Kursed (10 page)

But then the lighter starts to hiss. The flame swells and swells, until it rages like a torch. Al waves his hand over it, and the flame leaps into his palm, like he's become a human brazier. Then he closes his fist, and just as quickly, the flame winks out.

“All right,” she allows, “not shabby.”

Al smirks at her, then looks toward me. “How about you
, Fräulein
? Got any neat tricks?”

I shake my head slowly. I've got to do like Andrei said—win over his trust, then state our case. “Mine don't really lend themselves to demonstration.” I glance at Olga—then a fresh vision cracks inside me. Olga, again, surrounded by flames. The same one I'd had earlier. Now, though, I have more clues. We're dealing with this man who can control fire—

I grip my fist tight around the glass of water to try to still the tremble in my arms. Can't let him know I'm not in control.

“If we're done showing off, I thought maybe we could make a deal.” The half-smile on my face hurts to maintain. All I can see are those flames. “Your people are interested in scientists, yes? All of Germany's brightest and best who know a sinking ship when they see one.”

Al's gaze tightens. “Go on.”

“Our friend here … Doctor Stokowski … he's had a rough time under the Third Reich.” I gesture to Friedrich, who offers Al a pained smile. “A Pole, captured during the
Lebensraum.
Much better than those Heil Hitler types you've been chasing—he was never a believer, he just did what he was forced to do. But he knows all kinds of military secrets, details of medical experiments … just the sort of thing I wager you're looking for.”

Al cups his chin in one hand and studies Stokowski. “Is this true,
Herr Doktor
?
”

Friedrich's face sags. “I'm afraid so. I'm not proud of what I've done. There's no pride in being a survivor, not one like me. But if it could—if what I learned could serve some greater purpose…”

Al flicks his fingers, as if in dismissal. “If what he knows is so great, why doesn't Uncle Joe want him? Don't you want to march back into the Kremlin with a pretty prize?”

I lock eyes with Olga. If she still doubts my plan, now is the time for her to let me know. But she lowers her chin, one slow, deliberate nod.

“Maybe there's more that we can offer you, as well,” I say.

I expect Andrei to say something in my head—to reassure me that I'm playing this right, some hint that he sees Al's thoughts starting to turn toward our favor. But he's silent.

“How many men and women like you do you have? Just you? A few more?” I ask. Al stays silent, but his smile sharpens, bladed. “Did you even know before today that we had them, too?”

“The specifics aren't relevant.”

“Aren't they?” Olga asks. “This war may be nearly won, but can't you already see the stage setting for the next? Just as the Treaty of Versailles, ending the Great War, laid the groundwork for this one.”

“Your people and ours have already divvied up Berlin and the rest of Germany. How long will either side be content with the deck they've been dealt? I'm betting none too long,” I say.

Al twirls the lighter between his finger and thumb. “Just so we're clear.” He speaks low, though the café is nearly empty now; no one's within earshot of our table. “Is this a sales pitch, or a threat?”

Bozhe moi,
I wish Andrei were here, with his silver tongue and slippery disguises. “We're offering our services. We get out from under the NKVD, you get to deprive Uncle Joe of his crown jewels. No threats.” I spread my hands, fingers wide, on the table.

Olga nods. “We want out. It's as simple as that.”

Another crackle of flame, lapping at my skin from a too-near future.

“That's very touching. I might even shed a tear.” Al cups his hand around Olga's cigarette and helps her light it, earning a sarcastic smile from her for his efforts. “But I know how you slippery Reds work. You play the long con. Sleeper agents. Hidden communist agendas. How do I know you're genuine?”

“Well, depending on what kind of psychics you have, you could always force us to tell the truth,” Olga says with a bat of her eyes.

Al arches one brow. The good humor is gone from his mouth, which has been slowly twisting downward.

“What, don't have one of those?” I ask. “No matter. I suppose you may never have any real proof—like with any asset you might run.”

Olga issues a thin stream of smoke from her mouth. “Feel like taking a risk on us?”

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 Rostov 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.”