Sekret (33 page)

“Is it safe?” Larissa asks from the street.

“Come on down.” I step away from the window; the streetlight illuminates a fresh cut along my calf from the broken window. “Watch the glass.” I step forward into the darkness, kicking aside a pile of rubber tubing. There have to be stairs somewhere, some path Masha can’t track …

I see you.

Sergei’s voice. I stop cold. The only sounds now are my short, panicked gasps of breath.

“Sergei?” I whisper. Dirt skitters underfoot as I turn in a circle. “Please don’t lead them to us…”

Metal thumps overhead in an irregular beat. My ears ring with painful silence. I creep toward the far end of the basement with only the faintest blue glow from outside to guide me. The sound of my breath chases me in circles.

Footsteps rush toward me. “Yul?” Larissa’s voice. “We’re over here.”

I press against a metal door, reach for its lever and give it a yank. A thread of Papa’s melody warms my hand against the metal and pours out of me in a contented sigh. “This is the way.”

CHAPTER 42

THE PISTONS AND ARMS HAMMER
away in the main factory at the top of the stairs. Like in Moscow, the machines are manned by women, their eyes hollow like jewels lost from their settings as they feed cotton strips into the machines. We move like wisps along the back wall until we find an exit door on the far side of the factory and slip through.

“Wait.” Valya holds us at the alley’s mouth, and we take cover behind a trash bin. Dozens of boots crunch through the snow, growing louder and louder. They move through the swirl of a fresh snowfall: two columns of soldiers down the main street. I wonder if they’re taking orders—mentally or otherwise—from Rostov.

A scarlet drop flecks the bank of snow beneath me. My nose smells like metal and warmth.

Larissa stares at me with icy eyes. “Rostov is getting closer. He’s starting to see the right path to us.”

“Just give me a moment.” I peel back one more layer on Papa’s memories.
Come on, Papa.
Three notes envelop me.
Show me the way home.

I shove off the bin and step out of the alley. Valya grabs me by the shoulder to tug me back, but I’m locked onto my target: a demolished building halfway down the block, with one western wall still standing, though it’s scarred from mortar shells. It looks like a sternum with all the ribs snapped off where the floors have collapsed. “There. There’s a way out in there.”

Larissa and Valya exchange looks. “Looks like a death trap to me,” Valya says.

Larissa winces and falls backward. “Rostov. He’s getting inside my head through Masha, and I—”

“I’ll handle it,” Valya says. A static roar engulfs him, but then he yelps, and the roar dissipates. His jaw tightens as he looks between Larissa and me. “He’s too strong. It’s like he’s … amplified himself somehow.”

A vein dances on Larissa’s forehead; her eyes are bloodshot. She’s grinding the heels of her hands into her temples like she’s trying to squeeze Rostov out. “Yul, I have to stay here. Keep him focused on me so you can escape.”

“No.” My chest constricts. “We’re almost there, I promise. Come on, we can—we can carry you if it hurts—”

“You don’t get it!” she screams. “If I go with you, those possibilities that I see, the branching choices you make—they’ll be that much clearer. And Rostov will be right there in my head, watching them being made. If I stay behind, at least I can give you a head start.”

I clamp my hand on her wrist. “Please, Lara, you haven’t come all this way not to leave with us!”

But she shakes me off. “I can see my future, right?” She smiles. “I can play their games and be just fine. It’s the ones like you and Valya—the ones who won’t play by the rules—who fare the worst. I’ll be all right. I swear.” Tears quiver in her eyes. “Besides, I owe you. For helping them catch you … I think I can buy you a few minutes more.”

“You always were the stubborn one,” Valentin says, offering her a rueful smile. “Ivan loved that about you.” He tugs on my shoulder. “We have to go.”

“Are you sure this will work?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from wavering.

“Rostov wants to see the possibilities of the future.” Larissa manages a half smile. “I think I’ll let him see
just
what I see.”

Larissa slinks to a sitting position in the alley and closes her eyes. Her music stops; her mind opens wide. My hand hovers over her shoulder. The images spiraling off of her make me dizzy—hundreds and hundreds of scenarios, all overlapping, some strong and others weak. A sentence being spoken over and over with each word tweaked. People jumping in front of cars, getting crushed—and then the same people stepping back onto the sidewalk at the last moment.

