Sekret (3 page)

“Do you know this for a fact?” she asks, pacing away from me.

We’re both fighting to keep our faces blank. Like the market, it’s a game of getting what you want without paying a price that can’t be counted in rubles. But she’s had her whole career to master this art.

Think, Yulia.
Everything is a system, and systems can be learned. Figure out the rules for her game. She’s not asking any questions. Isn’t that the whole point of interrogation? She mentioned cooperation—

“I’m not asking questions because I know everything I need to know from you. You are not here for what you know, but what you can do.” Her hands curl into fists, making her leather gloves creak.

I stare at her, shock momentarily numbing my resolve to keep quiet. “Did you just—”

“—read your mind?” she asks, and her smug smile is like a liter of vinegar in my gut. “Did I? You tell me.”

“I’m not telling you anything until I see my family.” I try to sound confident, casual. But I can’t erase the memory of the empty apartment, their coats still hanging up.

“I will offer you the next best thing.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a necklace, dangling it before me by its chain. The clasp is broken and bits of black hair are snarled in the links, as if it were ripped from someone’s neck. I recognize the medallion spinning at the end of the chain: an emblem of Saint George slaying the dragon.

My mother’s necklace.

“It could be anyone’s.” I tilt my head away. “Lots of Russians pray to Saint George.”

She holds the necklace in front of my bound left hand. “But you can prove that it is hers. Go on—touch it.”

Does she mean what I think she does? The medallion spins back and forth, the image on one side flickering like a zoetrope. She can’t possibly mean my little trick, my market strategy. My funny extra sense that shows what I shouldn’t see. I stretch my fingers toward the pendant.

No, no, this is my secret. I can’t possibly share it with the KGB.

“What do you want from me?” I ask, my fear making the words soupy.

“You want to keep her safe, yes?” Her eyes narrow. “Your brother Yevgenni. I know he has some … mental concerns. His condition requires extra attention, I am told. I will need to justify such care to my superiors.”

“You can’t hold him in a cell. I need to be with him.” I strain at the bindings. “He needs to follow his routine—”

“Why do you think they are in prison cells?” She waves her hand before her face as if waving away the very words. Or her bad breath. “They are cared for. But you want this care to continue, do you not? And so I require something in return. Come now, Yulia.” She sighs. “You barter all the time. You know how this works.”

I grind my teeth together because they’re the only thing between her face and a wad of spit right now. This isn’t an interrogation—it’s a sales pitch. “What could you possibly want from me? I’m not a political criminal or—or any of those things you say my parents are. I’m just a girl.”

Her chapped lips pull back into something like a smile. “Yulia, but we both know that isn’t true. You aren’t
just
anything.”

I squirm away from that awful smile. My wrist brushes the chair arm, and there’s a candle-flicker memory of terrifying pain—but it is quickly, mercifully gone. “No. I’m just another person you’ve chosen to harass. You want to arrest me over things my parents have done? Careless things they might have said?” I roll my shoulders. A Russian shrug, a dismissal, a shifting of blame—
What do you want from me, this is just how things are
. “You’d have to imprison the whole country if that’s such a crime.”

Her gaze drifts away from me, and she stands perfectly still, like she’s watching a memory. “You see things sometimes,” she says, suddenly somber. “Things that can’t be seen.”

I stop squirming around.

“You think it’s your imagination, or a phantom déjà vu. Sometimes it appears to come true, but not enough to make you believe. Coincidence. Anything more would be searching for patterns where there are none,” she says.

I realize that my mouth is hanging open, and I hurriedly shut it. She can’t possibly know about that. I barely believe it myself.

“Do you ever think about these occurrences? Do you ever wonder if there is a power behind them?”

I shake my head. A word comes to me to describe my trick sometimes, but it seems like a castoff of our superstitious past. The realms of magic, religion, mysticism—things beyond the laws of science—died in a dank basement with the last emperor. Bullet to the brainpan—flatten these outdated beliefs with tank treads.

“
Psychic
. That’s the word you’re looking for,” she says.

I don’t like the way she’s looking at me: her smile is too genuine, too familiar. I jerk my head away and stare at the tile wall. I can see my reflection in it, but it’s blunted, all shadow and light.

