Wolf by Wolf Page 7

  That was the plan, anyway. Tomorrow would be a long day.

  When Yael lifted the pillow of her assigned communal bunk, she found a lone star made of folded propaganda paper. It was carefully constructed, with a smallness that made her smile. It would’ve been easy to toss away, but she tucked it into her pocket instead and put her boot-knife under the pillow in its place. Many of the other riders were already asleep. Bare-chested, their snores as rough as their Zündapp engines. A racing official sat in the corner, playing chaperone, looking close to slumber himself.

  Yael slept with her jacket on. The smallest doll, the thumbtack, the paper star, and her gun lumped in its pockets. Her wolves hid under its sleeve. She traced them by memory over the leather, named them in silence.

  Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad.

  Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.

  THEN

  THE SECOND WOLF: MAMA WINTER 1945

  Time between sessions whittled away, shedding off like scales of Yael’s skin. There were no more days of rest. Every single morning, Dr. Geyer punched needles into Yael’s arm. Pushing in more poison than her body could bear.

  She was a raw pink thing. The color of a newborn, arms peeling and glossy under the electric light of Dr. Geyer’s office. The doctor’s eyes were shining, too. Invisible hooks pried his grin wider every time he examined her. He even joked with the nurse, who never smiled back even though her shoes were soled and there was a cushion of fat under her pasty skin.

  “The compound is working!”

  Progress. Progress. Progress.

  The stab and slide of needles didn’t hurt as much as what came after: a coal-glow burn that spread from Yael’s arm to every part of her. There was no relief—even when the evening’s cold slunk into Barrack 7. Her skin itched, fell in flakes like snow. Searing to the touch.

  The pain she could handle. It was the stares that punched through Yael’s soul. The same sight that made Dr. Geyer’s teeth split into what he called a smile summoned blank horror from others. Women whispered about the strange blaze of her eyes, the phantom-wash of her skin and hair. A girl who was disappearing right before their sight… being replaced by… something else.…

  “Mонстр.” “Monstre.” “Monster.” They thought Yael couldn’t hear their whispers, but she did. Yael’s mother was quick to extinguish them, hissing, “She’s my daughter! Not some creature!” into all corners of Barrack 7. Challenging anyone who dared to voice otherwise with battle-ready eyes.

  But even Yael’s mother watched her with a wariness that wasn’t there before. Her lips pulled in a tight slant every time she returned to the bunk and found her daughter curled up in straw and pain. Brow slick with sweat.

  “Fever still,” she’d mutter after pressing her frail fingers to Yael’s skin, then turn to their bunkmate. “Miriam, get me some snow.”

  It always melted fast—the snow Miriam brought dripped down her skin in one hundred different ways. Braiding down her throat, into her workdress.

  “You’re not cold, Yael?” The older girl shivered, tucked her fingers into her armpits for extra warmth.

  “She’s different from us,” Yael’s mother answered. Though Yael’s hair was short, too short to smooth, her mother ran her hand over it anyway. “She’s sick.”

  But she was cold. Chills laced over her skin as she burned from the inside out. Yael was fire and ice. Together. An impossible thing.

  “N-Not.” Yael coughed the word out. “Not different. I’m the same.”

  Her mother didn’t answer. She kept smoothing her daughter’s bristled scalp with fingers so thin that Yael felt the hard of bone beneath their touch.

  “You look different.” Miriam cocked her head.

  Same, Yael wanted to yell again. Same on the inside. Where it matters. The same girl who proudly recited the Mah Nishtanah at Passover seder. The same girl who played ball games with the other children in the ghetto streets. Who wouldn’t let go of her mother’s coat no matter what when they were shoved into the train cars. Who cried when the numbers were needled into her skin, and cried even more when she realized they would never come off.

  She wanted to tell them these things, but Dr. Geyer’s poison was too strong. Yael was lying down, but her head spun, images flashing like fragments of shattered mirror. Thoughts broken and everywhere, glazed by fever-fire. Prayers ghosted above her—“ El na, refa na la” (God, please heal her, please)—mother’s voice, mother’s lips, mother’s hope. The lump of the Babushka’s dolls under her patch of mattress, curved into her spine: one solid thing. The only solid thing.

