Sekret (9 page)

“Much better. See if you can press a little further while holding the deepest memories at bay.”

Whispers stir around my feet like fog as I wade into the frosty lake of thoughts. The fog thickens, and the water chills; memories fly past me, swarming now, on insect’s wings. Nasty thoughts, happy ones, thoughts that no one would dare to speak. Anastasia hears them all. They soak into her skin. She can’t get rid of them; she can’t shake them away. I try to dispel the fog and swat the insects, but more keep coming. They are full of secrets; she’s drowning in their pain and selfishness. A man—a boy?—tries to wipe them clean, but it’s a sponge trying to soak up the sea. An ocean of the other voices’ inner worlds, smothering, crushing, heavy. Her skin’s too tight with their secrets. She needs to slice it open, pour them out. I see it, and like her, I just long to
forget
 …

“Easier when you show some restraint, isn’t it?” Kruzenko says.

I set the bear on the desk, far enough away from me that I can no longer see or hear its memories. “She was overwhelmed by all the thoughts she heard.”

Kruzenko nods. “Now go deeper.”

I take a deep breath and gather the bear into my arms. Anastasia’s memories hum through the air. I know how she feels when she’s going mad with the voices, when the psychic electricity turns her inside out. I see the razor glinting under dank bathroom lights. I don’t need to watch it slice her veins open. “I can’t.” I’m already bracing for Kruzenko’s slap.

But none comes. She collects the bear and places it back inside a desk drawer.

“You will have to accept all aspects of your power someday,” she says, leaning against the desk. “You can’t be afraid. You must strengthen your shield, too. You take emotions in without pushing them out. Do not try to be an empath—one who shares the feelings of others. You’ll torment yourself that way.”

I work one thumbnail beneath the other. I can’t watch that razor. I can’t listen to Anastasia’s head full of whispers or see the dark eyes that track her every move. “How did she get this way?” I ask. Surely our powers alone can’t do this to a person. Is this the exception, the abnormality? Or is madness the usual path—our inevitable fate?

“She thought she could cultivate her powers on her own, without our assistance. She hungered for more and more, when she wasn’t ready. This is the fate of all of those who do not learn control. She did not listen to our rules.” Kruzenko holds her hand out to usher me out the door. “She fought against our teachings, and it drove her mad.”

CHAPTER 11

WE START OUR
first real operation with one of Larissa’s visions: Red Square, a specific date, a member of the
Veter 1
engineering team. Too many possibilities, she claims, to pinpoint the exact member. Then Misha and Ivan confirm her vision on a trip to the Academy of Interplanetary Sciences. There’s a traitor in the team’s ranks. He or she is plotting to smuggle secret rocket designs for the
Veter 1
out of the academy and deliver them to a waiting American spy in Red Square. But Misha and Ivan can’t get close enough to identify the traitor. Under their cover as a school tour, they have to keep their distance, the thoughts of the
Veter 1
team members blurring through the heavy secure doors like snowflakes melting into a single drift.

Now it is my turn to put my skills to use. My first time out of the mansion in the month that I’ve been there, and I can’t be more relieved. While the others edged us closer to the
Veter
conspiracy, Kruzenko’s been choking me with KGB training manuals. Leave it to the KGB to make even spycraft read as dull as economic dissertations, and anyway, the manuals are ill-suited for our particular type of work. Psychics don’t need complicated routes to lose a pursuer, not when they can read the pursuer’s mind. And it’s not hard to tell an asset is lying when their fear of not being believed is woven through their thoughts.

So I am sent to wander Red Square, that massive pool of people and noise in the Kremlin’s shadow, in hopes of feeling—something. A fresh memory, trailed behind our traitor like a spelunker’s cord. An overwhelming sense of wrongness, of betrayal. I will not be alone, of course. I have a pet spider of my own now, Pavel—ox-shouldered, with a grim reaper face. I suspect there will be others anchored through the crowd. But they are also sending Sergei with me, for reasons unexplained. He won’t be using his remote viewing powers—Masha will cover that from back at the mansion—and his skill at reading the average person’s mind isn’t much better than mine when I’m not touching them. I suspect it has more to do with the smug little grin that wedges onto Kruzenko’s lips when I listen to
The Promise
, Sergei’s favorite radio drama, with him in the evenings.

