Kursed (2 page)

Andrei steeples his fingers in front of his face. “And this is the final test.” When I nod, he turns to Stalin. “If I fail, you will have me shot, so no one else can know that you are searching for psychics.”

“Comrade Chernin—” I start, as Stalin's face contorts in rage, a growl building in his throat—

But something's changed in the air; a crackle like an impending lightning strike. The hairs on the back of my neck lift up, and a vein throbs, loud and angry, behind my right eye. My thoughts are tearing open—my mind is not my own. The visions flood in to fill the empty space.

Walls crumbling around me, the earth bucking beneath my feet, as my heart pounds into my throat. Shouting, lots of shouting all around. Andrei seizing me by the shoulders, shouting my name.
This is our chance.

Me, standing in an empty room, the walls smeared with ink—taut, frantic writing, circles around it, lines webbing from one circle to the next, disordered, a thousand futures that refuse to sort themselves, until they converge on a spiral of red.
There has to be another way.

My hand pressed against a pane of glass as the girl on the other side is dragged away.

A snowbank, fresh-fallen and blinding white, with a single feather drifting onto it.

Then the visions seal themselves up with one heavy crack, like the snap of bone.

I open my eyes. Andrei stands before me, head bowed, hands jammed in his coat pockets, smile gone from his face. “Two hundred and ninety-eight,” he says.

“Yes.” Stalin's facial expression twists into something frighteningly like a smile. “That's correct.”

I grip the chair in front of me. My head is hammering; I can't quite feel my legs. What happened? Why I am I reliving the previous minute? I must have skipped into a vision of the future again. It's never felt so real before—but this is playing out differently. Yes. When I lived this moment before, Stalin didn't confirm Andrei's choice. Why has it changed? Did I do something to affect it?

“Comrade Berezova?” Stalin asks. “Please proceed with the next test.”

“The—the final test.” My voice quavers as I reread the instructions for the remote viewing test. “Behind this screen, my assistants have placed a series of objects. I do not know which objects they placed; the assistants are no longer in the room. Tell me, please, what is—”

But before I can even finish, Andrei cuts in. “Lightbulb.
Podstakannik.
Matchbox.”

I whirl away from him and storm to the table. Three items are lined up behind the cardboard screen: a burned-out lightbulb. A metal
podstakannik,
designed to hold a glass cup of tea. And a small, battered box of matches.

“Well?” Stalin asks, that awful stare settling around me.

I swallow down hard, pain radiating from my head down into my jaw. Another migraine on the way. “How long have you known?” I ask Andrei. “That you could—”

He shrugs, as if I've asked him if he thinks it'll snow, eyes rolling away from me as his mouth becomes a weary line. “Long enough.”

The words twinge right in my chest. While we worked side by side, I had no idea he was carrying such a secret—or that, if his weary look is to be believed, it burdened him so. What more have I overlooked about him?

“I am assembling a team of men and women like yourself,” Stalin says. “The fascists are all but destroyed. The Motherland is advancing, ever westward, as we liberate the oppressed workers of the Third Reich.”

“Well, bravo. Hitler's on the run. Sounds like our work here is done,” Andrei says.

Again the ministers and general bob their heads together like hens pecking at the chaff.

Stalin's smile, however, seeps like a wound beneath his mustache. “No, comrade. It is only beginning. A new war is upon us—East against West, the glories of communism against the depravity of the capitalists. Once the fascist threat is eliminated, they will turn on us. They already have.”

I pull the schematics from the stack and hold them out to Andrei. His brow furrows, shielding those seaglass eyes as he studies. “I don't understand. This is some sort of—fission weaponry. But no one thinks it could actually work. Einstein's theorems are just that—”

“The Americans think it could work,” I say. “And they are testing their prototype very soon. Using scientists and techniques they stole from the Nazis.”

“But they have not shared this information with us. Even though we are allies in our fight against fascism,” Andrei says.

“And why should they? They need every advantage they can get to fend off the inevitable spread of global communism. But there are many scientists still in Berlin, there is still much research to be gleaned.” Stalin nods toward the NKVD generals.