  Everything else was falling apart. Sloughing off with her skin.

  Maybe I’m not the same, came the sudden thought. She didn’t cry at the needles anymore (she hadn’t since the very first injection session, when Dr. Geyer slapped her wrist and demanded that she stop sniveling). He’d changed that.

  You are going to change.

  “Babushka?” Yael struggled against the straw, pushed herself elbow high before she realized the voice was a memory. The bunk across from hers was crowded with many wavering faces, but none of them was the Babushka.

  No. That was wrong. It was change things.

  You are going to change

  things.

  She collapsed back into the scratchy straw.

  Howls woke her. It was the same chorus she heard every night. Groans of sorrow, wails and loss from every barrack. Twining together in wild song. During her first weeks in the camp, she’d imagined there were real wolves—just behind the barbed wire and sizzling electric fence—wild and free.

  But tonight the howls were different. The song that tugged at the fringe of Yael’s dreams felt closer. Was closer.

  The bunk’s wood trembled when Yael sat up. The world around her felt like the swabs the nurse sometimes wiped her arm with—clear and cold. No more creeping chills. No more fire under her skin.

  The fever was gone.

  Her mother’s back was to her. Hunched over so Yael could trace a ladder of ribs through her workdress. They shuddered in time to tears, howls, crooning sobs.

  “Mama?” Yael reached out for her mother’s back. “I’m better now.”

  Her mother seized at the touch, her cries all choking into one. Knotting back into silence.

  For a moment Yael wondered if she was still dreaming. But her fingers meeting her mother’s back. That was real. She felt the shudder of her mother’s breath. The scrawn of her starving muscles. The hot, hot, hot of her skin.

  “Mama?” she called again, breath hitched tight in her throat.

  The woman turned, eyes on her. They were… strange. The same color as her mother’s (dark like the shadows in an evening forest). The same shape… but they seemed to belong to someone else. Yael looked deep into them but could not find the woman who’d birthed her. Raised her. Held her close when their cattle car rattled over kilometers and kilometers of track.

  “What are you?” Her mother pulled away, voice scraping.

  The empty space beneath Yael’s fingers was frigid. “I’m—I’m Yael. Your daughter.”

  “No!” Her mother’s eyes wheeled, side to side. “No… you’re not my baby. Not her.”

  Stab, stab, stab. These words were a hundred needles all at once.

  “Mama…” she tried again.

  “Don’t!” Her shriek tore through the barrack, waking the near-dead from their sleep. Miriam jerked awake, stared at her bunkmates with bleary eyes. “Don’t call me that! I don’t know who—what—you are, but you’re not my Yael!”

  Whispers cluttered the straw around them. Yael felt the eyes on her. Dozens, scores, hundreds had awoken.

  “Rachel!” Miriam grabbed Yael’s mother by the shoulders and said her name over and over. Like a spell. “Rachel. Rachel. Be calm.”

  Every part of Yael’s mother shook: her head, her shoulders. She shrank away from Miriam’s touch until her back was to the barrack wall. “It’s not her! It’s not
Yael!”

  Yael was shaking, too. Pumped full of the poison of her mother’s screams. They flowed hot inside her. Not fever, but anger. The helpless kind a person fills themselves with to keep the fear away. “Stop, Mama! Stop! I’m ME! I’m Yael!”

  She yelled until she caught Miriam staring at her. The older girl’s eyes were as wide and awled as Yael’s hidden matryoshka dolls.

  “Y-Yael?” Miriam said the name carefully. Her hands were still set on Rachel’s shoulders, but all her attention was on the girl across the bunk. “You… changed.”

  Yael followed Miriam’s stare, down to her own arms. The raw shine was gone, peeled away with all those scrolls of dead skin. No more splotches or spots. Her skin was soft, white as milk. Her fingers danced up, pulled out a single strand of hair. It was shock pale.

  The way Dr. Geyer always wanted it to be.

  “That’s not my daughter! It’s a monster!” her mother kept howling, pulling against Miriam’s grip. “Yael’s dead! Dead! Like everything else here!”

