Nina. Be careful. Andrei’s thoughts are interspersed with brassy chords from “The Internationale.” I think there might—
But his words are buried under a cascade of white noise, jammed into my brain as if by a hot poker. I cringe, biting into my own tongue, waiting for the agonizing noise to subside—the world edging into a white haze—
And through the haze, a man in an SS officer’s uniform appears in the café’s doorway, just like in my vision. Andrei. My lungs swell as I move to stand, fighting gainst the crackling in my brain. But then the man in the officer’s uniform turns.
Instead, SMERSH officer Anton Ivanovich Rostov smiles at me.
Chapter Six
“A setup.” Al swears under his breath, something English and prickly. “I knew it. What are you dames trying to pull—”
“Guten Tag,” Rostov purrs, striding toward us. “Antonina Vasilievna. What have you caught for me?” His stare skewers first Al, then Doctor Stokowski. Al flinches as Rostov scrapes against his mind. “An American? That’s quite a catch. Ahh, and another scientist as well. You’ve been busy!”
The Firebird spins its whirling, chaotic dance around my thoughts. I can’t let Rostov know what we were trying to do. He’ll kill all of us—make us dance on his strings. But how do I get them away from him? I twist toward Stokowski and give him a knowing look. “I suppose they’d better learn to speak Russian.”
Stokowski’s jaw hangs open, for a few moments, then he clamps it shut. The sorrow that’s hung over him since we met ossifies into grim determination. Learn to speak Russian, LSR—the nickname Olga told us for the air raid shelter. I hope it’ll be enough to keep him safe.
Al, however, isn’t privy to such a clue. He flicks the lighter open and closed, eyeing Rostov like a cut of meat that’s started to spoil. “So what’s your special power, comrade? Being an asshole?”
Static crackles through the room as Rostov seizes control of Al, but it’s a moment too late. The rising heat curls my eyelashes and singes the hairs on my forearms. Flames engulf the Bavarian wooden columns that dot the café. Al slumps forward as Rostov releases control of him; Rostov hisses as though he’s been burned.
“So you Americans have gifts, too.” Rostov takes a step back; Olga and I scramble up from our chairs. “But mine is better, I think. You should come with us.”
“No way in hell.”
Flames wreathe around Al, surging, reaching toward our side of the café. The columns subdivide Al and Doctor Stokowski from Olga, Rostov, and me; soon, they’ll form a wall, cutting the café in half. I don’t have long to make a decision. It has to be right now.
I close my eyes and fling myself into the future—whichever future gives me the best chance of survival. But not survival for survival’s sake, this time.
This time, I want to live another day so I can use this gift for something more than the Party’s whims.
If I try to go with Al and Stokowski now—I see Rostov, holding me back, pinning me in place, letting flames consume me. He’s not strong enough to stop the rest, but he’ll turn all his hatred and SMERSH training straight on me, and I won’t survive. Olga, too—I see her face, contorting with screams, Lyubov trying to pull her away, but the flames eat at them both.
No. No, no, no.
If I surrender now, if I keep up the lie that we were only trying to lure another scientist into Rostov’s web, and an American spy besides—then what? The first image is of Andrei, lip bloodied and swollen, and I cry out. But, no, he is alive. I am alive, kneeling beside him, no burns, no Rostov inside my head. Again, I see us standing on the bridge, the Moskva River flowing beneath us, everything awake and alive and bursting with spring as victorious airplanes soar overhead. We toss a bouquet of flowers, together, into the pile outside Novodevichy Monastery to commemorate the atonement I have made.
And the dark-haired girl—I see her, too, sitting in the classroom, her face turned away from me.
I step back, into Rostov’s circle. Olga narrows her eyes at me, assessing, but then does the same.
“Come, quickly, poshli, this place is going to come crashing down,” I say to Rostov, forcing an authority that I don’t feel. “Let the American burn.”
“What, and give up your prize? Don’t be foolish.”
Again, the air warps with the force of Rostov’s power, drilling into Al’s brain. Al is pinned in place; I want to cry out, but I can’t. I can’t blow my cover. In a moment’s time, I’ve been transformed into a sleeper agent—the very thing Al accused us of being. But I’ve seen what the future holds—it has to be done.
Flames roar in my ears, curl the ends of my eyelashes. I nudge Olga toward the door while Rostov is focused on Al; if we don’t move soon, we’ll be engulfed. Lyubov is screaming at us to get out, get out, but the pop and hiss of the fire catching drowns out her screams. Olga narrows her eyes and stares straight ahead.
With a fierce creak, one of the oak pillars tears free of its mooring under Olga’s power and swings straight toward Rostov.
“Get out, get out!” Lyubov howls. The pillar plows through the wooden planks of the floor, just before Rostov, breaking his concentration and sending a column of flame up between us and Al and Stokowski. They lock eyes with us, then turn and run for the air raid shelter. The floor buckles inward. I can’t wait here to see what becomes of Rostov—we have to get out, now.
Olga staggers out the door and down the stairs of the cafe; the pants leg over her prosthetic leg is singed and charred, and I wonder if the prosthesis is damaged as well. I offer her my arm and help her down to the curb while Lyubov shoots us dirty looks. “Come on. We have a car waiting around the corner.”
I let go of Olga. Andrei. I have to get Andrei from the alleyway. “Wait—what about—” But as I round the corner to the alley, it’s deserted.
Andrei isn’t here.
He was never here.
Andrei! I scream, inside my head, desperate for him to hear, though I’m almost certain he won’t. The Andrei I foresaw in a vision, the Andrei bruised and battered—Bozhe moi. What has he done?
