Skandal

by Lindsay Smith

  Human bones line the walls around us—femurs stacked lengthwise, their knobby ends worn smooth as polished wood. The archway before us is crowned with grinning, yellowed skulls. Bile burns at my throat. Now I recognize the thickness in the air, denser than mere humidity; it’s the muffled memories of the hundreds of thousands of dead it must have taken to build this lewd labyrinth.

  I wrap my arms tight around my chest and turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow arch. I will not touch these walls. I cannot carry the weight of so many memories. As Al’s light glides over each row of bones along our path, though, I feel as if those empty eye sockets are watching us, as if their memories are just waiting to envelop me like a plague the moment I get too close.

  Is this what Cindy’s vision of Judgment meant for me?

  What’s the matter, Yulia? Sergei’s voice slinks around my thoughts like an overly friendly cat. Afraid of what you might find?

  I nearly slam into Al. My heart pounds like a dirge. Sergei. Where are you? Why is Rostov sending these scrubbers after us?

  Come, now, you’re a clever girl. Why do you think?

  Because he doesn’t want NATO meddling in the civil war in Vietnam. Or maybe he wants us to go to war in Vietnam. And he’s trying to use his scrubbers to control the delegates. But—I clench my hands into tight fists. But why is my mother helping him? Is she really creating these scrubbers? They weren’t psychics before. And why are they dying?

  His laughter pings against my musical shield, like a kid throwing rocks. Of course they’re her work. I suppose not everyone’s afraid to make the most of their gifts.

  I am an ungrounded wire, crackling with anger and frustration. He can’t be right. She wouldn’t tell Sergei, of all people, if she had another plan. There has to be something more.

  I stagger forward on the uneven ground and reach out to catch myself on the wall of bones. Sergei laughs, the sound ringing through my skull. You didn’t mind touching dead bodies the other day.

  My head whips upward. You saw that?

  I’m always watching out for you, Yulia. Someone has to. He laughs again. Someday, you’ll thank me for it. Maybe someday very soon.

  What do you mean? I ask. Sergei? I peel back a fraction of my shield. Who is the mole? But there’s nothing but the ringing silence of Al’s and my shoes on the grimy catacomb floor.

  “Keep going, Yul, keep going.” Al tugs at his charred, ragged shirtsleeves. “We’ll find the bastard.”

  But even as he says it, we reach a split in the tunnel.

  Al’s grip tightens on his lighter; the shadows on the bones quiver in reply. “Okay. Let’s go left. Each time we come to a fork, keep taking the leftmost turn, got it? Try leaving a trail of memories for us to follow.” He smiles weakly. “Your pops’ll kill me if I get you lost, you know.”

  I relish the idea slightly less than I’d relish the chance to toss the radio in the bathtub with me, but I nod. “Thank you for not making me go by myself.”

  We move slowly into the next chamber after scanning ahead of us. Its walls hum with a psychic resonance I’m afraid to identify. But I must. With Al’s eyes on me, I curl two fingers around the ball grip of a femur.

  The memories hit me like an electric current. The scrubber is close—very close, possibly the next chamber over. But as I open my mouth to warn Al, the skeletal memories flood through me. Gravediggers, piles of bones—no, that skull is looking at me, I’m sure of it—a lightning storm tearing through my head. Yes, the bones are coming alive. They are crawling toward me, bringing with them a white, soothing breeze, promising to carry me away. Whispers thread around me like spider silk. Chanting. Begging me to stay with them, to sink into the cool, wet earth. Bony fingers reach for me, buzzing with faint static—

  No, Yulia! Marylou cries. It’s the scrubber. You have to fight him off! A dark image pushes against the haze, against the roaring of voices. The scrubber and his unsteady appearance emerge through an archway. His static rolls forward, threatening to crush me like an avalance. But I have my own weapon: a tide of emotions, sweeping me along, hungry and eager for a target. Yes. I can stop him, just like I stopped the Hound. If I can keep control of myself just a moment longer—

  The static engulfs me, like I’m at the base of a waterfall and the voices are pouring onto me. I shove off of the femur and reach forward. I have to unleash these feelings. Just a few more steps and I can reach him—

  Click. I see the world in snapshots through the haze of scrubbing white. Al Sterling lunges forward with a scream, an order that’s buried under the words of the tortured, clambering, skeletal dead.

