Sekret (28 page)

We are heading to Berlin to protect the secret
Veter 1
launch. Our mission will not be easy, Kruzenko warned us. We have no guarantee of what kind of threat we will face in Berlin: sabotage, assassination, theft of the rocket design or its components, maybe even kidnapping of
Veter 1
scientists. All this while evading the scrubber and his team—at least, that’s what Kruzenko told us to do.

But that three-note melody in the soft hollows of my brain says otherwise.
A way out.
Needles prick at my mind like someone cross-stitching on my thoughts, but they are warm, humming with the soothing tune.

Valya and Larissa aren’t as pleased by the melody. Valya has stopped in the middle of the stream of travelers and grips his head like he’s trying to keep a lid on a boiling pot. Larissa curls her arms around her wiry frame and whimpers. Only Major Kruzenko is smiling, smiling as blissfully as me. Why doesn’t everyone else hear this beautiful melody?

“We have to get on the train.” Valya speaks through clenched teeth, spittle spraying from his lips. “Yulia. Don’t you hear that noise?”

“It smells like springtime, doesn’t it?”

“Yulia.” Valya pulls a dingy kerchief from his coat pocket and swabs at my nose. When he pulls back, the kerchief is smeared with blood.

“But I—” I wipe my nose on my sleeve, but my dark brown coat doesn’t reveal anything. “But I feel just fine—”

Valya tugs on Major Kruzenko’s jacket. “Come on, Comrade Major. He’s nearby. We have to board now.”

Kruzenko turns toward him with a slick red trail down her right nostril, curving like a scythe around her lips.

And then light blossoms on the horizon like a second sun. Dazzling, warm. I want to turn my face toward it like a flower and let it melt away the frost. Sticky warmth flows down my upper lip but I don’t care, I just need to bask—

Valya wads up his kerchief and presses it against my nose. “You, too. Get inside.”

We have a whole car to ourselves: Larissa, Masha, Kruzenko, and I will share one compartment, and Valentin, Sergei, and Misha will share another with one of the guards; at the end of the car is the tiny closet with a hole directly over the rails, which qualifies as a toilet. We are lucky to have that luxury.

Rostov will be flown in with a Red Army convoy, joining us in Berlin. I am far more grateful for that.

Valentin pinches my nose and tilts my head back to stanch the blood flow before we part for our separate compartments. As he gives my forearm a gentle squeeze, I sense a terse little bundle of music slip under my skin. I mentally place it in my pocket for later decoding.

Once my nosebleed is stanched, Larissa and I head to the dining car. The train clatters along the iron road through Moscow’s heart; the failing light shows endless smokestacks and snaggled wires overhead. We’ll pick up speed as we leave the city, but for now, we’re closed in a Moscow-sized aquarium. I reach out mentally around me as Larissa and I shuffle down the corridor. The glass panels make me feel empty, exposed.

“Why do you think the scrubber only affected you and Kruzenko?” Larissa asks under her breath as we pass a forlorn-looking man, staring out the window and smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

“I feel like I have this … connection to him. Maybe not a connection, but this certainty.” I trace a finger around my temple. “I know he’s dangerous, but I can’t help but sense there’s something more to it. I … I need to find out what.”

Larissa presses her lips into a thin line. “How about you leave the prophesying to me? Besides, it doesn’t explain Kruzenko.”

“He must have had a reason for targeting her specifically. Maybe he’s encountered her before.” I shake my head as I sink into an empty bench in the dining car.

My tea arrives with too much honey, wrapped in a metal
podstakannik
commemorating Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight in space with a geometric, stylized swoosh of stars and meteors. Our dinner is an unidentifiable whole fish, eyeballs thankfully removed, and a bowl of boiled potatoes with mushrooms. Larissa flips through her book while she pushes the potatoes back and forth. I curl up on the bench and unravel the thought that Valya left for me.

You are right about needing to recover your missing memories. I fear they may be tied to the way the scrubber affects you. Stay in the dining car tonight until everyone is asleep. I’ll help you as best I can.

