Sekret (17 page)

The goal of most eugenics programs is to eliminate unfavorable mutations, but some programs embrace them as welcome additions, much like dog breeders shaping a new breed.

Or turning a fox into a pet or a weapon
, I think.

There’s a commotion on the couch; Ivan hovers over Larissa, arms plunging around her, but she pushes him away. “Not now,” she murmurs, looking back at me.

Ivan sighs and gets up to crank the volume dial on the brand-new television set: Larissa’s reward for selling me out.
KVN
, Larissa’s favorite show, is too loud, making it hard for me to read. It’s an endless parade of bulbous Russian men performing lopsided comedy routines. All the jokes are safe, boring; the audience laughs at the ridiculous antics the performers get into while waiting in line for rations, but no one is laughing at the lines, the rations, the absurdity of our daily life. Ivan wheezes and chuckles along with the audience. The laughter crashes and swells in my head, like a wave sloshing back and forth. It emits an endless too-bright color display of teeth and throats rolling with laughter, and Ivan’s laughing with it, and the fact that they’re laughing only makes them laugh more—

A hand closes on my arm. “Yulia.” Larissa peeks up over the chair arm, watching me with wide blue eyes.

I narrow my eyes at her, though the look she’s giving me is an achingly good mirror of Zhenya’s when he knew he’d disappointed me in some way. “What do you want?”

Ivan laughs again at
KVN
; Larissa tugs at my wrist. “Let’s talk somewhere else.”

I let her guide me out of the living room and into our classroom, where Major Kruzenko has taped up photographs of all of Natalya Gruzova’s colleagues and friends on one side of a blackboard. Larissa flips the blackboard over and starts scratching out names on the reverse side: Chernina, Yulia Andreevna. Sorokhin, Valentin Borisovich. She adds the rest of our team members’ names, then lists out code names for John and Jane Does.

“The dossiers you saw in Gruzova’s apartment,” she explains. “I want to help you find them.”

“And who says I want your help?” I ask.

Larissa starts scribbling additional information in a grid: profession, address, last known location. “No one.” She shrugs. “But you won’t get far on your own.”

She passes me a stack of folders: Rostov’s typed reports on everything he recovered about the wildlings from interrogating Gruzova. They’re all around our age—fourteen to twenty. Young enough to be aware of their powers, but likely without any real mastery. Factory workers, a railway technician, polytechnical students—nothing high profile, just cogs in the Soviet machinery. Just remote enough that the KGB can’t find them and bring them in without our help.

Larissa twirls the piece of chalk between her fingers. “When I was ten, my math teacher held me after class. He was convinced I’d cheated on my test. I hadn’t—I just saw strange things happen when I wrote down answers. I could already see the teacher’s writing on the test, marking it correct or not.”

“So you reworked your answers until you got the right mark?” I ask.

“Yeah. I wasn’t the best student, so of course he was suspicious. He started lecturing me, but I found I knew the words he was about to say right before he said them. I started answering accusations he hadn’t yet made.” She gazes off, lips easing into a smile. “I’m sure it was his report that tipped off the KGB. I didn’t know well enough to hide what I was.”

I stare at the grid again. Factory workers. It’s far too broad. We’ll need a way to narrow it down. “You think these wildlings have probably slipped up, too.”

She nods. “Not enough to get brought in, but I’d bet there are
some
reports that could point us in the right direction. Let’s you and I figure out what we’re looking for, then we can present it to Kruzenko.”

“Good idea.” I smile—then stop myself. “I guess you’re pretty good at bringing people in.”

Her hand tightens around the chalk; I hear a soft snap. “I’m doing this to keep those wildlings from getting hurt. You know that, right?” She shakes her head. “It was the same for you.”

“Spare me.”

“Yulia. You don’t know what I saw.” Her gaze is hollowed out. “The American scrubber—he’s not like Rostov, ripping your thoughts out all at once. He’s corrosive. A slow poison. You don’t understand what I was saving you from. All I could taste was blood when I tried to see you going to him…”

Anger surges through me, but I’m haunted by Natalya Gruzova, her thoughts sputtering out as she tried to cling to sanity. I try to swallow down this constriction at my throat—this emotion at the crossroads of anger and relief. “We can’t live like this forever,” I say.

