Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) (7 page)

Lips.

Skin.

Warmth on warmth.

These thoughts feasted on Luka with mosquito-needle eagerness, gorging on his concentration. It didn’t matter that the engine whirred beneath him or that Katsuo was fording every river in record time or that the actual bug bites on his neck itched until his nails made them bleed. Whenever he shut his eyes, he saw Adele, a movement away, ready to kiss him, to be kissed. Whenever he opened his eyes, he saw her, too, wheels in time with his own, driving through water with gritted teeth and steeled eyes.

Both of these things—thoughts and sights—made Luka’s insides soar. Adele was distracting, yes, but she also drove Luka forward: much faster, much further than any Zündapp had ever carried him. He doubted his father had ever felt anything like it.

Zoom, zoom.

The second day out of Dhaka was as grueling as the first. Tsuda Katsuo’s pace stretched everyone thin. Ten hours into eleven, mud splashing/gashing over everything, thirteen hours and still going, a darkening jungle blurring by, fourteen hours cramped by muscle agony, wavering wheels, exhaustion thickening the night, making the darkness impossible to pierce, even with the brightest of headlamps. Fifteen hours and they could go no farther. Hanoi was still over thirteen hours away, which was much too far to push without sleep, especially with the Hanoi
Shanghai stretch on the horizon.

Both Luka and Adele were covered in mud as they set up camp, checking the overhanging branches for creepy-crawlies and driving stakes into the soil. The electric lantern lit their movements. Adele looked more beautiful than ever as she worked. Luka’s smile would not stay tamped down. He wondered, vaguely, if he was being the soft dummkopf his father had always feared he was. The one Luka had spent his whole life trying to prove he
wasn’t.
He was strong. A
verdammt
victor.

But it wasn’t enough; it was never enough.

And here was… something.

Adele felt it, too. He could see it: in the subtle shift of her hips, in the glances she threw Luka’s way when she thought he wasn’t looking. He heard it, as well: in the perfect silence between her sentences, in the way she said his name.

“Luka…” Adele let the pause stretch, until they were both taut. “This is our last night alone together.”

Already?
He realized, with a start, that Adele was right. Tomorrow night, Hanoi. After that, the Li River ferry crossing. Once they knocked Katsuo out of the race, their alliance would end. The thought gutted Luka more than it should have.

He didn’t trust himself to speak on the subject. He chewed on his dinner instead, nodding to her sliced jacket. “How’s your arm?”

“No gangrene. Yet,” she added. “Your hand?”

“Getting better.”

They fell back into a muggy, not-quite silence. Ration packets crinkled. Somewhere in the distance a tiger called out—burning growl against the dark. There was something profoundly lonely about the noise.

Is this all there is?

Adele cleared her throat of the last of her meal. “I never thanked you for distracting Takeo.”

Luka looked down at his bandaged palm. He couldn’t see the blood, but he knew it was there, in crusts, entombing its way back inside of him. The wound would be completely healed by the time he returned to Hamburg.

“It’s what allies do,” he said.

“Is it?” Adele tilted her head. “You shaved seconds off your time for me. You risked the blade. I’ve never heard of a racer doing that before. Even for an ally.”

“I’m not most racers.”

“You’re not most men,” she countered. “If any other racer had come across me in that washroom, they would’ve turned me in to the officials. But
you
chose to form an alliance with me. You see me as your equal.”

Adele reached out, placed her hand on his. Her fingers looked as they had the first time he’d noticed them: delicate, built of bones slender enough to reach into Luka, rearrange the laws of his existence. “I don’t want this to end. I know it has to, after the river. But…”

She didn’t finish her thought. Perhaps because they both knew there was no
but
. The Iron Cross called to them both, and it was a strong siren.

“We can be together after Tokyo,” Luka heard himself saying. “I’ll come visit you in Frankfurt, or you can come to Hamburg. I’ll try my best to hide all the fish.”

Adele’s laugh trembled all the way through her fingertips. “I’d like that. But…”

Another
but
. The word felt as sharp as fear in Luka’s gut.

“If you win, I’ll want to race in next year’s Axis Tour. Everyone knows who you are, Luka. If the Reichssender sees us together, that will put me in the spotlight. I wouldn’t be able to compete as Felix without somebody noticing.”

She wouldn’t, would she?

“Let’s…” There was sadness in Adele’s smile. “Let’s enjoy this night while we have it.”

Luka’s exhaustion—the same one that had leadened limbs and lids alike while they set up camp—melted away. Kissing was an art, but with Adele it also felt like a bit of a battle. He didn’t mind letting her win. They kissed and kissed and kissed, until the bulb of the electric lantern began to dim and darkness crept out of the jungle leaves, stretching across them both. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, jackets still half-zipped, breaths tangling into each other’s hair as they gathered strength for the dawn.

