“My poor Yulia. This is so much worse than I feared.” The man slaps a clipboard against his open palm. “Four little alleles, bits of your genetic code. If only you didn’t carry the genes, this would not be necessary. I’m sorry it must be this way.”
He drags a chair right up to me and cradles my face in his hands. I flinch away from his searing touch—then choke on a gasp. The fringe of black hair across his forehead, those steel-rimmed frames. I wet my lips; strain my vocal cords like the out-of-tune strings in the ballroom piano. “Papa?”
His blinding glow retreats in fits and starts. He slides a cigarette from behind his ear and lights it with a flick. “Your mother and I are at an impasse,” he says, smoke oozing from his mouth and nose. “She thinks that we can train you ourselves. Teach you to keep your powers safe.”
He taps the ash away with a trembling hand. “But I am not so convinced. Not because I find you weak, mind you—my darling girl, you are so much stronger than I could have hoped. Already you remind me of her, way back when…”
“When what?” I wheeze. “During the war?”
Papa nods. “Yes, it is not your weakness that I fear. It is the Party’s strength.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “They have methods, skills that our minds just aren’t made to overcome. You know what I always say.” He stretches one hand and leans forward, flattening his palm to my forehead. “An empty mind is a safe mind.”
My eyes fly open, the laboratory, Papa, the current of my thoughts blazing away in an instant. I rip my hands out of Valentin’s. “Bozhe moi.” I trip over the bench as I stumble out into the aisle.
“This stop, Biaroza, in the Soviet republic of Belarus,” the conductor calls, as we slow into the station. I charge out of the dining car and pound down the steps straight into waist-high snow.
“Yulia, come back! Please!”
Valentin charges after me but I’m running straight for the thicket of birch trees, so bone-white and perfectly straight against the inky sky. Stars mix with snowflakes in the air. The only sound I can hear is the crunch of snow beneath and behind me, my ragged breaths, and the distant rumble of the stalled train. The trees swallow me whole.
In my thoughts, the three-note melody rings out tauntingly.
Hands close around my waist. Valentin tackles me into the snow. I stare straight up at the bared branches and dream of them coming to life, scooping me up, crushing me.
“Please, you can tell me. What’s the matter, Yulia? Just let me know.”
“The scrubber.” I stare at my breath as it hovers before me. Words are too solid in this winter night. Snow is dripping through my sweater; my bare hands are going numb. “He’s not American after all.” I sink further into the white abyss. “He’s my father.”
CHAPTER 37
“IT’S WHY I DON’T REMEMBER my powers ever showing up until after he’d left.” I gulp down frosty air that worms through my lungs, both scorching and numbing. “He—he suppressed it, scrubbed out my memories of even having such an ability.”
Valya lets me sob into his shoulder as he rubs my hands between his. We’re both coatless, hatless, scarfless in the January night. “We can talk about it more, Yulia, but we have to go back. The guards are coming.”
“Why? Why can’t we flee now? I can’t go to Berlin and face—I mean, how could he be so close to me and not even tell me—” I choke down a scream. “Look at all the people he’s hurt!”
“Yul, look at you. At me.” He helps me to my feet. “We’re in no shape to run right now. We’re in the middle of the Soviet Union in the dead of winter.”
“Why wouldn’t he say something to me? Why all of the games?” I bite down on my raw bare hand, already throbbing from cold, to stop a sob. “Doesn’t he care anymore?”
“He must have had a good reason.” But Valentin’s shoulders slump—he can’t come up with a good reason, either. “He wants us to meet him in Berlin, we know that much. We have to at least learn why.”
I shake my head, though I don’t fight him off as he wraps his arms around me. “He should have told me,” I whimper. I realize how pathetic I must sound, but I’m too numb—from the shock, from the cold—to care.
Two sets of boots crunch through the snow toward us—our guards. I look away, deeper into the forest, though I can’t see far for the fog and snow. I ache to keep running but my legs sting from the cold.
“Fine.” I shake snow from my skirt. “Let’s go back.”
“Comrades!” one of our guards calls. “I trust there is a good reason for this?”
Valya kisses my cheek and helps me back toward the train. “Sorry, comrade. The toilet was occupied.”
*
I sleep like death and awaken well past noon to Larissa staring me down from her bunk. “Oh, good. You’re alive.”
“Good to know,” I say, rubbing my head. I examine my fingers and toes—I have escaped General Winter’s frostbite.
She cants her head to Kruzenko’s bunk. “Her nose started bleeding again and she was talking nonsense. How do you feel?”