Kursed

by Lindsay Smith

  “I prefer to think of it as realism,” I reply, but I can’t really argue the truth of what he says. I call my power a gift, but too often I feel cursed by it. I live my life looking at a future that is so permanent, so immutable, it might as well be my past.

  “So if I ask you a direct question about something in the future, can I trust that you will have an answer for me?” Rostov asks.

  I square my jaw and force myself to nod. “I’ll have a strong possibility.”

  Rostov’s smile pulls taut. “Then that will have to suffice. I will be asking you very precise questions, then, as to what we are encountering, but I expect you to be continually monitoring for further threats. Understood?”

  “Yes, comrade.” I know the drill—no room for excuses, no matter how valid. Excuses sound a lot like dissent.

  “And Comrade Chernin. What exactly is it you do, again?” Rostov flips through his notes. “Your test results are—not too strong.” Rostov glances at me, only a brief jab, but I feel its sting.

  Andrei gives him that crooked smile. “Oh, nothing as exciting as the rest of you. I can see things happening at a great distance.” He taps his glasses frames. “In the next room, the next building, the next city…”

  “We call that type of psychic ability ‘remote viewing,’” I say.

  “Remote viewing. Yes. I like that name.” Andrei smiles.

  Rostov narrows his eyes. “So if I were to ask you to confirm an individual’s location, or to tell me the contents of a locked room, could you do so?”

  “Like telling you the time.” Andrei tugs at his straps with a grin.

  But something isn’t sitting right with me about his power. When I’d tested him earlier today, he’d showed good aptitude for reading Stalin’s mind with more precision than other kinds of psychics—unless that, too, was me misinterpreting my vision, just like that strange future I saw play out.

  We spend the next few hours of the flight reviewing Rostov’s plan to infiltrate the Mittelwerk factory, and reviewing how to work the rudimentary crystal-powered shortwave radios he’s distributed to us that will allow us to communicate in the field, in case we get separated. Then Rostov encourages us to sleep, if at all possible, until we approach the eastern front somewhere in what used to be Poland before the Nazis snatched it up. Each time I start to drift off, though, listing toward the empty seat on my right, my visions press against me like fingers clearing a fogged pane of glass.

  Walking skeletons, skin pulled like a secret over ragged bones.

  Metal monstrosities on a pedestal, concentric rings telescoping to a lethal point.

  A darkened tunnel ringing with the distant march of giants.

  At first, I think the sharp yank, ripping my stomach one way and my body another, is another vision. Then everything comes into focus around me: the plane shuddering, the harness cutting into my shoulders, and the half-awake mumbles and gasps of the other passengers.

  Rostov unlatches his belt and tries to make his way toward the cockpit to speak with our pilot, but the plane tosses him into Lyubov’s lap, then against the empty seat at my side. Thunder roars through the cabin, as if we’re flying through a lightning storm, but Rostov and the pilot scream back and forth at each other, the whine of the propellers chopping up their words. “Anti-aircraft,” I hear. “Sustained fire.” “Supposed to be clear.”

  “Wait,” Andrei shouts, scrubbing at a trail of drool from his chin to his shoulder as he rouses from his sleep. “Wait. I can help.”

  Rostov’s eyes narrow at Andrei for a moment, then he nods, and beckons Andrei to join him at the cockpit. “You look for a safe path. I’ll try to throw the gunners off our trail.”

  “Are we close enough for you to do that?” I shout.

  Rostov’s face stretches long. “No. But if we fly lower—”

  “Bozhe moi, just let me help you.” Andrei wobbles back and forth as he crawls toward the cockpit.

  A shell explodes just outside the cabin—a spray like sand strikes against the metal. Had we been just a few feet closer to the right, the shrapnel would have torn straight through our hull, right into my body. Instead, it tosses Andrei into my lap, and we shove against each other, both hurrying to push away.

  We’re going to die, I think, then laugh at myself at the absurdity of the statement. People who know about my powers (a very short list, granted) always ask me if they’re going to die. Of course, I tell them. If I stare long enough into the future, it always ends in death’s soothing white.

  “Idiot fascists,” Lyubov says under her breath. “Don’t they know their war is lost?” Somehow, in this tense moment, I notice her slight lisp, the whistle of air between her bent front teeth, and it strikes me as unforgivably funny. Fear does that to a person.

  “No one fights fiercer than when they’re backed into a corner,” I say. “The most dangerous person is someone who has nothing left to lose.”

  The plane drops out from under us; I lift up, thighs peeling from the vinyl seat, weightless, then crash back down against the thin chair. My legs snap out from under me. Another explosion, on the other side this time. Olga and I exchange looks, our jaws tense, veins jutting along our necks, exposed.

