Kursed (5 page)

This one … this one, he glances to the left and right, makes a little sigh like he'd dreaded and anticipated this day, and curves his shoulders forward.

This one will work with us
. I place the words on the edge of the musical shield, hopefully where Rostov can scoop them off without digging into my thoughts again. I don't like knowing he's capable of that. When powers like his were a theory, a cold description in badly set type, I admired them. New specimens to examine. In the flesh, though, I find myself wishing they could be destroyed.

Rostov nods. Suddenly, I see Andrei's face constrict, and I realize it is now his turn for Rostov's probing. I don't know if this makes me feel better or worse.

“Herr Trammel.” Rostov strides up to the man I'd pinpointed—wire-frame glasses, dirty blond hair parted straight down the middle, bangs brushed back like decorative wings on a flightless bird. He's round faced and pink, like I remember good hams used to look. “Will you come with me, please?”

Our shepherd, Herr Grossman, clears his throat. “
Mein Sturmbannführer
, if you wish to speak to any of my men, you may do so in my presence.”

“Ah, but I'm afraid that there you are mistaken. This is a delicate matter, and I cannot allow you to intrude.”

In an instant, Herr Grossman's face transforms, and he steps back to allow us to pass.

As Rostov leads Herr Trammel back into the main corridor, I glance over my shoulder, wondering why, if he's so capable of twisting everyone's mind around, he is trying to separate him from the herd, as it were, before making his pitch. Maybe there is a limit to his power, then—he can only maintain the illusion on so many people at once. The thought gives me sick comfort for a moment before I recall that Rostov is on my side. That my scientific career is built around enabling people like him to serve the Motherland.

We crowd into an empty office and Lyubov latches the doors behind us. Rostov flings Trammel into the chair and seizes him by the throat. “You will tell us where they keep the schematics.” His voice is as rough as uncut stone. “All of them.”

Herr Trammel's glasses are buckled up to one side of his face, and his pink cheeks are flushed with crimson, but still he laughs in Rostov's face. “I know what you are. All of you. You'll never be able to reproduce our work. You Russian swine will—”

He cuts off with an agonizing yelp; the room swirls with static that grinds against my skin like broken glass. A drop of blood leaks from Trammel's nostril. Andrei and I share a look.

“The archive room. It's in cabinet K, shelf 12—but the real schematics are the ones drawn in blue, not black.”

Rostov glances up. “Olga. Andrei. Antonina. Fetch the schematics and return to me.” The static hisses and snaps. “Let us verify that he's telling the truth.”

“You're too late,” Trammel says, blood painting a vulgar mustache across his upper lip. “The Americans are coming for me in Berlin. I'll never go with you Communist rats. You think you're better than the Reich? You think you wouldn't do the same in our place?
Yeargh!”
Trammel's face wrenches upward like a piece of clay, smeared by a dissatisfied potter.

“Gently,” Lyubov says to Rostov, though her expression is none too concerned. “We don't want to damage the valuable knowledge he possesses.”

Rostov grunts, then relents, releasing whatever psychic hold he has on Trammel to turn toward us. “You studied the maps. What are you waiting for?” Rostov asks us. His expression is calm, calmer even than when he'd issued orders on the plane. The soft tilt to his lips makes him look bored. “Go.”

Andrei and I clamber out of the office, Olga right behind us.

“Monster,” Andrei mutters under his breath, once we're far enough down the corridor not to hear Trammel's screams.

Olga shrugs. “Trammel's a monster, too. Another all-too-willing Nazi collaborator. I'll save my sympathy for another day.”

I wonder whether I'd also fit that description. I willingly agreed to work with Stalin and his secret police, after all, because of the research opportunities it afforded me and the doors it opened. But now that I'm seeing for myself what true believers like Rostov can do …

We find the doorway labeled DAS ARCHIV, and I reach for the handle, eager to be out of the hall, with its stench of death and sounds of agony. The lock clicks, seemingly on its own, as Olga unlatches it.

“Wait.” Andrei places a hand on my wrist. “There might be guards inside.”

