Donna holds up our stack of collars that remain. “There are only eight scrubbers here.”
She’s right. The crowd of minions is far smaller than we expected. Marylou? Tony? Who are we missing?
Your mother showed us dossiers for at least twenty-five different operatives, Tony answers, via Marylou.
My heart is beating rapidfire; I scan the faces of the neutralized scrubbers in front of us. So where are the rest?
We’ve got a problem. It’s Papa. The haze in his image is gone; he stands over the slumped form of the Hound, wiping a trail of blood from his nose. Rostov isn’t here.
Then who was controlling the minions? Donna asks.
But I see the second figure now, unconscious next to the Hound.
Sergei.
He was controlling them instead of Rostov. I try to swallow, but it’s as if a fist has clenched around my throat and won’t let go. I knew he was getting stronger, but I hadn’t realized his powers were evolving this way. Then where’s Rostov?
Marylou sucks in her breath. Oh, golly gee. Oh, dag nabbit all to … Marylou takes a deep breath. Look out at Lafayette Square, in front of the White House.
Donna and I rush back into the main hallway to peer through the watery old glass. At first, I’m not sure what it is we’re seeing on the square. There are the usual protestors, with placards calling for everything from repealment of Jim Crow laws to release of the Kennedy assassination files to the public to voting rights for cats. But a cluster of men in suits at the mouth of the entrance gate stands out. The guards are slumped against the guard post; the gate to the White House stands open wide.
A flock of people trudge through the gate, heads lowered, shoulders drawn. A Secret Service agent rushes toward them from the White House portcullis, but then he crumples, falling into the emerald grass. In the very center of the flock, a head above the rest, I can make out the olive-green rounded hat of a KGB commander.
Major General Anton Ivanovich Rostov.
And at his side are Mama and Valentin.
CHAPTER 30
“WAIT, YULIA. It’s too dangerous.” Donna grips my shoulder. “We can’t overpower Rostov without your dad’s help.”
But he’s deep beneath the Soviet embassy, almost a mile away. Distraction. Maskirovka. Rostov’s—and the Soviet Union’s—signature style. We thought the threat of war in Vietnam was meant to be a distraction for the United States. But it was a plot to distract us from this.
Cindy cuts in via Marylou. Stay put, Yulia. We’re sweeping the tunnels right now, but I’ll try to dispatch a SWAT team to the White House, if they’ll take orders from me instead of Frank. There’s nothing you can do.
You think they can stop him? With an army of scrubbers supporting him? I shake my head. I have no choice.
But Yulia—the Death card. Cindy’s thoughts feel thin as paper. The more you think about charging in there, the stronger it looms in my mind.
Then I guess that’s the price I’ll have to pay.
I hobble down the grand staircase, Donna trailing behind me. The foyer is still crammed with reporters and diplomats, laughing nervously about Saxton’s collapse, oblivious to the siege taking place at the White House next door. As soon as we run onto the patio, the air around us turns sour; it’s permeated by an overwhelming sense of foreboding, like those green-tinted moments before a massive thunderstorm. Already, Rostov and his twisted herd are entering the White House, but there’s still time to stop them. I just have to figure out how.
Donna twines her golden ponytail around one finger and stares right through me, like I’m one of her psychic subjects, an orange just waiting to be unpeeled. Come on, Yulia, Donna says, pressing the thought just to me instead of through Marylou’s connection. We can do this.
A tiny, taunting voice—I suspect it’s an echo of Misha and Masha and Frank Tuttelbaum, all rolled into one—tells me we can’t. That I’ll end up like the scrubbers’ victims, my sanity clinging to the fast-fraying rope that is my brain, my thoughts mangled and mauled, my mind a hollowed-out husk. I remember too clearly the taste of blood down the back of my throat, the smell of it metallic and the taste salty on my upper lip. A single powerful scrubber can wipe a mind clean. What could twenty of them do to me?
Yulia. It’s Papa, hunting desperately through the lab as the FBI agents rush around him. If you can block Rostov’s amplifier, you’ll have a much better chance.
But who’s the amplifier? I ask.