Two guards—rifles in hand, naturally—swing open the door to the van. With late autumn sunlight glaring down on us, I stagger out of the van behind Sergei, cupping my hand over my eyes so I can see, and my breath falters a little. We’re at the bottom of Red Square, staring up the spiraling, swimming slope of cobblestones. The high-walled Kremlin fortress bounds us on the left, while the white filigree Universal Store—a grandiose shopping arcade, a memorial to our indulgent Imperialist days—lines our right. Over the horizon are the Easter-egg turrets of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the jagged ziggurat of Vladimir Lenin’s crypt, where he lies stuffed with formaldehyde and wax, preserved and displayed in glass like our saints of old.

And in between it all: thousands upon thousands of people, all their thoughts ready to crash and break upon us like waves, drowning us in their unfiltered, uncensored monologues.

“Well,” Sergei says, turning up the collar on his wool coat, “where should we begin?”

“If you were planning to commit treason, where would you go?” I reply.

He strokes his chin, feigning deep thought. “Probably not Lenin’s tomb. That might be in poor taste.”

I smile despite myself. “Or maybe that’s what they’re hoping we’d think.”

Sergei looks me over, some of the brightness ebbing from his grin. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” He nudges me with his elbow. “Don’t be. You know how to stay in control of your power.”

“Not like this,” I say. But it’s not just the crowds. I want to perform well—convince Kruzenko and Rostov that I deserve to see my family. I just wish I didn’t have to destroy someone else’s life to do it. Someone else’s attempt to stand against the Party. I watch Sergei through the corner of my eye, wondering if he carries this same sense of guilt—if he helped them track me down.

Old women hobble past us with anemic bread loaves and browning lettuce clutched to their chests. Their pantyhose sag around bloated ankles; their scarves are threadbare and frayed. They smell like beets, like the fallen bits of food that cling to the range and burn when it’s turned on again. But then they brush against me.

Summers—they think of summers in the wheat fields, when they were young girls kissing their beaux, and praying before gilded icons of the Romanov emperors and the Holy Mother. They don’t like to think of how things are now, fifty years later, but they must sometimes; one worries about whether her grandson’s boots will last him for the winter before he outgrows them, and prays (very quietly, without a bowed head or folded hands) his ration comes up in time.

The men are few. They are the ones left behind by the Great Patriotic War, whether by cowardice, fate, or dumb luck. They don discolored furry hats, and are much heavier with their worries. They try to store those thoughts in vodka, pickling and preserving them like Lenin, but I touch their arms—I know what they fear. Marching boots on the stairwell in the middle of the night. Black vans with no headlights. Jail cells. Wetting themselves. And the endless cold, white cold of Siberian prisons, if they’re lucky enough to survive.

“Anything?” Sergei asks, watching me with a playful grin. I shake my head and plunge ahead of him.

I hold my hands at my sides, fingers splayed, trying to touch everyone who passes me. I’m like a gypsy thief, but instead of pickpocketing, I’m snatching up thoughts. Hopes and loves and hates and fears and sorrows and blessings and curses and prayers—it’s churning, it’s thrilling, it’s taking over
me
.

But there are only tiny acts of defiance around me: black market traders, ration swappers, resentment of the whole Soviet system shuttered away. Nothing as drastic as what the
Veter
team member intends.

Pavel shoves through the crowd and snatches me by the arm. He doesn’t say anything, but I hear him thinking; he believes I’m trying to run. “I’m here,” I say, yanking my arm free—though I don’t believe I could if he didn’t let me—and march determinedly through the crowd.

Sergei jogs up to me. “Trying to lose me?”

“Not just yet,” I say. “You haven’t told me what happened on
The Promise
last night while I was practicing with Kruzenko.”

He laughs, big and brassy. “Ahh, so that’s why you put up with me. Well, Grigorii was taking the night train out of Leningrad, right? Only Natasha woke up and realized he was gone…”

Pavel hovers behind us as we push toward the northern end of Red Square, watched over by the red crenellated historical museum. I’m still coming up empty-handed; no spies leap out of the crackle and hum of workers around us. But if I can’t bring back a prize for the KGB, then at least I can conduct an exercise of my own.