“No,” Larissa agrees. Far more readily than I’d expected. “But there’s got to be a better way than
that
.” She smiles. “That’s a puzzle for another day. Today, let’s see about keeping these wildlings from that fate.”

After a few hours poring over records and maps, we’ve compiled a list of possible wildling locations for Major Kruzenko to compare to neighborhood KGB post reports. I catch myself smiling at Larissa, laughing at her jokes, even discussing our upcoming operation at the Revolutionary Banquet. How easy it could be, for me to surrender to this life and accept my place in the machine.

If only I could forget the way the wind felt on my face in the Metro tunnels; the taste of possibility in the air.

CHAPTER 21

THAT NIGHT, I DREAM OF
my old life again, a strange lens skewing it like a memory I’d forgotten until now. Papa sits in a sterile room I’d never seen before—white, smelling of bleach and menthol, with an undercoat of stale cigarette smoke. He hunches over a soapstone countertop, jiggling one foot as he lets ashes tumble from his unsmoked cigarette. They land to the left of the ashtray, flecking the stack of charts before him marked SEKRET.

He swivels on his stool to face the two dark-haired children tussling over a ragged bunny doll on the floor. The scene isn’t familiar, but the bunny sparks my memory instantly—I’d had it from birth, but it vanished when I was nine. Papa told me I’d probably left it somewhere, but I never bought his excuse. Most likely, Mama had decided it had endured enough trauma for one lifetime and threw it out. In the dream, it looks on death’s doorstep.

“Sorry, Antonina,” Papa says to himself, watching us. The cigarette dangles precariously off his lower lip, held in place only by spit. “It stops here.”

He plucks the cigarette free and lowers it to the corner of the charts. It crackles at first, resistant; but soon the flames blossom across the paper’s edge. As orange laps at the page, I can see a name at the top of the charts:

CHERNINA, YULIA ANDREEVNA

CHAPTER 22

IT IS THE SEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
, the forty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace, shot up the royal family in a basement, declared all land to be state property, and promptly let millions of peasants starve to death when the new centralized government was unable to distribute food. (So the history Papa taught me goes—my schoolbooks tended to skip over the dying parts.) They also pushed the Russian calendar forward by twelve days, so we could emulate the Europeans we one day hoped to convert to communism, which is why we celebrate the October Revolution in November.

Secretary Khruschev has been shouting angrily on Red Square all day, punctuating his statements not with the thwack of his shoe on the podium (as he often does), but with artillery fire, which sounds as if it’s exploding directly over our mansion. Red Army Sukhoi fighter jets burst forth from the Moskva River on the hour, tearing through the sound barrier, and circle overhead before strafing Red Square to our north.

Masha and Misha are watching the live broadcast on television, but I grow bored with it once Ivan starts fighting with them for control of the dial. Larissa helps me lug the big electric samovar next to the door of the back deck, and we pour ourselves mug after mug of hot tea so we can watch the aerial show in person under the threat of fresh snow.

Finally, the time comes to prepare for the Communist Party celebration at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. There are actually seven official Revolutionary Banquets, and we are attending the third most prestigious gala, posing as honored Komsomol guests. Of course, we are actually on a mission. If Gruzova wasn’t working alone, we must dig through the thoughts of her colleagues and acquaintances, searching for signs of treasons.

Dresses and suits were dropped off for us this morning. Mine is a warm shade of blue, with a sash in the back that won’t stay tied. Larissa and I curl each other’s hair, and I can’t resist a little twirl in the mirror, to great applause from Larissa. After years of baggy clothes belted onto me as I root around in the streets, the glide of satin against my skin does feel nice. I look like a dark-haired doll in the mirror, like the child of lavish Party members I once was. But the more I look at it, the more it churns my stomach, and I smear off most of the lipstick Larissa has applied to me, so the rosy stain is only a ghost on my lips.