“Touch the necklace—see for yourself that it’s your mother’s. I know you can do this.” She holds it out to me again, Saint George dancing on the end of the chain. “See through it to the past it contains.”

I curl my hands into fists; my nails burrow into my palms. She is guessing wildly, or making things up. “Who are you?” I ask.

“I represent the First Chief Directorate for the Committee of State Security—”

“Committee of State Security—”
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
— “KGB, I know that much,” I say.

She sighs—delicate, measured—and stuffs the necklace back into her pocket. “My name? Why don’t you try to see it for yourself?”

I look back at her with my eyebrows furrowed.

“It’s very simple. You look at me, and then you imagine stepping inside.”

“You—you want me to read your thoughts.” I squeeze my eyes shut before she can nod. “No. It’s not possible—”

“Yulia. I know all about your ability.” She chuckles. “You’re quite easy to read, yourself.”

That slams my heart into my throat. My eyes fly open like she’s thrown cold water on me. “You can’t really mean—”

“You have a skill. Others, like me, have similar skills—but none quite like yours. So you will work for me, and I will help you refine it.” This time when she smiles, the patient motherly look is completely gone, and all that’s left are her cold, animal teeth bared at me in dominance. “Otherwise, as you know—we have ways of dealing with people who commit crimes against the State.”

CHAPTER 5

THE COVERED TRUCK BED SMELLS
like rotted cabbage and wilted lettuce. The soldier on the bench across from me holds an AK-47 across his lap, casually, like it is no more threatening than a walking cane; but his eyes are unlit matches, and his arms, his steady fingers, are full of energy waiting to be unleashed. He is potential; he is a threat. But when our knees bang together, I get a whiff of his thoughts—the kielbasa sandwich awaiting him for lunch and the nightclub dancer awaiting him for dinner. He isn’t plotting my execution just yet, and I mean to keep it that way.

My red-haired interrogator, Comrade Major Lyubov Grigorievna Kruzenko, says I’ll be living with six other teenaged children who are, she claims, like me. (I tried plucking her name from her mind, as she asked, but she was sitting across the room from me. I heard nothing save anguished cries muffled through concrete.) She is our instructor as psychic spies. She drilled me for two hours in the interrogation room until I could read her thoughts without direct contact, her face looming directly before mine with a thin, too-satisfied grin. As our instructor she’ll help us develop our skills to eventually work for the KGB as psychic spies. Classes, field trips, meals—she makes it sound like the Komsomol summer camps I attended as a little girl, but I think of the Siberian gulags instead—the life-sentence permafrost prisons. For there is a steep price to pay if I disobey; I must play along to keep Mama and Zhenya safe.

But no one can bend the rules quite like me.

The truck takes a sharp turn and slows to a stop. Someone unlatches the back for us. The soldier stands, hunched over, and prods me with the butt of his rifle. I shoot him a frosty look. We hop down into a bland, pathetic courtyard overrun with weeds and surrounded by high concrete walls. Razor wire frosts the top of the walls, softened by a fine dusting of snow.

I try to gauge the walls’ height. The razor wire doesn’t scare me, not if I’m bundled up for winter already. A few cuts and scrapes. The blood trail I’d leave behind could be a problem. I scan the courtyard, but it’s thick with armed guards.

Careful, Yulia. Your mind isn’t a safe hiding place anymore. I push down thoughts of escape as Major Kruzenko marches our way.

“Come, come,” she calls to me, holding out her hand like I’m a schoolgirl who needs to be herded everywhere. I wrap my arms around my chest—the scratchy white blouse, sweater, and wool skirt she gave me aren’t nearly warm enough for late September—and stomp past her. We round the truck and I stare up. And up.

The building is an old Georgian-style mansion—the sort that once housed princes and countesses, those long-extinct fairy-tale creatures. The walls are robin’s-egg blue, though the plaster has chipped in places to show its gray flesh. White stones scale the corners and windows; the slate roof billows and peaks over three stories. Rusty water stains trail from window corners like tears, and cracks spider up the façade. Someone has taken a chisel and hammer to the frontispiece above the entryway, marring the old Romanov seal of a two-headed eagle—the symbol of the imperial family before the Communist Party took over.