Andrei flattens against the wall, eyes scrunching shut, lips going slack. He'd looked the part of an SS officer so flawlessly, I realize, that I'd almost forgotten he was just playing a role, until this moment when he's let the mask fall away. He has a bad habit of that—of blending into the scenery, of melting into a crowd, of camouflaging himself with whoever he's around. It isn't until he ceases to do so that I notice him, really notice him. His youthful lilt and unsettled limbs and a face that I can't believe I'd not noticed before.

Then he opens his eyes and the façade goes back up. He is scenery once more.

“Are we safe to—” I ask, but Andrei shushes me by pressing his index finger against his lips.

The door handle clicks open and the door swings wide under Olga's power. I fly against the wall beside Andrei, but Olga's weight is shifted to her prosthetic leg and is in no position to move quickly. My heart pulses into my throat. We're not supposed to be here, even if we could pull off flawless German accents (which we can't) and intimate knowledge of SS protocol (also out of the question). Without Rostov here to alter thoughts, we're twisting in the wind.

A guard saunters out into the hallway, unlit cigarette clenched between his lips. His eyes scud across me, as uninterested as a gust of wind, and he continues on down the hall with a heavy thud of his boots.

How could the guard not notice us? Not care? “But how—why—”

Andrei's jaw shifts left, right, tectonic. “I thought I'd—I'd just give him a push. He was standing right there, so close to the door, and if I just nudged him along, encouraged him to step through…”

“Like Rostov did to us. Intruding in our thoughts.” The needling feeling is back, scratchy as raw wool. “But you—you're not—”

“It was only a suggestion, all right?” Andrei turns away from me and yanks the door open, hard. “I didn't
make
him do anything. Would you rather we be caught?”

The archives are deceptively plain in appearance—rows and rows of file cabinets, powdered with cement dust from the uneven ceiling overhead. Each cabinet bears multiple combination locks, but Olga looks almost bored as she sets to work spinning the dials this way and that on the cabinet K Trammel mentioned. “Shouldn't we check the other cabinets, just to be sure?” she asks.

“Yes, but remember we can only bring what we can carry out of here with us.” I scan the labels on the cabinets: propulsion schematics, work records, inventory. The blue-ink plans look authentic enough to my untrained eye, but I grab all of them to be safe and roll them up tightly into a narrow cylinder. “We still don't have a plan. And who knows how long Rostov means to keep up his—”

The sirens start churning, cutting me off. At first I think they're in my head, in the future. The wail nudges forward with each churn, then fades off. Someone's cranking them by hand to make them sound that way—they can't spare electricity this deep in the caverns. But Andrei and Olga look up, then at each other and me, and I know this is no vision but is happening right now.

“Air raid,” Andrei says, but with that hopeful twist to it. I wonder what world we live in where an air raid is the ideal outcome.

“No. They've found Rostov.” Olga charges for the door with her uneven gait. She's got schematics rolled up and tucked under one arm, but she stops herself at the door. “Antonina, can you help me…?”

At first I'm not sure what she's asking, but she tugs the left leg of her trousers out of the boots and jabs the prosthetic leg toward me. I help her ease the boot off, then we roll the trousers up higher. There's a little compartment cut into the calf of the prosthesis. Olga uses her power to pop it open, then I slide the rolled-up documents inside.

“Thanks,” she says. “Sometimes, the old-fashioned way is less of a hassle.”

Andrei uses his remote viewing to scout out the hallway for us, but it's sheer chaos, he reports—we've little to fear from our “fellow” Nazis. We hurry out into the stream of administrative workers, shouting and shoving toward the exits. The electric lights strung overhead dim a little each time the sirens sound, as if the siren's drawing too much power; my confidence in the tunnels' structural integrity is none too high right now. But we push ahead.

“There—that's the tunnel we came from.” Andrei points to the left when we reach a T junction.

I gesture to the German signage before us. “This says there are exits in both directions.”

Andrei looks at me, chewing his lower lip, as he bears the full weight of what I've said. That we do not have to return to that office, with Rostov and blood and static noise. That I needn't forever make myself Stalin's pawn in the name of science. That even Antonina Vasilievna, model Party labrador, is willing to shed her leash.

