Kursed (6 page)

Olga steps forward. “Look, doc, we don't have time for chit-chat. Show us the way out of Mittelbau. Now.”

“Or you'll kill me?” He snorts. “Fear of death—look what it's gotten me. Transfer from the Polish camp to the political prisoners. From the rocket assembly line to the morgue. From cremation to dissection, experimentation, barbaric research to fuel an even more barbaric eugenics program. I don't fear death anymore.”

“You're one of the camp's laborers?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. One of the lucky ones.” His face suggests his luck is anything but. “Rather than working me to literal death on the factory floor, I get to use my medical training to desecrate those who did.” He slumps back against the wall. “So much for the Hippocratic Oath.”

“Sorry for you, pal.” Olga rolls her eyes. “But if you haven't noticed, this mountain's about to come crashing down around us, and…”

The doctor lowers his gaze. “There's … there's a bay of trucks down the G corridor. But it's heavily guarded.”

Andrei closes his eyes for a few seconds. When they pop back open, he says, “Not anymore, it's not. Let's go.”

No one bothers to stop us, to question us, to even notice us in our uniforms amidst the screaming, writhing madness. We have to cut through several criss-crossing hallways, avoiding cave-ins and makeshift barricades and the smell of burning meat, before at last the truck bay stretches before us. No signs of Rostov and Lyubov—somehow that knowledge, alone, gives me courage to endure whatever comes next.

Surprisingly few of the Nazis have come to the truck bay, presumably because they have no access to the keys, but between Andrei's ability and mine, we're able to dart around their field of vision. “It's still daylight,” Olga points out as she uses her power to jump-start a truck without the keys. “There's a chance they'll bomb us on the road.”

“That's a chance we'll have to take,” Andrei says, as the truck roars to life.

We follow the trail of trucks toward the main road. Above ground, the aerial bombing looks even worse than it sounded down in Mittelwerk; Allied planes by the dozens fly overhead in flawless formation, dropping their bombs on the hilly forests with all the regularity of a farmer scattering seed. Each bomb sends a gout of dirt and wood and stone geysering into the air around us, and the trucks on the road swerve and juke to avoid the explosions, though many take a direct hit. The lucky ones catch fire; more explode into a fireball of diesel and hot metal and flesh.

“Hang tight,” Andrei says, through clenched teeth. “I learned a few tricks this morning.”

“Hopefully about what
not
to do,” Olga says, but even her expression is looking tighter than usual.

The truck swings wide to the right, slamming us all against the left side as an explosion sets us bouncing on too-tight suspensions. Gouts of dirt fly into the air; the sound of trees and rocks splitting apart fills the air. But Andrei stays focused; he keeps us safe. Finally, after a frantic half hour of steering through the chaos, we can no longer hear the roar of engines overhead.

Olga is the first to puncture the silence that's pulled tight as a blanket around our truck as we wind through the tree-lined road. “So.” Her mouth twitches. “What's our new plan?”

I rub the silk lining of my purse where the radio crystal is concealed. “I suppose we ought to check the shortwave … see if there's a message waiting for us…”

But Andrei keeps white-knuckling the steering wheel; no one seems too eager, myself included, to take me up on that suggestion.

“Okay. Really, though.” Olga twists around so she can face Andrei and me, ignoring the doctor curled up in the back. “There is no default plan here. We have to do something.”

The possibility hangs in the air like a threat of rain, tangy and lush. The option no one wants to voice. Am I only imagining it, or are they thinking it, too? The way we all took the first chance to get away from Rostov that we could. I can't be the only one.

Maybe it's not just Rostov I'm running from. I've seen what obeying the Motherland does to me, the way its choices wind around my future like a tourniquet. How it's forever a choice between staying alive and staying myself, that the two options will never coexist. Oil and water. Rostov isn't the first to rub my nose in the spineless, soulless choices I've made to stay alive, to pursue my research, but he can be the last. I can end it.

