Sekret (29 page)

“IT’S WHY I DON’T REMEMBER
my powers ever showing up until after he’d left.” I gulp down frosty air that worms through my lungs, both scorching and numbing. “He—he suppressed it, scrubbed out my memories of even having such an ability.”

Valya lets me sob into his shoulder as he rubs my hands between his. We’re both coatless, hatless, scarfless in the January night. “We can talk about it more, Yulia, but we have to go back. The guards are coming.”

“Why? Why can’t we flee now? I can’t go to Berlin and face—I mean, how could he be so close to me and not even tell me—” I choke down a scream. “Look at all the people he’s hurt!”

“Yul, look at
you
. At me.” He helps me to my feet. “We’re in no shape to run right now. We’re in the middle of the Soviet Union in the dead of winter.”

“Why wouldn’t he say something to me? Why all of the games?” I bite down on my raw bare hand, already throbbing from cold, to stop a sob. “Doesn’t he care anymore?”

“He must have had a good reason.” But Valentin’s shoulders slump—he can’t come up with a good reason, either. “He wants us to meet him in Berlin, we know that much. We have to at least learn why.”

I shake my head, though I don’t fight him off as he wraps his arms around me. “He should have told me,” I whimper. I realize how pathetic I must sound, but I’m too numb—from the shock, from the cold—to care.

Two sets of boots crunch through the snow toward us—our guards. I look away, deeper into the forest, though I can’t see far for the fog and snow. I ache to keep running but my legs sting from the cold.

“Fine.” I shake snow from my skirt. “Let’s go back.”

“Comrades!” one of our guards calls. “I trust there is a good reason for this?”

Valya kisses my cheek and helps me back toward the train. “Sorry, comrade. The toilet was occupied.”

*   *   *

I sleep like death and awaken well past noon to Larissa staring me down from her bunk. “Oh, good. You’re alive.”

“Good to know,” I say, rubbing my head. I examine my fingers and toes—I have escaped General Winter’s frostbite.

She cants her head to Kruzenko’s bunk. “Her nose started bleeding again and she was talking nonsense. How do you feel?”

My eyes feel like I’ve been rubbing them with wool, and my joints ache, but I shrug. No nosebleed. “I’ll survive.”

Sergei is polishing off what appears to be his third round of breakfast when I enter the dining car. His gaze flicks toward mine. “Yulia,” he says, hunching his shoulders forward as I slide into the booth across from him. “I … I’d brought my official Spartak team photo to show you.” He manages a faint smile. “They used the photo from last year, when I first joined.”

Sergei grins up at me in black and white, wearing a full set of hockey armor, skates, and jersey. He kneels before the goal net with the Spartak logo blazing across his puffed-up chest.

“Congratulations,” I say. “I know how badly you wanted this.”

“You’ll come to my games. Promise? I’ll get you box seats. I’m sure Kruzenko will allow it if I ask her.”

He looks so happy in the photo; there’s a light in his eyes that I’ve never seen, not even when he’s at his most mischievous. “You said this is an older picture?”

“Unfortunately.” He tilts his head. “I don’t look tough enough in it, do I? I’m a lot more muscular now.”

“And you’ve still got your tooth.” I point to his grin—left front tooth and all. His front teeth buckle inward. I’d never noticed it before because it’s less obvious with one of them gone. I look up at him with something dark pulsing through my thoughts. “Sergei … smile for me.”

He pulls back his lips. “Like this?”

Sure enough, his remaining front tooth buckles in. “Your crooked front teeth. That’s hereditary, isn’t it?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Isn’t that your area of expertise?” He studies his grin in the photograph. “Maybe I should ask them to retake the picture. People take you more seriously if you’ve got some injuries, some scars…”

I study Sergei’s stats printed alongside the photo. IVANOV, SERGEI ANTONOVICH. Ivanov is the default Russian name, the great anonymizer, like a Smith for English speakers—no surprise that the KGB would want him under a pseudonym. It’s the patronymic that terrifies me, staring up at me. Antonovich. Son of Anton.

Sergei’s talking, eyebrows drawn down. “Yulia, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. About you and … and Valentin—”

But I can’t listen. I stand up, stepping backward carefully. I wish I could unsee this. Realization is a shattered glass that you can’t unshatter. All you can do is slice yourself on its edges.

“Yulia?” Sergei asks. “Are you listening to me?”

And his teeth—I’ve seen that genetic trait before. “Sorry, Sergei. Maybe another time.”