The lights dance, sputtering and flickering, as something rumbles deep in the tunnels' bowels. The Allies are bombing us—bombing the Germans, rather, with us inside. For the first time since I've met her, Olga looks afraid. Andrei, however, has thrust his chest forward in his black slimy officer's uniform and clenches his fists like he wants to punch something but hasn't decided what.

“No.” Olga takes a step back, weight sliding to her good leg. “No. You saw what he can do. If we—if we were to—”

The next explosion is on top of us, concrete splitting open like a wound, rubble cascading before us. Only twenty feet ahead of us. Down the hallway to the left.

Cutting us off from Rostov and Lyubov.

None of us says a word, but Andrei reaches for my hand with his left and Olga's with his right, and we follow his lead.

Chapter Four

“Quickly. What's our safest path?” Andrei asks me, speaking from the corner of his mouth in Russian. The corridor is emptying quickly now, as the Nazi workers dive into offices and vaults to hunt for something sturdy to cower under. But Rostov's map of the compound didn't extend to this hall; we've no idea if there's even a way out of the mountain down here.

I fling myself into the visions—searching for any signs of devastation in our immediate future.

That way, up ahead, another cave-in of rubble is coming for us, in less than a minute's time. I reach for the metal door nearest to me without glancing at its lettering—there's no time, because the moment I touch the cool handle, another vision envelops me. A man, frazzle-haired and thin as a shadow in his lab coat, his face blunted by too many horrors and his eyes guarded. The vision grows fingers, spreading away—in one, he runs down a cobblestone alley while sirens scream overhead. In another, he sits in a classroom, older now, guiding a dark-haired girl through her work. But another, down a different path from those—a red bullet hole sprouts from his forehead.

The lock clicks as Olga unlatches it and the door falls open from my hand.

The man from my visions is wedged under a metal desk in the room that reeks of chemicals and cold. “How did you—” He stops himself. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. Quickly, come inside and lock the door.”

We do as he asks. As soon as the door latches, another explosion rocks the tunnels—the next cave-in I'd foreseen. Andrei looks to me, lips cupping to ask a question, but his gaze is snared by something in the room around us.

As the bulbs overhead cease their flickering and shine bright again, I see what.

Bodies, spread out across the medical examination tables before us—so withered and slender they could be made of sticks, the papery skin barely stretching from joint to joint. Each body has been autopsied in a different fashion, with parts missing—a limb here, the heart there, or a pair of pliers teasing open a ribcage.

I've always prided myself on my strong stomach; I think it makes me a better biologist, able to look upon any grisly scene dispassionately, my eye only toward the knowledge it offers up. But these bodies tell a story of starvation, abuse, pain. A lengthy, agonizing story—dried brown blood crusts their fingernails and stains their shriveled lips. Lacerations line their arms and legs; an endless hunger peels the skin back from their faces until they are nothing but teeth, desperate to sink into something, anything.

Andrei erupts beside me—one minute he is a perfectly camouflaged SS officer and the next he is a knot of electricity, crackling as he seizes the doctor by the throat. “What have you done?” he snarls as he slams the man against the nearest wall. “What did you do to them?”

To my horror, the man smiles.

“Yes.” His voice is only smoke, dissipating in the air. “Kill me. Please.”

Andrei's eyes widen and he loosens his grip. “What—what are you—”

The man sags in Andrei's chokehold, face turned skyward like an old Russian icon of the saints. “It would be a mercy. What I've had to do…”

I look between the man and the corpses. Another explosion sounds, but farther away now; it could be blocking our only path out of the mountain, or it could be tearing open a new escape route. “Andrei. We need to go.”

Andrei renews his grip on the man, but some of the rage has leached out of him. He's not like Rostov—he doesn't let it build and build like an oily ball of hatred that festers in his belly. “How do we get out of here?”

“You're Russians.” The doctor's demeanor shifts, his smile retreating. “Why are you dressed like that?”