Skandal (34 page)

Once our fingers are firmly laced together, I unclip the collar, releasing my own power while exposing myself to the maelstrom of psychic power in the room. The scrubbers’ noise crashes back in like an avalanche. But we’re ready, Mama’s power amplifying my own. Our minds are ours alone.

Rostov and I are playing tug of war with their minds, and Mama’s amplifying power is the rope—the minions jerking this way and that, their painful noise strobing against our thoughts as her power helps him, then me. I keep my grip on Mama firm to share in her power. It’s my only defense against him. Even then, blood drips down my face; the emptiness calls to me, goading me on as surely as the ocean called to Valentin’s mother, as the bliss of forgetting called to Papa. But Mama’s power is fueling mine now, if I can just fend Rostov off—

Rostov’s face turns ghoulish with a hateful sneer. “Fine. Take her. I’ll do this by myself.”

The air around us buckles and combusts, each molecule turned into an isotope of radiating pain. Mama’s his clear target, but I’m close enough to feel the flashburn of his strength. Mama yelps as her knees buckle underneath her and she sinks to the ground.

Mama stares straight through me, her eyes marbled with blood. Red drips from her ears and slicks her lips, her chin; it pools into the hollow at her collarbone. “Mama.” I reach out to cradle her head. I can undo this. I can try to straighten out her thoughts, like I did for Valentin. “Mama.”

A flute’s breathy melody totters through the air between us like a wounded bird weaving through the trees. Igor Stravinsky’s
Firebird Suite
. The strings glissade around us, twinkling like fireflies, and a low timpani builds. “Yulia.” She tightens her grip on my hand. “Stay with me.” I wrap my thoughts in the music and step into Mama’s world, and the entire scene of the Oval Office crystallizing around us, frozen in time.

Nothing moves around us, trapped in the moment, but I can move. Mama stands before me, not as she is now, but as she was years ago—whittled like a Siberian tiger, all sinew and sharp wit. Her smile could cut down the most pompous Party member, and her claws would protract in an instant to defend her plans. “Yulia.” She glides toward me across the marble halls of Moscow State University, where her mind aparently has chosen to be, as the strings section builds with tension. “There’s something I need you to do.”

The square granite columns seem impossibly tall around me; maybe I’m still a little girl in her mind. “Of course. Anything.”

Heavy drums quake through the halls. “Please, my darling
devochka
. Take my memories. This is your gift.”

I grab a fistful of her satin skirt as the floor rolls; plaster dust pours down on us like the sand of an hourglass. “Mama, no! We just have to fight off Rostov, you and I. It’s going to be okay.”

“Listen to me.” She kneels down and grips my chin, somehow unaffected by the building as it crumbles around us. “I can’t break Rostov’s psychic hold on me. If I fight back, my mind will erase itself—this is what he’s done to me. But if I’m gone, Rostov will lose my power. Zhenya and Larissa will be free of him. You can stop him.”

I’m shaking my head. I need an outlet for this pressure building up inside me, this overwhelming sense of terror. No. She can’t do this. We need our family. I need her. Papa needs her, even if he doesn’t remember it yet. “Mama, please—”

The columns collapse in a flurry of dust as Stravinsky’s
Firebird
erupts.

“Your father gave up his memories to save our family. So give him mine, instead.”

She closes her eyes and slumps against me. The
Firebird
melody consumes us both; her memories pour into me. Most are encoded, tangled in her and Papa’s shared melodies, but a few shake loose: Mama and Papa, much younger, hiding from the SS in an alley, their arms linking together and lips seeking each other. Mama defending her dissertation. Mama giving birth to me, hand clamped around Papa’s. Mama and her sister as little girls, trying to count all the stars in the sky.

And her gift—her ability to foretell the future. Rather than branch away into endless possibilities, like Larissa’s, every path is converging on this single, finite point. It burns like the brightest sun, the final choice on her long journey, brilliant and sure.

“I love you,” she whispers. “Tell your father I love him.”

The flow of memories wanes; the symphony has drained away. Slowly, the Oval Office comes back into focus around me.

Mama’s body hangs limp in my arms, but there is no music under the surface. No stream of thought. There is nothing.

Mama’s mind is completely silent.

Mama. I settle her back onto the floor. No pulse. No flutter of breath. Already, the red in her eyes is blurring into cool gray. Mama.

Her memories, her emotions, amplified and swelling, wait just beneath my skin.