The first general stands. “We are looking for persons with your unique skillset to undertake a mission behind the lines of the crumbling Third Reich. Find projects like this one—rocketry, genetic experimentation, weapons design—and recover either the information or the scientist who created it. We cannot let such information fall into the hands of the British or the Americans.”

“Persons with my skillset,” Andrei repeats. “I take that to mean there are others?” He's asking the NKVD general, but I feel the heat of his stare on me.

“Not all psychics possess the same type of ability, no,” I say. “But you are not alone.”

“So that's what you're calling it. Psychic powers. Mindreading. Telepathy.” Andrei shakes his head. “If Mother Russia has a strike team of psychics already at her disposal, what good is a heap of half-baked Nazi projects? In case you haven't noticed, comrades, all their advanced engineering didn't exactly help them win the war.”

I set my folders down on the table in front of me. Now this, this is what makes it all worth it—Stalin's cold stare and the NKVD's cruelty and everything in between. This chance to advance my research—to understand the strange gift that's been given to me and others. To understand it, and make it work for me instead of merely curse me. “Because I've seen what this technology can do.”

Andrei's smile fades; his gaze focuses like a laser sight.

“What it will do, in the Americans' hands. The devastation it will bring, the advances they will gain. If we let them be the sole owners of such power—of any of these powers—”

“We must not.” Secretary Stalin stands up. “We must prepare the world for global communism. And that means we must deny them every possible advantage.”

Andrei watches me, really watches me now, his tongue working at the edge of his teeth. I'd always thought he looked boyish when we'd cross paths in the halls—a brittle and fragile thing, sure to shatter if he were sent to the front. For clever men, studies granted them a reprieve from the death sentence of a fallen comrade's battered boots on their feet and a jammed rifle in their hands, for they had other ways of serving the Motherland than as fodder for the fascists.

Now, though, I see the reddish tint to his skin from blunt war-ration razors and cruel winter winds. The darkness under his eyes that can't be erased in one night's sleep. The fine lines of his features look like clockwork. He is handsome in the way of a distant porch light in a blizzard—but whose porch light, I couldn't say.

“All right.” Andrei turns toward Stalin. “I'll join your little team. You will be taking part as well, Comrade Berezova?”

I nod, feeling guilty somehow. I'm admitting a secret I've kept from nearly everyone at Moscow State—the true nature of my research. Enhanced mental abilities in the Soviet population, and potential genetic mutations responsible for them.

“Then when do we leave?” Andrei asks.

Stalin says, “Tonight.”

Chapter Two

I'm running out of room in my notebook, but I still haven't made sense of the notes, of my visions from a future so tantalizingly out of my grasp. Every few weeks, I try to come up with a new numbering system, but nothing fits the data—chronological is the goal, of course, but I'm fumbling in the dark for a light switch, a flashlight, a match. I can only really group visions with like visions, and those are rough guesses. Is that glimpse of the back of a man's head the same as this man? How do I put a time and place to a bowl of fruit?

The rest of the team members ignore me as they file onto the transport plane, but I take note of each of them. I've handpicked them, more or less, reeled them in with the wide net of my genetic sampling test. Some had already volunteered their unique services to the Motherland—like Anton Ivanovich Rostov, paging through his files in the corner of the aircraft, or the husband and wife deployed on a deep-cover mission on the Italian front right now. Our team is small, to be sure, but growing daily, thanks to my tests that found Olga, Andrei, and Lyubov.

Olga nods in slow acknowledgment to me as I find my seat across from her in the narrow hold. “The good little
apparatchik,
” she says. “I see the genetics wing isn't short of work these days.” She was a teaching assistant in the physics department at Moscow State; I'd never interacted with her personally, but I'd seen her, in the commissary, at the students' soviets. Hard to miss, when everyone swerves around her and her missing leg like she's a disease they might catch.

