I LOCK THE RESTROOM DOOR behind me, not caring who I inconvenience, and park myself before one of the angled mirrors. I study the flash of freckles that marches from one high cheekbone, across my flat nose, to the other cheek. I trace the hollow under my cheeks; it’s hardly the cavernous pit it was eight months ago, when Mama and I were in hiding, sharing two food rations with five people. No, I am not the leaf stripped down to its stem that I was then, but I barely resemble the well-fed, doted-upon Party member in those photographs, restored to her former high-ranking glory.
Why are they keeping those pictures from me? I know my mother is part of the enemy’s machinery. I have accepted this—am trying to accept it, at least, though I cling to the belief that Mama must have some greater plan at work. If the Americans are going to make me a member of their team, then they must treat me as part of the team. I thought Cindy was showing us trust earlier, asking us our opinions, letting us build our own cases. I thought she was respecting us. While I know they’re spying directly on Mama, the fact that they’re keeping it from me sets my rusty gears of paranoia churning once more.
Do they have a good reason? Or am I right to be concerned? Competing hypotheses, comparing the possible scenarios—this is a problem my scientist’s mind can solve, like sifting through equations and formulae. The Americans know more about Mama’s situation right now than I do, I’m sure of that, but I don’t know why they’re keeping it from me. Do they not trust me, or am I the one who should be on my guard?
Someone pounds on the bathroom door. “One minute, please,” I shout.
The obvious hypothesis: Mama is working freely with Rostov. She will do whatever he asks.
“The door’s not supposed to be locked.” The woman on the other side hesitates. “I’ll have to get security.”
“Please, I only need a minute.”
A counter-hypothesis: Mama is sabotaging Rostov’s work from the inside. If this is what she’s doing, and the Americans don’t realize it, will their meddling ruin her plans? Does she need my help?
The woman rattles the door handle again. I scrunch my eyes shut, struggling to find a quiet space in my mind where these thoughts and emotions can’t overwhelm me—
I must help them. I must earn their trust. If I am to keep Mama safe, it will be easiest if I do so from the inside—while following the rules. I am not merely a weapon, after all.
Like an army knife, I have many uses.
I splash cold water on my face. For one moment, I imagine myself as the ghostly Mama in the pictures, all of the life bleached out of me. For one moment, I am stripped down to the monster inside of me, hungering for a new goal. For one moment, I am not afraid to be me.
I open the door to a security guard, hand raised, trailing a jailer’s ring of keys.
“Sorry,” I say, eyes cast down sheepishly and cheeks red. “There was a…” What was the word Winnie taught me? Accident, occurrence, disaster—they are all one euphemistic word in Russian. “Emergency.”
My new plan pulses through me like a dangerous bass line under my shield melody as I return to our psychedelic psychic’s den. Some trippy record oozes through the room, thickening the air around me. I’m swimming through the watery music—a Hammond organ shimmers against a rollicking drumbeat and sitar chords pierce the air like rays of sunlight. I force my way through the maze of curtains until I finally reach the far corner.
Cindy and Donna huddle together on a pile of pillows, talking in liquid tones. Donna’s skirt spreads around her in a perfect circle, knees tucked demurely to one side, while Cindy’s wiry knees nestle under her chin. I stare at Cindy through the lens of an operative. I want to know what she knows. I need her trust. I need to be a part of whatever she’s involved in.
“… But surely they asked you to,” Donna’s saying, her lashes fluttering. “That’s what powerful men do.”
“That’s not for me to tell,” Cindy says. But then her thoughts chime against the watery organ chords, completely unshielded, so loud that even I can hear them through the rug we’re both touching: Once or twice. Thibadeaux …
Then her musical shield slams down. They both twist toward me. “Yulia!” Cindy pulls herself to her feet.
“Hi, Jules,” Donna says. “Mind if I call you that?” But she looks to Cindy while she says it, like her permission would outweigh mine.
“What are you people doing?” I ask. Guys, I chide myself. What are you guys doing.
