Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) (6 page)

The knifing incident cost Luka a few seconds and a tablespoon of blood. Nothing he couldn’t reclaim over the next few days.

Katsuo dismounted at the courtyard of the New Delhi checkpoint with ease, standing just long enough to watch his name get chalked into first before heading inside. Takeo, on the other hand, looked skittish. Especially when Luka marched up to the boy’s bike, bloody hand first. There were too many officials and camera lenses floating around for the Higonokami blade to make an appearance without Takeo’s name getting struck off the list, but the boy’s eyes darted to his sleeve, as if he was thinking about using it anyway.

Luka held his cut palm up, words cold: “You use that knife on me again, and I will use it to cut you to pieces.”

He didn’t have to ask if Takeo understood the German. Luka could see his threat being weighed and settled behind the boy’s dark gaze.

“Same goes for Felix Wolfe,” Luka added. Just on the other side of Takeo he could see Adele favoring her left arm as she pulled off her helmet.

Not just a nick, then.

Takeo followed his stare. “No more thinning the field?”

“Just stay away.” Luka didn’t quite snarl, but the animal signal was there, bristling between them long after he turned away.

Reichssender press crowded around, eager for updates, but Luka pushed them away as he followed Adele into the checkpoint. She walked fast—through the dining hall already fragrant with curry spices, down one of the building’s many twisting corridors until she found the first noncommunal toilet.
Thud, click
went the door before Luka could reach it.

“A—” He started to say her name, but caught himself. “Open up! It’s me!”

Her voice came, faint through the wood. “I’m fine.”

Luka didn’t believe her. “I want to see it.”

A pause. Faucet water started flowing. And flowing… and flowing…

She wasn’t going to let him in.

“Let me see your arm, Felix.”

Finally, the door opened. Adele’s jacket was off, slung over the sink. In her plain white undershirt she looked small, though not small enough in certain anatomical places. It suddenly made sense why she wore the jacket at all times, even when she slept.

“Stop ogling.” Adele didn’t sound angry when she said it, just pained. Her left arm was smeared in blood, as if her swastika armband had seared through her sleeve, branded into her skin.

Once Luka looked past the blood, he realized the cut wasn’t as deep as he’d feared. There was no visible muscle mass or fat, only a red that made Adele hiss. It needed a thorough cleaning, certainly. Maybe even stitches. “You need to go see Nurse Wilhelmina.”

Adele jerked away. “I can’t go to the nurse, dummkopf! It will take her twenty seconds to realize I have breasts, and another twenty seconds after that to tell a racing official. I’d be out of the Axis Tour before you can say, ‘
Heil Hitler!
’”

“You want that to go gangrene central on you?” Luka asked. “Trust me, getting an arm amputated is
not
worth seeing this rat race through to the end.”

“Rat race?” Adele’s incisors flashed against the vanity light. Her question—as sharp as those teeth—caught Luka off guard. “Is that all this is to you?”

Words often had a habit of spilling out where Luka was concerned. Ones he didn’t always mean, but usually did.
Rat race
: running in circles—around, around—just for show. What use was being the prize rat if you were still just a rat?

Would two Crosses really make his father see that Luka had bled, was bleeding? Just not in the way Kurt Löwe wanted…

“No,” Luka said. His hurt hand throbbed against an uncertain pulse. “But I’ve seen what losing an arm can do—”

“Quite the one for melodrama, aren’t you? The wound won’t get infected. I’ll clean out the cut myself.” Adele went on, “You already have a future, Luka Löwe. One that matters. Not all of us have that luxury. This is my chance to live my life the way I want it to be lived. I’m not going to toss that away because of some playground scratch.”

“What kind of playgrounds do they
have
in Frankfurt?” he asked as she moved to the sink. Her blood flowed down the drain—bold to pink and away. “Let me get some proper disinfectant. I need to go see Nurse Wilhelmina anyway.”

Nurse Wilhelmina—a pretty woman in her early twenties with sun-colored curls—made quick work of bandaging Luka’s wound.

“You boys and your knives,” she tutted. “If all of you just followed the rules, there would be a lot less blood.”

“But a lot fewer visits to the infirmary. I wouldn’t want to cheat you of that!” Luka winked.

It took only a bit more flirting to wheedle an extra bottle of disinfectant, some gauze, and a handful of teeny-tiny bandages from the nurse. By the time Luka returned to the washroom, Adele had mopped up most of the extra blood. She sat on the covered toilet; wads of pinkish toilet paper littered the floor by her biking boots. Luka kicked these aside and knelt close to the wound. The sight of it—six centimeters of parted flesh—made him wince.

