There is blood on my lips and an eerie song in my head and my hands are cold and raw and I’m not certain I can feel my left ankle.
“Are you all right?” Valya tries to push off of me, but manages to crumple me up more in the process.
“My left foot—” I try to wiggle it inside my boot. Pain splits up my leg like ice shattering. I stifle a whine.
“Can you walk?” Valya holds out his arm for support as I pull myself onto my right foot. I take a tentative step down the rubble pile, but as soon as I put weight on my left foot, it gives way under me. I crash to the ground.
“I can walk.” I force myself to stand again, keeping my left knee bent to minimize the weight on it. “We’ll just have to go a little slower.”
Valya nods, the streetlights from overhead glinting off his glasses. “The question is, where?”
I hobble to the left and, bracing myself, prop against the wall with my palm.
She’s down here with hundreds of other wives, and some of their husbands, in soiled, shabby uniforms. They speak in terse bouts of German that ricochet off the tunnel walls like gunfire. Overhead, the streets rumble with rolling tanks and mortar shells, as pebbles spray from the ceiling. They huddle close and march forward.
“This way.” Though it’s dark here, I can see the lit tunnels in the past. The wall becomes my crutch, supporting me as I hop into the black abyss, Papa’s song growing heavier in my head.
Memories leap out at me as my hand skates along the stone. An argument among the officers’ wives. The shelling, far too close. The men want to change out of their uniforms in case the Allies capture them—if I understand their German, they mean to surrender if the tunnel is found and beg that they were only following orders, that as soon as they could they fled the Nazi ranks.
They’re filthy fascists, scampering under their own city like cockroaches. But I see myself in them, too. Justifying the pain I’ve caused others—the lives of wildlings, of scientists like Gruzova that my father has destroyed to reach me. I feel the salty bite of tears on my wind-burned cheeks, but I tell myself it’s only from the pain in my leg.
My hand pounds the wall again, sinking back in time. The next shell sounds like a thunderclap instead of a distant drum. Shards of rock fly through the air, frozen in place as the lights suddenly wink out. Everyone stops. The women cling close to their husbands, those with husbands left to cling to. A little girl cries in the background. The collapsed rocks shift and flow toward them, and daylight appears. The helmeted heads of Allied soldiers emerge, their rifles raised.
“There’s a break in the tunnel ahead.” I hop along the wall faster, bobbing up and down on my good foot, bad, good, bad. The light of street lamps trickles through the darkness. I’m putting more and more weight on my foot. Tendons strain and pop but I can bear the pain. We are almost free. The light is clearly coming through the collapsed part of the tunnel from the memory—we can climb out of it onto the street level. A few more yards. My papa is waiting for me.
A shadow crosses the light. A curve of jaw, a bald dome. Just like Valentin’s memory from when he escaped. He stops moving beside me.
With a crack of his knuckles, the Hound straightens up within the tunnel, blocking out the light from beyond.
CHAPTER 43
YULIA ANDREEVNA CHERNINA. Rostov’s sandpaper voice scrapes through my head, as cruelly as if he were standing right before us, as the Hound looks me up and down. I am beginning to think the Chernins are more trouble than they are worth.
“I’m sure Secretary Khruschev feels the same about you. When’s the execution, comrade?” I take a step backward, but my bad foot tweaks, and I nearly collapse against Valya at the sharp pain.
Rostov chuckles through our minds; it makes the Hound smile in his own ghastly rictus. His face is partially illuminated from the street beyond him: the dim glow of freedom. The light glints off his crooked teeth and my stomach churns to see my suspicions confirmed. I sigh. Well, I’ll use what I must.
Your mother has been most cooperative, Rostov says. She has revived the program; she’ll help us replace all the wildlings your father wiped. And as you’ve already witnessed, Khruschev won’t be a threat to me much longer. His refusal to confront the Western fearmongers is a shameful mark on our history, one soon to be erased by wiser men. But you, and Comrade Sorokhin—you don’t want your own role in our new order? The Hound steps forward. A chance to shape it into whatever you want the Soviet Union to be?
“We’ll take our chances elsewhere,” I say.
That is not for you to decide. He pauses. I know the expression he must be making now, wherever he is: the skin puckering around his eyes as his mouth narrows to a pencil stroke. Proceed.