Luka’s life was marked by a trail of bread-crumb rebellions. In the early days, these were small, insubstantial side effects of an overbearing National Socialist father. A tongue stuck out at the Führer’s portrait. A cigarette inhaled (but mostly coughed out) behind Herr Kahler’s shop. Things Kurt Löwe hated. Things that made Luka feel like Luka and not a loyalist lemming.
But there was always a part of him that yearned for that shiny red bicycle. The same part of Luka that wanted his father to clap him on the shoulder and say, “Well done, my son.” The same part that made Luka dust off Kurt Löwe’s old BMW R12 and enroll in the Hitler Youth’s Axis Tour training program. The same part that made him get back on his motorcycle again and again, through heat and snow, after countless crashes.
This part of Luka wanted to be as strong as his father, stronger even: leather tough, steel hard. This part pushed him, pushed him, pushed—all the way to his 1953 Axis Tour victory.
Everything changed after he won. Luka met the real Führer without sticking out his tongue (though he couldn’t stop his neck hairs from prickling; that response was purely instinctual). The victor became not simply a part of the system that stifled him, but the very image of it. His face was immortalized on Sieg heil posters all over the empire’s streets. We are strong, the Aryan people thought whenever they saw it. We are so invincible a fourteen-year-old boy can race across continents and win.
But whenever Luka looked at these posters, he did not feel strong. He did not feel right. He felt… swallowed. People saw him—a boy wearing a black jacket, hair clipped military tight, arm planked in a high salute—but they did not see him.
So the bread crumbs of Luka’s discontent grew bigger, bolder. A carton of cigarettes a week. A brown jacket donned instead of the standard black racing uniform. An angry word—or two, or three—about the state of things, always and only in the right company. Luka’s rule-breaking was very calculated. Just enough to set him apart, never enough for a one-way ticket to the labor camps.
But after Fräulein had come back for Luka, after she fought the Japanese soldiers and lost, after their weapons were seized and their hands bound, after they were stuffed into the patrol wagon with about as much dignity as a verdammt hay bale, Luka knew he’d made a mistake.
Actually, he mused as the transport rolled through Tokyo’s streets, I’ve made quite a few mistakes. Wandering down to the docks. Chasing not-Adele out of the garden. Inviting her to the Victor’s Ball. Falling in love in the first place (and the second, for that matter).
The fräulein sat next to him, eyes out the window, as they rolled through the main gate of the Imperial Palace.
“Back so soon,” Luka muttered.
He watched her and waited. For an eye roll. A retort. Anything. But not-Adele kept staring out the truck, face eggshell white. Luka would much rather have her yelling. Angry words and accusations he could brace himself against. But silence…
He never did well with silence.
The sound of it was everywhere. Just yesterday Luka had crossed the Imperial Palace’s main gate to a storm of cheers and flashing cameras. There was none of that now. The palace grounds were strangely quiet for a place that had just seen the Führer shot. No more frantic SS men rooting through the garden. Very few lamps were lit; most windows had gone dark.
Luka and not-Adele were handed over to the SS guards, dragged back to the ballroom. The place had been stripped of music, cleared of guests. Its Reichssender cameras were unmanned—six views gone blind—ringing a dance floor covered in glass. Adolf Hitler’s body lay in the midst of this shattered scene. Someone had draped a sheet over the corpse before the blood fully dried. Stains had seeped through. Red now fading…
The Führer, a man who’d always been so much larger than life—whose face was everywhere, always (above Luka’s parents’ mantel, on their television screen, inside every textbook)—was now just worm food waiting to happen. Luka—apart from the possibility of being implicated, tortured, executed—wasn’t terribly torn up about the death. Oddly enough, the SS bodyguards didn’t look too miffed about it either. The highest-ranking among them was actually smiling: a stiff expression not framed by dimples or laugh lines. It had no business on the man’s face.
“Victor Löwe,” the SS officer growled as the pair was shoved in front of him. “I expected so much more from you.”
There was no time like the present for Luka to tell his tale of woe. He’d always had a knack for talking his way out of things. (Exhibit A: Convincing the Axis Tour officials that, yes, he was wearing the brown jacket in honor of his veteran father. Wasn’t the whole point of the race to honor bloodlines and war victories?) But, Luka realized, the story of how he valiantly pursued this girl across Tokyo to make a citizen’s arrest would not work for one simple reason: The fräulein had come back for his sorry Arsch. She’d fought for him the way she would fight for an ally. A friend.
The evidence was stacked against Luka in a way no swaggering grins or loophole reasoning could erase. His fate was bound to not-Adele’s. For better or worse.
At the moment, it was looking very much worse.
He searched the SS officer’s uniform for rank. The man’s middle finger shone with a gold signet ring—engraved with double Sieg runes. Two silver-threaded oak leaves haltered his neck via a collar. The surefire symbol of a “Standartenführer—”
“Baasch.”
“Thank you, Standartenführer Baasch.” Luka nodded. “I believe you just came up with the title of my autobiography.”
Luka Löwe: We Expected So Much More. It would probably be better reading than that Mein Kampf headache.…
The SS-Standartenführer cleared his throat, his gaze sliding to where not-Adele was being held in place by an SS-Sturmmann. Her left sleeve was shoved up: wolf pack loping from wrist to elbow, beneath the chandeliers’ glow. “As for you, Inmate 121358ΔX. I would never have expected one of Dr. Geyer’s lab rats to accomplish so much. You truly had me and my men convinced you were Fräulein Wolfe.”
Inmate? Lab rat? What was the SS-Standartenführer talking about?
“Even after all this time you Saukerls can’t stand to use my name,” not-Adele said.