Adele didn’t, even when the disinfectant cut into her exposed nerves. Her tolerance for pain was higher than most boys’. Including his own.

“Another few centimeters and that knife…” Luka thought aloud as he applied the bandages. “Adele, what if Takeo had hit an artery?”

“You sound like my brother.” Adele gave an irritated grunt. “If Takeo had hit an artery, then I would’ve bled out on the road, and you would’ve gone on to avenge my death by winning the race.”

She was right. But now all Luka could imagine was Adele sprawled on the road she loved so much, anchored in a pool of her own blood. The image made him shudder.

“I can’t lose you,” he said.

Adele’s arm stiffened beneath his fingers. It was an instantaneous reflex: there and gone. Luka’s touch responded in kind, pulling away to fumble with another tiny wrapper. Wrong. He’d said something wrong. It was too soft, too
feeling
. If she were any other fräulein, he might’ve been able to wink it off, but all the suave coolness Luka had channeled in the infirmary was gone.

“I can’t lose you,” he backpedalled. “Our plan to sabotage Katsuo on the ferry takes two.”

Adele leaned down. Her eyes flowed straight through him.

“We’ll get Katsuo.” These words were formed by lips so close that Luka could count the lines etched in them—a delicate pattern traditionally hidden by lipstick.

Adele lingered. Had she been some Germania sweetheart, Luka wouldn’t have thought twice about kissing her. But this fräulein was something else entirely.…

He wrestled the urge back.

Nothing happened.

Adele pulled away.

The wound didn’t look so bad once it was bandaged up. It might not even scar. When Luka told Adele this, she just shrugged and pulled her jacket back on, heading out the door without another word. Her blood was still everywhere—littering the floor in paper form and streaking the edges of the porcelain sink. Luka stayed behind to clean up, wondering if… indeed… nothing had happened.

It felt, in a way, as if everything had.

Just as Nurse Wilhelmina had predicted, Luka’s wounded hand grew stiff, griping against all efforts to STOP or GO as he handled the throttle and handbrake. The road to Dhaka was an easier leg than many of the ones before it. The desert’s omnipresent dust had settled, tamed by tree roots and grassy plains. The roads were well tended, allowing for the fastest speeds and longest days since Europe.

Katsuo pushed on well past sundown. No dust meant excellent night visibility, so they were in for another test of endurance. By the time their drive hit the fifteen-hour mark, Luka’s hand was in agony. His fingers felt frozen in place by fire—hot, hotter, hottest—until it took everything in Luka not to pull to the side of the road and let it rest.

Instead he followed Katsuo’s taillight, with nothing but his thoughts to distract him. In any other race, these would be fantasies of the finish line: rolling through the gates of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, with flashbulbs bursting, the first double victor in the history of the Axis Tour. Best of the best.

But tonight Luka’s thoughts were trapped in the New Delhi bathroom, living and reliving his exchange with Adele. All that blood and their almost-kiss, the words flung at each other in between.

I can’t lose you
. But he would, after the Li River. Once Katsuo was out of the picture, the race would be down to him and her. First and second, neck and neck. No more laughter and cigarettes stubbed out by their pup tents. Luka thought of all the soft lines that made up Adele’s lips. The kiss that wasn’t.

Could Luka miss something he never had?

(It sure felt like it.)

For now Adele was still behind him, blocking any riders who tried to advance from the rear. Most didn’t. Takeo had taken Luka’s warning to heart, and Katsuo’s pace was too grueling for most of the cataclysmic racers to keep up. The herd of headlamps that made it to Dhaka together was a small one, rolling into the city well past midnight, where a bleary-eyed timekeeper recorded their places.

There was another day of rest in Dhaka, used for napping, a second visit to Nurse Wilhelmina, and more Reichssender interviews while the last of the pack reached the checkpoint, filling the board from fourth place (
WATABE TAKEO, 9
DAYS, 19
HOURS, 44
MINUTES, 6
SECONDS
) all the way to August Greiser’s sixteenth, followed by four crossed-off names. The road had been whittling away stragglers through accidents, illness, and sheer despair. The next few days were about to claim more.

If the desert was boring, the jungle was anything but. The journey to Hanoi was littered with perils. The luxury of pavement did not extend far beyond Dhaka. Neither did bridges. In several places the road’s dirt vanished into riverbeds thinned out by the region’s dry season. Shallow, but still dangerous. There were always one or two boys who submerged their air intakes or got mired in mud so deep it took an entire team of men to free the wheels.