Papa winces as he leafs through a file folder. The Hound wasn’t the only amplifier—she’s an amplifier, too. I swallow, hard, as a knot of emotions—betrayal, shock, disbelief—tangles itself tight inside my chest. That’s why I was always so much stronger with her, Papa says.
It was never just foresight for her, though he’d made himself forget that part. In our family of three psychics, she was always our backbone, our guardian. He’d said it himself—he was always strongest with her. And she bolstered us in other ways, too. I just didn’t pay close enough attention to the firebird feather right before me.
I can do this. My mind is mine alone. I thread my mantra through my thoughts, through my mental shield, through the rise and fall of my lungs. My mind is mine alone. My mind is mine alone.
But their minds—they will be mine.
Donna stays right at my side as I stride toward the black iron gate; I’m dimly aware of Judd moving our way from the Dolley Madison House, as well, where he’d been ready to start a fire emergency if our initial plan to stop the summit scrubbers went awry. Marylou, Cindy, Papa, and Tony hover in our thoughts, ready to help. I don’t have to do this alone.
I press my hand to the forehead of the gate guard, slumped inside his command post. He stares back up at me with bloodshot eyes that won’t focus. Chaotic thoughts swarm like hornets inside his head, drowning out his mind’s efforts to process the world around him, to make sense of what he’s seeing and hearing and feeling.
Cling to that image—there. The man’s memory spits up an image of him sitting in a sunny lawn, watching his son play catch with their sheepdog. This is you. Your memories and thoughts. I focus on the warm emotions, the sense of peace these memories offer him. Direct him away from the negative, the fear, the pain. If I can guide him away from what the scrubber did, then maybe I can help him counteract it. Where does this thought lead? How does it make you who you are?
Slowly, related images coalesce around the fragment. Training the dog to heel and fetch. Teaching his son the alphabet. Grilling burgers on the back patio while his wife sets the table in her flouncy Donna Reed dress. He is, bit by bit, himself once more. The noise from Rostov’s horde remains, but it’s relegated to one segment of memory, rather than infecting the whole.
Donna’s turn. “Those men and women. They weren’t supposed to pass through here. What did they tell you? What did they show you?”
His thoughts turn over and over on her words, filtering through Rostov’s lies like any other memory. “They said it’s time to relieve President Johnson of his burden. Oh, God, they wanted me to—” He swallows down a sob. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time—”
“And where is President Johnson?” Donna presses. Judd jogs up to us, face flushed and red as his freckles, but keeps quiet.
“The Oval Office. He’s scheduled to sign a non-aggression pact with the Viet Cong pending the outcome of the peace summit.”
Donna and Judd and I glance at each other; their expressions look as sour as mine feels. “Then we’d better be on our way,” Judd says.
We round the curving driveway, passing another guard, this one a soldier clutching an assault rifle to his chest as blood spills from his ears. A shiver runs down my spine as I remember Cindy’s cards, and the way her determined spin on “Death” didn’t soften the interpretation much.
A KGB officer in uniform runs down the curving staircase of the grand entrance as we step inside. “Halt! It is not permitted for you—”
Then he screams as his rifle
’s ammunition box explodes. The conflagration spreads to his sleeve and up his arm, and he runs from us, screaming and flinging his flame-wrapped arm against the wall. The fire crackles and hisses.
“Frank said I was never good at following orders,” Judd says.
We reach the top of the staircase. Psychic energy hangs heavy in the air, swampy and miserable to wade through, as if it could physically force me back down the stairs by its mere presence. There’s no doubt which direction Rostov has taken them. My stomach roils like a simmering stew, and blood wells in my nose; I can’t risk walking any closer with the scrubbers under Rostov’s command.
Come on, Yul. We’ve got this, Marylou says.
Can you give me a glimpse further down the hall? Show me what we’re facing?
I’ll do my best.
I close my eyes and reach through my mind into Marylou’s vision.
A white blur clouds our sight like a wind-whipped tundra plain. The scrubbers are phantoms looming in the mist, wisps of thought eddying around them. I push my thoughts closer, welcoming the porcupine spikes of so many scrubbers’ minds. Through Marylou’s viewing, I can trail my fingers along their arms, like rubbing my finger along the wrong side of a knife. Most of their minds are too far gone to salvage much, but I can wrest them away from Rostov’s control. It will have to be enough.
