Skandal (31 page)

“… I just want you to be prepared,” she finally says. “It won’t be as easy as all that. Rostov brought us here to oversee his ‘operation,’ after all, and he has some safeguards in place to force us to carry it out. But we will do our best to help.”

“Of course,” I say. But I’m already charting escape routes and calculating formulas that Mama and I can test for the cure.

The door groans on rusty hinges, and Larissa ushers me inside.

While it’s the same concrete as the rest of the vast tunnel network, this chamber is massive. Rows and rows of fluorescent lights buzz overhead like a swarm of wasps, bathing the gleaming metal scientific tables and racks in a bleached-out glow. Tubes and wiring and petri dishes cover every square inch of surface area; in stark contrast to Doctor Stokowski’s tidy, by-the-book lab protocols, this looks like Doctor Frankenstein’s madness made manifest.

A woman in a white lab coat—stained here and there with splotches of blood and blue pigmentation—turns to face me.

Mama. Under all the extra wrinkles, the exhaustion, I see straight through her, right down to her genetic code. I see the wistful smile she plasters to her face whenever Zhenya has a fit; I see the spark in her eyes, faint but visible nonetheless, that reminds me why she persists against all odds.

“Yulia.” Her arms open wide. Like slipping into an old habit, I’m stumbling into them, I’m folded into her embrace, her softness, her sweetened chemical smell. “It’s time for us to get to work.”

*   *   *

Mama pulls out a metal stool for me as she settles onto one of her own. She motions toward Larissa; without a word, Larissa scampers off to a far corner, where Zhenya is hunched over a notebook of music paper. Zhenya. My brother. He looks up at Larissa as she sits next to him, breaking out of his private fugue, and listens as she speaks to him in low, familiar tones. Envy sears through me. Though Larissa’s suffered greatly, she has my mother and brother; this is what I’ve traded for Papa and Valentin and our comfortable American life. Is this what it’s like for her to always see the branching paths of choice? To always know what doors she’s closed to herself by walking through another one?

My hand closes around Mama’s. “I ran like you told me. I found Papa and escaped. But—but you didn’t tell us what to do next.”

Mama’s hand is stiff; she won’t meet my eyes. “I didn’t want to—to worry you. It’s never a guarantee, the futures that I see. I knew there would be challenges. I had to keep you in the dark.”

All the doubt and anger comes surging back. It’s as if Mama’s nearness makes everything brighter, sharper, crueler; I’m fighting harder to dispel this resentment. “What, you don’t think I’m strong enough to do what needs to be done? Maybe if you let me in on your plans, I could decide that for myself!”

Mama’s head lowers; she glances over at Larissa. “I told you she wouldn’t understand.”

“Understand what?” My throat closes up as I stare at her. “Something that you can see in the future?”

“Yes.” Her voice wavers. “I created the serum; I gave Rostov this tool. But I’m not doing this for Rostov. I’m doing it for you.”

I know she has to have some good reason for doing what she’s done—for spreading a psychic plague. But she can’t have meant for this to happen. For Valentin—“Mama. Mama, how is this supposed to help me? If it was all to bring you here, I understand, but this seems like so much.”

She shakes her head frantically, squeezing tears through her lashes. “I know what you’re thinking. But there’s a greater purpose.” She forces her lips into a smile, but it looks false. “You’ll understand one day. I can’t explain it to you now, but I promise, you’ll understand.”

“Well, what can you explain? I’m very close to undoing the serum—I understand the basics.” I pick up her lab notebook and start sketching on the graph paper. “The psychic genetic code rests here, right? On the twentieth and twenty-second chromosomes. And your virus attacks that code—amplifies it until it’s too big and the whole thing collapses under its own weight.”

Mama nods. “That’s the gist of it. I took cultures from the Hound. The way he can amplify other psychics’ powers, you know, and how easily he becomes a vessel for Rostov to control. I knew there had to be a key to it there. Of course, it’s highly unstable in anyone else’s genes. It keeps growing and growing, which is why they don’t survive for long…”

“All right. So how can we safely reverse it?”

Mama twirls a pencil back and forth between her fingers. “Yulia … I didn’t design it to be reversed.”