  Click. The skeletons surge forward, all around me, crushing me in their brittle bones; they urge me to sleep, to forget my fears and concerns. Do not fight, they beg me. Their memories press into my skin. Stay and listen to our tales.

  Click. Al’s lighter clatters to the stone. The shadows of Al and another man, his psychic noise blazing like a nuclear blast, form one monstrous mass across the skeletal chamber wall, then merge into total darkness as the light extinguishes.

  My emotions surge back into me, suffocating, scouring. I fall into the scrubber’s haze, riding on a tide of empty white.

  CHAPTER 17

  I DREAM OF RUSSIA; of Mama tucking me into bed at our dacha while a fierce blizzard fills our windows with white. “Hush now,” she tells me. “Sleep. When you wake up, the worst will have passed.”

  But I do not sleep well. In my mind, I am trapped inside a maze of bones, and I can feel the thudding steps of a Minotaur drawing nearer from all sides. Rostov and the Hound and his fleet of altered scrubbers. Mama, wielding a gleaming syringe. I scream at her in Russian, but she shifts into the scrubber, and Al Sterling wrestles with her. He staggers back, rubbing the vein in his forearm and begging me not to tell.

  Someone steps in front of me—Cindy? Donna? I scream at them, trying to make them understand, but I can’t put the words in the right order. He is poisoned. I am poisoned. The mole is poisoning us. I will poison you all.

  Dimly, I am aware of an engine drone. I breathe in stale, stratosphere-cooled air and slowly open my eyes. We’re back on the Starlift, and everyone else is either asleep in their chairs, cross-armed and pouting (Donna), or sprawled on a makeshift cot (Al Sterling and, apparently, me).

  The damned scrubber again. I touch my upper lip, but find no blood. I twist around to study Al on the cot next to mine; he’s slumped against the bent metal wall of the plane, staring straight ahead. If he sees me, he doesn’t acknowledge it. I suppress a shudder. That haunted look aligns too closely to what I saw in my fevered dreams.

  Were they dreams? My gaze travels down his tattered, burned sleeves. I’m looking for something—a snake bite? Something in the soft inside of his elbow. But the puckered, seared skin of his forearms makes for great camouflage; I try to remember what I’m searching for, but the tighter I try to grasp the thought, the quicker it slips from my mind.

  “Yulia.” It’s Valentin—I hadn’t even noticed him curled up beside my cot. “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired of letting these scrubbers get the better of me.” I slump into his outstretched arm; he pulls me into a warm embrace. “I’m feeling … tired. What happened?”

  Valya grimaces. “We lost the scrubber. When we caught up with you in the Catacombs, he was long gone.”

  I sink further against him. I’m too tired to muster up anger. At Rostov and Mama and their army, at Sergei, at my own weakness. If I could have just fought past his noise, embraced my powers …

  “We got Senator Saxton and the rest of the NATO delegates out of there safely and they’re all under their respective country’s protection, but the trail is cold again.”

  I frown. “There was only Heinrich? He didn’t have any backup?”

  “No one we could find, no.”

  “But he seemed to know exactly who I was. If they knew we were coming—” I do not say what I am thinking, If the mole told them we were coming, but Valent
in must be thinking it too—“why wouldn’t they bring reinforcements?” I groan and slump back on the cot. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop Heinrich. We can’t seem to catch a break.”

  Valya traces a slow, soothing circle on my shoulder. “If your theory on this … relay … is correct, then Heinrich’s time is almost up. Maybe we’ll have better luck stopping whoever comes next.”

  “But we have no idea who they are. And no idea about what Rostov’s directing them toward,” I say. My eyelids sag, the weight of exhaustion and my own futility too much to bear.

  “I’m afraid not.” He presses his lips to my forehead. “But there’s nothing we can do about it until we’re back at Headquarters. Get your rest, Yul.”

  I lean against him, savoring his warmth, his scent, his music humming on his skin. But the last thing I see before I sleep is Al Sterling’s intense stare, drilling right through me from the other side of the plane.

