Read Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) for Free Online Page B

dust.
    It wasn’t the worst wreck Luka had ever seen. Kobi Yokuto would live. If he was wearing his riding gear properly and landed just right, he might be spared the painful ooze of road rash.
    Luka swung around the wreck, falling in line behind Katsuo’s taillight. The other victor had slowed; the wide road next to him begged to be seized—heavy with dusk and dust and the promise of
go, go, win and be worthy
.
    Pride before the fall.
The proverb of lesser men, ones who had nothing to be proud of. Stupidity
before the fall
were the words Luka lived by, and he had no intention of being stupid enough to repeat Yokuto’s fate. There were far smoother roads ahead, and so like any good predator, Luka Löwe would wait.

Chapter 7
    There were two things Luka appreciated about the cataclysmic racers.
    1.   Someone had to be last on the scoreboard. Their slothy times ensured it wasn’t Luka.
    2.   The longer it took for them to drag their wheels through the desert, the longer Luka got to sit on his
Arsch
in the Baghdad checkpoint—guzzling mineral water, making ashes of cigarettes, and watching March 20’s sun drift up through latticed windows.
    In many ways, days off were nice: sleeping in, taking showers to wash off the stink, eating actual food, using toilet facilities that weren’t just a hasty dig in the side of a dune. Today, though, Luka didn’t want to stay still. It wasn’t because of his time on the scoreboard. ( LUKA LÖWE, 5 DAYS, 12 HOURS, 2 MINUTES, 46 SECONDS. Eleven seconds behind Katsuo. Ten seconds ahead of Felix Adele.) It wasn’t because Katsuo’s stare was fixed back on him. Nor was it because his at-rest muscles were undergoing lactic acid mutiny.
    It was because of Adele.
    He wanted to talk more, but they couldn’t do that here. At least, not the way they did in the desert. There were too many ears around, and whenever Adele spoke, it was with a boy’s voice from a girl’s throat: strange, husky.
    Luka couldn’t even really
look
at Adele without giving something away. His Reichssender interview was more distracted than most, because he could see Adele past the ends of Fritz Naumann’s wiry hair, making a snowman out of the leftover mushed chickpeas on her plate. The sight (almost) made him smile, and not in the propaganda grimace/
cameras are watching
kind of way. This was an
I feel happy and my mouth wants to show it
reflex. One Luka had spent his entire childhood learning to iron out.
    Don’t show emotion. Don’t you ever show emotion.
Kurt Löwe’s own voice had been flat when he said this, colder than the Christmas Eve snow falling around them.
I won’t have any son of mine being weak
.
    When Adele caught his eye, she smashed the sculpture with her fork and jerked her head to the camera.
Don’t waste Fritz Naumann’s precious film!
He imagined her saying this in her real voice, complemented with a laugh and a puff of smoke. It made quelling his smile that much harder.
    What the hell was happening to him?
    Luka was not weak, but it took all his strength to tamp down the edges of his mouth. He used thoughts of his father like nails. When Luka stared into the camera, he imagined Kurt Löwe watching the clip on the television—blue eyes as detached as the rest of his face.
    Smile: deceased.
    The Reichssender team usually spent twice as much time on Luka’s footage as they did on any of the other German racers’, asking questions that Felix Wolfe and Georg Rust were never expected to answer.
    “Victor Löwe”—the interviewer cleared his throat—“I think many of our young female viewers are wondering, is there a sweetheart cheering you on back in Hamburg?”
    This
question. Luka was surprised they hadn’t asked it sooner. Last year it had popped up at nearly every checkpoint, as if Luka’s answer would change if they worded their query differently.
    “I…” He looked at Adele’s eyes over Herr Naumann’s shoulder. A blue so different from his father’s stare.