Donna stares at me, like it’s the first time anyone’s ever ignored her. “We’re practicing my skill. Cindy turns off her musical shield, and I ask her all kinds of uncomfortable questions.”
“Not all kinds,” Cindy says sharply. “There’s still plenty you’ll never learn, young lady.”
“Someday, I’ll get your real name out of you.” Donna grins.
But Cindy’s studying my expression. “Donna, I’m afraid we’ll have to continue our exercise later. I’d like to work with Yulia privately for now.”
Donna’s face twists, but she smoothes it out by the time Cindy looks back at her. “Yeah. Of course. I’ll just … go watch Marylou practice, or something.”
Cindy beckons me to follow her through the maze of curtains. “Feeling better?” she asks, as we wind through the path.
The room feels pressurized, closing in on me. My breath buzzes in my lungs as I search for the right words. “Um,” I say. I have mastered this English stalling technique, at least. “First, I must say something. I know you did not want me to see the photographs in that folder.”
“No,” Cindy says, voice clipped. “I didn’t.” Her eyes keep darting back to the shoebox, as if she’s eager to end this discussion and resume our work.
“But this is a problem.” I swallow through my tightly clenched throat. “In Russia, I could not trust my handlers, you see.”
She taps her heel against the linoleum. Her smile is easing away, but she says nothing.
“I do not want that life here. I want to be able to trust you. I want to work with you.” I look away. “Is this something we can do?”
“I’m not trying to keep secrets from you.” Cindy holds her palm up like she’s shielding herself. “Our chief doesn’t want you to work directly on your mother’s case. He thinks it will be … easier for you, that way.”
“But—but I want to help. Is this because of what I said in my hearing? That I’m not willing to hurt her.”
“Honestly?” Cindy smiles. “Yes, that’s a part of it. It tells me two things about you. The first is that you have a compass in you still—some dividing line between right and wrong. That the KGB didn’t break that part of you.” She tilts her head as if she’s trying to see me from a better angle. “Though I already knew that about you.”
I certainly don’t feel like someone with a good sense of right or wrong. From her cool tone, I’m not entirely sure she means it as a compliment, either. “And how do you know that?”
Cindy looks down at her lap; her lips twitch, like she’s about to tell me, but then she shakes her head. “Another time.” We reach another alcove in the maze, where she plucks a shoebox off of a desk and holds it out to me. “But the second thing it tells me is that there’s only so far you’re willing to be pushed.”
I breathe in slowly, so slow the cold air makes my teeth ache. I know what’s coming next.
“I had the field team bring this in for you. We collected these items from the dead spies we’re investigating. We need to know who these people were and why they were sent here.”
I sink into the nearest couch and balance the shoebox on my knees, trying to touch it as little as possible. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”
Cindy settles next to me, barely disturbing the couch. “Take your time.”
My hands tingle from disuse. I’ve learned to keep them to myself in Papa’s house, where he and Valentin leave a faint trail of scrubber sound on everything they touch. When Winnie takes me to the Smithsonian museums, I’m too overwhelmed with her translation challenges to focus on the whispered conversations the tourists leave behind. Well, maybe I’ve read objects at the museum once or twice. A tour group had just gone through, and the guide had read the Old Glory plaque verbatim, so I pressed my fingertip to the plaque and quoted it back to Winnie as if I was reading it.
I learned quite an earful of unpleasant words when Winnie realized I was cheating.
Cindy gestures toward the box. “I understand that you knew one of those men—the one who exuded the extremely strong psychic ability. He had been the contact for a double agent within the State Department.”
I study the box’s contents: eyeglasses, a pillbox, a tiny notebook, a man’s wingtipped shoe. The possessions of the bloody, wide-eyed dead from the photographs.
“I am your teacher and your commander, after all. So when I choose to challenge you, or not challenge you—include you or exclude you—I need you to trust that I have my reasons for it.”