“Run!” Donna screams, though she might as well be on another planet for all that her words reach me. Time unfreezes around me, the world coming back into focus like the first moments of waking up: Rostov winds back into motion, Donna and Judd charge into the room, President Johnson leaps up from his desk. Blood leaks from his ears as he staggers toward a panel of curtains and activates a switch; the wall retracts behind the curtains. He slides inside and slams the panel shut behind him, moving with a haste I’d never expected from someone we’d always branded a lazy cowboy.

Something is burning—something sharp and molten and warm fills my nose. Rostov screams. He has reached for the panel to the hidden passage, but Judd sets fire to the curtains, blocking him in here with us.

But Rostov must be stopped. My mind is mine alone. I lunge toward him while he’s distracted. Flames leap from the curtain toward Rostov, lapping at his uniform. I let turmoil churn inside me, then fling it at Rostov, my hand clenched to his throat, filling his head with every ounce of sorrow and pain and rage that I have to give. It pours from me like a geyser: my memories, my feelings, my entire life, all one pressure-cooked eruption of agony and noise. Rachmaninov clashing with Tchaikovsky; Dostoevsky and Marxist-Leninist doctrine and “Stars and Stripes Forever” forming a chaotic noose that draws tight around Rostov. He flails and clings to the threads, but he’s caught up in the wave of pain—of his own sons’ memories, of the lick of flames on his skin, of every bad thing I’ve had to feel living under his shadow, in Russia and here.

Every death serves a purpose
, Mama said. She didn’t just get her family out of the Soviet Union. She gave me the tools to stop Rostov.

Rostov’s face is flushed with red and purple as he tries to repel the psychic assault. He lunges forward, as the flames gobble at his uniform—the red tabs and medals; the brass buttons; the sickle and hammer pin set inside a red star. He drops to extinguish himself on the massive round rug that bears the United States seal, and the fire goes out with a whimper. But I don’t let go.

“Kill him!” Judd cries.

But death would be too good for General Rostov. I have something far better in mind. My hand is steady, so steady, as I pull another syringe from my purse and jab it into his neck.

Color rushes back into the world, blotting out the chattering white haze. The fog burns away as the air thins, as the sound dies, as the antidote courses through Rostov’s veins. He hadn’t been infected with Mama’s serum, but the end result should be the same—the virus should devour every last traces of the genetic code that makes us psychics what we are. I breathe in, count to myself, breathe out, then force myself to press two fingers to his pulse. Slow, but stable; he’s badly wounded from both the burns and psychic struggle, but he’ll survive to stand trial.

What I’m more anxious for is what I don’t feel.

His powers.

It’s safe. The cure is safe. I release Rostov and rush toward Valentin, slumped with all the other scrubbers. Valentin’s eyes are squeezed shut. Red rims his nostrils, but his nose isn’t flowing like the others’. He shudders and jolts as if from a seizure, and a film of sweat sheens his forehead. He thrusts his hand forward and gropes for mine.

“
Tebya lyublu,
” he murmurs. “
Molodtsa.
”

“No. No. You can’t go, Valya. Hold tight.”
Please don’t let it be too
late
, I add silently. Mama’s dead face looms ripe in my memory and a fresh pool of anguish starts to build, but I let it drip away from me as I dig out another syringe and administer the cure.

The next seconds—minutes—ache. I can barely breathe. All I can see is Valya’s still eyes, and in my mind, Mama’s face, so cold and empty. My antidote worked on Rostov, but what if Valya’s had the serum in him for too long? What if it’s already shredded up his mind and body? I reach out to brush his hair from his forehead, but I can’t bear to touch him—to hear whatever psychic war is waging inside his own head.

Valentin sits up with a groan.

I fling my arms around him and hug him tight. His thoughts are right there on the surface—no shield, no subterfuge. He’s trying to piece together the past several hours, but it’s shattered like a mirror, refracting out of order and context. “Yulia.” He buries his head into my shoulder. “Yulia.”

I kiss his forehead, clammy with sweat, and swallow back my tears. “Are you okay? Please, if he hurt you—” I can hear his thoughts whirring, unguarded, merely half-formed words and ideas gone as soon as they surface. Slowly, his shield weaves back around them, but it’s faint. “Valya, please, talk to me.”

His lips part—and hang there. “I can’t—”

His shield churns and churns, louder now. Like he’s reassuring himself he can still shield his thoughts. But that steady hum of psychic energy, hungry for a target, is nowhere to be found.