The jungle had taken its toll on the Axis Tour roster. Once all the times had been entered on the chalkboard at the Hanoi checkpoint nine names were struck through. There were only eleven racers left in the lineup. Only three times that mattered:

Darkness bunched outside the checkpoint’s open windows, pulsing with cricket song. Luka sat by his empty dinner bowl—eyes on first place, Katsuo and company lingering in the corner of his vision. Luka kept his back to Adele because he wasn’t sure he could bear to look at her without… aching.

She pushed into his sights anyway, seating herself only two chairs away, hands wrapped around a bowl of pho. White blazes of hair stabbed into Luka’s periphery. He kept staring at the chalked
1ST
until the board around it bloomed: cones and rods gone stale. A blue as vibrant as her eyes…

Don’t!

Adele blew at the steam curling from her bowl. “Tomorrow?”

“The plan hasn’t changed.” Luka kept his voice low. “I’ll push ahead, get on the ferry first. Try to let Katsuo stay in second while you pull in third. When we’re crossing the river, I’ll distract him; you cut his fuel lines.”

“And then our interests diverge,” she murmured back.

Interests change.
Luka’s lips buzzed with the memory of hers. All of him wanted to turn, push aside the empty chairs between them, taste the movement, the warmth, the whole of her.

You and I aren’t so different.

The Iron Cross called to them both. Iron calls to iron, and Adele called to him.

There was only one way Luka could answer.…

You already have a future. Why do you need the Double Cross so badly?

There was always something more, but what if a second Cross wasn’t it? What if the answer was just a glance away, slurping spoonfuls of lime-tinged broth? What if… Luka let her win?

The thought alone was close to heresy. How many worlds’ worth of kilometers had Luka ridden to get to this point? How many lungfuls of dust had he inhaled? How many ounces of blood had he spilled for a chance to make history?

Was a fräulein worth all these things?

She shouldn’t be.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t.

Adele cleared her throat. It was a sound that begged Luka to look at her, just look at her. He stared even harder at the
1ST
, his vision decaying into neon around it. When Luka blinked, the staleness cleared. He could see Katsuo across the room, watching him. Why the hell was the victor smiling?

It was
verdammt
unnerving.
All
of this was so
verdammt
unnerving. Kisses and long games and kilometers still undriven. Luka almost wanted to go back to the starting line: where things were—well, not exactly simple, but at least they were straightforward.

Now it was more than just road jitters fraying his insides.

Luka patted his pocket for a cigarette. There was only one left in the pack he carried on his person. He took it out and lit it. Flames’ warmth prickled his insides at the first inhale, washed out with his exhale—
Scheisse
taste coated his mouth.

“Don’t expect me to go easy on you,” Adele spoke into her bowl, words mixing with meat bits.

Katsuo kept smiling.

Stay the course, Löwe.

“Likewise,” Luka muttered.

They were an exhausted lineup, eleven racers at the end of their proverbial rope, strung out on fumes of sleep and the promise of the end. Not quite in sight, but close. At 2,394 kilometers, Hanoi to Shanghai was the final exam of endurance. To be a victor, you had to complete this stretch without camping. It was a dangerous race against sleep deprivation.

The sun was all shine. Their motorcycles rumbled, weariless machines. Luka’s wrist shuddered over the Zündapp’s throttle, but the engine revolutions weren’t enough to rattle the weariness from his veins. They did not banish the shadows from the edge of his goggles, the ones that threatened to shove him into sleep there and then.

Speed helped. Thick, humid ribbons of air smacked Luka’s cheekbones, spurring him out of Hanoi, past rice fields of mirrored sky. Katsuo’s fender flashed only meters ahead—something to chase, something to beat.

They were well into the day—zooming through a land of mountains without ranges—when Luka made his move. He was awake now. All awake. Wrist, hand, fingers, made of pure adrenaline as he twisted the throttle. Katsuo was so close Luka could see the vertebrae sloping along his neck. Their wheels were a turn away from touching, lunging along with a maniac hum. Katsuo lashed his engine forward. Luka’s acceleration matched it, until he realized that bikes
did
get weary. Hot oil and rattling bolts. You could only push an engine so fast, so far before it broke.

The land blurred green around them: rice seedlings into hillside foliage into bamboo stalks. Luka’s Zündapp—stretched with speeds faster than his speedometer needle could measure—made noises he’d never heard before. Katsuo’s motorcycle joined the duet, refusing to slow.