I lock myself in the bathroom and watch the tracks whir past through the hole in the “toilet.” Sergei’s smile, those chiseled cheekbones and flop of blond hair. I’ve seen that face in fuzzy black and white. And then that tooth—

My fingertips trace the edge of the tiny mirror. Surely she used the restroom at some point in the night. Misha, Masha. Sergei, flexing in the mirror. Masha again. Valentin, refusing to meet his own gaze as he scrubs at his hands.

Kruzenko. She smoothes down her hair and checks her nose—no blood for now. Then she curls back her lip to pick her teeth.

I slump back against the wall and bite down on my fist to keep from crying out. Kruzenko’s son. Son of Anton.

Major General Anton Rostov.

*   *   *

East Berlin is a concrete crypt. Everywhere I look, stark, flat buildings rise out of shell-shocked rubble and watch us with broken windows for eyes. The streets hold no cars. The old buildings—from before Stalin seized this land for his own—look safe from one side, but when we pass them, the rest is crumpled by artillery fire, the wreckage blocked off by barbed-wire fences. The few people we pass fix their stares on their feet and hurry past us. Coal smoke and sulfur linger around every corner as we wade through half-melted black slush.

Valentin’s arm presses against mine as we walk.
Are you doing all right?

I’ll live,
I reply. Papa or no, we have to find our way out.

The streets turn darker gray as the sun evaporates. We trudge, clutching our satchels, silent like the last survivors of a war. Finally, Kruzenko points ahead, to a squat Baroque building of grooved stone with its name spelled in lights, in elaborate German script: the Hotel Kepler.

“Remember, children, we must not discuss our purpose here. Stay on guard,” Kruzenko says.

I look to Valya to point out the fire escape tucked behind the building’s façade, but he’s transfixed by something in the lobby windows. Bathed in the soft glow of a jeweled chandelier is a full grand piano, perfectly framed by the oversize window that looks out on what must, in better weather, serve as a café. Too much space everywhere; I spot only one alley curving behind the hotel. We cross around the wide traffic circle, with a cement plug where a war-shattered fountain must have been, and into the hotel’s golden light.

Major Kruzenko handles our check-in and sends us to our rooms to change for the Party banquet. We can already hear laughter spilling down the lush carpeted hallway that leads to the ballroom. Dozens of the highest-ranking
nomenklatura
, scientists, and cosmonauts mingle, all anxious to see the
Veter 1
slingshot around the moon. Do they know the threat that faces the launch? That my father is circling us all like prey?

I have to share my room with only Larissa, and I couldn’t be more grateful. There’s barely space for us to walk past the beds. We’d never maneuver around Masha and her suite of luggage. “I wish we didn’t have to play pretend around these people,” Larissa says, as we unpack on our double beds. “It splits my concentration. I just want to do our job and get out.”

“And by get out, you mean … our escape,” I say. I glance at her from the corner of my eye as I try to shake the wrinkles from my satin dress.

She doesn’t look my way. “Of course.”

Lara manages to set our hair in gentle curls around the temples by leaving an iron to heat on the radiator. I choke down three glasses of murky tap water, and I almost feel human. Almost ready for the task ahead.

We ride back down the elevator arm in arm, our fake-fur stoles slung across our shoulders. The doors glide open and gorgeous, rich music flows around us: the song Valentin’s been playing so much lately. My heart edges up my throat, pounding anxiously, as I cross the marble foyer. It’s as if time has stopped around me, leaving me with just the music, and Valentin hunched over the keys.

It’s too beautiful. The notes are too crystalline. I’m afraid to move through them—I might knock them to the floor and they’ll shatter.

“Hey! Yulia!” Sergei waves us over to the piano; I lurch back into myself. He’s leaning over the piano, and from Valentin’s steely expression, I’m guessing Sergei has been harassing him about one thing or another.
Bozhe moi
, I can’t bear to look at Sergei now. I see his lineage in his nose, his ears, his chin. I wobble on my high heels as I carefully approach the boys.

Valentin glances up at me and the music falters. Two scarlet patches sprout on his cheeks as he stumbles to pick the tune back up.

“Damn. Looking lovely, ladies,” Sergei says. “You especially, Yulia. Nothing personal, Lara, but Ivan was a good friend, and
some
of us understand the rules about things like that.” He takes another swig of Shampanskoye. “Want to hear something pathetic? This stupid song Valya can’t stop playing—he thinks it’ll woo an ice princess like Yulia.”

