Sekret (14 page)

My nails bite into the windowsill. Natalya’s memories flood past me—receiving the apartment as a gift for her work on the
Sputnik
satellite designs, lovers past, endless dinner parties with other Party elite—but I don’t care, I don’t care, I just need a way out.

Valentin moves beside me, carefully, and his hand hovers above mine.
I know what you’re going through. Please—let me show you.
A sad smile traces his lips.
I know you won’t believe me any other way.

I lower my eyes from his.
Fine.

His grasp is firm, but not hateful or controlling like Rostov’s. I sink through his music until Natalya’s room is completely washed away.

I’m standing in Valentin’s skin, under the rusted abutment of a bridge, watching the Moskva River flow past. Starlight twinkles in its choppy waters. He is—I am—breathing furiously, made all the more difficult for the desperate need to stay silent. My hands—I feel Valentin’s hands as if they were my own—sting from razor wire’s bite, and blood smears the front of my trousers where I’ve tried to wipe it away. But my trail is clean. Between the psychic eraser in my head and the rushing water that carried me a kilometer downstream before I crossed to the other bank, not even Rostov could trace me.

My heart rate slows. The Moskva River water evaporating off of me leaves raised gooseflesh in its wake. Overhead, the Metro cars chatter as they race across the bridge, and gravel cascades around me.

Safe. I am almost safe. All I need is a soft, simple mind—one of Father’s old friends, perhaps—to draw up the documents I need.

The train fades, but the sound of gravel continues. It crunches under heavy feet. My heart lurches as blood races through my veins. They can’t have found me. Not even Rostov is so clever. But then my thoughts are ripped away, my shield disintegrated. It’s not Rostov—he can split open my skull, sure, but he doesn’t suck me dry this way, soaking up all my energy. And yet my face feels numb despite the late summer swelter. Every silent step takes exponentially more strength.

Ahead of me the gruesome curve of a jaw catches the moonlight. It’s the man, the thing, or whatever it is that’s sapping me away. I am hunted. I am prey who thought myself free, and instead I’ve hidden right in a trap. The man’s massive fist opens, sucking away the last warmth from my bones as everything fades—

Valentin pries his own hand away, like it’s some wicked lure that must be slid carefully from my flesh, and I stagger out of his memory and back into the chaotic room, only a few seconds after the memory began. His eyes are pure black behind his glasses. No, only a trick of the light. But I’m afraid of him, of this darkness he collects like I collect memories. He stares down, haunted like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—like he’s just hacked an old woman to bits.

I let go of the windowsill.
Tell me what happened, Valentin.

Another time.

Who is this man?

Valentin’s music shifts, like a mental clearing of the throat.
You should check the folders on the coffee table.
He strides across the bedroom at a steady clip and vanishes back into the living room—as if the horrible thoughts he’s shown me never happened. But even now I see that hand sucking away at my life.

There has to be more.
I sweep through the room again, tossing clothing aside without bothering to replace it where we found it. Dull daily routines. Static emptiness. She met with the fedora man in the lobby downstairs without the scrubber around. Surely she’s done it once more. I’m growing heavier and heavier with all the emotions I’m soaking up, Natalya’s frenzy overflowing.

Valentin watches me with infuriating calm.
You draw up so many emotions and memories,
he thinks.
Don’t you ever push them away?

I follow him back to the living room and run my fingers over everything. I try not to linger on the folders with their tabs clipped off; I want it to look like I’m examining each thing in turn, from the wadded tissues to the old issues of
Pravda
.

But it’s the folders that have my interest. I slip my thumbnail against their edges, seeing a memory of the tabs stamped with a big red SEKRET. Natalya shoves documents into them at her office. Her thoughts are wound too tight; her mental clock is running fast. She has to buy her way out.

But I don’t see anything more about the American team.

I knock the folder off the table, making it look like an accident, but I press deeper into the memories as I put it back. My heart leaps into my throat. What I see is not the documents she smuggled out of the laboratory. Instead there are dossiers. Black-and-white photographs, paper-clipped to typewritten fact sheets. The first photograph, I don’t recognize. But the next one—

Our guards are coming. Hurry,
Valentin says.

