MARCH 9, 1956 GERMANIA, CAPITAL OF THE THIRD REICH
The sun was a low orange threat in the sky as Yael stepped out the flat door onto Luisen Street—an asphalt artery at the heart of the city once called Berlin. She’d lingered too long in the tattoo artist’s chair, bearing the needle and the sting and the memories. Watching him put the final black touches on the final black wolf.
It had been her fifth and last visit to the tiny back closet, with its ink bottles and cracked leather chair. Five visits to cover up the crooked numbers on her left arm. Five visits for five wolves. They swooped and jostled and howled up her arm, all the way to her elbow. Black and always running, striving against her skin.
Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad.
Five names, five stories, five souls.
Or, a different way to do the math: four memories and a reminder.
But Vlad’s wolf needed to be as perfect as the others, which meant Yael pushed her luck to the edge, watching the clock on the far wall tick its way toward sundown. In the end Vlad’s wolf was a flawless open wound—throbbing under hastily wrapped gauze.
Yael was late.
Germania was a dangerous place after dark. Official curfew was not for a few more hours, but that didn’t stop patrols from lurking on the capital’s street corners. Checking the papers of random souls who passed. Ready to arrest at the slightest aberration.
Nothing good happened at night, the National Socialists reasoned. Honest Volk had no reason to be out once the shops and beer halls locked their doors. The only people desperate enough to do business under high moon and heavy shadows were resistance conspirators, black-market scoundrels, and Jews in disguise.
Yael happened to be all three.
The resistance leaders were going to have her head. Henryka especially. The tiny Polish woman with too-bleached frizz springing from every direction of her scalp was far more fearsome than these features credited her for. Yael would’ve preferred Reiniger’s stern National Socialist army commander voice to the whirlwind/Mama Bear/spitfire that was Henryka.
More than likely they would both give her a talking-to. (Henryka: How could you stay out so late! We thought you were dead or worse! Reiniger: Do you realize how selfish you were being? You could have compromised the resistance. We’re close. So close.) If the patrols didn’t catch her first.
Luisen Street was empty as Yael walked under its brightening streetlamps. A long row of Volkswagens—identical but for their plate numbers—fortified the curbs. The grocery down the block was already locked tight, windows dark. Propaganda posters—some tattered and curled, others still fresh with paste—lined the walls between flat doors, reminding strong blond Aryan children to attend Hitler Youth. Reminding their mothers to produce more strong blond Aryan children to attend Hitler Youth.
Yael did not have far to walk, just a few blocks to the safety of the beer hall’s hidden basement. But all it took was one encounter. One too-hurried answer.
The necessity to move quickly and avoid detection beat high in Yael’s throat as she tore past the rows of posters, turning a corner onto a sequestered side street.
And came face-to-face with a patrol.
It was a standard unit: two young men with Mauser Kar.98Ks strapped over their shoulders. The soldiers were leaning against a wall, trading a single black-market cigarette between them. Illegal smoke curled from their lips like dozens of phantom tongues. White—not black like the billows of Yael’s childhood. The ones that poured, day and night, out of tall smokestacks. When Yael was very little, she’d thought a monster lived inside those sooty brick walls. (She knew the truth now. Saw the photos and endless lists of the dead. Rows and rows of numbers like the ones her wolves hid. There was a monster, but it didn’t live inside the death camp’s crematorium. Its den was much finer—a Chancellery full of stolen art, and doors with iron locks.)
This smoke, the white smoke, vanished quickly when the soldiers caught sight of her. The first tossed the cigarette down, crushing it under his heel. The second called to her in a rough voice, “You there! Fräulein!”
There was no turning back now.
—WALK STRAIGHT SHOW NO FEAR NO FEAR—
When Yael reached the pair, she offered a mandatory, unflinching salute. “Heil Hitler!”
Both soldiers mumbled it back. The first pulverized the tobacco further into the cracked sidewalk with his heel. The second held out his hand.
It took Yael an extra beat of a moment to realize what he was asking for. She’d been through this dance with patrols before (more than she’d ever admit to Henryka and Reiniger), but the sight of smoke, plus hours in the artist’s back closet, had rattled her. Sessions under the needle always left Yael feeling raw. It wasn’t the ink and pain so much as the needle itself. The memories of needles. What they could do. What they did.
Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away. The tattoo artist’s needles took white skin and numbers, gave her wolves. Dr. Geyer’s needles had taken so much more. But what they gave…
Yael had many faces. Many names. Many sets of papers. Because the chemicals the Angel of Death had crammed into Yael’s veins had changed her.
“Papers,” the second soldier demanded.
Yael knew better than to argue. Her fingers fluttered to the pocket of her leather jacket, pulled out the tattered booklet that belonged to today’s face.