I stare slack-jawed at Sergei, like if I look hard enough, I can see some trace of that goofy, kindhearted boy who showed me around the mansion months ago. But now all I see is Rostov and Kruzenko in his cruel smirk and clueless devotion to our work. His usual good cheer has burned away leaving this drunken, sloppy mess.

“Now would be a good time to stop talking,” Valya growls.

“Valya says this song is called ‘Yulia.’ Coz it sounds like the thoughts in your head. What a borscht-for-brains. I mean, he’s such a…” Sergei’s words slur together as he leans, exaggeratedly, toward us. “Phony. Who says things like that? No one, not unless they want something from you.”

“I told you to shut up.” The music halts with a clatter. Valentin stands up, eyes burning like lit oil. His hands cock fists at the ends of his frayed suit sleeves.

“What? A failure like you doesn’t belong with her. You must be working your scrubbing magic to get her to so much as look at you. I mean, even if she did slip on the ice and bang her head and somehow liked you—you’d just run away and abandon her like poor Anastasia.”

The piano bench screeches against the marble as Valya leaps up and seizes Sergei by the collar of his shirt. “This is nothing like Anastasia.”

Larissa steps between me and the boys, like she can shield me from the truth. But it’s too late. I stagger back from the piano as if I’ve been punched. “The—the girl who went crazy?” I ask.

Larissa squeezes her eyes shut and nods. “She and Valentin were planning an escape, then he went without her…”

Valya pulls away from Sergei. “Listen, Yul, it’s not what you think—”

“Don’t.” I whirl away from him and totter toward the ballroom. My arms are electric with Anastasia’s memories: her bed, her teddy bear, her razor blade finding release on the soft interior of her arms. In one brief stretch, a lift of hope, only for it to crash down catastrophically afterward. He’d abandoned her. Promised her a way out, then ran on his own.

Larissa scampers to keep up with me, but I shoot her a sneer. “You knew about this, and you didn’t tell me!”

Larissa slaps me. I stop dead, trying to muster up anger at her, but my head is too full of fury for Valentin. I can sympathize with Anastasia and her head fogged with the thoughts of everyone around her. Every sweet word and glance from Valentin is cast in doubt now; they’re all lining up to be sorted, to laugh at me for believing that he’d escape with me. I stare Larissa down for one moment—one moment is all I have strength for—then I slump forward, too exhausted to be angry anymore.

“First of all,” Larissa says, “Anastasia is dead, and until we find a way to psychically resurrect people, there’s no changing that. The past is past.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Don’t make me slap you again.” Larissa smiles, placating, and guides me toward an alcove. “Second of all, Valentin didn’t love her.” Larissa’s voice wavers. “She wanted him to, sure, but he didn’t. Nothing like the way he feels for you—”

“What are you talking about?”

She snorts. “He may be a scrubber, but he’s terrible at hiding his feelings when it comes to you.” She shakes her head. “You tear his soul open, and it all comes spilling out.”

Hope flutters in me, and I instantly hate myself for it. “That’s not the point. It’s what Sergei said—about Valentin leaving her behind when he ran away.” I can barely force the words out of my mouth. “Is he using us to escape?”

“I don’t know,” Larissa whispers. Then tosses her head, golden curls swinging. “There’s too much else cluttering my vision when I try to look at our escape. I think we have more immediate concerns.”

I take a few sharp breaths and let them out. Righteous indignation burns through me, like strong alcohol, but it’s all fumes now. I can’t worry about what Valentin might do. I have to take care of Larissa and myself—we’ll run with or without Valentin. I ring with emptiness, with aftermath. “Something about the banquet tonight?”

I reach for her hand, but she winces, pulling away from me. “No. It’s better if you don’t see.” She swallows audibly. “Nothing specific, but glimpses of running, fighting … there’s a fire, and…”

“Lara, please. If it’ll help us, I want to see.” We sink deeper into the alcove and onto a cushioned bench, shielded from the flow of Party officials by a potted plant. I prop my hand palm-up on my knee.

Larissa spreads her fingers across mine, skin tingling. Images jolt through me like electricity. All the possibilities run together like overlaid filmstrips, but one image burns through them all. Flames, twisting up the face of a great structure—is it metal, or wood? It keeps winking out of existence too quickly for me to tell, but then it’s back, the angle changed, then gone again. Then it blooms in one great tuft of fire.