I stare down at my sketches. The answer is here, I’m sure of it. “It doesn’t matter. There has to be a way. Right? There’s always a way.” I box off a portion of the code. “When it amplifies this bit of code, it makes it too difficult to extract without damaging everything else. So maybe if we—if we reverse the amplification effects…”

Mama leans back from the table, chewing at her lip. I know this look. The look she used to give me when I asked when my little brother would be normal—the look when she’s tossed between a harsh truth and a gentle lie. “I just don’t know, Yulia. I can’t—I can’t see the outcome. I can’t see anything past…”

Larissa stands back up. “Antonina. We don’t have much time.”

Mama nods, shaking off whatever frightful things she saw in our future. “Yes. If you want to stop Rostov, you’ll need to take control of his scrubbers. He controls them through the Hound. The Hound is an amplifier—I’m sure you remember how Rostov would use him to make himself even more powerful. So with the scrubbers, the Hound both amplifies Rostov’s ability and links them all together so he can control them at once.”

“Sergei can do it, too,” Larissa explains. “Any sufficiently strong psychic can, as long as they have access to whoever is the amplifier, which in this case, would be the Hound.”

“So if we can gain control of the Hound, we can stop Rostov’s scrubbers,” I say.

“Right.” She sketches a quick map of the compound. “They’re keeping him here. We can help part of your team get back to disrupt Rostov, but you’ll have to have someone ready to stop the scrubbers, too. Disable them, so they can’t continue with whatever orders Rostov has passed along for them to carry out at the summit.”

“One moment. Let me show this diagram to my teammates.”
Marylou
, I say, leaving the thought outside my shield like a beacon in case she can hear me. But she must be blocked by the devices that encase us like a Faraday cage.

Larissa stands up. “The circuits—they run throughout the tunnels. We need to switch them off. I’ll only be able to do it for a few minutes, though, or it’ll trigger an alarm.”

“We only need a few. Sergei and Misha won’t be out for much longer,” Mama says. She grabs a thick file from across the table and pulls it toward us as Larissa heads for a control panel. “Then I’ll need you to memorize these faces. These are the men and women Rostov has recruited from the KGB’s ranks who will be infiltrating the Pathway for Peace summit—they’ve all been injected with the serum at the same time so they’ll be at the peak of their power. You have to memorize their faces, Yulia. All of them. Can you do this?”

There you are!
Marylou exclaims.
Lord almighty, Jules, I’ve been looking all over for you.

Is Tony with you?
I ask.

Tony’s voice comes across loud and clear.
Right here.

“I can do even better,” I tell Mama.

After Tony’s absorbed the minions’ faces—Russian delegates, compromised convention workers, and more—and Larissa reactivates the shield, Mama moves on to the next stage. “If the peace summit fails to produce Rostov’s … desired effect…” Mama uses the clipped, euphemistic Russian that I remember so well. Every word layered with meaning, laden with a graveness and significance that can’t be found in a dictionary. “Well, we’ll have to ensure it doesn’t come to that.”

I glance back over at Larissa and Zhenya. “What about the three of you? We can escape right now, while Sergei and Misha are out. We—we can synthesize the cure at Professor Stokowski’s lab. I’m already so close—I’m sure with your help, we’ll finish in no time.”

Mama and Larissa exchange a look—another hasty wordless agreement, one I’m not privy to. “We have to stay here, for now,” Mama finally says.

I look from Mama’s tense expression to Larissa’s widened eyes. What has them so frightened? “Has Rostov done something to you?”

Zhenya cries out in the corner; Larissa squeezes his hand and makes shushing noises. “It’s almost time, Antonina,” she says.

“Time for what?” I slide off the stool and walk toward the corner to join her and Zhenya. “What’s the matter with him?”

Zhenya’s eyes lock on to mine. He sees me. He’s here, really here, engaging with me. “Took you long enough,” he says.

I smile, though I’m aching to throw my arms around him. “I missed you, too.” I turn to Mama. “Come on. Let’s leave now, before Sergei’s awake.”

“It’s Rostov. If we stray too far from him, this—this control he has over us—” Mama flinches and seizes my wrist, giving me a fleeting glimpse of the sharp agony that scraped through her at the mere thought of trying to escape. “We can’t leave here without his direct order. Otherwise, my—” She dabs her nose with a kerchief; though she hastily stuffs the kerchief back in her pocket, I can’t miss that flash of red. “I’m sorry, Yulia. You’ll have to do this on your own.”

“What?” I cry. “Mama, no! Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not leaving without you. We’ll—we’ll figure out a way to break you free.”