The next one is of me. It was taken on the street, when I was still free. I look two steps away from the grave,
bozhe moi.

I close the folder but slip my finger inside.

Natalya Gruzova sets the documents beside her on the park bench, and a man settles down beside her. Not the man in the fedora—this man has no face, no thoughts but a frenzied swarm of noise. The scrubber. He yanks her documents out of the folder and shoves them into his attaché while Natalya stares dead ahead.

“These are a good start,” the man says. His voice scrapes like metal on metal.

Natalya’s lips twitch. “I will bring you more. It takes time to get the necessary accesses—”

“Yes, I know. But I have an additional task for you.”

“Your boss didn’t mention anything else.” She laces her hands together, over and over. This conversation must have taken place before the one I saw in the lobby, when she confronted the fedora-ed man—this “boss”—about these extra demands.

He laughs, cruel and empty, then slips the dossiers into the folder. “When you bring me the next batch at Red Square, some of these people will be looking for you. Memorize their faces. Watch for them. Let me know when you see them.” He laughs again. “Let them fear us.”

I stumble out of the memory, vomit burning at the back of my throat. He
wants
us terrified.

The front door crashes open, and Lev and Pavel, our guards, spill into the parlor. “What’s taking so long?” Lev asks.

“Nothing.” Valentin shuffles backward. “We haven’t found much yet—”

“You’ve had plenty of time. Let’s go. Before that idiot doorman comes to his senses.”

They herd us toward the front door. I catch the wink of brass on the entry table where we left it, and my ration rat instincts kick in—my hand darts out, back into my pocket, too fast for even Sergei to see what I’ve grabbed. So I hope.

I admire Valentin for trying to escape, once. He must have craved it—the razor wire slicing through his hands, his beautiful, pianist hands, cannot lie. I know he thinks it’s safer on this side of the wall, and he may well be right.

But I can’t leave well enough alone. I have to approach the Americans—I have to at least try. Surely they would make a deal with me. Whatever this man’s reasons for wanting us scared, he has to be interested in what I can offer them. Like the games at the market—my information on the KGB’s psychic training program must be worth more than whatever else they have in mind.

It might even be worth helping me rescue Mama and Zhenya.

I reach back into my pocket for my gloves as we head outside, and permit myself a tiny smile as my fingers close around Natalya Gruzova’s spare key.

CHAPTER 17

THERE’S A TREMOR DEEP
within me all through our debriefing the next morning. It started in my shoulders and hands, but I had to bury it when I heard how my teacup rattled against its saucer. Masha glanced at me once, sharp—like she could hear my fear. Like the plan rattling around inside me had set me shaking.

But as she gives her report on their remote viewing, there’s no knowing glance or hint of deception. If she saw what I did, she’s hiding it well. Much better than I’ve seen her hide anything thus far—her pride isn’t fond of gathering dust. The safe bet is that I’m safe. It’ll have to be enough. The answers I need can’t wait.

After lunch, Sergei tugs on one of my braids as I’m about to head upstairs. “Hey. Yul.” He’s wearing his dazzling grin and leaning back against the doorway, hands tucked behind him. “Look what I found.”

He holds up a record sleeve featuring a brooding, flinty-eyed Russian man with a woman hovering behind him, eyes heavily mascaraed.
The Promise
, reads the loopy lettering across the top. Then, in smaller letters:
The promise is only the beginning …

“It’s the very start of the series,” he says. “When they’re talking about their lives back in Yekaterinburg—this is it.”

I grin in spite of myself. “Larissa told me the first few episodes are the best.”

Sergei tweaks my braid again. “And tomorrow night, you shall find out.”

“What about tonight?”

Sergei rolls his shoulders, leaning back into the other room. “I’ve got some special training mission with Masha and Larissa. Trust me, I’d rather stay here, listening to radio dramas with you, but what can you do…”

I swallow hard, feeling that tremor rise up out of my bones once more. What can you do, indeed, with only a skeleton crew of guards for the night? With Rostov and Kruzenko gone, and half our team with them? With a brass key humming in my pocket, ready to unlock just the answers I need?

