1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 9 days, 26 minutes, 8 seconds.
2nd: Luka Löwe, 9 days, 26 minutes, 23 seconds.
3rd: Felix Wolfe, 9 days, 26 minutes, 34 seconds.
4th: Watabe Takeo, 9 days, 29 minutes, 19 seconds.
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.