“The house is yours to roam.” Major Kruzenko opens the front door. No lock, no electronic callbox, just a heavy wooden door, its carved face worn smooth. It creaks when it opens—not a good escape route. “Your room is on the third floor, with the other girls. Take some time to get acquainted with everyone. We’ll start our lessons for the day soon.”

The stench of mold overwhelms me as we enter the dark foyer. A chandelier hangs overhead, but it’s been stripped of its crystals; only half of the fake candles screwed into its sockets are lit, and all are capped in dust. Wood planks squeal and shift beneath us. The grand staircase ascends into darkness, its marble steps sagging in the center, worn down by decades of feet.

“Yeah, it’s a shithole.”

I whirl to my right. A blond boy leans against a nearby doorway, watching me like he might watch a pigeon at the park: with bored indifference. Then he hoists his head high, showing off his chiseled everyman face. I know it from countless Stalin-era murals, the kinds slathered across Moscow as tribute to the Communist state: muscle-bound factory workers with a perfect curl of hair in the center of their foreheads and chins that could hammer rivets into place. My gut does a quick gymnast tumble, and I don’t even
like
blonds.

“Never hurts to try.” He laughs to himself.

I stare at him. “Try what?”

Major Kruzenko cuts him off before he can answer. “Sergei, since you are here, would you please show Yulia Andreevna around before class?”

“Sure.” He shoves off the doorway with his foot and stretches to his full height. He’s a beast. Hulking shoulders, thighs like tree trunks—and it’s all muscle, over two meters of it. “Hockey,” he says, casting a glance at me over his shoulder. “I was going to play for Spartak before…” His gaze slides toward Major Kruzenko, and he trails off.

“Sergei Antonovich!” Major Kruzenko’s voice is piercing as icicles. “Stop reading the poor girl’s mind.”

My cheeks instantly flush. I can’t let my thoughts stray for a moment here. But the more I look at Sergei, the more I’m compelled to think everything about him that I wouldn’t want him to hear me think. Horrible things that I
wouldn’t
think otherwise, if I weren’t worried about him overhearing—

“It’s all right.” He smiles at me, and it feels like the sun’s rays slipping around dense clouds. The sun? I’m comparing some smug boy’s grin to the sun?
Bozhe moi
, Yulia. “The less you want to think of something, the harder it becomes to think of anything else.”

“Wonderful,” I mutter.

“It’ll get better.” He leads me through the archway. “First stop: our extensive library.”

Near-empty bookshelves grin back at us like a toothless old babushka. “I thought we’re taking classes here?” I glance at a few of the titles—all Leninist-Marxist political theory, economic dissertations proving the perfectness of the Communist system, historical accounts of the Great Patriotic War against fascist Germany (Uncle Stalin did not believe “World War II” adequately described our quest for revenge). The bookshelves are hairy with dust.

Sergei shrugs. “It’s not that sort of school.”

“Then what sort of school is it?” I try to match his lazy half-smile, but it feels wrong, like a too-tight boot.

“Spycraft, mostly.” He looks away from me. “We’re training to join the psychic operations wing of the KGB. We use our skills to monitor the Americans and hunt down traitors.”

Like me
, I think.

“I’m a remote viewer, myself. I can see inside places without going to them. I’ve never met someone with your particular power. Reading thoughts and memories through touch?”

“A lot of good it did me,” I say. But maybe I can turn it to my advantage still. If I can find out where Mama and Zhenya are being kept …

“I suggest you take it easy,” Sergei says, though I’m not sure if he’s answering my thoughts or not.
Bozhe moi
. It hurts my head to contemplate it. “Hey, Boris,” he adds, to the lanky uniformed man in the corner of the room. I hadn’t even noticed him. Boris makes no acknowledgment, but his eyes follow Sergei, and as we approach another doorway, Boris glides along behind us. “He’s my pet spider,” Sergei explains. “Anytime I think I’m alone, he comes spinning down on his web.”

“Do we all have—er, pet spiders?” And can they read minds as well? Have they heard me thinking about escape? My chest tightens.

Sergei chuckles. “You’ll have one you know by name. It’s the ones they change around you have to watch out for. Right, Boris?”

Boris grimaces and positions himself in the doorway.