For a moment, I let myself consider it—a future away from the Soviet Union and the ever more restrictive projects passed down to me by Moscow State and the NKVD, where I can study the secret code of my genes without being forced to weaponize that code—turn it into something to threaten and bargain and bribe others with. Does such a future await me, at the end of some unknown choice?

I'm searching, searching, but the only thing I can see right now is a swirl of colors and noise, nothing coming into focus. At least it's not darkness. At least there's something there.

My voice cuts through the silence. “We don't have to go back.”

Now I've gone and said it: taken the idea from my mind and given it form, weight. It exists, now.

It won't be squashed down.

Olga drums her fingers against her hollowed-out prosthesis.

“All right. All right. We can—let's just get to Berlin, first of all. That's where the Americans are, the ones Herr Trammel was going to meet.” Andrei flicks on the truck's headlights, though only one comes on. “Then we can figure out a plan of action from there.”

“Comrade Secretary said the Red Army was making a push for Berlin. It'll fall soon enough,” I say. “And the Americans and British are pressing in from the west. Everyone meets in the middle. Utter chaos.”

Andrei quirks a smile again. “The perfect place to disappear.”

Olga slings one arm over the back of the chair and peers at the doctor, passed out on the rear seat. “But what about him?”

I ask myself a question about his future—but not for me, not for anyone else except that dark-haired girl I'd seen sitting in a classroom, attention rapt as she listens to a white-haired professor. Something in her earnest eyes and hidden face … I'd seen it before, echoing on others' faces.

I would see it again.

“First, we find out the truth from him,” I say. “Then we decide.”

*   *   *

Somewhere a few hours after nightfall, the truck begins to shudder and shake, jarring me from my dreamless sleep. I knew our luck was too good to last, that the visions of blood and a cold-iron grip I'd seen on the plane were coming, but I thought we'd have more time. Andrei turns off the headlights and lets us coast over to the shoulder of the road.

“Well,” Andrei says, “I suppose we'd better find shelter.”

I listen to the unsettling silence, so foreign to me after the madness of the past few days—no droning prop jet or planes overhead, no crackle of badly shielded electrical wiring, no yelling Politburo officials or NKVD officers or other men trying to get into my head. “Is there a reason we can't rest here? In the truck?”

Andrei gestures to the darkness pressing up against our windows. Even the stars are blotted out by thick cloud cover; no moon, no streetlights, no nothing around. “We're vulnerable on the road. No radio. No way to prove ourselves to be who we say we are—or who we really are, depending. It's best to be where we won't run into anyone else overnight.”

“And do you have any suggestions on where that might be?”

Andrei taps his temple. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

We shove the truck over the shoulder and into a ditch. Andrei has gotten a German pistol from somewhere—I'm afraid to ask where—and fires a couple rounds into the windshield and tires. “For authenticity's sake,” he says, though I'm not sure if it's the Germans we want to convince or our fellow countrymen.

As Andrei leads us into the forest, I notice the doctor's cracked lips, and the way he wipes away blood from them every now and then. It's no surprise, how malnourished he is; I saw how the corpses looked, shrunken down, every last nonessential ounce drained away from them until there was nothing left to take but what mattered. They told tales, during the siege of Leningrad, about people so desperate with hunger that they resorted to eating themselves—a foot or an arm or a buttock, sheared off like ham. But you don't have to eat yourself to survive. Your body will start to do it for you.

The forest swallows us up, so thick and syrupy, smothering even the sounds of our own footsteps, our own hearts thudding with its dank and rain-soaked air. I don't notice the cabin until we're nearly running into it—unlit, uninhabited. I close my eyes, try to peer just a few minutes ahead—are there other squatters already inside? But I only see our party sweeping through the dusty two rooms, no one disturbing us. I nod to Andrei and he pushes open the unlocked door.

“How long did it take you to find this place?” I ask, as we head inside. Thick tufts of dust coat the floor and windowsills, lit only by Olga's lighter.

