Alsatian. Thorax. Liquefied.
Row after row, Rostov funnels the code from me, working down the page from the memory, then pours it out of Khruschev’s mouth. The last ventriloquist act the world shall know, before we are bathed in white sunrise. The silos are opening with each row he recites; the missiles are warming up, ready to trot onstage for the grand finale as the last line draws near. My brain blisters under Rostov’s touch. I must fight back. I cannot fight back.
Bang-bang. Here lies Yulia, who thought she could escape. You can’t outrun a mushroom cloud.
What was it that I tried so hard to forget? The deeper Rostov digs, the more wounds he rips open; the more long-buried pains are brought to the fore. I cannot hold them inside, hoarding them greedily, collapsing under the weight of the world’s emotions. I have to set them free.
And then, like an explosion in my chest and in my head, the memory reappears. Bang-bang.
No, that doesn’t quite do justice to the detonated emotions surging out of me, memories and pain and gunfire and Papa and hatred and Rostov’s despicable smile. I fling myself at him, palms raised, and clamp onto his throat.
BANG.
His awful attack at the KGB headquarters, staged to look like a murder-suicide. It floods back out of me and into him, sharp as gasoline, and I am the match. I do not merely drink up emotions and memories. I push them away.
BANG.
Rostov’s control retracts from me. Khruschev slumps to the floor as Rostov loses that thread, too. I jam the pain under his skin. For every time he scrubbed our memories, every time he used our powers against our will. Every indignity I’ve suffered, whether from my parents trying to protect me or the KGB trying to exploit me. My fingertips are rage. My palms are vengeance. It all comes gushing out of me, overwhelming Rostov’s steel-wool thoughts with my own.
Blood trickles from Rostov’s nose as he collapses onto the secretary’s bed, head turned toward me, his breathing steady but shallow. I feel empty and purposeless, like the first day of summer after school ends, but I am free.
No—I am almost free.
I am trapped in a hotel room with two unconscious men, one the leader of the unfree world and the other its near-destroyer. “Allo? Allo?” cries the man at the other end of the telephone, waiting for the rest of the code that would lob destruction across the world. I slam the receiver back onto the cradle.
Think, Yulia, think. Each thought is a colossal effort. The window. I lunge for the window. Please, don’t be sealed shut—
Valya’s face looms before mine on the other side of the windowpane, crouched on the fire escape. He motions me away from the window, and as soon as I’m out of the blast radius, he slams his foot through the glass. “Are you all right?” He peers around the bizarre scene.
“I will be. How did you find us?”
Larissa’s head appears next to his on the fire escape. “Please. It’s like you were setting off psychic fireworks in here.” She jabs her thumb toward Valentin. “He, ah, convinced Kruzenko to bring us back to the hotel after you left with Rostov.”
I approach the window, arms open, and Valya wraps me in an embrace. He rocks me back and forth, and I almost let myself cry. I feel like I could dissolve into him, what little of me remains. But we have to run. Valya kisses my forehead, then helps me climb out.
“You came back for me,” I say. The words sound stupid hanging in the air between us, but they mean so much.
“I always will.”
We soar down the fire escape. “Where’s everyone else?” I ask. “What about the guards?”
“I had Kruzenko give them some work to occupy them,” Valentin says.
Larissa nods. “We’re not sure how long the effect will last, though. I’m predicting it’ll break at some point between here and the next block.”
“Hopefully by then, we’ll be at Café Mozart,” I say. And then we’ll escape to the great, vast, unknown life on the other side of the concrete wall. We’re free. We’re almost free.