Chapter 12

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:

1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 39 seconds.

2nd: Luka Löwe, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 59 seconds.

3rd: Felix Wolfe, 12 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 15 seconds.

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.