I turn to the kitchen on my left, just past the washroom and the water closet. A cup of tea steams, abandoned, on the table. An issue of Pravda lies open beside it: “Khruschev Promises Moon Landing by 1965.” Vladimir Vysotsky croons one of his safe, tepid folk ballads through the AM radio, Aunt Nadia’s prized possession that cost her more rations than she’ll ever admit. She can’t be so impulsive with us around. Each ration must stretch until it snaps to feed Mama and Zhenya and me.
Maybe, I think desperately, Mama went to lie down with another of her headaches. Perhaps a patient showed up, and they’re all crammed into Nadia’s old bedroom that we share. Perhaps she stepped across the hall to chat with neighbors, safe neighbors, neighbors who would never surrender us to the KGB—
I stop with my hand resting on the bedroom doorknob, my extra sense wiping memories from it like a layer of dust. The scream that I cannot unleash burns back into my lungs, ripping through me in search of escape.
In my mind, I see the other side of the door. Two men hold Mama and Zhenya as if they are dolls. Hands clamped over their mouths, they are motionless, waiting. A third man flattens against the wall beside the door, wedged in that narrow pass between our fold-out bed and the cabinet full of molding Tolstoy and medical journals. He will grab me as soon as I walk in.
I nudge the door with my shoe and jump back.
Silence, dusty and dense. I barge into the room, but it’s empty and still. I’m too late. The memory is just that—come and gone, and with it, my family. Tears burn in the corners of my eyes. I trusted my sense, and it failed them. I’ve failed.
Something flutters against the smoke-stained curtains.
A woman—she wears the same mud-green uniform as the KGB officer on Lubyanka Square—steps down from the balcony. Her hair is dyed the riot-red that every Russian woman over forty sports these days; it’s styled in an overgrown bob that does no favors to her sagging shape.
“Yulia Andreevna Chernina.”
My name hangs between us as we study each other. She might have been beautiful ten years ago, she might have had the endless lashes and silver screen lips of Tatiana Samoilova for all I know, but the weight of her deep frown appears to have recast her face. She folds her hands behind her back. She’s physically unimposing, but the spark in her eye betrays a mind that never stops churning. I’ve seen that spark before. The superior spark of informers, spies, politicians—anyone smart enough to use you for all you’re worth.
“Daughter of Andrei and Antonina Chernin.” Her eyes narrow. “Sister to Yevgenni—”
Yevgenni—Zhenya. My brother, whose own thoughts turn against him if his supper’s five minutes late. “Where is he?” I ask. “And Mama? What have you done with them?”
She smiles, though her face fights to hold the frown in place. An old gypsy song floats through the room like a breeze. Something about lost love, crying-in-your-vodka folk music; it must be Nadia’s radio still, but the music sounds watery, like it’s soaking into my skin.
“Your mother and brother will be safe, but I require your cooperation, Yulia.” She smiles—the confident smile the twins in the market wore. The smile of someone who holds all the cards, when their opponent doesn’t even know the game’s rules. She takes a step toward me, lamplight slithering off the edges of her brass military emblem. “It’s time to show you what you really are.”
I step back, but two men have appeared behind me. Their leather gloves are cold on my skin. I buck against them as they wrangle my arms behind my back. “Mama!” I scream. “What have you done with them?”
They yank me from the doorway. If I were stronger, perhaps I could break free, but I’m weak from too few rations and too many years of unfocused fear. They press a rag against my mouth, and the last thing I see is our old family photo with Mama and Papa smiling right at me before I’m lost in endless black.
CHAPTER 3
WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, I read about an experiment where biologists took silver foxes and bred the friendliest, most docile specimens to determine if domestication could be genetically inherited. In just a few generations, they’d produced playful, calm foxes that wanted to cuddle up to human beings and looked to them for happiness, like pet dogs.