Andrei shuffles onto the plane last; in his scarf and jacket and worn-out boots, he looks like any other Russian man. He wedges his way sideways down the aisle between the two facing rows of jump seats that run the length of the narrow hold. Only when he catches sight of me does the Andrei I remember from university emerge, his eyes bright and his grin outsized. “Are you in charge here, too?” he asks, tossing his duffel bag in the fold-down chair next to mine.

“Thankfully not.” I jab my pen toward Rostov. “That honor goes to Anton Ivanovich Rostov over there. He's a SMERSH officer—they pulled him off the front lines to run our operation.”

Andrei rubs at the stubble along his jaw as he studies Rostov. Rostov's wiry, not in the slippery, newly starved way of most of the war survivors, but from a lifetime of fastidiousness. Dark grooves under his eyes belie his relative youth. I've seen the way he looks at everyone, like he's seeing inside more than just their minds—like he's peeling back each and every layer of flesh and bone. His mental powers intrigued me when I read about them in his file, and I admit I'm curious to see them in action, like watching a deadly virus replicate under my microscope.

“SMERSH, eh? And what's a scientist like you know about SMERSH?” Andrei asks me.

What do any of us know about the Soviet hierarchy? Whatever we need to know to survive. “The special counterintelligence force for the Read Army, right? They catch the fascists' spies and infiltrators in the military.
SMERt' SHpionom
—‘death to spies.'”

“They catch people they
think
are fascist spies, yes. And what they do to them—” Andrei cringes, head retracting into the collar of his jacket. “Well. I'm sure Comrade Rostov knows what he's doing.” He glances at my notebook, at the folded scraps of paper jammed into it every which way. “Bringing one of your research projects with you?” he asks, then squints at me. “Just what were you
really
researching, anyway?”

I snap the notebook shut and stuff it back into my bag. “I didn't lie to you. I just didn't tell you the whole truth.”

He pauses; for a second, I think he's done with the conversation, but then I see the skin draw tight around his eyes as he concentrates. Is he really trying to read my mind? That's right—he doesn't know. That any of his attempts will be foiled by my—

“Huh. Stravinsky. So that's your trick, then?” Andrei asks. “When I tried to read your mind during our research together, when we worked for Doctor Zavodov—”

“Oh! So you tried reading it back then, did you?” I force away my grin.

He raises his hands, holding up an invisible wall between us, as he dons the sheepish smile of a boy sampling sweets before they've finished baking. “—I just thought you really loved the
Firebird
Suite
.”

The plane rumbles around us, coming to life, air flattening and crackling like a thin live wire. Olga and Lyubov are already seated, chatting back and forth, but Rostov hesitates at the closed doorway, as if reluctant to leave his post. Finally, he folds his long limbs into the seat beside Lyubov, but stays perched right on the edge. It's not a large plane; everyone's thoughts and shields slosh against everyone else's, just like our knees press together. I suppose it's only fair that Andrei have the same safeguards as everyone else.

“Have you ever had a piece of music stuck in your head?” I ask, lowering my voice, though it doesn't do much in these cramped quarters. “The kind that weaves through all your thoughts.” I grip the armrests of my chair as I speak; Andrei grips the same armrest, but keeps his hand lower, a safe perimeter between our skin.

“My parents were both musicians.” He winces as the plane leaps forward down the runway. “I always have music in my head.”

I shake my head. “No, no. It can't be just a backdrop. It has to soak into your every thought. Make it part of your breathing.”

I'm no mind reader, but I can hear enough of others' unshielded thoughts if I try; I sense the shift in Andrei as he binds his thoughts up. He doesn't seal them up completely, but he'll get better with practice. He's chosen Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto—a bold, thundering piece, heavy on the brass and the piano glissades. Prior to today, I'd never have pegged him for the bombastic, but now, I'm not so sure. The Andrei who worked with me at Moscow State rarely said more than two words at a time; I never recognized him in the halls until he was only a few feet away. I would've trusted him the same as any other stalwart Soviet man—which is to say, not at all, but in a reassuring, familiar pattern of deceit. Now, though, I'm not so sure.