Major Kruzenko summons us for a pre-operation briefing, reviewing the names and faces we’ll be seeking out tonight. She wears not her usual green KGB uniform, but some tiered, pink monstrosity trimmed in floppy lace. She’s positively radiant as she warns us about our targets’ potentially dangerous, treasonous thoughts.

The van deposits us a few blocks from the conservatory, and we must trudge through the snow past a long line of old women, shivering in their threadbare coats. The building they are lined up for reads “Pharmacy.” I think of Mama and her makeshift clinic. She helped so many in our neighborhood who couldn’t have gotten to the State clinics on time. But I also know our supplies had been smuggled or stolen from state-owned pharmacies like this one, which only meant a longer wait for these old women who follow the rules. I turn my head away from them, as if they might somehow recognize my shame.

Red velvet banners frame the conservatory entrance, and its already ornamental façade has been further spangled with bronze sickles and hammers and sparkling stars of crystal. We slush through the snowbanks to the staircase, and Major Kruzenko promptly loses us in the press of fur-clad partygoers that carry us up into the entrance. I can sense her, though, at the back of my mind; Pavel and our other guardians never feel far enough away.

Inside the main atrium, we are greeted with even more red bunting and a massive bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin. He is midstride and holds one hand out before him as if testing for rain. Perhaps it’s just the sculptor’s doing, but there’s something too crooked in his grin, too assured; his eyes are unfocused and his legs seem too long for his body. I am glad when the crowd—suddenly radiant with heat as they shed their fur coats—sucks us into the next room.

Where is the food? I’m starving.

I can’t believe Natasha got invited to the second-best party. I’ve done that bitch’s work for years …

Oh, great, here comes Boris with another glass of vodka. I’d better stay sober.

Aren’t those Rostov’s kids? Better keep my thoughts to myself. What was that trick he showed me…?

My gaze follows the last as he drifts past us with a smile that never dims. He wears a trim, well-pressed suit, but something about his gait and his hair suggests KGB. I file away his face in case I need to remember him.

Others’ thoughts build around me frantically as I push deeper into the hall, searching for Larissa—I know she’s probably working with Ivan, but I don’t want to work on my own. The negative remarks and ugly fears are like splinters pricking my skin each time I brush against someone; they twist into me, impossible to wrench free. These are the
nomenklatura
, and they have everything and yet they worry over money, love, work; their lives just like the rest. I wrap my arms tight across my chest, hoping that if I make myself small enough, people will stop brushing against me, wrinkling my gown, leaving their nasty little thoughts behind.

A hand closes around my shoulder with a familiar tune. “Hello, gorgeous. That’s a good color for you.”

I spin around to face Sergei. He smiles and scrubs at his hair, like he’s a little kid about to charm his way out of a scolding. Well, I won’t give him the satisfaction. I shrug his hand off of me and turn away.

“Yul, wait. Please.”

And there it is, that pitiful twinge in his voice like a kicked puppy. I stand still, not facing him, and wind Shostakovich tight around my thoughts.

“I know you think I owe you an apology. And—and you’re right, I probably do. But I—”

“
Probably?
” I hiss, trying to keep my voice down.

He takes a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m no good at this. Let me try again. I know you think I betrayed your trust by telling them that I saw you take the key—”

“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what happened.”

I turn back again, and his face is completely wilted, his smile drooping. “It wasn’t
just
me,” he says, voice pitiful. “Larissa saw it, too. She saw that now that you had the key, there was a high chance you’d make a run for it when the opportunity presented itself—so they made sure it did.”

So my entire escape had been orchestrated from the start. I want to be furious, but the more complicated the situation becomes, the less I know what to feel. I study his rumpled tuxedo, twisted awkwardly around his sturdy frame. The sleeves are too short for his long arms, so his forearms creep out whenever he moves. “I’ll let Larissa speak for herself.”

“I just want you to know I did it to keep you safe, Yulia. If you had gotten caught by the Americans and gotten your thoughts scrubbed out—or worse—and I could have prevented it…” The smile dies. “Well, I never would have forgiven myself.”

I let Shostakovich harden around me. A protective shell. “Well, I’m glad your conscience will be clean.”

“So…” He extends his hand toward me, holding it more like a question than a handshake. “Truce?”