Sekret (6 page)

“Please—not today.” I will endure their demonstrations, but it’s all too much. Valentin’s words are a storm within my skull. What more does he know? Why shouldn’t I run?

Her low heels click on the wood as she marches toward me. She rears back. Strikes me across the cheek with a hot, fearsome crack. The sound of the slap scares me more than the slap itself; I hear it ringing in my skull. “You will join us at the front.”

Pain burns on my cheek, as though I’ve been scalded, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of seeing me rub the wound. “No,” I say.

Kruzenko lifts her head to catch the attention of a guard in the back. “Vasily. Place a call to the colonel.” Larissa whimpers at the mention of a colonel. “Tell him that the Chernins are to be transferred.”

Death would be a mercy
, Sergei’s voice echoes in my head. It is not a whispery psychic thought, but a physical presence, echoing against my thoughts over and over, demanding to be heard.

I spring to my feet. “No! Leave them alone.” I’m shaking; my mouth tastes like ash. Mama’s tired face flashes in front of my eyes. The spider called Vasily looks from Kruzenko to me. “I’ll do it,” I say. “But please—”

“The telephone call will not be necessary.” Kruzenko walks back to Sergei and Masha, and Vasily retreats into his shadows. My heart is still racing; I’m too terrified to move. Is that all it takes to lose my grip on Mama and Zhenya? Only a few words of disobedience? “Quickly, quickly, Maria and Sergei are already growing tired.”

Valentin is watching me as I move to the front of the room, but I can’t look back at him. My stinging cheek is punishment enough without his skewering gaze. Kruzenko drags a third chair next to Sergei and motions for me to sit. “Take Sergei’s hand. I want you to practice watching the scene through someone else’s eyes. You won’t have to call on your own abilities for this part.”

Sergei grins at me—crookedly, but he’s too clever not to know he’s got such an endearing crooked grin. He’s even missing a front tooth. How hockey of him. I tremble as we join hands.

It’s like a jolt of electricity. A new room unfolds before me with wooden floors, elegant lighting sconces, high-backed dining booths. But there are gaps in the room—foggy, blurred segments where there are sometimes chairs or windows, but sometimes not.

“There will always be uncertainties in a viewing, especially with inexperienced viewers like Masha and Sergei,” Kruzenko says. “Just do the best you can.”

A table has been abandoned by the window, a wadded-up napkin dumped into a bowl of soup. Someone has fled here in a hurry. Tucked into Masha’s famous blue drapes is a leather attaché case.

“Once you are stronger, you will be able to use your powers inside their vision to remotely gather information from the attaché,” Kruzenko says. “For now, though, I have a prop for you to work with.”

She places the case in my lap. I run my fingers over the stiff, shiny leather. It still smells of the tannery.

“Trace the spy’s footsteps. Show us where he’s been.”

I plunge into the case’s memories.

A man in oversized sunglasses with a ridiculous, false curlicue mustache sets down the attaché by his table. This is the KGB’s impression of an American secret agent? No matter. I need to go further back. My fingers press deeper into the leather. He runs backward out of the Ukraina Hotel, backward down the street, on the Metro, to the train station, the ticket counter—there. He is buying a ticket. What did the ticket girl say?

“Prague—he’s bought a one-way ticket to Prague.”

But I keep going. I follow him back to the KGB station where he prepares for our training exercise. I see the KGB’s costumers dressing him up like a movie star, smoking their cigarettes, whispering under their breath about how stupid the whole program is. The mighty state swears there is no god, no superstition, no supernatural world, they murmur, this conceit of special powers is pure foolishness.

“Prague is correct. Well done, Yulia Andreevna.”

I open my eyes; find myself under the needle of Valentin’s gaze. “See what memories you can find on the documents,” he says, his voice thick. I narrow my eyes at him, trying to read his expression. What’s his game here?

Kruzenko lifts an eyebrow. “Yes, excellent idea, Valentin. Give it a try.”

I reach into the attaché case and yank the documents out. Big red Russian letters stamped on the front declare them SEKRET. The cover has been stamped three times, and each subsequent page twice—just in case I missed it before. I leaf through the pages. There’s text here, something about currency regulation, manufacturing output, Soviet economic supremacy, but every paragraph bears the noose of classification and, much smaller than the stamp, “for training purposes only.” I run my fingers across the ink, smudging it, so I can see what the paper sees.

