Iron to Iron

Book 0: Wolf by Wolf

by Ryan Graudin

Genres: YA Action & Adventure; YA Romance

Synopsis

Once upon a different time, there was a boy who raced through a kingdom of death. Sixteen-year-old Luka Löwe has one goal in mind: Win the 1955 Axis Tour and become the first Double Cross victor. If he can accomplish that, maybe his father will finally see him as a worthy son. He's completed the grueling trek from Germania to Tokyo before, but this time is different. Luka never expected to meet Adele Wolfe, another racer posing as her twin brother and with a singular dream--to live life on her own terms. When Luka and Adele form an alliance, an unlikely bond forms, and even possibly love. But only one person can win the Axis Tour....Can everything Luka and Adele built together survive the race?

Release date: March 8, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 104

Sample

Nineteen fifty-five was going to be Luka Löwe’s year.

He could hear the screams of the Reich pulsing through the walls of the Olympiastadion’s changing room as he laced up his boots. The chant beat against his temple when he double-checked the safety of the Luger pistol hidden in his waistband. (The last thing he needed was to get his Arsch shot off by his own gun.) The yells roared, louder and louder with every passing minute. Feral volume, constant beat.

“Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

Hail victory.

It was not his name they were shouting, but it might as well have been. Two years ago, Luka had been the face of this phrase. After his astonishing win in 1953, posters of the fourteen-year-old victor had been plastered the Reich over: from the walls of Germania’s U-Bahn stations to the alleyways of Moscow. It was a watercolor portrait by Mjölnir—one of Joseph Goebbels’s favorite artists. The man had painted Luka in the style of a war hero: sharp jaw, tight-cut hair, black jacket, arm rigid in a salute as he stood by a Zündapp KS 601. A swastika standard billowed in the background, its red edges melting out into a map of the Axis Tour. Ten cities—Germania, Prague, Rome, Cairo, Baghdad, New Delhi, Dhaka, Hanoi, Shanghai, and Tokyo—all connected with a scarlet line: 20,780 kilometers. Half a world of sand, sweat, mud, blood, and—on more than one occasion—death.

The Mjölnir version of Victor Löwe stood in front of these things: a conquering hero. The actual Luka hated him.

Pride. That’s what the poster was meant for. That’s what Luka should’ve felt surging through his veins every time he looked at the propaganda piece. He was the best of the Reich’s racers, but being the best didn’t fill him with a sense of glorious purpose. Instead it did the opposite. Whenever Luka saw the boy on the poster, he felt all at once smothered and drained.

Years of training. Days and weeks and months spent at the racetrack. Striving, striving, striving, getting dust in his teeth and road rashes up his arms and burn marks against his calves. All for this: SIEG HEIL! 1953.

Luka’s face was on a poster, and he was the best of the Reich’s racers, but there was still something crushing inside him. Something missing.

One victory was not enough. It certainly hadn’t been for his father. When Luka first returned from Tokyo with his Iron Cross, all Kurt Löwe had to say on the matter was, “I bled on the fields of the Muscovy territories for my cross. I lost an arm for it, and now they’re handing them out as prizes for a gottverdammt race?”

If being the best wasn’t enough, Luka would just have to be the best of the best. Not even Kurt Löwe would be able to shrug off two Iron Crosses.

“Victor Löwe?”

Luka barely heard the knock on the changing room door, much less the official behind it. The screams for VICTORY had reached a drowning volume.

“Time… procession…”

Ah yes. The procession. Where the twenty racers were led out onto Olympiastadion’s manicured grasses and presented like racehorses: trot and all. This part was always laborious to Luka. He hated pomp and circumstance, standing still when everything inside was chomping at the bit.

He shouldered on the final, most essential piece of his uniform, zipped it into place, and walked out into the stadium. The place—with its thousands of spectators and their lung-bursting heils!—was so loud that Luka could hardly feel his own footsteps. When the crowd caught sight of his trademark brown jacket, their yells swelled even louder.

“Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

The smell of gasoline soaked through the March air. Twenty factory-shiny black Zündapp KS 601s sat in a staggered row. Every lens the Reichssender television channel owned honed in on Luka’s face as he led the line of Reich racers into the center of the stadium.

There were the usual pleasantries. Racing officials gave speeches about the importance of March 10 and the Axis’s Great Victory and the providential destiny of the New Order and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and on and on. Anthems were sung, and racers were introduced, while the sun beat down at the height of its afternoon strength. By the time they were allowed to mount their motorcycles, Luka could feel his skin sizzling—sunburn making itself at home.

His wasn’t the first Zündapp in the lineup. That particular honor belonged to Tsuda Katsuo. Victor Tsuda Katsuo, a sixteen-year-old from Japan who’d cut Luka’s 1954 victory out from under him. The boy was a good racer, an even better saboteur. If Luka wanted to win the Double Cross, he needed to be a better racer, the best saboteur.

Tsuda Katsuo was Luka’s biggest threat, but far from the only one. There was Georg Rust from Munich, third in the starting line. Kobi Yokuto—the younger brother of Victor Kobi Eizo, who’d won the Axis Tour of 1951—was fourth. Both racers were seventeen, medal-less, and in their last eligible year of racing, which meant they’d be determined. Nay, desperate.

From there the threat level took a sharp decline. Of the three remaining sixteen-year-old racers only one—a slender boy from Frankfurt with the surname Wolfe—had qualifying times that came anywhere close to concerning. Max Kammler (fifteen, in his second year of racing) was another to watch. On the Japanese end there was Saito Jun, who’d impressed Luka last year with his ability to slip through tight racing formations, and Watabe Takeo, the boy who liked sharp knives.

The rest were wet-behind-the-ears first-years and boys whose qualifying times had no drive, no oomph. They were what Luka liked to call the “cataclysmic racers,” whose only chance at the title lay in some force of nature coming along and sweeping away the rest of the competition. (See the flash flood of 1951.)

But all these boys were behind Luka. The only thing he could see was Katsuo’s fender, blinding his eyes with concentrated chrome sunlight.

“Lovely day for a drive. Eh, Katsuo?”

The boy turned at the sound of his name. When Luka wiggled his fingers in a wave, the Japanese racer’s expression hardened: as iron as the cross around his own neck.

Katsuo’s many-worded response contained neither konnichiwa nor any of the choice Japanese curses Luka happened to know. But body language was universal, and there was no missing the disdain that coated Katsuo’s syllables.

“Same to you!” Luka’s mouth hooked into a half smile—more mock than not. He settled onto his Zündapp, testing the ease of its throttle. Everything seemed to be in place. “Enjoy the view of the open road while it lasts!”

The other victor’s nostrils twitched. In one fluid motion he twisted around, kicked his bike to life, revved the engine. A wave of exhaust slapped Luka’s face—pipe innards and angry asphalt. The smell stank, but Luka’s smirk only grew. His words were wriggling under the Japanese victor’s skin, making him emotional. Good. High emotions meant rash decisions. Rash decisions would not a double victor make.

Luka cranked his own motorcycle, all traces of a smile retreating as he glared at Katsuo’s fender.

This would be the year of Luka Löwe.

“Take your marks.”

Double victor. Hero of the Third Reich.

“Get set.”

Tough as leather, hard as steel.

“Go!”

Worthy.

The racers tore through the capital’s streets, wheels spinning out as many kilometers per hour as their engines would allow. Germania to Prague was the shortest section of the Axis Tour: an afternoon of driving on Grade A roads. Luka had navigated this leg so many times during training that he figured he could drive it with his eyes closed. He almost wanted to. Katsuo’s fender kept winking an annoying shot of sunlight at him. Catch me. Catch me if you can!

It was tempting bait. Verdammt tempting. But Luka knew better than to go for it.

Georg Rust didn’t.

They were just past Dresden, where the grandiose cityscape of palaces and churches faded into cherry tree orchards still a month shy of bloom, when Herr Rust edged into the frame of Luka’. . .