Heat exhaustion was also common. Gone were the chilled temperatures of a European spring, replaced with humidity thick enough to swim through. The very same jackets that protected riders from road rash now clung to them with miserable sweat—black leather baking beneath the sun. Brown wasn’t much better, but Luka didn’t dare take his jacket off. He’d seen too many cases of mangled-meat skin to risk it.

Then there was the wildlife. Snakes, monkeys, tigers, creepy-crawlies. The jungle had them all. Luka had personally never seen a tiger, but several years ago a Reichssender cameraman had managed to catch the magnificent beast on film. Monkeys were much less rare and much more likely to rip apart the motorcycles’ panniers in search of food. But by far, the worst creature of the jungle was the mosquito. There were millions upon millions of them, all starved for juicy racer flesh.

Smoke helped keep them away, which was one more reason to keep the cigarettes coming. Luka had no problem whatsoever ripping the final pack open, if it would get the
gottverdammt
bugs off his neck. He could only imagine how many of them were trying to poison his blood with tropical diseases—yet
another
hazard of the jungle stretch.

“Don’t forget to take this.” He tossed a chloroquine tablet to Adele along with her cigarette. “Tastes like tinfoil, but it keeps the disease away. You don’t want to end up like Adolf Schäfer. Poor
Saukerl
won the race in 1952, but then he up and died of malaria just a few weeks later because he forgot his tablets.”

“That’s… anticlimactic.” Adele opened the tablet, swallowing it in a swift silver-wrapper movement.

“He was a decent guy, Schäfer.” Luka settled back down. They sat outside of their standard-issue mosquito nets, close enough to make Luka think of the almost kiss. “It was my first race, and I had no idea what I was doing. He took the time to give me some pointers in Prague.”

They lit their cigarettes in silence. The evening’s conversation had been sparse, mostly due to sheer exhaustion, but Luka couldn’t help but wonder if the wordlessness between them held more. Was that tension in the air between them? Or just mugginess?

The sweat on Adele’s face glowed bronze bright whenever she brought her cigarette to her lips. She had to be sweltering, but she didn’t take off her jacket.

“Aren’t you warm, Adele?” Luka asked, desperate to keep talking.

“Aren’t you?” She eyed his own jacket—still half zipped, despite the sweat stains on his torso.

“I’d rather roast than become a bug buffet.”

“No.” Adele shook her head. “That’s not why you wear the jacket. It’s not because of mosquitoes, and it’s not because you look better in brown. You swagger around in your unofficial jacket and smoke for the same reason I try to pass as a boy.”

The logic was bendy. Luka couldn’t follow it. “To enter the Axis Tour?”

“To show you’re untouchable. Nothing can get to you. Not even the official rulebook. Cigarettes and leather are just pieces of the armor.” Adele’s cigarette wasn’t even half finished, but she stubbed it out in the dirt anyway. “If you take them off, if you seem vulnerable, then people will try their best to own you. Devour what’s not theirs.”

She wasn’t far off. There were no crowds in the middle of the jungle, but Luka could still hear the chant of a thousand
Sieg heil
s drumming his ears. He could still feel his father’s rough palm on his arm, pressing too hard, trying to mold Luka into his own image.

“But sometimes the armor just gets too
verdammt
heavy,” Adele went on, unzipping her own jacket. The white undershirt beneath was just as dirty as his, but it wasn’t the sweat stains that drew Luka’s eyes. He tried his best not to stare, faking sudden interest at the embered end of his cigarette.

“The thing is”—Adele shifted closer, until they weren’t just elbow to elbow, but arm to arm—“no one’s untouchable.”

Luka was still staring at the dying fire when she kissed him. The whole of it—motion, speed, flavor—caught him completely unawares. Her lips tasted of salt. They stung against his: warmth and movement, edged with teeth. She kissed him with fervor, a hunger Luka
knew
.

For a moment he was frozen, but the more her lips moved, the more he broke, until, finally he kissed her back.

Adele did not smell very much like a garden. Her scent was wild: sweat and sun and road-worn leather. No one would be rushing to make a perfume out of it any time soon, but Luka hardly cared. There wasn’t much time for smelling when Adele’s lips were pressing into his as if she were a drowning girl and Luka was oxygen. Hungry, hungry. They’d both been so hungry for something….

Turns out it was each other.

When Adele pulled away, she shoved her short hair from her eyes and smiled. “Not bad.”