The experiment was written up in one of Mama’s professional journals, back when she practiced medicine, before we went into hiding. I’d always been enamored of genetics, which had been Mama’s specialty before joining Papa in developmental psychology research, and something in this experiment strummed the right chord in me. I’d ramble about it to anyone unlucky enough to let me corner them. I dreamed of attending the Mendeleev Genetics Institute at Moscow State University, where Mama and Papa met, and researching a cure for the storm of thoughts inside my brother’s head.
I read every book about genetics and biology that I could find, forever lugging around books that unbalanced my eight-year-old frame. But I was not satisfied; I was desperate to fix my brother and his growing fits of fear. And so, in the meadow behind our dacha, our summer cabin in Kazan, I tried to catch and breed some foxes of my own.
The only thing I ever caught was a raccoon, and when I lifted up the seething, chattering cardboard box, he flew from it and latched on to me, a ball of claws and desperation. Mama snuck me into the laboratory where she and Papa worked—past the patrolling soldiers with AK-47s—to get a rabies shot immediately, instead of waiting at the state hospital. I didn’t understand why their clinic had armed guards, but I realized, then, that my parents’ work was perhaps not as straightforward as I thought.
But I kept dreaming of the Mendeleev Institute. I spent months formulating my strategy—everything in the Soviet Union is a system, a game, and you must learn the system’s rules. I devoted myself to earning perfect marks in biology. Papa only offered his constant platitudes; “An empty mind is a safe mind,” he’d say, though I wanted to fill my head with knowledge until it overflowed. After he left, and we went into hiding, Mama swore she’d help me find a way to attend. We would craft another identity for me to slip into, much like unbeknownst to Mama I was now learning to slip into others’ skin.
There was a second part to the fox experiment that I didn’t like to think about. In addition to breeding the friendliest creatures for domestication, the scientists bred the aggressive foxes together as well. For years those raging monsters, similar to the raccoon I’d caught, invaded my nightmares, striking at the cage wire, ready to attack the moment a person came near. When I joined the program, I told myself, I would do away with that part of the experiment.
CHAPTER 4
THE TILED INTERROGATION ROOM could double as a grade school sports equipment closet or a changing room for the community pool—there’s that lingering musk of sweat and bleach and the rusty drain in front of the wooden chair that I’ve been bound to. But I know the real reason for the smell, the drain, the walls so easy to hose down. These are the sorts of closets dissenters get lost in, never to be found again. In my cotton-mouthed, sluggish waking, I fight to keep my wrists from settling on the chair’s wooden arms. I’m not in control of myself enough to keep from slipping into past prisoners’ battered skin.
When the door opens, it’s the red-haired KGB officer, clicking along the floor in black pumps with only a sly wink of a heel. The door shuts behind her and I catch a whiff of her weary body odor. I hope it’s been days since she slept; I hope her daring mission to capture me, a fearsome unarmed, half-starved teenager, has kept her from showering and eating. I don’t want to be the only prisoner here.
“You know why you are here.” She steps toward me, close enough that I could punch her if my hands weren’t tied.
I hold her gaze and don’t answer. Anything I might say could be used as an admission of guilt. I’m better off saying nothing and thinking even less. Whatever happens, I must play this like the market game: carefully, controlled.
“Your parents are Andrei and Antonina Chernin.” Air whistles through her front teeth, which I notice are bent inward, when s
he says our last name. “Both are wanted for political subversion and theft of state property.”
The theft part is news to me, but I don’t let it show. She lifts one eyebrow. Icy fingers of panic worm into my lungs. Why is she looking at me that way? A wisp of weepy gypsy music runs through my mind. In my foggy logic, I suppose she wears that music like others wear perfume.
“You are not troubled by these crimes? Perhaps you do not understand their seriousness.”
“I understand what you do to people who commit them,” I say.
She tightens her lips and hmms. “Your family is already in my custody. It would be so easy, very easy, for you to help them out of this unfortunate situation. I only need for you to cooperate.”
“You don’t have all my family.”