Larissa looks away, a curtain of golden hair shielding her face from me. “We’re working on it.”

“Trust me, Yulia. Trust us a little bit longer. The best you can do right now is stop Rostov’s attack on the summit. Can you do that for me?”

“All right, we’ll stop them! But Mama, I have to come back for you—”

She seizes me by the shoulders. Once more, I feel ten years old, being scolded by my mother who knows and foresees so much more than I can ever dream to comprehend. Her eyes bore straight into mine. “Stop Rostov’s scrubbers at the symposium. It’s the best solution that I can see.”

“But, Mama, what about the serum?” My throat squeezes tight. “I have to save Valya.”

Mama’s lips press into a hard, cruel line. “I’m sorry, Yulia. There is no cure.”

I am tearing apart, a fission reaction spreading through my lungs. No. No. Fury is etching its flash burns across my skin. No. She’s lying. She can’t be right. “You designed it.” Heat pours through me, into my fingertips, engulfing her. “You have to know how to undo it.”

At the far end of the lab, a series of metal bolts clang open. “Go!” Larissa hisses.

“I’m sorry, Yulia. I’ve done what I can. Stop the summit.” Mama shoves me through the doorway and, with chest-aching finality, slams the blast door closed.

CHAPTER 28

CINDY AND THE REST OF THE TEAM
—of
my
team, I realize with a timid sense of pride—swarm around me as I stumble out of the T Street exit hatch. They’re hurling a million questions at me. How big is Rostov’s strike force? Where is Rostov? Where else do these tunnels lead? Are they still targeting the Pathway for Peace?

I answer as best as I can, but my attention is inside my head. Mama said something about the design of the virus, how it put too much strain on the genetic code. “Papa.” I seize him by the wrist. “We need to go. Now. Can you drive me by Doctor Stokowski’s lab?”

“Sure,” he says, eyebrows knitting together. “Are you all right?”

I saw her,
I think, desperate to tell him everything about Mama—her smile, her plans, her voice. Everything he wiped away. I’d started to forget it all myself. But instead I tell him, “I think I know how to cure Valya.” Mama thinks there’s no cure, but she’s wrong—I saw it myself.

Papa presses his lips into a thin line and hastens his steps. “Then we’d best get to work.”

After a hasty exchange with Cindy and Winnie, they head off to coordinate with the FBI over our findings and Papa drives me to Georgetown. Doctor Stokowski is in the middle of a lecture on uncategorized genetic disorders when I storm into the lab. A dozen faces turn toward me—bright, pale boys’ faces, their noses and cheeks rosy from the April sun. I march past them, ignoring their stares, and yank open the fridge full of cultures.

“Miss Chernina,” Stokowski says, face puckered. “I’ll be happy to meet with you after class if you need help with your research.”

“Sorry, Doctor.” I cast about for the right English phrase. “Medical emergency.” I snatch a cooler from the stack next to the fridge and start loading my labeled vials into the preformed slots. “I’m going to need a lot of LSD.”

*   *   *

While Papa drives us into Arlington, toward the safe house, I perform the genetic equivalent of brain surgery with gardening shears. I scrape the lysergic acid diethylamide samples into the most promising antiviral strain, add the necessary catalysts, and load it all into a trio of capped syringes. The INFRA should suppress Mama’s swollen psychic gene markers enough for the virus to strip them out without damaging the proteins around them. The samples look promising, but a thorough test would take weeks—weeks we don’t have. If I’m lucky, Valya has days. There’s no time to waste—I’ll need to inject Valya as quickly as possible if we’re going to have a chance of saving him.

Papa tries to upshift and fly past an old lady in her Bel Air, but the stoplight foils him, and he drums his fingers anxiously against the steering wheel, casting a glance my way. “You’re a brave girl,” he finally says. “Braver than me, to seek out your mother like that.”

I shake my head, cheeks burning. “I’m just stubborn as sin.”

“Do you get that from your mother?” he asks, then spreads his arms, a sheepish grin on his face. “It’s certainly not from me.”

We laugh, but his words hang eerily in my head, reminding me how little he must remember of her personality. Anyone who’s met Mama would remember her tenacity—
my little pit bull
, Papa used to say of her. Another thing he’s forgotten.

I tighten my grip around the case of syringes. Well, after I cure Valya, I hope to give him a chance to relearn it all.