo burst past, just as Yael dragged herself over the line. Felix jogged up behind her, not even trying to keep up with the others.
It didn’t matter that two boys crossed the line before her. They’d gained only seconds. She was still ahead.
“Scheisse!” Luka swore as he kicked at the dirt. It clouded the air as red as Holi dust. Yael followed his stare to the scoreboard, where an official was calculating their times. Etching them in order.
The first name was already there.
1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 11 days, 6 hours, 55 minutes, 6 seconds.
She stared at the numbers and the name in front of them, stunned, as her own time was chalked out.
2nd: Adele Wolfe, 11 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes, 12 seconds.
3rd: Luka Löwe, 11 days, 10 hours, 29 minutes, 20 seconds.
Not by seconds or minutes, but by hours. Three and a half hours.
Katsuo had beaten them all.
The news got worse.
It was delivered to them at dinner. All the racers were exhausted, both from the last leg of the race and the intense questioning the racing officials imposed on every single one of them. (Who kidnapped them? Why? How did they escape? Over and over and over until all their answers were streamlined and written down in an official report. The Reichssender crew and the Japanese journalists were instructed to record a highly edited version of the story: LANDSLIDE DECIMATES RIDERS’ ZüNDAPPS. The Axis Tour was a display of ultimate victory. Guerrilla kidnappings didn’t fit into this narrative.)
Yael had eaten her fill of chicken curry and basmati rice. Instead of chewing, she was glowering at the scoreboard—working Katsuo’s lead between her teeth.
Three and a half hours and no sandstorms in sight.
The Japanese victor attain
ed this lead by evading the Soviet soldiers and holing up in a cave until the heat of their search died down. “It wasn’t hard to double back and steal my own bike out from under the commies’ noses,” Yael heard him bragging to Takeo and Iwao. Both boys still sat next to Katsuo at dinner, though they seemed much less enthused by this story than they had by his earlier ones. Iwao did not laugh. Takeo jammed his knife so hard into the table that he had to use two hands to wrench it out.
Katsuo, as he went on to tell them, drove back to the detour road the supply trucks had used to skirt the mountains. By the time he caught up to the supply caravan, the other riders had radioed in. So he blasted his way through the night, to New Delhi and the first slot on the scoreboard.
There were over nine thousand kilometers between New Delhi and Tokyo. Gaining back the time between them would be hard, but not impossible. Yael would have to push: sleep in bursts, ride through the night, pray for a merciful road.
The New Delhi checkpoint official—a lean, fierce man with the rising sun wrapped around his arm—made his way to the end of the dining table. The room fell silent.
“We were unable to recover the Zündapps.” He spoke in Japanese first, then repeated the words in clean, stilted German. “And we don’t have enough replacements for every racer.”
RIP, Fenrir. Yael frowned down at her leftover curry. You had a good run.
“In all ten years of the Axis Tour we’ve never been faced with a situation quite like this: racers without bikes. We’ve been in communication with Germania and Tokyo, and it’s been decided that the race will go on with new bikes.
“However, your Zündapps were specially fitted for the tour’s hardships, and there are no motorcycles of cross-country-racing caliber in New Delhi. Officials in Germania and Tokyo have agreed to a revised racing plan.”
The table was not just silent but dead still. Even spoons had stopped scraping. Fourteen sets of eyes (eight brown, six blue) stared at the official.