I clamp my teeth down on my tongue. I shouldn’t have revealed that. But Papa is safe, Mama swears it; she just won’t tell me where. An empty mind is a safe mind, he would say. I can’t help thinking of the last time I saw him. Scarf wrapped tight at his throat; steel-rimmed glasses fogging as he steps into the cold.
“Do you know this for a fact?” she asks, pacing away from me.
We’re both fighting to keep our faces blank. Like the market, it’s a game of getting what you want without paying a price that can’t be counted in rubles. But she’s had her whole career to master this art.
Think, Yulia. Everything is a system, and systems can be learned. Figure out the rules for her game. She’s not asking any questions. Isn’t that the whole point of interrogation? She mentioned cooperation—
“I’m not asking questions because I know everything I need to know from you. You are not here for what you know, but what you can do.” Her hands curl into fists, making her leather gloves creak.
I stare at her, shock momentarily numbing my resolve to keep quiet. “Did you just—”
“—read your mind?” she asks, and her smug smile is like a liter of vinegar in my gut. “Did I? You tell me.”
“I’m not telling you anything until I see my family.” I try to sound confident, casual. But I can’t erase the memory of the empty apartment, their coats still hanging up.
“I will offer you the next best thing.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a necklace, dangling it before me by its chain. The clasp is broken and bits of black hair are snarled in the links, as if it were ripped from someone’s neck. I recognize the medallion spinning at the end of the chain: an emblem of Saint George slaying the dragon.
My mother’s necklace.
“It could be anyone’s.” I tilt my head away. “Lots of Russians pray to Saint George.”
She holds the necklace in front of my bound left hand. “But you can prove that it is hers. Go on—touch it.”
Does she mean what I think she does? The medallion spins back and forth, the image on one side flickering like a zoetrope. She can’t possibly mean my little trick, my market strategy. My funny extra sense that shows what I shouldn’t see. I stretch my fingers toward the pendant.
No, no, this is my secret. I can’t possibly share it with the KGB.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, my fear making the words soupy.
“You want to keep her safe, yes?” Her eyes narrow. “Your brother Yevgenni. I know he has some … mental concerns. His condition requires extra attention, I am told. I will need to justify such care to my superiors.”
“You can’t hold him in a cell. I need to be with him.” I strain at the bindings. “He needs to follow his routine—”
“Why do you think they are in prison cells?” She waves her hand before her face as if waving away the very words. Or her bad breath. “They are cared for. But you want this care to continue, do you not? And so I require something in return. Come now, Yulia.” She sighs. “You barter all the time. You know how this works.”
I grind my teeth together because they’re the only thing between her face and a wad of spit right now. This isn’t an interrogation—it’s a sales pitch. “What could you possibly want from me? I’m not a political criminal or—or any of those things you say my parents are. I’m just a girl.”
Her chapped lips pull back into something like a smile. “Yulia, but we both know that isn’t true. You aren’t just anything.”
I squirm away from that awful smile. My wrist brushes the chair arm, and there’s a candle-flicker memory of terrifying pain—but it is quickly, mercifully gone. “No. I’m just another person you’ve chosen to harass. You want to arrest me over things my parents have done? Careless things they might have said?” I roll my shoulders. A Russian shrug, a dismissal, a shifting of blame—What do you want from me, this is just how things are. “You’d have to imprison the whole country if that’s such a crime.”
Her gaze drifts away from me, and she stands perfectly still, like she’s watching a memory. “You see things sometimes,” she says, suddenly somber. “Things that can’t be seen.”
I stop squirming around.
“You think it’s your imagination, or a phantom déjà vu. Sometimes it appears to come true, but not enough to make you believe. Coincidence. Anything more would be searching for patterns where there are none,” she says.
I realize that my mouth is hanging open, and I hurriedly shut it. She can’t possibly know about that. I barely believe it myself.
“Do you ever think about these occurrences? Do you ever wonder if there is a power behind them?”
I shake my head. A word comes to me to describe my trick sometimes, but it seems like a castoff of our superstitious past. The realms of magic, religion, mysticism—things beyond the laws of science—died in a dank basement with the last emperor. Bullet to the brainpan—flatten these outdated beliefs with tank treads.