As soon as the door clangs shut that evening, I drag my duffel bag into the restroom and layer on half my wardrobe. Trousers under my skirt, three sweaters piled one over the other. As many socks as I can wear and still lace up my boots. The inner lining of my coat is heavy with military rations and pumpernickel bread.

Silence thickens the hallway, stagnant and heavy. I know Valentin, Ivan, and the guards are listening to the Dinamo hockey game on the radio. Now or never, Yulia. I take a deep breath of the moldy air and hope I won’t breathe it for much longer at all.

I head back to the walls that don’t quite add up, the mismatched rooms I’d founded during my night walk. A hallway near the kitchen and the two rooms off of it meet at odd angles. I can hear humming through the walls, a drone like electricity. The memories hum, too, but they’re lurking on the other side. On whatever’s in that hollow space.

I head to the basement in search of an entrance. Usually, our guards keep us out of here, but the skeleton crew doesn’t have the manpower. It isn’t until I reach the kitchen that I spot the trail—Rostov’s static carving a swath through history. What was he trying to erase?

I follow the path of scratched-out memories. The kitchen is dark, animated only with the purring industrial refrigerator. There’s a long range fit for cooking fifty meals at a time; a chain of baskets hangs stuffed with vegetables. One whole corner of the kitchen is an oven, floor to ceiling, wide enough for five to stand inside comfortably.

If our meals are prepared here, then the cooks must come in and out from somewhere else. But I’ve never seen them come and go. Where are they coming from?

The kicked-up trail of ash gives it away before the memories do. Footprints, hastily swept over, leading in and out of the oven. I duck my head and touch my gloved hand to the stone hearth, its chill permeating the wool. There’s a gap just inside the archway, so you wouldn’t notice it unless you’re looking from inside the oven. Only half a meter wide. I squeeze through and find a set of stairs that curves up and down.

Upward will likely only lead me back up through the mansion, through that initial mismatched wall I’d found. No use escaping off the roof. I’m not Valentin, with the brute strength to throw myself over the wall, or however he got up and over. Down it is.

The sweat building on my back chills as I descend the seemingly endless spiral stairs. For a good twenty feet or more, I’m submerged in complete darkness, but then electric sconces start to appear at regular intervals. They hum, industrial, immutable. Every few minutes, I hear a rumble deep below me, like the earth turning over in its sleep.

And without warning, the stairs stop before a metal door. No lock, no lettering. The lack of a lock raises the hair on the back of my neck; there must be some other form of security nearby. I steady myself with a deep breath, one laced with hard water and concrete dust, peel off my glove, and press my palm to the door.

A soldier strolls past the doorway on the other side, AK-47 in hand. I choke back a gasp. Before I can press deeper, the room quakes again. I press my ear to the door as wind rips through the room on the other side. A train—the brakes shriek against the rails as it pulls to a stop.

“Station Number 19,” a woman’s voice announces, muffled as if beneath water. “Ascending.”

What Metro line is this? All of the Metro stops are named, not numbered. The closest Metro station to the mansion should be Sparrow Hills, but that’s above ground, hanging over the Moskva River. The next stop would be University Station for Moscow State, but that’s too far southwest—I traveled straight down.

I press against the door again. The guard was walking away from the door, and his back should be to me now. Sure enough, he’s at the far end of the platform, and now he’s pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, his attention absorbed. The train humming on the tracks is only two cars long, and it’s covered in golden filigree, red stars, and swooping lines that radiate from boughs of wheat. This station is like the inverse of the plain cars and elaborate stations on the normal Metro lines.

This must be the Party-only secret line that Valentin mentioned.

The train’s doors slide shut, and with a roar, it rockets away. The soldier’s back is toward me, but I don’t have long. As the air vibrates from the departing train, I throw open the door, charge across the platform, and fling myself into the darkness of the train rails. The noise recedes just as my boots hit the gravel.

With one long crackle, the soldier strikes his match.