“It’s working,” Valentin says, though his mouth is grimly set. “Let’s go while we can.”

“Be careful, Larissa,” I whisper. I want to hug her, but I don’t dare break her concentration—her icy blue eyes are squeezed shut, tears eking through her lashes. She looks so young, yet so accepting of her heavy burden. I only wish I could show such strength. I twist away, shaking my head, and dash across the street with Valentin.

The doorway to the wrecked building is intact, save for an actual door—a stacked-stone archway leads into nothingness. We step through the arch and onto a waterfall of rubble. Peeking through the debris is a black-and-white checkerboard floor, scorched and scarred.

“Where now?” Valya slides down a shattered stone heap and onto the checkered floor. It sags dangerously to one side.

I’m afraid of what memories this miserable ruin might hold, but Papa’s melody is gone. Valya watches me expectantly, keeping his head low. His music is all knotted up, and I have no interest in untangling it to hear how little he’s trusting me right now.

I sink down onto the floor beside him. The stone creaks underfoot. I crouch down and drag my hands through the dust and snow along the tiled floor—

Sirens whirring overhead. She wears two fur coats and a heap of pearls and gems around her neck. The first mortar shatters the ballroom, stripping the hanging red banners to ribbons.

Now or never. The leather suitcase straps cut into her satin-gloved hands. Clattering tanks in the distance draw nearer. Her heels ping across the checkered floor as she counts the tile—one white, one black up; one white, one black, one white across. She drops to her hands and knees, brassy blond hair falling across her face, and digs at the tile’s edge.

The black chasm beneath the tile yawns at her with musty stench.

I jerk back into the present. “There’s a passageway. Under the floor. She used it to escape the Allies when they captured Berlin—” I shake my head. “Never mind. Let’s just look for an opening.”

To his credit, he doesn’t call me crazy, and drops to his hands and knees to search. “Over there.” He points to a chunk of debris where the snow has frozen over its edge, spilling onto the stone floor. “It could just be dirty snow, but it might be a hole.”

“Only one way to find out.” I kick the ice squarely with the heel of my boot.

The ice squeaks together as it compacts. I smash it a few more times; rocks shower down on me from the remnants of the upper levels. One last kick—and my leg goes clear through into a pit. I sink into the hole up to my thigh.

“No!” Valya locks both hands onto my arm. “Pull with me, Yul—”

But he slips and crashes against me. The last of the ice frozen over the hole gives way. I tumble down, practically doing the splits as my other leg comes through the hole, and Valya crashes on top of me on a bed of jagged stone.

There is blood on my lips and an eerie song in my head and my hands are cold and raw and I’m not certain I can feel my left ankle.

“Are you all right?” Valya tries to push off of me, but manages to crumple me up more in the process.

“My left foot—” I try to wiggle it inside my boot. Pain splits up my leg like ice shattering. I stifle a whine.

“Can you walk?” Valya holds out his arm for support as I pull myself onto my right foot. I take a tentative step down the rubble pile, but as soon as I put weight on my left foot, it gives way under me. I crash to the ground.

“I can walk.” I force myself to stand again, keeping my left knee bent to minimize the weight on it. “We’ll just have to go a little slower.”

Valya nods, the streetlights from overhead glinting off his glasses. “The question is, where?”

I hobble to the left and, bracing myself, prop against the wall with my palm.

She’s down here with hundreds of other wives, and some of their husbands, in soiled, shabby uniforms. They speak in terse bouts of German that ricochet off the tunnel walls like gunfire. Overhead, the streets rumble with rolling tanks and mortar shells, as pebbles spray from the ceiling. They huddle close and march forward.

“This way.” Though it’s dark here, I can see the lit tunnels in the past. The wall becomes my crutch, supporting me as I hop into the black abyss, Papa’s song growing heavier in my head.

Memories leap out at me as my hand skates along the stone. An argument among the officers’ wives. The shelling, far too close. The men want to change out of their uniforms in case the Allies capture them—if I understand their German, they mean to surrender if the tunnel is found and beg that they were only following orders, that as soon as they could they fled the Nazi ranks.