I am Slim Pickens, riding the bomb all the way down. I am Dick Van Dyke, deftly avoiding that ottoman in my path. I am James Bond, throwing the Soviet assassin from the train. I am Cathy Gale on The Avengers, coolly navigating a darkened room.
My mind is mine alone.
The mist draws back. The scrubbers stand in a yellow-striped, rounded room, its high ceilings frosted in molding. So many thoughts flow together, like the thin ribbons of a river delta joining and tangling into a roaring behemoth, right at my fingertips, flowing straight into Rostov.
If we can disrupt that stream, if we can break Rostov free of Mama and her amplification—
They turn as legion to face Rostov.
Rostov is clutching an older man by the throat: President Lyndon Johnson, with his rounded nose and caterpillar brows. He howls as Rostov drills into his mind; blood trickles from his ears.
Rostov’s lip curls back in a sneer. His gaunt face, like a wax statue melted and hanging off its metal wire frame, is forever seared in my memories, no matter how I’ve tried to forget. Even though I’ve been freed of his control for months, the sight of him still makes my knees buckle, as if it’s written into my DNA to bend to his will and carry out his command.
The scrubbers draw tighter around Rostov. It’s now or never, while they’re focused on the president. I pull my vision out of Marylou’s and reach into my bag. Two people to save—Valentin with the cure, and Mama with the disruptor. But I don’t know if I can fight through the scrubbers long enough for even one.
“Judd?” Donna asks. “I think you know what to do.”
He beams as we charge through the hallway and into the Oval Offfice.
The blizzard of scrubbing noise burns my skin like radiation and throbs deep in my marrow. It batters against my thoughts, relentless as the tide, but I neither fight it nor surrender to it. My mind is mine alone. I am the Star, I am a riverbed; these thoughts and feelings and commands rush over me and continue on their way.
Dimly, I hear the shatter and feel the spray of glass as Judd explodes the lights overhead. Mama. I’m staggering blindly through the torrent of noise. I sense the shift in the scrubbers around me, as Rostov’s confidence streaming through them turns to rage. I reach into the purse still hanging at my hip.
Now that I have his attention, it’ll be too much—
Give up, surrender, accept—
—I clip one of the spare disruptor collars around my own throat.
It’s only a finger in the dam, only a bandage on the sucking wound, but it holds the scrubbers at bay, a frail soap bubble of silence in a room full of pins. Only a few more feet to go. Mama is slumped forward, shoulders hunched, eyes reddened and dulled, but she looks up at me as I reach for her hand. Her smile tells me all I need to know—that this is how she wanted it. That I’m making the right future shine.
Once our fingers are firmly laced together, I unclip the collar, releasing my own power while exposing myself to the maelstrom of psychic power in the room. The scrubbers’ noise crashes back in like an avalanche. But we’re ready, Mama’s power amplifying my own. Our minds are ours alone.
Rostov and I are playing tug of war with their minds, and Mama’s amplifying power is the rope—the minions jerking this way and that, their painful noise strobing against our thoughts as her power helps him, then me. I keep my grip on Mama firm to share in her power. It’s my only defense against him. Even then, blood drips down my face; the emptiness calls to me, goading me on as surely as the ocean called to Valentin’s mother, as the bliss of forgetting called to Papa. But Mama’s power is fueling mine now, if I can just fend Rostov off—
Rostov’s face turns ghoulish with a hateful sneer. “Fine. Take her. I’ll do this by myself.”
The air around us buckles and combusts, each molecule turned into an isotope of radiating pain. Mama’s his clear target, but I’m close enough to feel the flashburn of his strength. Mama yelps as her knees buckle underneath her and she sinks to the ground.
Mama stares straight through me, her eyes marbled with blood. Red drips from her ears and slicks her lips, her chin; it pools into the hollow at her collarbone. “Mama.” I reach out to cradle her head. I can undo this. I can try to straighten out her thoughts, like I did for Valentin. “Mama.”
A flute’s breathy melody totters through the air between us like a wounded bird weaving through the trees. Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. The strings glissade around us, twinkling like fireflies, and a low timpani builds. “Yulia.” She tightens her grip on my hand. “Stay with me.” I wrap my thoughts in the music and step into Mama’s world, and the entire scene of the Oval Office crystallizing around us, frozen in time.