I hesitate, palms itching, nervous energy running through me. I don’t think I can trust her; not yet. But maybe, by following her orders, she’ll reveal more of what she knows about my mother. “Okay.” I like this English word: round and flexible and noncommittal. It will satisfy for now.
“Glad to hear it.” She pulls her smile back into place. “Now—what can you tell me about these objects?”
I reach for the shoe, but the moment my fingers close around it, blinding white pain fires through me like buckshot. I slam against the back of the couch. Static spirals around me in a whirling storm, blistering with cold. It feels like Papa and Valentin and Rostov all combined, needling through my skin, in and out. My throat is raw—my hand sizzles with electricity.
The office is utterly silent except for the trippy record player; Cindy stares at me with white-rimmed eyes.
“It’s been scrubbed of memories. It’s completely…” I clench and relax my hand in a fist. Is there an English word for this aggressive emptiness, like a void sucking away all thought?
“There isn’t anything you can glean from it?”
“I don’t think so.” I try to envision an edge to the vast nothingness I saw, stretching as far as Siberia in every direction. “Even my father and Valentin aren’t strong enough to erase so much. Whose was this?”
Cindy checks the folder in her lap and holds up a photograph. “Your old friend, Pavel. Apparently he was running this man as a Russian agent.” She taps the folder. “He worked in the Latin American office of the State Department for five years. The FBI opened an investigation on him a month ago when a co-worker raised concerns he might be committing espionage. Turns out, he was dropping briefcases full of classified documents next to a bench on the National Mall, and Pavel was collecting them.”
“And this is Pavel’s shoe. After he died.” Something rings inside of me, as though I am hollowed out. I didn’t truly believe the general when he told me Pavel was a powerful scrubber. But the proof is still crackling through my nerves. Could this really be my mother’s doing? Rostov demanded she build an army of psychics, and this man wasn’t one before.
Cindy nods. “Originally, we were going to bring you to his apartment so you could search the area, try to find new leads for us, but there was an … incident.”
I swallow. Incident. Emergency. Disaster.
“Someone burned it down not an hour after we removed his body. We’re lucky none of the men guarding it were hurt.” Cindy’s voice doesn’t waver, but her smile does. “The other items are from other locations where we found similar bodies. The pillbox was on a woman who’d last been seen trying to enter the NATO offices in Brussels.”
I reach for the pillbox. My pulse ricochets in my ears, anticipating another wave of bleaching noise. As my fingers circle the cold metal, white blossoms suround me. It drinks me in, swallows me into its throat of steel wool and scrapes me all the way down. The bleach rots me away, one layer of skin at a time.
But maybe I can outlast it. If I can skim just one memory—salvage one clue—
The woman curls around a telephone receiver, lying in a fetal position, stiff polyester carpet fibers stamped hard into one cheek. Her skin is mine, and it is too tight—like a cooked sausage pushing at its casing. The psychic noise pushes back on me from all sides. It’s worse now. I gain some sense that this noise has been festering for a while, but now it’s consuming me whole. It’s invaded my every cell. I am nothing but this painful, piercing noise.
I have a telephone receiver cradled to my ear, propped beside me on the carpet. “Please,” I rasp into the perforated holes. “Send someone.” My thumb strokes back and forth against the faded rose pattern on the pillbox’s lid. “Your cyanide didn’t work.”
The phone crackles with a voice tinged in frost. “You must finish the mission.”
“Please.” Speaking is so hard. I can barely feel the word pushing through my vocal cords. I’m strangled by my own psychic noise. “Please kill me.”
A labored inhalation, or maybe it’s the static in the phone line turning the caller’s breath into crackling squares of noise. “You must reach Senator Saxton.”
“It doesn’t matter.” The pillbox slips through my fingers. The carpet fibers pressing into my temple are damp, hot with the smell of copper. “It’s too late for me.”
I fling myself out of the chattering white void and choke down fresh air. As soon as I’ve let go of the pillbox, I clamp my hand onto Cindy’s wrist and let what I’ve just seen pour back out of me.