  Yael—certain now this was a dream—turned over her arm, upending the crooked numbers. She was still marked. Still Inmate 121358ΔX.

  “Look.” Yael tried to offer the numbers to her mother—proof that she was who she was—but her mother’s eyes kept wheeling. Lost and glazed.

  “She’s delirious. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” Miriam’s voice frayed with the strain of trying to keep Yael’s mother still. “Her skin is burning.”

  Fever. Yael could see it—now that she looked—shimmering over her mother’s face, emptying out her eyes. Yael thought of her own sickness and the coolness of her mother’s hand pressed to her forehead. Had she passed it on? Poisoned her mother with her own flesh? Her own change?

  “I’m Yael. I’m alive.” She said this to her mother and Miriam. To the three speechless bunkmates, who had slid away from the straw mattress and into the aisle. To all the hundreds of women who were watching their bunk.

  But most of all, Yael said this to herself. Because the whispers in a dozen languages were coming back to haunt her. Mонстр. Monstre. Monster. Her mother’s voice was the loudest of all. It’s a monster!

  I’m Yael. I’m Yael. I’m Yael, she thought back. I’m special. I’m going to change things.

  But right now, it didn’t feel that way.

  Her mother wasn’t screaming anymore. Across the bunk Miriam was soothing her down into the straw. Yael’s mother curled up. Had she always looked so small? So thin? The fever seemed so much larger than her—flaring out of the edges of her skin. Like a spirit trying to peel out of a body.

  One of the silent bunkmates came back with some snow and handed it to Miriam. The older girl pressed it to Rachel’s forehead, the way Yael’s mother had done for Yael only hours ago. But it didn’t help. Her mother only whimpered against the cold. Those strange and familiar eyes stopped wheeling, went dull.

  Dead. Like everything else here.

  The women of Barrack 7 stopped whispering for just a moment, and all Yael could hear was the agony of everything. The death camp’s song rose from every corner of the night. Not wolves. Just people. Crying and crying and crying.

  She howled with them.

  CHAPTER 9

  NOW

  MARCH 11, 1956

  PRAGUE TO ROME

  The pack stayed tight. Knit into a delicate formation of wheels and gears. The racers moved as a herd through foothills patched with shy spring grass and jutting crags of rock, through towns lined with cheering, swastika-waving citizens and Reichssender cameras camped for the perfect shot.

  As first and second place, Katsuo and Luka led the line out of the Prague checkpoint. Both racers were far ahead, as small as the dirt granules flecked across Yael’s goggles. She itched to be with them, to twist hard on the throttle and let the road vanish beneath her. Meters swallowed as fourth gear kicked into place.

  But this could not happen for three reasons. Takeo, Hiraku, and Iwao. They were fanned across the road—third, fourth, and fifth place. The exact same racers Katsuo had gathered to his table, Yael noted. Probably to plan this very tactic. It was planned. There was no doubt about that. From the moment they’d ripped out of Prague, the trio had formed their blockade, spaced evenly across the asphalt in an unwavering line.

  The road was locked.

  The boys’ pace was sluggish. Yael’s motorcycle raged behind them. Trapped in third gear (too slow, too slow), her hand pining on the throttle. She’d fought her way through the choked pack, edging out Yamato, Dolf, and Karl for sixth place. They were still close, trailing her by just a meter, as she pulled up behind Hiraku’s rear wheel.

  The boy was the youngest of Katsuo’s three allies. The weakest link in this mechanical dragnet. Sooner or later Hiraku would slip up, and when he did, Yael would be ready.

  Watching, waiting, watching, waiting. Kilometers spun through Hiraku’s splash guard. The hills swelled, and the air swam with the taste of mountains: fresh fir, the silvery sparkle of snow. Yael’s body started to ache, cramped with the tension of being ready and waiting, waiting, waiting.…

  But the kilometers kept spinning out, out. And somewhere ahead, Luka and Katsuo kept tearing away, away. (She couldn’t see them anymore; both boys were lost to the bend of mountain roads.)