“Psychic. That’s the word you’re looking for,” she says.
I don’t like the way she’s looking at me: her smile is too genuine, too familiar. I jerk my head away and stare at the tile wall. I can see my reflection in it, but it’s blunted, all shadow and light.
“Touch the necklace—see for yourself that it’s your mother’s. I know you can do this.” She holds it out to me again, Saint George dancing on the end of the chain. “See through it to the past it contains.”
I curl my hands into fists; my nails burrow into my palms. She is guessing wildly, or making things up. “Who are you?” I ask.
“I represent the First Chief Directorate for the Committee of State Security—”
“Committee of State Security—” Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti— “KGB, I know that much,” I say.
She sighs—delicate, measured—and stuffs the necklace back into her pocket. “My name? Why don’t you try to see it for yourself?”
I look back at her with my eyebrows furrowed.
“It’s very simple. You look at me, and then you imagine stepping inside.”
“You—you want me to read your thoughts.” I squeeze my eyes shut before she can nod. “No. It’s not possible—”
“Yulia. I know all about your ability.” She chuckles. “You’re quite easy to read, yourself.”
That slams my heart into my throat. My eyes fly open like she’s thrown cold water on me. “You can’t really mean—”
“You have a skill. Others, like me, have similar skills—but none quite like yours. So you will work for me, and I will help you refine it.” This time when she smiles, the patient motherly look is completely gone, and all that’s left are her cold, animal teeth bared at me in dominance. “Otherwise, as you know—we have ways of dealing with people who commit crimes against the State.”
CHAPTER 5
THE COVERED TRUCK BED SMELLS like rotted cabbage and wilted lettuce. The soldier on the bench across from me holds an AK-47 across his lap, casually, like it is no more threatening than a walking cane; but his eyes are unlit matches, and his arms, his steady fingers, are full of energy waiting to be unleashed. He is potential; he is a threat. But when our knees bang together, I get a whiff of his thoughts—the kielbasa sandwich awa
iting him for lunch and the nightclub dancer awaiting him for dinner. He isn’t plotting my execution just yet, and I mean to keep it that way.
My red-haired interrogator, Comrade Major Lyubov Grigorievna Kruzenko, says I’ll be living with six other teenaged children who are, she claims, like me. (I tried plucking her name from her mind, as she asked, but she was sitting across the room from me. I heard nothing save anguished cries muffled through concrete.) She is our instructor as psychic spies. She drilled me for two hours in the interrogation room until I could read her thoughts without direct contact, her face looming directly before mine with a thin, too-satisfied grin. As our instructor she’ll help us develop our skills to eventually work for the KGB as psychic spies. Classes, field trips, meals—she makes it sound like the Komsomol summer camps I attended as a little girl, but I think of the Siberian gulags instead—the life-sentence permafrost prisons. For there is a steep price to pay if I disobey; I must play along to keep Mama and Zhenya safe.
But no one can bend the rules quite like me.
The truck takes a sharp turn and slows to a stop. Someone unlatches the back for us. The soldier stands, hunched over, and prods me with the butt of his rifle. I shoot him a frosty look. We hop down into a bland, pathetic courtyard overrun with weeds and surrounded by high concrete walls. Razor wire frosts the top of the walls, softened by a fine dusting of snow.
I try to gauge the walls’ height. The razor wire doesn’t scare me, not if I’m bundled up for winter already. A few cuts and scrapes. The blood trail I’d leave behind could be a problem. I scan the courtyard, but it’s thick with armed guards.
Careful, Yulia. Your mind isn’t a safe hiding place anymore. I push down thoughts of escape as Major Kruzenko marches our way.
“Come, come,” she calls to me, holding out her hand like I’m a schoolgirl who needs to be herded everywhere. I wrap my arms around my chest—the scratchy white blouse, sweater, and wool skirt she gave me aren’t nearly warm enough for late September—and stomp past her. We round the truck and I stare up. And up.
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