Our teammates filter through the dining car, as well as heavy-faced old women and skeletal men with bear-trap jaws, but none of them glow with the scrubber’s imprint. I try not to circle too close to their depressing, dull thoughts: fretting over dwindling rations or persistent coughs or promiscuous paramours in Murmansk. Misha and Masha enter in tandem and dine at the opposite end of the car, offering us nothing more than the occasional evil eye.

Larissa heads to sleep once the sky is too dark to mark the flurry of parallel naked birch trees whizzing by. I’m alone in the dining car with a group of loud, intoxicated Komsomol university students. Their thoughts are simple and clear. I wait for the screeching sound of the scrubber but it never comes.

Sergei and Valentin appear at the far end of the car. Sergei fiddles with his hair, trying not to scowl, while Valya wears his scowl like a medal. They give each other a look as they reach my booth, silently jockeying, then both slide onto the bench opposite me.

Valentin drums his fingers against the tabletop.
Sorry. We’ll have to wait.
His thoughts never waver as he sends the message my way. He’s calm in a way I can only dream of.

“We should reach Warsaw by morning,” Valya says, as the train slows and the conductor calls out a station name somewhere in Belarus. “We’ll arrive at East Berlin by afternoon. Doesn’t leave much time to look around the city before dark.”

I nod, keeping my gaze fixed out the windows, but I know what he means. He wants to scout our escape route.

“I just hope we’re home before next week’s game. Oh—Yulia, I didn’t get to tell you!” Sergei pokes my leg under the table with his foot. “I’m on the third line for Spartak next year! Kruzenko’s letting me play half the games.”

I force a smile on my face and let Shostakovich fill the hollowness in my chest. As much as I want to be genuinely happy for him, I can’t split that desire from the sadness at seeing him settle for this life, this gilded cell that the KGB would put us in, telling us it’s a lavish Party apartment in Kutuzovsky. He deserves better; he deserves to be free. But he has to want it, and a lifetime of Party doctrine has clouded his thoughts more than any scrubber could.

“I can’t wait to see you play,” I tell him, the lie chafing.

The train clatters along the tracks, puncturing the silence that hangs over us. I try to think of something more to say—some way to get Sergei to leave, but everything sounds false and bitter in my head. I shift on the bench. Sergei looks between Valentin and me, smile fading. Slowly, Sergei stands up, his Tchaikovsky music bursting with cannon fire. “Well, I, uh … guess I’d better sleep.” He swings toward me, his eyes icy points. “You should, too, Yulia.”

The dining car door slams behind him in a wave of winter air.

“He knows.” I swallow hard. “About us.”

“He
suspects.
” Valentin slumps back on the bench with a sigh. “We’ll have to be careful. Maybe it could work to our advantage. Distract him from what we’re planning.”

I shake my head, but I can’t find words for the fear I feel rising in my throat. I can’t worry about Sergei or our escape just now. I have to focus on why we’re here. “I’m ready.”

Valentin studies me, gaze soft, but there’s an intensity in his wrinkled brow that I feel, too. These are the last moments before something changes me on the outside as much as in.

I place my hands on the table, palms up, a sacrifice to whatever comes next. I need to know who I am. What’s been taken from me. I don’t care about the cost.

“You’re sure about this,” Valentin says, sounding like he already knows. He laces his fingers in mine. “Just relax your mind. Unclench the music around it and let yourself float…”

The train spins away from me. The world is dark, marred like a scummy pond. Three clear notes ripple the water as dark shapes dart below the surface. There’s a submerged wooden cabin—our summer dacha in the forest, flooded, moss reaching up from its roof like groping fingers. The tower of Moscow State.

I skim above the water, letting the current carry me over these fragments of my past, staring up like drowned faces. The melody crescendos, but I’m not feeling that tenderness under my skin, that battered soreness that warns me not to proceed deeper into that patch of memory as surely as an electric fence.

You’re still fighting it, Yulia. You have to let go.

A red and gold star juts from the water. I follow it below the surface; it’s the top of a strange baton wielded by a statue of the Soviet Man, forever midstride. I’ve seen this statue before, though I couldn’t say where. I catch on the baton and sink, following it down into the depths, toward the statue’s base.

Better. Stay calm, Yulia. I’ll do the best I can.