“Yulia!—” she pleads, her tone suddenly sharp and high. The tone of panic and pain. I want her to feel this pain, too. I shouldn’t be the only one subjected to such misery. She needs to know what I’m capable of, what these scrubbers are like. I won’t suffer alone—
Bozhe moi. My anger is suddenly gone, poured out of me and into Cindy. I pry my hand away.
“Cindy—Miss Conrad—I am so sorry—” I dump the shoebox onto the ground and curl my arms around my legs, ignoring the twinge from my bad ankle. “I wanted you to see the memory, but I—”
Cindy’s breathing heavily; she runs a hand against her taut, silky hair. “No harm done.” Her eyelids flutter rapid fire. “Is—is that how you shared your findings with your KGB mentors?”
No. I was only a tarpaulin strung between trees, collecting memories like rainwater, then waiting for Rostov to wring every last drop from me. I shake my head and lower my legs back down, trying to match Cindy as she schools herself to calmness.
“Very well. It was my choice to push you.” She raises her chin, regal. “So this woman appears to be a—a scrubber, as well.”
I take a slow breath. “I think so. And she was dying. Whatever is causing the bleeding from her ears—the psychic noise—I think she was in great pain, and she tried to end it with a cyanide pill.” I tighten my hands into fists, trying to squeeze down the dark memories lingering against them. “Do you know this Senator Saxton they mentioned?”
“I’m afraid so.” Cindy stands, bracelets jangling. “Wait right here.”
While Cindy digs around in her desk, I try to keep balance on the couch, as it threatens to reel me in again. Someone laughs from behind me, a snorting sound. I peer over the edge to find Marylou flat on her back on the floor. She’s chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and her hair makes her look like she’s escaped a volcanic eruption because she keeps undershooting the ashtray by her head. “That was real groovy,” she says.
“What? You heard us?”
“Yeah. I liked what you did with your box of stuff.” Her pupils are cavernous pits, inviting me in. I can’t read the look on her face, both bleary and frighteningly incisive, and I don’t like it. “It’s like you’re reaching through the time-space continuum, you know? And, like, knotting it all together.”
I creep back on the couch. “Thanks.” The silence between us swells. “I did not … know you were down there.”
“Always.” Another heavy, crushing pause as she takes a slow drag. “Do you think we could swim in it?” she asks. Then, as if to clarify, “Time.”
Suddenly Cindy is there, peering over Marylou with a click of her tongue. “I didn’t realize you were scheduled for an INFRA session today.”
Marylou snorts with laughter again. “I’m looking in the Forbidden City—couldn’t get past their blockers without one. Following Mao around. I slide in on sunbeams and melt into his shadow, Miss Cindy. It’s poetry.”
“I’m sure you could do it without the ‘outside help’ if you tried.” Cindy turns away from Marylou and settles beside me again. “Project MK INFRA. Our research department had been trying to induce psychic abilities for years through the use of hallucinogens so we didn’t have to rely on psychic volunteers, but we had it all wrong—you have to have the genetic predisposition for psychic ability first. Now we’re running preliminary trials to see if it can enhance the abilities you all already possess.”
“Hallucinogens,” I repeat, still trying to process her words.
Cindy smirks. “Don’t worry, I’m not keen on letting them run trials on you anytime soon.” She opens another folder across our laps. “Senator Arliss Saxton, Congressional representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
I page through the file. Russian propaganda led me to expect a round, white-suited Southern old boy with sinister facial hair, not unlike the man on the bucket of chicken Papa sometimes brings home for dinner, but Senator Saxton just looks tired. His face is riveted into place with deep pockmarks, and his dark hair has been splashed with white. His stockiness looks like fortification against some unseen threat.
“Congressional representative,” I echo. “Is this … significant?”
“You have more experience with scrubbers than I do.” Cindy thumbs the corner of the file. “You tell me what one could accomplish if they had control of the man who can send every NATO country to war.”