All thoughts of Luka’s own story fell away as he watched Fräulein’s features change. The process looked different out of the garden’s dream-filled dark, under the ballroom’s light—much more brash and factual. The angles of her face shifted; all traces of Asian heritage vanished. Hair pulled—long silk, pure white—out of her skull. Her skin was just as pale, pigmentless. And her eyes… they burned. An impossible fluorescent, shop-light blue. One that put Adele’s bright irises to shame.
“I am Yael,” she said.
Yaaaaaaaaah-ell. The name had a sort of poetry to it—one that didn’t jibe with any of the German names Luka knew. It didn’t sound Japanese or Russian either.
“It’s hardly my concern what your mother called you. What does concern me is who you’re working with. I need names. Addresses.” Glass from broken champagne flutes crunched under the SS-Standartenführer’s feet as he walked toward Yael. It was the same restless stride Luka’s father used to perform. The one that created threadbare circles on the Löwes’ sitting room rug. The one that set Luka’s teeth on edge because he knew what often followed it.
The officer’s fist flashed out. There was a dull, wet noise that reminded Luka of the evenings his mother made schnitzel, when she stood over the butcher block, hammering pieces of veal until they were paper-thin.
Yael’s head twisted back, white hair streaming. A flag of no-surrender.
That signet ring had to hurt like hell, but the girl didn’t make a sound. Color spread through her pale hair, and at first Luka thought maybe she was doing her trick again. But as Yael spit the strands out of her face, he realized it was blood. The Sieg rune ring had left a split along her cheekbone. The cut flowed freely, as bright and red as any.
Her mouth stayed closed. Her eyes blazed.
“Names!” SS-Standartenführer Baasch tossed his fist again. There was another thud, just as wet and deep and sickening as the first.
Silence.
Another hit (more silence), another (more), another (more). Blows so hard the SS-Sturmmann who held Yael struggled to stay in place. If her flesh had been schnitzel, it would’ve been long finished, ready for the skillet. Luka kept expecting her to break—to yell, scream, anything—but Scheisse if this strange-named fräulein wasn’t tough. Pain seemed like nothing to her. Maybe it was. But from where Luka was standing, it was too much.
The color, the silence, the blow after blow…
It was all too much to watch.
“Hey!” he heard himself yelling.
The thuds stopped, replaced by the heavy, bloodful sound of Yael trying to breathe. Luka couldn’t see the extent of the damage, with her hair plastered to her cheek the way it was. But that was enough of a thrashing for any man to take, much less a fräulein her size. Even the SS-Standartenführer looked tired as he retrieved a kerchief from his pocket, toweling pink spray off his knuckles. He spent an extra few seconds polishing his signet ring before letting the soiled fabric fall to the floor.
SS-Standartenführer Baasch’s eyes met Luka’s. They were the color of sharkskin. Too calm.
“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?” Luka asked. “I could really use one right now. Helps my nerves. They’re a bit jangly—”
A fist. A flash of gold. The signet ring did hurt like hell.
Luka shook the sparks from his eyes, working the Sieg rune pain out of his jaw. “Could you avoid the face next time? I need to keep it pretty for my press release.”
“It’s a bit too late for that,” the SS-Standartenführer said. His face stayed smileless. “Victor Löwe has asked for a cigarette. Should we oblige him?”
Seconds later, a cigarette and silver lighter appeared. Click, whoosh! Smoke crept in tendrils out of Baasch’s thin lips; fire flared circle-bright off his fingertips. “We used these a good deal in the early days. Easy torture tools that fit in your pocket. Ever since the Aryan Health Laws were instated, they’ve become much less convenient. Illegal, expensive. Though I hear you’re quite partial to them.”
“Like I said. Helps my nerves.” Right now Luka’s nerves were the furthest from calm they could be. Prickling, jabbing, SCREAMING as the SS officer brought the cigarette’s smolder closer to the victor’s skin.
“You know what happens when you play with fire,” the SS-Standartenführer said.
You get burned. On the collarbone.
The fire ate into his first epidermal layer, fizzling along Luka’s nerve endings. He would be steel hard, leather tough. He would push, push, push through this.…
Luka managed not to scream. He bit through his lip instead.
“Stop!” Even Yael’s voice sounded weeping-meat wet. She spoke in short chops of sentences. “Luka had no part in this. Neither did Felix. They know nothing.”
Scheisse. It was a nice gesture. Luka was genuinely touched. But the SS-Standartenführer was right. It was too late for that. The victor braced his boots against the ballroom floor—the very one they’d danced on—and got ready for the next burn. But the cigarette hung limp in the SS officer’s fingers. His face looked… thoughtful. “These two… they were found at the docks?”
The SS-Sturmmann holding Yael nodded.
“In what order?” the SS-Standartenführer asked.
“Victor Löwe was restrained first,” the SS-Sturmmann recounted the Japanese patrolmen’s report. “They caught the girl trying to rescue him.”
“An assassin with attachments. How unique.” There was that smile again. The expression would’ve looked more natural on an actual shark than it did on the SS-Standartenführer’s face. The sight of it dragged tooth tips along Luka’s spine.
“Luka and Felix are innocent.” Yael’s protest smudged through her battered face. “Let them go.”
Again, nice gesture. But the end of an era lay too close by, death rusting through the white sheet, as tangy as the taste edging Luka’s own lips. Blood… mixing with the charred stink of his own flesh. Just the beginning, he knew. He could see it in the edge of Baasch’s smile. Shark-hard, drifting closer, expecting so much more.
The SS-Standartenführer lifted the cigarette again, but this time he flipped it. Wedged it butt-first between Luka’s lips. Ash and surprise—the victor almost choked on it.
“Keep these two here,” Baasch instructed his underlings. “I have a few calls to make.”