The road curved, sloped downward to its first glimpse of the Li River. Its waters were as green as the rest of the landscape, threading around the hillsides like a jade necklace. Cormorants sat, wide-winged, on docks made entirely of stone. A lone ferry operator stood at the end of the nearest one, waiting to transport the racers across.

The race path was ending, but Katsuo kept pushing. The dock’s rocks flew forward—too narrow to drive on—and Luka knew it was down to nerves. Who would buckle first?

The cormorants—unsettled by the dueling engines—slipped into the water. The ferry operator gripped the edge of his hat, knuckles knotted. Luka was close enough to see the whites of the old man’s eyes. Fear gleamed in them.

Luka had to fight the
put on your brakes, you death-flirting dummkopf
flex of his fingers. There were only a few meters left before not even a state-of-the-art brake system or years of mastered technique would save him.

Six meters. The ferry operator waved his pole in warning. He was probably shouting, too, but the engines clashed too loud to hear. Four meters.
Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse!
Two meters…

His bike made a terrible screech when he slammed to a stop. Luka’s heart flung forward with the sound, disappearing into the emerald tangles of shoreline bamboo. He had no time to calm down, breathe, find it. The dock was at hand, and to Luka’s surprise, he’d managed to out-nerve Tsuda Katsuo by an entire meter.

The plan was working.

He shifted the bike into neutral, dismounted, and shoved it along the dock. The beast was heavy. Its overworked engine blistered against Luka’s leg as he pushed, but he had no time to whine about it. Behind him Katsuo was doing the same.

The ferry sat at the dock’s end, looking as shambly as ever. The craft felt that way, too, leaking water through the gaps in its bamboo stalks when Luka boarded with his bike. Every year he feared the raft would just keep sinking: ankle, knee, engine deep. Every year it didn’t. River water licked the edges of Luka’s boots, but that was as high as it would ever go, even when Katsuo rolled
his
bike onto the raft.

Luka kept his Zündapp at his back, well out of Katsuo’s reach. An uneasy expression shadowed the other victor’s face.

“Relax!” Luka grinned at him. “Enjoy the river cruise.”

Other riders jostled their way down the dock—a frantic blur of armbands. Swastika, rising sun, rising sun, swastika, swastika. All shoved their bikes forward, hoping to claim the third space on the raft.

Come on, Adele
.

He could see her at the front, jaw set. This time Adele’s girlness was working against her. She simply didn’t have the strength to push her 224-kilogram Zündapp as quickly as the others. A rising sun was closing in from behind—

Luka felt his smile going stale as he watched the Japanese racer—Takeo, he thought it was—push forward, draw even with Adele, go faster. The dock was barely wide enough for both bikes, too narrow for a fight.

This didn’t stop Adele from trying. She shoved into the boy, ramming both his body and his motorcycle to the edge. But Takeo was firm on his feet. His Zündapp stayed grounded. He lashed back—Higonokami-less—knuckles hitting the sliced spot on Adele’s jacket, the wound beneath.

Her scream was loud, stripped of fake-Felix huskiness. Luka’s grin vanished. The raft’s water level rose as the ferry operator took his place at the stern and removed the ramp.

No!
Luka wanted to shout, but the word didn’t quite make it out.
This isn’t right.… What about the third passenger?

The operator didn’t look like he gave a
Scheisse
about his raft’s capacity. In fact, he seemed eager to leave, turning his back on the skirmish as he shoved off from the rocks.

Adele and Takeo ceased fighting. Both racers stood, watching first place float away. The river swirled—green and gray—between themselves and the dock. More green, more gray, wider, wider. Luka’s insides sank into the shivering waters.

No! No! No!
Still the cry did not come.
Adele… their plan…

Luka wasn’t sure which loss hurt more—girl or a chance at first. Neither was a pain he could allow to show, so he twisted his lips into default: sneer mode.

Katsuo sneered back. The other victor had positioned himself in front of his tires, body rigid. Not that Luka would try anything now. Without Adele to provide a distraction, sabotaging Katsuo’s bike would only lead to mutually assured destruction. It was useless.

Without Adele…

The raft pushed into deeper waters. Katsuo folded his arms against his chest, eyes heavy with dare.
What are you going to do now, Löwe?

Excellent question, Katsuo.

Luka crossed his own arms. Stared back. It took everything in him not to look over Katsuo’s shoulder, to the girl standing by the river’s edge, drawing farther and farther away. She was just a dark speck on his periphery, blending in with all the other black-clad racers. Without a spot on the first ferry, Adele’s time was hampered by ten whole minutes. As talented a rider as she was, there was no coming back from a loss like that this late in the race. Her Axis Tour was over.

It was just Luka and Katsuo now.

Victor and victor.

The race was on.