They’re filthy fascists, scampering under their own city like cockroaches. But I see myself in them, too. Justifying the pain I’ve caused others—the lives of wildlings, of scientists like Gruzova that my father has destroyed to reach me. I feel the salty bite of tears on my wind-burned cheeks, but I tell myself it’s only from the pain in my leg.

My hand pounds the wall again, sinking back in time. The next shell sounds like a thunderclap instead of a distant drum. Shards of rock fly through the air, frozen in place as the lights suddenly wink out. Everyone stops. The women cling close to their husbands, those with husbands left to cling to. A little girl cries in the background. The collapsed rocks shift and flow toward them, and daylight appears. The helmeted heads of Allied soldiers emerge, their rifles raised.

“There’s a break in the tunnel ahead.” I hop along the wall faster, bobbing up and down on my good foot, bad, good, bad. The light of street lamps trickles through the darkness. I’m putting more and more weight on my foot. Tendons strain and pop but I can bear the pain. We are almost free. The light is clearly coming through the collapsed part of the tunnel from the memory—we can climb out of it onto the street level. A few more yards. My papa is waiting for me.

A shadow crosses the light. A curve of jaw, a bald dome. Just like Valentin’s memory from when he escaped. He stops moving beside me.

With a crack of his knuckles, the Hound straightens up within the tunnel, blocking out the light from beyond.

CHAPTER 43

YULIA ANDREEVNA CHERNINA.
Rostov’s sandpaper voice scrapes through my head, as cruelly as if he were standing right before us, as the Hound looks me up and down.
I am beginning to think the Chernins are more trouble than they are worth.

“I’m sure Secretary Khruschev feels the same about you. When’s the execution, comrade?” I take a step backward, but my bad foot tweaks, and I nearly collapse against Valya at the sharp pain.

Rostov chuckles through our minds; it makes the Hound smile in his own ghastly rictus. His face is partially illuminated from the street beyond him: the dim glow of freedom. The light glints off his crooked teeth and my stomach churns to see my suspicions confirmed. I sigh. Well, I’ll use what I must.

Your mother has been most cooperative
, Rostov says.
She has revived the program; she’ll help us replace all the wildlings your father wiped. And as you’ve already witnessed, Khruschev won’t be a threat to me much longer. His refusal to confront the Western fearmongers is a shameful mark on our history, one soon to be erased by wiser men. But you, and Comrade Sorokhin—you don’t want your own role in our new order?
The Hound steps forward.
A chance to shape it into whatever you want the Soviet Union to be?

“We’ll take our chances elsewhere,” I say.

That is not for you to decide.
He pauses. I know the expression he must be making now, wherever he is: the skin puckering around his eyes as his mouth narrows to a pencil stroke.
Proceed.

The Hound lunges for me and snatches me by the throat in one swift arc. I’m soaring upward to greet the sky. I am a
Sputnik
satellite. I can look down on my country and my world and laugh at how pitifully small we all are.

My head strikes uneven stone as I come crashing back down to earth.

“You’ve tried to control us—make us your own. But we’re not like your Hound here, blindly following orders!” Valentin throws himself against the Hound’s arm and sinks his teeth in, somewhere high above me. The Hound whips his arm around, flinging Valya away.

Valentin Borisovich Sorokhin. I see that one failed escape was not enough to teach you your place. It’s a pity. You had such promise as a scrubber. You could go much further than even your father did once I’m in charge.

Valya howls. The sound is agonizing enough to shred my heart. I can’t use my legs; I crawl forward on my elbows toward the sound and reach out for him—

“No! Don’t touch me!”

The waves of psychic noise pour from Valya like a jackhammer. Rostov is killing him from the inside out. Turning him into a lovely corpse, formaldehyde and cyanide, like Lenin or Saint Sergei. The cacophony pushes me away from him; it is a physical force, a wave shoving me back into the grip of the Hound.

What monster would do this? The Hound rings hollow as he reaches for me again. He must have once suffered whatever Rostov’s doing to Valentin. His vision and hearing, his thoughts and dreams, emptied out and stuffed back in to fulfill Rostov’s every wish.

Papa’s melody trickles through my nose with blood.
I’m sorry, Papa.
The Hound snatches me back up; I’m too battered to fight back.
I got so close.