Nothing moves around us, trapped in the moment, but I can move. Mama stands before me, not as she is now, but as she was years ago—whittled like a Siberian tiger, all sinew and sharp wit. Her smile could cut down the most pompous Party member, and her claws would protract in an instant to defend her plans. “Yulia.” She glides toward me across the marble halls of Moscow State University, where her mind aparently has chosen to be, as the strings section builds with tension. “There’s something I need you to do.”
The square granite columns seem impossibly tall around me; maybe I’m still a little girl in her mind. “Of course. Anything.”
Heavy drums quake through the halls. “Please, my darling devochka. Take my memories. This is your gift.”
I grab a fistful of her satin skirt as the floor rolls; plaster dust pours down on us like the sand of an hourglass. “Mama, no! We just have to fight off Rostov, you and I. It’s going to be okay.”
“Listen to me.” She kneels down and grips my chin, somehow unaffected by the building as it crumbles around us. “I can’t break Rostov’s psychic hold on me. If I fight back, my mind will erase itself—this is what he’s done to me. But if I’m gone, Rostov will lose my power. Zhenya and Larissa will be free of him. You can stop him.”
I’m shaking my head. I need an outlet for this pressure building up inside me, this overwhelming sense of terror. No. She can’t do this. We need our family. I need her. Papa needs her, even if he doesn’t remember it yet. “Mama, please—”
The columns collapse in a flurry of dust as Stravinsky’s Firebird erupts.
“Your father gave up his memories to save our family. So give him mine, instead.”
She closes her eyes and slumps against me. The Firebird melody consumes us both; her memories pour into me. Most are encoded, tangled in her and Papa’s shared melodies, but a few shake loose: Mama and Papa, much younger, hiding from the SS in an alley, their arms linking together and lips seeking each other. Mama defending her
dissertation. Mama giving birth to me, hand clamped around Papa’s. Mama and her sister as little girls, trying to count all the stars in the sky.
And her gift—her ability to foretell the future. Rather than branch away into endless possibilities, like Larissa’s, every path is converging on this single, finite point. It burns like the brightest sun, the final choice on her long journey, brilliant and sure.
“I love you,” she whispers. “Tell your father I love him.”
The flow of memories wanes; the symphony has drained away. Slowly, the Oval Office comes back into focus around me.
Mama’s body hangs limp in my arms, but there is no music under the surface. No stream of thought. There is nothing.
Mama’s mind is completely silent.
Mama. I settle her back onto the floor. No pulse. No flutter of breath. Already, the red in her eyes is blurring into cool gray. Mama.
Her memories, her emotions, amplified and swelling, wait just beneath my skin.
“Run!” Donna screams, though she might as well be on another planet for all that her words reach me. Time unfreezes around me, the world coming back into focus like the first moments of waking up: Rostov winds back into motion, Donna and Judd charge into the room, President Johnson leaps up from his desk. Blood leaks from his ears as he staggers toward a panel of curtains and activates a switch; the wall retracts behind the curtains. He slides inside and slams the panel shut behind him, moving with a haste I’d never expected from someone we’d always branded a lazy cowboy.
Something is burning—something sharp and molten and warm fills my nose. Rostov screams. He has reached for the panel to the hidden passage, but Judd sets fire to the curtains, blocking him in here with us.
But Rostov must be stopped. My mind is mine alone. I lunge toward him while he’s distracted. Flames leap from the curtain toward Rostov, lapping at his uniform. I let turmoil churn inside me, then fling it at Rostov, my hand clenched to his throat, filling his head with every ounce of sorrow and pain and rage that I have to give. It pours from me like a geyser: my memories, my feelings, my entire life, all one pressure-cooked eruption of agony and noise. Rachmaninov clashing with Tchaikovsky; Dostoevsky and Marxist-Leninist doctrine and “Stars and Stripes Forever” forming a chaotic noose that draws tight around Rostov. He flails and clings to the threads, but he’s caught up in the wave of pain—of his own sons’ memories, of the lick of flames on his skin, of every bad thing I’ve had to feel living under his shadow, in Russia and here.
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