“My powers. They’re gone.” His hands tighten into fists. “I can’t—I can’t hear anyone, I’m not—”

I lean back, chewing my lower lip. “I had to, Valya. It was the only way to save you.”

His face softens, then, his mouth lifting with a faint smile. He runs his finger along the side of my face. “Yes. I’m safe now.”

I hug him tighter, and then I feel it: how smooth his mind is, worn like a river stone, all the crackle and jaggedness erased. The mind of someone unburdened. “Are you okay?” I ask him, which is absurd, since I’m the one sobbing massive tears of sorrow and relief and joy and pain, every emotion in my repertoire spilling into and out of me.

“Of course.” His eyelids sink shut. “Of course I am. I’m free.”

CHAPTER 31

WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 1964

LARISSA IS PARDONED
for espionage charges because Cindy, Papa, and I testified that she cooperated with the PsyOps team. Rostov, Sergei, Misha, and Masha, however, joined Frank Tuttelbaum in a military jail outside of Bolling Air Force Base while they awaited trial. Their cells have to be fitted with psychic disrupters so no one’s thoughts can get in or out, though that isn’t a problem for Rostov anymore. Tuttelbaum confesses to sharing classified information with “unauthorized foreign government personnel,” which sounds so much nicer than what he was really doing—collaborating with the Soviet Union to force America into war against the Viet Cong.

Once we were able to certify that Rostov had been completely stripped of all psychic ability, we exchanged him with the Soviet Union for five of our own spies. A few weeks later, an article turned up in the Party newspaper,
Pravda
, citing the exposure and condemnation of an unnamed rogue KGB general whose defiance of the Party’s wishes had been dealt with accordingly.

Larissa and I visited Sergei not long after he was locked up. He’s not sad about his plight, or even his father’s; he’s more disappointed that the world is the way it is, and the grand ideas he wanted to purport are not so grand after all.

Now, surrounded by the bursting colors of May, we’re hosting Mama’s funeral—a small affair at a little graveyard along the Potomac River. Just Papa, Zhenya, Valentin, Larissa, and me, spreading her ashes to the four winds. While Larissa and Valya entertain Zhenya, Papa and I sit on the cliffs together and let the wind thread through our hair. “Are you ready?” I ask him, as the afternoon shadows start to pull and stretch.

He laces his hand in mine in return.

At first, I see only his raw, torn-edged memories of Mama, but as the music flows from me to him, wisps of images spiral away from their songs. Her face melts and swirls like a sketch artist refining it—Mama in a drab soldier’s uniform, picking through a pile of rubble with a young Papa at her side as smoke rises around them and air raid sirens drone. Mama clutching a bundle to her chest as Papa and a tiny raven-haired girl peer at her. Mama’s face wreathed in a field of clover as the sun splashes her and Papa in gold.

Papa’s thoughts are stitching themselves back together; the frayed ends where he ripped Mama away tie themselves off, albeit imperfectly. There’s a sinkhole aching in his heart where Mama should belong, but piece by piece, he can unravel her gift, and maybe someday fill most of it in.

After the FBI raided the Soviet embassy, they found twenty miles’ worth of tunnels that accessed nearly every major agency in Washington. They also found five dead scrubbers and eighteen bankers’ boxes full of Mama’s life’s research. I took the boxes to Doctor Stokowski, and he and I are going to work on them for a new research initiative when I start college at Georgetown in the fall.

The Soviets said nothing about the death and capture of multiple Soviet spies, seizure of the Soviet embassy, and discovery of the endless tunnels, though they did announce that the Soviet Union had just acquired a lovely piece of property on the edge of the District and intended to build a newer, better embassy there instead.

Zhenya doesn’t ask about Mama, but he and Papa have been nearly inseparable since Larissa brought him home. Maybe Papa never forgot that echo of Mama in Zhenya’s smile.

*   *   *

Valentin’s invited to perform at a battle of the bands at a round-domed coliseum near Union Station, where we saw the Beatles play when they first visited America. The music fills us up; the music flows out of us. Larissa, Donna, Marylou, Judd, Tony, and me—we scream and dance and sing along and sweat until my dress sticks to me like cling film. I like to imagine Mama’s face in the crowd, stitched onto all the anonymous souls who know nothing of the war we’ve averted or the pain we’ve felt.