  *

  Cindy sits me down at Langley the next day, towering over me in heels while the couch endeavors to slurp me up. She purses her lips and looks me over like I’m an “interesting” piece of art.

  “Would you like to talk about what happened in Paris?” she asks.

  I flinch and stare down at my fingers, spreading them out before me. The catacombs, drenched with so much pain and suffering … And then the scrubber’s noise like a toxic spray. “I’m sorry I let the scrubber get away, Miss Conrad. It was just too much.”

  She tilts her head, a smile softening her expression. “Of course the scrubber was too much for you. He was too much for any of us—even your father. I’m more concerned about the effect the environment had on you.”

  My cheeks burn with shame. “I’m sorry, Miss Conrad.”

  “Sorry?” Cindy tilts her head. “We learn through failure. I certainly have. What are you sorry for?”

  I tuck my hands in my lap. “I just don’t know what to do with those strong emotions. They overwhelm me.”

  “That’s why I’m going to have you work on your emotional control this morning.” She smiles again. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to be a sponge. You should be in control, Yulia, deciding for yourself what affects you and what doesn’t. Like the card I showed you—the Star.”

  For the rest of the morning, Cindy, Donna, and Marylou take turns summoning up memories—good, bad, anything tied to strong emotion, as long as they don’t tell me the emotion in advance—and I must draw it away from them, name the feeling, and release it without experiencing the strong emotion myself. After Marylou’s memory of getting locked in a closet by bullies at her elementary school left me sobbing in a corner of the room, however, Cindy conceded that I might require more assistance than she previously anticipated.

  “I want you to read this.” She hands me a strange book titled The Science of Being and Art of Living. “It’s by Maharishi Maharesh Yogi.”

  I flip open to the first pages and stare at the words. “‘Transcendental meditation,’” I read very slowly, drawing out each syllable without understanding a letter of it. “‘Inducing a wakeful … hypometabolic … physiologic state.’”

  Cindy purses her lips together, then takes the book back from me. “On second thought, maybe I’ll just teach you myself.” She slips out of her heels—sugary pink today—and daintily sets them aside before settling onto a pile of pillows. “Sit cross-legged. One leg on top of the other.”

  I follow her lead, legs crossed, back straight, wrists resting on my knees.

  “Now. Think of a phrase—a mantra, it’s called—that empowers you.”

  Papa’s old adage drifts through my thoughts, as carefree as his whistling. An empty mind is a safe mind. But I’ve seen what his idea of an empty mind entails—scrubbing away memories of my power, trying to make me forget what I am. He desired to protect me, to be sure, but the truth always finds its way back in the end; forgetting has harmed me more than it’s helped.

  I scrunch up my nose in thought for a few moments, but nothing else comes to mind. “Can you give me some ideas?”

  Cindy wiggles her toes. Without her heels and her looming posture, she looks much more vulnerable. “Do you want to know my mantra?” she asks, head lowered.

  I nod.

  “My past cannot hurt me now. My future cannot stop me now. All I have is now.” She keeps her gaze lowered while she says it, lashes shrouding her eyes, but I feel I have a glimpse into her hard, fearful life in New Orleans that put a tremble in her hands. Her voice, however, doesn’t waver, but the way she guards the words reminds me of the old babushkas in Moscow, standing at the site of the demolished Church of Christ the Savior (now a swimming pool, courtesy of Uncle Stalin) and whispering prayers they hope only God will hear.

  “I like that.” I smile. “Really—there’s a … a balanced quality to it. Philosophical.”

  “It’s very zen,” Cindy agrees. “It focuses on being in the moment. You need something that grounds you in the moment, too. Something to let you know that the emotions inside of you don’t control you. They don’t have to affect you.”

  I grimace. “None of us really knows our limits,” I mutter to myself. Papa doesn’t have to scrub me to infect my thoughts, it would seem.

  Cindy raps her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “What about … I am as solid as an oak tree?”

  I shrug, feeling unmoved. My leg is starting to fall asleep in the awkward pose. “No. I want to be like—like that card you showed me. The Star.”