“‘Mina Jager,’” the soldier read aloud. Looking from picture to face to picture again. He flipped to the next yellowed page, taking in Mina’s unremarkable history: Germania-born. Blond. Member of the Hitler Youth. The rough biography of every adolescent within a sixteen-kilometer radius.
“What are you doing out so late, Fräulein Jager?” the first soldier asked while the other read.
The real answer? Getting a black-market tattoo to hide my Jewish numbers before I go on a top secret mission for the resistance to bring an end to the New Order. A truth so absurd the soldiers might even laugh it off if Yael voiced it. A small, contrary sliver of her wanted to try, but she settled with the best answer. The boring one. “I was hoping to reach the grocery before it closed. My mother ran out of eggs and sent me to fetch more.”
“Eggs…” The first soldier frowned and nodded at her arm. “What’s that?”
Yael followed his gaze to the cuff of her left sleeve. Her gauze wrapping had been too hasty. Its netted white tail peeked out from under the leather.
“A bandage,” she told him.
He leaned in. Closer, curious. His breath was stale with smoke. “Let’s have a look.”
Flash, thud, verdammt, went Yael’s heart.
Yael could manipulate her appearance the way other people might change clothes. These skinshifts could modify many things: her height, weight, coloring, the length of her hair, the sound of her voice. But some things could not be altered: gender, wounds, tattoo ink.
These things stayed.
The wolves were her constant, the single thing about her that was solid and sure. Months ago, when Yael had returned to the resistance headquarters with her first, fresh wolf, Henryka had several peevish words to offer on the matter (the foremost among them being “dead giveaway”). The Polish woman even went so far as to point out that the religious laws of Yael’s people forbade the practice.
But what was done was done. Ink had been under Yael’s skin for more than a decade. By adding the wolves she’d simply made it her own. These new markings were far, far better than the National Socialists’ numbers. Their presence alone was not enough to condemn Yael, but they would raise questions if the patrol saw them. Enough suspicions to get her detained.
The only thing that would raise more questions would be for Yael to refuse the soldier’s request. Slowly, slowly she lifted her sleeve. The gauze went all the way up her arm. Flecked in rust spots and frayed at the edges.
The soldier squinted at it. “What happened?”
Yael’s heart was louder now (FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT. FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT), pumping hard with the knowledge that only a few threads stood between her and disaster. All the soldier had to do was reach out and tug. See the ink and the raw and the blood.
What then?
There was always a way out. Vlad had taught her that, along with so many other things. These two men and their two rifles were no match for the skills she’d learned, even in this seventeen-year-old girl’s body. She could knock them out cold, disappear in twenty seconds flat.
Yael could, but she wouldn’t. An incident so close to the resistance’s headquarters, on the eve of her first mission, was far too risky. It would draw the eyes and the wrath of the Gestapo to the neighborhood. Expose the resistance. Ruin everything.
There was always a way out, but tonight (tonight of all nights) it had to be clean.
“It’s a dog bite,” Yael answered. “A stray attacked me a few days ago.”
The soldier assessed the bandage for another moment. His stance slacked from aggressive to conversational.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
Was it bad? Yael would take a thousand and one of Mina’s dog bites in place of what had really happened. Trains and barbed-wire fences. Death and pain and death.
“I survived,” she said with a smile.
“Stray bitches make good target practice. Almost as much as commies and Jews.” The soldier laughed and slapped the butt of his Mauser. “Next one I see I’ll shoot in your honor.”
Yael kept her lips drawn up in Mina’s meek, demure fashion. The mask of a good little Reichling. It was only in the unseen places she raged. Her toes curled hard inside her boots. Her fingers slid back to her jacket pocket, where her trusted Walther P38 handgun nestled.
The second soldier shut the book, so all Yael could see was the Reich stamp on the front. The eagle’s wings were rigid: a double salute. The wreath and twisted cross hung effortlessly from its talons. All as black as that monstrous smoke. The same blackness that grew inside Yael if she let the memories billow back.
“Everything seems to be in order, Fräulein Jager.” He held Mina’s book out to her.
The lining of Yael’s throat tasted sooty. Her toes were cracking—pop, pop, pop—tiny, quiet gunshots inside her boots.
There was a time and a place for remembering. There was a target waiting for her rage, her revenge. This evening, this street, these men were not it.
Her touch slipped off the gun. Yael reached out and grabbed the papers instead.
“Thank you,” she said as she tucked the pages of another girl’s life deep into her jacket. “I must go. My mother will be worried.”
The second soldier nodded. “Of course, Fräulein Jager. Sorry to delay you.”
She started walking, her fist shoved into one of the jacket’s normal pockets, clenching the talismans she kept there: a blunted thumbtack, a pea-sized wooden doll with its face worried off. One by one her toes uncurled. Bit by bit the blackness retreated, back to its uneasy sleep.
“Watch out for the strays!” the first soldier called after her.
Yael held up a hand to acknowledge him but did not turn. She was done with soldiers and strays.
She had much worse things to face.