  Another bike wove up, dangerously close to the lavender smoke of Takeo’s exhaust. Its wheels ate away lateral road space. Centimeters Yael needed if she was going to make a pass, break through Katsuo’s human barrier.

  “I’m sorry, Ad!” It was a testament to how slow they were going that she could hear Adele’s brother. He screamed at the top of his lungs as he half straddled, half stood on his bike.

  Yael didn’t know how Felix had managed to squeeze up so many places in the airtight formation. The punch he’d thrown at Luka had docked him a whole hour, making him the last rider out of Prague. Though all the racers left at the same time, their formation was determined by their places on the board. Adele’s brother was far enough away in the lineup that Yael had been able to ignore him without trying. But he was next to her now. Peeling back her concentration with electric eyes.

  “Luka was right! I drugged your soup!” he yelled.

  No Scheisse. Yael was half tempted to shout this back, but there was no time. Hiraku was looking over his shoulder, distracted by Felix’s loud confession. It was the waver Yael had been waiting for.

  A jam on the throttle burst her forward, sent her bike lunging at Hiraku’s. His mouth fell into a slack O of surprise, horror. Yael’s wheel didn’t even touch his, but the aggression alone was enough.

  Hiraku’s bike swerved off the road. His scream rose as high as his wheel, cutting off in a sick crush of metal. One long scar plowed through minty, newborn grass: tangled bike and mangled boy.

  His partners spread wide, trying to repair the crack in their dam. But it was too late. Yael was through the breach, kicking her bike into the highest gear. The road spooled out in front of her, a wide tar ribbon rippling into the jaws of the Alps. Roadside foliage smudged into a long blur. The sudden end of Hiraku’s screams chased her: silent, silent, silent.

  She had kilometers to go yet.

  Gravel and pits. Slopes and bends. Shadow and chill.

  These were the mountain roads.

  Yael flew on wings of leather and wind, the motorcycle humming beneath her. At every turn, every peel around a large boulder, she expected to see Luka and Katsuo. But the boys had wings of their own… speed that carried them through the mountain pass. Even stretching her engine’s limit over patches of winter-worn road wouldn’t close the space between them.

  Evening pooled early in the crevasses of the Alps. Shadows clung to the edge of Yael’s goggles, crept through her aching limbs. Even when the mountains were far behind, nothing but ridges and memory against the far horizon, the darkness grew. Her weariness settled in for a long night. But Yael pushed on.

  One by one the others fell behind, their headlamps dropping off into the dark.
Pulling to the edge of naked twig vineyards to eat and rest. It was a smart, conservative move. Staving off sleep deprivation and utter fatigue. That was what Yael should’ve done—would have done—if she were a normal racer.

  If she didn’t have all the red, red territories drowning inside her. If she didn’t have five wolves and the fate of the resistance galloping alongside. If she didn’t have two boys hounding her with a past she didn’t possess. If she didn’t have a Roman address she needed to reach before she crossed the checkpoint line.

  The stakes were higher than a few hours of exhaustion. A few grams of hunger.

  You have nothing left to prove. Everything to lose.

  Those words were for Adele. The normal racer.

  For Yael it was squared: everything, everything.

  So she rode on.

  Rome was wrapped in a sleep like death, skeletal against the moonlight. Rib-cage shutters clapped over windows. Doorways and arches gaped, as empty as eye sockets. The streets’ worn stones reminded Yael of teeth ground to the nubs. Even its heart was made of ruins: The Colosseum rose to meet the pock-faced moon. As Yael rode by, she felt the weight of the place. All the dust and time rolling off its stones.

  When Yael was certain no eyes were around to see, she cut her motorcycle’s engine and pushed it off the Axis banner–draped race path, into an alley strung with laundry. Clothes and white sheets shuddered and twisted—a hushed dance. Yael lingered beneath them, breathing in the scents of lavender soap and alley-dank. The mouth of the street yawned. Empty.

  Part of her wanted to wait. Let the darkness spit out anything that was lurking. But the checkpoint was still ahead, and every minute she sat was official time lost. Chalked against Adele Wolfe’s name on the scoreboard.