The statue is in the courtyard of a submerged compound: curved concrete and metal bomb-shelter doors. I glide toward the elaborate mural painted over the doorway, full of stern-faced Soviet scientists, measuring vials and flasks as a comet trail of double helixes, stethoscopes, chromosomes swirl behind them. I reach out to trace the Cyrillic letters chiseled into the door.
State Laboratory for Neurophysiological Chromosomal Research
.
Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue
, I think to Valentin.

The current shifts, tugging me down toward the open doors. No. Oh, no. As I’m sucked into the building, my ribs clamp shut and my heart pounds madly. I suck in salt water.

Don’t fight it!
Valentin cries, as if it’s as simple as that when I’m losing control.

I slam into a cramped child’s desk, the kind we had in grade school, but this is no classroom. Wires slither out of my head and jam themselves into a blue electrical box studded with red lights. The room reeks of bleach and formaldehyde, a little too similar to the KGB interrogation room I remember from when Kruzenko first spoke to me.

We’re getting closer, Yulia. But I’ll have to work slowly. I don’t want to hurt you—

The door opens with a flare of white light. I open my mouth to scream as the light pours over me like sandpaper on my skin. When the scream finally comes, it’s raw as a wound, shredding apart—

The white light blinks out, and the pain sizzles out of me.
No. I’m sorry, Yul. I can’t do this to you.

Please.
I watch the red lights do their strange dance up and down the control panel that I’m plugged into.
We’re so close. I’m sure of it.
The fluorescents overhead sputter; the current starts to pull me away.
Valya, it’s fading—please!

I slam back into the chair with a clang; the whole room drains of water as the lights swing back into full staticky force. The door opens once more as a ghostly man-shaped blur steps inside. I lift my head toward him, but the wires attached to me limit my movement; I can only catch sight of him from the corner of my eye.

“My poor Yulia. This is so much worse than I feared.” The man slaps a clipboard against his open palm. “Four little alleles, bits of your genetic code. If only you didn’t carry the genes, this would not be necessary. I’m sorry it must be this way.”

He drags a chair right up to me and cradles my face in his hands. I flinch away from his searing touch—then choke on a gasp. The fringe of black hair across his forehead, those steel-rimmed frames. I wet my lips; strain my vocal cords like the out-of-tune strings in the ballroom piano. “Papa?”

His blinding glow retreats in fits and starts. He slides a cigarette from behind his ear and lights it with a flick. “Your mother and I are at an impasse,” he says, smoke oozing from his mouth and nose. “She thinks that we can train you ourselves. Teach you to keep your powers safe.”

He taps the ash away with a trembling hand. “But I am not so convinced. Not because I find you weak, mind you—my darling girl, you are so much stronger than I could have hoped. Already you remind me of her, way back when…”

“When what?” I wheeze. “During the war?”

Papa nods. “Yes, it is not your weakness that I fear. It is the Party’s strength.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “They have methods, skills that our minds just aren’t made to overcome. You know what I always say.” He stretches one hand and leans forward, flattening his palm to my forehead. “An empty mind is a safe mind.”

My eyes fly open, the laboratory, Papa, the current of my thoughts blazing away in an instant. I rip my hands out of Valentin’s. “
Bozhe moi.
” I trip over the bench as I stumble out into the aisle.

“This stop, Biaroza, in the Soviet republic of Belarus,” the conductor calls, as we slow into the station. I charge out of the dining car and pound down the steps straight into waist-high snow.

“Yulia, come back! Please!”

Valentin charges after me but I’m running straight for the thicket of birch trees, so bone-white and perfectly straight against the inky sky. Stars mix with snowflakes in the air. The only sound I can hear is the crunch of snow beneath and behind me, my ragged breaths, and the distant rumble of the stalled train. The trees swallow me whole.

In my thoughts, the three-note melody rings out tauntingly.

Hands close around my waist. Valentin tackles me into the snow. I stare straight up at the bared branches and dream of them coming to life, scooping me up, crushing me.

“Please, you can tell me. What’s the matter, Yulia? Just let me know.”

“The scrubber.” I stare at my breath as it hovers before me. Words are too solid in this winter night. Snow is dripping through my sweater; my bare hands are going numb. “He’s not American after all.” I sink further into the white abyss. “He’s my father.”

CHAPTER 37