Hypothesis: Our guards are not psychics themselves.

Experiment: I let down my Shostakovich shield as Sergei chatters on. I feel exposed without it. Kruzenko was right; it really does become a basic brain function. No matter. I steer toward the pink-and-green confection of a church at the northeast corner of the square. I concentrate all my thoughts on an imaginary tunnel leading out of there, on ditching them in the crypts and slamming the gate closed between us.

Result: Sergei’s narrative dissipates in a puff of his breath and he tilts his head. “Yulia, what are…” I hold up one finger to silence him and peer over my shoulder toward Pavel. He’s close on our heels, but nothing in his granite face indicates suspicion—more than normal, anyway. I turn back from the church as Shostakovich rushes up around me.

Conclusion: Further testing required without Sergei second-guessing me.

“I thought you were through with that,” Sergei mutters, turned away from Pavel. He speaks down toward his chest so only I can hear.

I shake my head. I don’t owe him an explanation, but I don’t like the dull glaze to his eyes. Like I’ve betrayed him somehow. “It isn’t what you think.”

My fingertips trail the ridge of a concrete barrier. If I were selling secrets to Russia’s enemies, how would I feel? What would I be thinking? Fear, certainly. But determination, as well. Hope—for I would feel there was some good to be gained by my act, or why go to the trouble? Why else do traitors risk their lives, their minds?

I stop so suddenly that two old ladies crash into me and shuffle off, muttering curses that only God is meant to hear. Then a woman’s voice prickles at me, looping and looping on itself in a hysterical chant.

I have to find them. Why can’t I find them? He said they’d come for me!

I press deeper into the echoing memory and see a woman, lugging a leather case at her side. I can’t focus on her face—it shudders and warps, like there’s something buzzing under the surface—but she has to be who we’re searching for. I can’t explain the certainty that settles like a stone in my gut, but I know it’s her. Who is she looking for? The spies she’s selling secrets to? Something in her frantic thoughts hints that there’s more to the exchange.

“This way.” We weave back in the direction of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Its pastel onion domes are flaking, washed out from the northern sun’s angled stare. Scaffolding clothes the church’s lower portion, though no workers climb around on the rig. It’s like a censor blacking out a past we’re not supposed to see.

We move alongside the Universal Store’s façade, each column shedding a fine powder of the woman’s voice. I see her in fragments, like the shattered tiles in a mosaic. Blond hair, ghostly eyes. She moves like a marionette, too frail to direct herself, guided instead by her obsessive chant.

Hypothesis: There is more to our hunt for scientist traitors than Rostov has said.

Experiment: I must find this woman. If not for Rostov, then for myself.

Sergei trudges beside me, hands buried deep in his coat pockets. “I just thought you were coming around,” he says.
Bozhe moi
, is he still hung up on this? “It’s not a bad life we have. And it’ll get even better once we’re full members of the KGB.”

“Are you joking? We’re
prisoners
. How is that not a bad life?”

“You would rather live in a concrete apartment cell like these people?” He waves his hand around the square. “We’re prisoners because they can’t trust us yet. It won’t always be that way.”

I nestle into the flowery eaves of the Universal Store’s entrance and press my fingertips into the carved stone grooves. She was headed this way—I have to find her again. Memories tumble upon memories, amplifying like waves, coiling up like genetic code. Airplanes soaring overhead as boots strike the cobblestones in unison—the Red Army on display. An American pilot dragged from his plane and paraded across Red Square. Women sobbing as they bid their soldiers farewell. The crowds roil in the sea of changing fashions, changing leaders, changing governments. Drab worker’s garb and frothy silk gowns and fur coats. Stalin screaming at a podium; Lenin pacing the stage with predatory grace. The last Romanov emperor, stiff-backed and trembling. It’s harder and harder to part the smoke. The woman has to be buried in here, somewhere—

“Yulia!” Sergei grips my shoulders, shaking me from the past. “What’s wrong with you?”

My hand’s twitching to some phantom rhythm. Decades and decades pump through my veins. But something’s wrong—they’re rattling through me, tinged in shrill, ear-piercing noise. It reminds me of the sonic churn around Rostov. I try to focus on Sergei, but he appears only in stuttering images. The square shifts around me.