“Not
bad
?” Luka’s eyebrows flew up. “I’ll admit, it wasn’t a peak performance. You caught me off guard.”

“Kissing’s not a sport,” she told him. “It’s an art. It’s all in the spontaneity, going where the inspiration takes you.”

“I’ll have you know that art is very technical. Good art anyway. Not that there’s much of that left in the Reich to judge by—” Luka cut himself off, watching Adele’s face with care. It was well and good to talk about lemmings, but directly critiquing the Reich was a dangerous pastime. Though Adele had spilled her own doubts, he wasn’t sure if he should say something so shadowed in her presence.

The tilt of her head was more curious than condemning. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a connoisseur.”

“Not me. My mother used to haunt museums when she was younger. It was her dream to go to art school.”

“What happened?”

“She met my father. He didn’t approve of the notion. They got married. Enter, stage right, baby Luka. She never really gave up drawing. We used to do it together, when my father was off at the war. We’d practice in the margins of newspapers when good paper became scarce.” Nina Löwe’s touch was so different from her husband’s: gentle fingers guiding Luka’s over the pen, coaxing something out instead of beating it in. “It was like racing to her—something to strive for. Something to make living bearable.”

“Did it help?”

Not when his father came home and found the sketches. Kurt Löwe hadn’t yelled; he rarely yelled, which only made his words more frightening. Any of them could be hiding his anger. Instead, Luka’s father had gathered up the drawings and shoved them, silently, into the fire. There were too many papers for his lone fist to hold. Five times he did this as Nina Löwe held a hand to her mouth, trying her hardest not to let a sob out. Luka did the same, biting his lip until blood seeped through. The papers were dry and their end was quick. They burned like so many of Europe’s great masterpieces had at the stake of Goebbels’s whim. Beauty into orange into ash.

The art lessons stopped after that. Nina Löwe kept drawing—in the shadows, in the dawn, in the edges of her life that Kurt would never see. As soon as her pen left the paper, she crumpled it up, tossed it into the flames herself.

These things were scorched into Luka Löwe’s soul. Always remembered, never spoken of. He found himself telling Adele the story anyway. She flinched at the part about the fire, as if she, too, could feel it, eating away at so many futures, too many pasts.…

Did it help?
Luka did not know; he did not want to know. Thinking about the cinders his mother swept from the hearth every morning just reminded him of his own hollowness. The feeling he hadn’t felt when their lips were pressed together.

He leaned forward. She leaned in.

This time when they kissed he was ready. Luka tossed his cigarette aside, brought his good hand to her face, explored all its angles with tender-brush fingertips. Their lips melted into a single motion: no clash of teeth, no too-hurried tongue. This kiss was about tasting; this kiss was about technique. This kiss was about being filled.

Warmth rushed down his throat, down his stomach, down…

Luka’s hand fell, too, grazing the swan-slope of Adele’s neck all the way to her shoulder, pushing aside the leather there. The skin beneath was so soft. His fingers couldn’t touch enough of it.

It hurt this time when Adele leaned back, her lips parting from his, flesh drawing out of reach. Luka’s whole body ached in a way that had nothing to do with the kilometers he’d driven.

“Much better,” she murmured. “
Too
much better.”

The jungle sweltered around them, yet Luka felt cold. Were his fingers
shaking
? Was Adele
that
strong of a drug, that he was already experiencing withdrawal? “Wasn’t that the goal?”

“I don’t need any… female lemming complications. If you know what I mean.” Adele tugged her jacket back over her shoulder. White flesh vanished under the leather. “It’s—it’s not like I prepared for this.”

Luka hadn’t either. Fräuleins had been the last thing on his mind when he was packing his panniers. Now his brain was scrambling, a hormonal stew à la sixteen-year-old boy. “We could… we could just keep kissing!”

Those lips—the ones he needed so badly—twisted. Adele looked up to the sky instead of him, where the dark was crowded with leaves, stars dusting their edges. “It’s late. Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.”

Luka paid no attention to the constellations. She was all he saw. Adele, painting of a girl, mythic as she stood, her black jacket ascending, blending with the midnight sky. It was as if she pulled pieces of Luka up with her. A heartstring here, an extra breath there.

“Tomorrow, then,” Luka managed. He wished he had a better argument.

Adele ducked down to her pup tent, pushing aside the mosquito net. She looked back over her shoulder at Luka. For a moment hers looked like any other pair of jungle eyes: luminescent against the electric lantern light, harboring some primal eeriness.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said.