  “Others’ thoughts and memories can pass through your mind,” Cindy says, “but your mind must remain your own.”

  I sit up straighter. “My mind is mine alone.”

  Cindy nods, leaning toward me. “Let’s work with that.” She sucks in air. “Take a deep breath, slowly, then let it out very gradually. On each exhale, think your mantra to yourself. Push away any other thoughts that try to creep into your head.” Her shoulders slump as the usual starch in her posture eases away. “Your music shield should be far in the background, like gentle waves lapping at the shore…”

  I tremble, thinking of Valentin’s awful ocean memory. “Or—or like the breeze through the birch trees.”

  “Yes, like that, too. Breathe in … My mind is mine alone. Breathe out … My mind is mine alone.”

  The words ring through me, clear and calming like a distant carillon. Shostakovich recedes to the background; the psychedelic record on the record player melts around us into cool liquid sound. It does not touch me. My fears for Mama and Zhenya cannot reach me. My mind is mine alone. The scrubbers cannot scratch at me here. My mind is mine alone.

  After a few minutes, I open my eyes, feeling calm, yet somehow awake, like I’m humming with psychic energy ready to be put to use. Cindy hops to her feet and slips back into her heels, transforming once again into the glossy professional. “Donna? Are you ready to share a memory with us?”

  Marylou sits up, eyes wide and bleary. “Donna’s talking to the boss-man … man.” She snorts. “It’s funny, because you’re not a man.”

  “Yes. Hilarious.” Cindy leans over Marylou and snatches up a scrap of paper. “Who told you to take three of these?”

  Marylou stares at her for a long, uncomfortable moment, almost as if Cindy is some strange new species she’s never encountered before. “Tuttelbaum,” she says finally, one eye squinting as she takes a step backward.

  Cindy harrumphs. “No more MK INFRA experiments for you. They make you too dependent on outside factors to perform well, when you should be developing your innate ability.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a square.” Marylou draws a box in the air. “I’m, like, this close to bustin’ through Castro’s defenses, man, all thanks to those pills. If I can get, like, five more…”

  “You could do it just fine on your own if you tried.” Cindy crushes the paper in her fist. “If Frank thinks he can turn us all into his perfect psychic drones—”

  “If Frank thinks what?”

  Frank Tuttel
baum stands behind Cindy, a lacy drift of curtain coiled in his thick fist. Almost vanishing into his broad side is Donna, a smug smile smeared on her glossy bubblegum lips, and her hands tucked demurely in front of her. There’s nothing smiling about Frank’s expression, however.

  Cindy’s face blanches. “I believe further discussion of the MK INFRA program is warranted before we allow our operatives to—”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got bigger problems than our scientists, Conrad.” Frank yanks the curtain from the ceiling and pitches it aside. “My office. Now!”

  As Cindy scampers off with Frank, Donna sashays into our den, pats the still-skittish Marylou on the head, then drifts down onto the couch and spreads her skirt out in a perfect arc around herself.

  “What’s happening?” I ask Donna, glancing between her eerie smirk and the doorway where Frank and Cindy left.

  Donna fixes her grin on me and narrows her eyes. “Now we’re even.”

  I cross my arms, suddenly cold. “Even with what?”

  “You hurt me with your stupid little emotions trick the other day,” she says, “so I told Frank all about your secret plot. The one you were rambling about on the flight home—how you’re a mole and you’re going to poison us all? Foil our plans to capture your evil scientist mom? What are you, some kind of sleeper agent the KGB sent over here to infiltrate us?”

  Anger weighs down on me like a slab of stone. I can’t breathe through my rage. I try to work through Cindy’s transcendental meditation routine, but I can’t remember all the steps.

  “Oh, well. Doesn’t matter now. No way Frank will let you do anything for us again, so you’ll have to find someone else to poison.”

  Anger draws tight around my lungs, fighting against me as I try to breathe deeply. I’m not the poison. I’m not the mole. For a moment, I can almost taste how good it would feel to let my fist crash into her nose; I can smell how she would cry and scream. The anger rises like a tide. How delicious it would be to let these emotions take control.

  My mind is mine alone. I chisel the words into my skull. My mind is mine alone.