Rostov staggers out the café in a billow of thick black smoke and races down the stairs. I follow them to the car, but the world is moving in slow motion, as if we are all weighed down by tar. Words whiz past me, German and Russian, but I am underwater. I am suspended in stasis between the future and the past. Now is an emptiness; now is the fresh fallen rain, streaking the windows of our car as the ruins of Berlin fly by.
*
Rostov is rushed to a secret airfield so he can be flown directly to the Kremlin for celebrations and medals in honor of his capture of Herr Trammel, a leading Nazi rocket scientist who has agreed under duress to cooperate with the Soviets. The rest of us have to take a more circuitous route home. It will still be a few weeks until the Red Army tears through the front into Berlin, so we are driven far, far north to the Baltic Sea and bundled into a chartered vessel to take us safely to the Bay of Finland and the newly liberated Leningrad.
Andrei meets us there, with a nasty bruise under one eye and a welt bubbling up his lip like a tumor. I fight back the urge, when I see him, to give him another black eye to match. No, I wait until we are alone, until Lyubov and Olga are at the other end of our ship to give him a piece of my mind.
“You lied to me,” I hiss under my breath, words rising and falling with the churn of the ship’s engine. “You said you were in the alleyway. That you were safe.”
Andrei stares at the bulkhead and folds his hands between his knees. “I told you what you needed to hear to get you out of the café alive.”
“Why couldn’t you warn me, then? That Rostov was closing in, that we were in danger?”
“Because he’d already captured me.” Andrei taps the side of his temple. “The song they embedded in the shortwave radio transmission—“The Internationale.” When we get something stuck in our head like that, a catchy song we can’t shake, it makes our thoughts easy to pick out of a crowd. That’s how Rosto
v found me.”
“Captured—as in, he expected you to be hostile?” I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to stave off a rising headache. Every bone in my body aches, and exhaustion keeps tugging at me, coaxing me with whispers and lullabies. But if we’re still in danger—
“He expected me to, yes. I mean—I was infiltrating the Ministry of Armaments and Weapons without his permission. He kind of assumed…” Andrei smiles sadly. “I couldn’t dissuade him of that. But I was, at least, able to convince him that I was acting alone. That you and Olga were awaiting further instructions to meet up.”
I shake my head. “But I don’t understand. How could he not see past your lies, into your thoughts?”
“Because I’m getting stronger.” Andrei reaches for my hand; his warmth is as comforting as a mug of tea straight from the samovar.
“Maybe so, but there are only a few of us, while the NKVD, Stalin’s cronies … they’re nearly limitless. How can we subvert them? Prevent our powers from being used to hurt others?” I slump against him. “I wanted to make the right choice. But yet again, I chose to keep myself alive.”
“No. No, you didn’t. Stokowski got away, didn’t he?” Andrei asks. “And the American man, as well. Maybe we’re still bound to Stalin’s whims, but we managed to help one man—that’s one victory. We have the opportunity now, Nina, don’t you see? A chance to do even more.”
But all I can see are the compromises in my past, yawning like unmarked graves. “It will never be enough.”
Andrei twists toward me and cups my face in his hands. Our earlier kiss seems as intangible as smoke, but the way he’s looking at me now makes me feel monstrous. I am monstrous. This gift, this curse, makes it all too easy to choose the path that’s best for me, and damn everyone else. Why can’t he see it? Why must he look at me with those soft lips and those inviting eyes and that exposed face that just begs to be hurt by me, like everyone else?
“I should have known, how my research would be used. I should have known precisely what Stalin would want with the power to read others’ minds. That he’d use it to make people disappear—turn into nothingness. Erased from the ledgers.” I clutch my knees and gasp for air. “I should have known. Of all people, with a power like mine—I could have seen, if only I’d thought to look. But all I cared about was my advancement. My research. Myself.”
Andrei extends one arm to me. No fear in his expression, only a question. I nod, and he drapes his arm around my shoulders and pulls me toward him. It feels like a rope being tossed to me—woman overboard. “We all make mistakes. We are not superhuman. Only different.”
“Not everyone’s mistakes get other people killed.”
Andrei laughs bitterly. “How is that entirely your fault? It’s the nature of Russia, now. It’s our world. We are all turned against each other, reporting on our neighbors and friends.”
“Then we have to change it, not just escape it.” I nestle deeper into his arm. “I thought yesterday we could leave it behind.”
He sighs. “I thought so, too. But this way is better. And if we can’t change it, then at least we can leave knowing we tried.”
“How can there be more chances, though? The war is nearly won. And a new war is coming—it’s true, what we said in the café. East against West. Russia and the Americans, stealing scientists from each other, secrets, worse. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it already.”
“But have you seen a chance for us to be more?” he asks.
In the future, I see once again the bridge Andrei and I stand on, over the Moskva River. We gaze at Novodevichy Monastery and at a row of new skyscrapers being built. The Soviet Union is on the rise, with Stalin at our helm. All the subversive elements have been swept away, thanks to Stalin, thanks to psychics and monsters like me.
But Andrei’s hand is in mine, and buried in our skin is a promise, one that no cosmic scale can outweigh.
A promise to do better—whatever long and twisting path it takes.
Andrei smiles at me. “We must keep it secret. It may take far longer than we can guess. But we’ll find a way.”
“To undo this curse that our powers give us to be weapons,” I say. “I’ll use the future to look for new opportunities to stop men like Stalin, men like Rostov. For ways to undo this curse.”
“No,” Andrei says. “To make it into a weapon of our own.”
THE END
Text copyright © 2015 by Lindsay Smith
Published by Roaring Brook Press
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eISBN 9781626723092
eBook edition, March 2015
Kursed Page 8