Andrei kneels in front of the cabinets that rim the makeshift kitchen corner. “Not long at all. As soon as I could tell we were running out of fuel, I started bumbling my way through the forest, searching.” He digs around inside the cabinets, even though he can't possibly see them in the dark. “Ah! Here we go.”

We all stare at the box that he plops onto the rickety wood table: a lantern half-full with kerosene. He fishes his crystal radio out of his pocket and sets it beside the lantern.

“Well? Shall we try to make contact with the rest of the team?” Andrei asks, his voice tight.

“Maybe in the morning,” I say, which eases the air all around me.

Olga reaches for the dial. “We don't have to tap in. Let's just see if there's any news out of Berlin or Moscow. We'll stay off the NKVD comms.”

“Sure. Okay.” Andrei dives back into the cabinets. “Now, let's see what we can find to eat…”

In short order, we're shoveling beans from a can into our mouths with our bare hands by the feeble light of the lamp. Even the doctor has joined us, though he starts to look queasy after just a few bites. Olga watches him with a cool expression on her face. “All right, doctor,” she drawls, leaning back in the chair. She's removed her prosthetic to rest for the evening, and she crosses her whole leg over the stump of her thigh. “I think it's time you tell us who you really are.”

He forces a weak smile to his face, but it falters in an instant. “My name is Friedrich Stokowski. I was a professor, before, in Warsaw. Biology, some genetic research. It was my passion, but lately the field of genetics has become … tainted. Political.”

My lips press into a hard line. “I know what you mean.” But I don't, not in the way he thinks. He's speaking of eugenics—of Germany's obsession with genetic purity and superiority, as absurd a concept as any. In Russia, we are not looking to prove a point; we are hunting for weaponry.

“I was a political prisoner, at first, but as soon as they learned I had a medical background, I got special assignments in the labor camps. Tending to the sick and wounded. It sounds very touching, yes, having a medical bay, but make no mistake—they wanted me to carry out one purpose, and one alone. Patch the starving, dying prisoners up long enough that they could squeeze one more day of work from them.”

“But you were—” I swallow down the noise that had been crawling from me—something exhausted, yet desperate to show horror at the boundless power of humans to cause pain to others. “You were dissecting them. The dead.”

Doctor Stokowski cups his hand over his mouth, muffling his words. “Yes. Yes, everything changed when they transferred me to Mittelbau-Dora.” His eyelids tug downward. “The factory—it's only one part of their work there. They have thousands of workers for it, all concentration camp prisoners, and those get fed through the gristle of the assembly line, no doubt about it. But it was also a place of … experimentation.”

My stomach churns as I dread what comes next.

“Trials, to see what manner of person is best suited to enduring such harsh work. Alterations, experimentation, see how we could tweak the human body to make it work longer on less sustenance … And then autopsies, after we'd worked them to death, to see what effects we'd had.” His hand migrates up to his eyes, heel of his palm against his eyes. “I couldn't—I never thought I could do such a thing. To anyone. I swore the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm. But then it became a game, to me.”

“A game of exceptions,” I mutter under my breath. Andrei glances at me from the corner of his eye, but his gaze is back on his meal before I can meet it.

Stokowski nods. “Yes. Exactly. At least this will keep my sister fed, over in the women's camp. At least this will spare my sister's life. At least this will ensure my sister is properly buried. At least I can show the dead proper respect, more than these others would … At least I meant to do right…”

I always try not to stare too closely into the past—what's happened is prologue, it's only the constraints of any given experiment. I can't change it or shape it or interpret it in any way. So I tell myself. But I think there's another reason, one that slices to the quick, that keeps me from looking back, and it's because I don't want to see the winding path that brought me here.

To the middle of war-torn Germany, scooping up swastika-sporting monsters to bring them to the Motherland.

To the confidence of men like Stalin and Rostov, when I promised them a new weapon in the war.

To the attention of the KGB, as I've trimmed away the parts of my research that wouldn't assure my safety in the Party.

I've willingly aligned myself with the sort of man the doctor felt forced to accept. I thought I had no choice—but I have a chance to do more. To be more.