A tiny gasp escapes me, completely unbidden, as the document overwhelms me with a sense of hate.

“Focus,” Kruzenko barks, but her voice comes from outside, from down the street, from a
Sputnik
satellite in space. “You don’t have to dig so deep.”

But I can’t control it. The memories are a hand reaching from the water, pulling me down. I’m screaming, I’m pulling away, but their dead eyes are locked onto mine and they won’t let go until I’m drowning with them.

Hatred. A man stands over the documents—gaunt to a degree that only Russian men can be, as though his whole face hangs on the two pegs of his cheekbones. His jawline is sharp as a scar, and his eyes are guarded deep within his skull. His lips, chapped and thin, curl back as he puts together this false little case of documents, this pathetic training exercise, this farcical project. What do little children know of spy games, of the real power of the mind? They are too undisciplined. They are too free. Obedient minds, not rebellious teens, are needed to run the program, the Soviet Union. I will make the necessary changes when I’m in charge, when Antonina breaks, when their minds belong to me—

Antonina.
The memory falls into the background, leaving this one word in my trembling grasp.

“Well?” Major Kruzenko rests her hand on my shoulder, and cool gypsy music drifts between us. My mind snaps out of the false document, the false training exercise, the false little window into the KGB’s idea of perfectly controlling the populace through psychic spies. “What did you see?”

“It’s—it’s nothing. A secretary preparing the documents.” I shake her off and stand, staring right at Valentin.

Why did you want me to see this man?
I ask him, though I don’t know if he can hear.
Why does he want our minds for his own? Why does he need to break Antonina for his plans to succeed?

And because I can’t bear to let anyone else know, I swallow the next thought: Antonina is my mother’s name.

CHAPTER 8

MASHA THROWS OPEN THE DOOR
to our dormitory and glowers at me. “Pick a bed,” she says. “Away from mine.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“I saw you eyeing the silverware at tea. You’re like all the other ration rats—always scouting for trinkets you can trade or hoard.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t want you near my things.”

I narrow my eyes. I’d pocketed a knife for prying open the door to Major Kruzenko’s office, in hopes I might find a clue as to where my family is being kept. Not that it’s any of Masha’s business—or the two spider-guards hovering in the doorway, watching our every move. The
Babi Yar
music, my chosen shield, bellows in my head to cover up my anger.

The girls’ dormitory was once two rooms—a sitting room and a bedroom, maybe, for a single countess—whose dividing wall was torn out long ago. Its extraction point stands bare, a gouge in the wall, exposing wooden bones. The walls may have once been painted pale green, but are now a dingy gray. Beyond the windows, I can see only treetops; the sound of the branches shushing in the wind fills the held-breath silence of the room.

There are ten beds in two rows, metal-framed and barely more than cots, like the hospital pictures we see from the Great Patriotic War. What must be Masha’s and Larissa’s cots are claimed at opposite corners of the room, but everything else is empty, with sheets piled at the foot of the skimpy mattresses. The whole mansion seems designed for a much larger group.

I march down the aisle to the middle bed on Larissa’s row, my footsteps echoing. I barely know her at all, but she doesn’t offend me nearly as much as Masha.
It’s only for a few nights,
I tell myself,
until I can find out where Mama is.
I reach for the folded sheets, coated with a thin film of dust.

“Wait!” they both shout in unison, but I’m already leaning against the bed frame.

Fever runs up one leg and down the other; needles pin my thoughts in place like captured butterflies. It’s like an electrical current arcing across my skin, full of anger, razor blades, panic, dark eyes, pain—

I jump back from the frame and fight to fill my lungs with air that won’t come.

“That was … Anastasia’s bed,” Larissa says, speaking to the floor.

Masha nods, face drained of her usual smugness. “You’d better take another one.”

I grit my teeth. Maybe if I clench them hard enough, it’ll kill the images of blood and electricity. “And what happened to Anastasia?” I ask, but Larissa fiddles with a strand of blond hair while Masha locks up all her belongings in the trunk at the foot of her bed.

