“I can’t wait to see you play,” I tell him, the lie chafing.
The train clatters along the tracks, puncturing the silence that hangs over us. I try to think of something more to say—some way to get Sergei to leave, but everything sounds false and bitter in my head. I shift on the bench. Sergei looks between Valentin and me, smile fading. Slowly, Sergei stands up, his Tchaikovsky music bursting with cannon fire. “Well, I, uh … guess I’d better sleep.” He swings toward me, his eyes icy points. “You should, too, Yulia.”
The dining car door slams behind him in a wave of winter air.
“He knows.” I swallow hard. “About us.”
“He suspects.” Valentin slumps back on the bench with a sigh. “We’ll have to be careful. Maybe it could work to our advantage. Distract him from what we’re planning.”
I shake my head, but I can’t find words for the fear I feel rising in my throat. I can’t worry about Sergei or our escape just now. I have to focus on why we’re here. “I’m ready.”
Valentin studies me, gaze soft, but there’s an intensity in his wrinkled brow that I feel, too. These are the last moments before something changes me on the outside as much as in.
I place my hands on the table, palms up, a sacrifice to whatever comes next. I need to know who I am. What’s been taken from me. I don’t care about the cost.
“You’re sure about this,” Valentin says, sounding like he already knows. He laces his fingers in mine. “Just relax your mind. Unclench the music around it and let yourself float…”
The train spins away from me. The world is dark, marred like a scummy pond. Three clear notes ripple the water as dark shapes dart below the surface. There’s a submerged wooden cabin—our summer dacha in the forest, flooded, moss reaching up from its roof like groping fingers. The tower of Moscow State.
I skim above the water, letting the current carry me over these fragments of my past, staring up like drowned faces. The melody crescendos, but I’m not feeling that tenderness under my skin, that battered soreness that warns me not to proceed deeper into that patch of memory as surely as an electric fence.
You’re still fighting it, Yulia. You have to let go.
A red and gold star juts from the water. I follow it below the surface; it’s the top of a strange baton wielded by a statue of the Soviet Man, forever midstride. I’ve seen this statue before, though I couldn’t say where. I catch on the baton and sink, following it down into the depths, toward the statue’s base.
Better. Stay calm, Yulia. I’ll do the best I can.
The statue is in the courtyard of a submerged compound: curved concrete and metal bomb-shelter doors. I glide toward the elaborate mural painted over the doorway, full of stern-faced Soviet scientists, measuring vials and flasks as a comet trail of double helixes, stethoscopes, chromosomes swirl behind them. I reach out to trace the Cyrillic letters chiseled into the door. State Laboratory for Neurophysiological Chromosomal Research. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I think to Valentin.
The current shifts, tugging me down toward the open doors. No. Oh, no. As I’m sucked into the building, my ribs clamp shut and my heart pounds madly. I suck in salt water.
Don’t fight it! Valentin cries, as if it’s as simple as that when I’m losing control.
I slam into a cramped child’s desk, the kind we had in grade school, but this is no classroom. Wires slither out of my head and jam themselves into a blue electrical box studded with red lights. The room reeks of bleach and formaldehyde, a little too similar to the KGB interrogation room I remember from when Kruzenko first spoke to me.
We’re getting closer, Yulia. But I’ll have to work slowly. I don’t want to hurt you—
The door opens with a flare of white light. I open my mouth to scream as the light pours over me like sandpaper on my skin. When the scream finally comes, it’s raw as a wound, shredding apart—
The white light blinks out, and the pain sizzles out of me. No. I’m sorry, Yul. I can’t do this to you.
Please. I watch the red lights do their strange dance up and down the control panel that I’m plugged into. We’re so close. I’m sure of it. The fluorescents overhead sputter; the current starts to pull me away. Valya, it’s fading—please!
I slam back into the chair with a clang; the whole room drains of water as the lights swing back into full staticky force. The door opens once more as a ghostly man-shaped blur steps inside. I lift my head toward him, but the wires attached to me limit my movement; I can only catch sight of him from the corner of my eye.