“Fine. Forget I asked.” I unfold the sheets on the opposite bed, in Masha’s row. My eyes are on the mattress, but in my peripheral vision, Masha and Larissa exchange a look. Even I can hear their dueling musical barriers swelling to fend me off: a schmaltzy Vladimir Vysotsky fool-the-censor ballad for Larissa and the blurty, chest-puffing national anthem for Masha.

“She was here until a few months ago,” Masha finally says. “She … wasn’t cut out for our work.”

“You mean she went crazy,” Larissa says. “What?” she hisses at Masha, who gives her a dirty look. “It’s
true
.”

I tuck in the sheets, hospital-corner style, learned from years of helping Mama. “Does that happen a lot?”

“Not as often as you’d think,” Larissa says. Then she moves up my ladder of regard when she looks sideways at Masha and adds, “Only to the ones who try too hard.”

“Girls.” One of the guards steps forward. “It is better not to worry our new friend this way.” His words take on an edge. “You should talk of other things.”

“Shut up, Lev.” Masha says it so casually that even Lev doesn’t know how to react. His puffy lips hang open for a moment before he falls back to the doorway. If her parents are the high-ranking Party officials I suspect they are, maybe Masha can get away with such insolence, but I’ll need to be far more subtle. “It depends on your genetic constitution,” Masha continues, strutting down the aisle in time with the national anthem shield billowing around her. “If you’re strong enough, come from good stock, you’ll have nothing to fear.”

“Good stock?” I laugh. “What are we, cattle?”

They exchange another look over my head.

“Come on. It’s obvious there are supposed to be a lot more of us here.” I flop onto my bed and sneeze as the cloud of dust hits me. “Did they all go crazy?”

“Of course not!” Masha’s anthem swells. “Most of the KGB’s psychics are like my parents—highly decorated psychological spies who served the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War. They stopped Hitler’s fascist forces from taking Leningrad by guiding our supply trucks into the city when it was under siege.” She runs her hand along the metal frame of my cot, and I’m sure the humming her touch leaves behind is intentional. “Their children, like Misha and I, have been monitored from birth.”

“Sounds like fun,” I say. My father never fought in the Great Patriotic War—one of the many privileges we enjoyed in our former life. He stayed shielded in his antiseptic lab, flirting with Mama, enjoying the Party life.

“So most of us are the children of these spies, or other documented psychics’ children. Their powers show up at around eight or nine, and they’re carefully monitored until they’re our age—old enough to be trained. Then there are wildlings, like Larissa, whose powers show up later,” Masha says. “Someone got suspicious about her predictions that always turned out true. They reported her to the KGB, and they brought her in once they discovered what she was.”

Larissa lets her hair fall over her face to hide her crimson cheeks, as if she’s still ashamed at being found out. I grimace. I hadn’t discovered my own powers until the day we moved in with Aunt Nadia. She’d hugged me tight and told me out loud that she would do whatever it took to protect us, but I heard doubt and disgust running through her mind. “So I guess I’m a wildling,” I say.

Masha pauses as the national anthem builds back up around her thoughts. Then she forces her sweetest spun-sugar grin to her lips and tilts her head just so, a poster girl for the Komsomol youth. “I guess you are,” she says.

But Masha’s made a mistake. She may have elite KGB spy training in her blood, but she has not learned how to survive—not like a “ration rat” like me. I don’t need to read her mind to see the signs that she’s lying. Shostakovich hammers around me. Liar. Liar. The word screams through my thoughts, screeches across the violins.

But what is she lying about—and why?

“Girls?” Major Kruzenko’s voice floats upstairs. “Come downstairs, it’s time for dinner!”

A cold fist grips my heart as I follow Masha and Larissa down the staircase, two guards sauntering along behind us. What does Masha know about me that I don’t? I never told Mama or anyone else about my ability—the KGB can’t possibly have been monitoring us for years, or they would have arrested us before now. But I never noticed any sort of ability when I was eight or nine, when Masha said the “legacy” psychics discovered theirs. My parents were doctors—glorified teachers, really—not psychic spies. They spent their days at the clinic training children with mental disorders to become just another cog in the Soviet machine. Surely they never noticed that I—

I crash into someone at the base of the stairs. Valentin looks down at me, his burning eyes wrenched open wide. But I barely see them—I’m tangled in the sight I saw when we collided, vivid even through his musical shield.