  In the future, I glimpse rain. I glimpse trees, a forest swollen with humidity, hungry and green.

  “Back in your seats,” the pilot shouts, once the report of artillery fire fades. “We’re almost to the hidden airstrip. It won’t be much longer now—”

  We lurch again, twisting, my body a dishrag someone’s trying to wring out. “—clearing in the woods up there—” Andrei screams, over the engine’s whine.

  “Aren’t you supposed to stop them from firing at us?” Olga says to Rostov.

  Rostov’s lip curls up into a sneer. “I’m stopping most of them—”

  The plane quakes as we take a direct hit to our left wing. Lyubov gulps down air, making a noise between a scream and a gasp; the humming sound of straining engines swells and rises in pitch. “Sit down,” the pilot screams. “Everyone sit—”

  Horrible squeals rake at the belly of the plane like fingernails clawing through us. Tree branches. Rostov and Andrei fling themselves into their seats and buckle up.

  “Brace yourselves!”

  The plane tips forward as its momentum screeches to a halt. A bag crashes against me, cargo tumbles toward us, knocking into the empty seats, slamming forward, as our limbs continue onward before snapping back toward our bodies. The smell of fuel burning laces the cabin, sickly and sweet. The scraping continues until finally, finally, we come to a halt—

  —and a crate crashes into my temple, painting everything with black.

  Chapter Three

  I awake to crackle and warmth. Just like my vision showed, the airplane’s cabin is rent through with tree branches, the plane’s hull peeled back like the skin of a metal fruit. “Antonina.” Someone’s shaking me, yanking at my harness. “Antonina, please wake up. We have to get out!”

  Oh. Fire. There’s fire around me. Yes, I feel its heat, hanging in the air that stinks of diesel fuel—

  “Antonina!” Andrei shouts again.

  I lurch forward, but my momentum’s halted by the harness. The latch is jammed, dented in by whatever struck me in the head. Bozhe moi, but my temple throbs; it feels crusted over as well, and I’m sure I’m bleeding and bruised. “Is there a knife?” My throat sounds raspy, dried out. “You’ll have to cut me out—”

  “I got it.” Olga fixes her gaze on me from an opening in the hull, and after a moment, I can hear the mechanical parts of the latch pop and detach.

  I scramble to my feet and snatch up my duffel bag, fighting against my aching body’s protests. “Thanks.”

  “Now,” she says, gesturing to her prosthetic leg halfway down the cabin, “think you can help me? I’m too heavy to move myself.” In an instant, Andrei’s slinging her arm around his shoulder and hoisting her up. She holds her hand out, and the leg snaps right into her grip; she and Andrei work their
way out one of the gaping holes in the plane’s cabin. I follow right behind them. The fire’s on the other side of the plane from us, but it’s spread to a nearby tree. Only the heavy, humid air, moist and warm like the inside of a mouth, keeps it from roaring further.

  We join Rostov and Lyubov, who are huddled under a tree at a safe distance from the plane. Lyubov dabs at the numerous lacerations on Rostov’s face. I’m amazed he’s letting her tend to him, though his expression is rather like a cat being bathed. “What about the pilot?” I ask them.

  Rostov snorts, the gravelly, bitter sound of a man who can’t be bothered. “See for yourself.”

  I glance behind us once we’re a safe distance away. The plane’s nose is buried in the soft, damp earth, while the body juts at a forty-five degree angle, cradled in the trees. Then I see the windshield, or rather, the shattered remains of it, with the pilot’s body slumped halfway out of it, dangling onto the nose. I cover my mouth, my whole body clenching like a jaw.

  Our mission hasn’t even begun properly, and someone’s already died because I couldn’t do anything about my visions—the plane, flames, the trees tearing through the hull. If we don’t keep moving, his death won’t be the last. I grit my teeth and head for Lyubov and Rostov.

  Andrei eases Olga to the ground, and she sets to work refastening her leg around the stump of her thigh. Rostov scans his field map, but the storm clouds overhead threaten to dissolve the paper. “We’re twenty kilometers too far east of the rendezvous point. Our agent was supposed to meet us at the clandestine air strip with a Schutzstaffel vehicle.” He squints at his compass, then back at the map. “However, we’re only a few kilometers west of the Mittelwerk factory itself. We’ll approach the factory on foot.”

  “We can’t just walk up to the factory dressed as SS officers!” Lyubov cries.

  Andrei shrugs. “And why not? Doubtless the Fritzes on the front have radioed word of our crash to every fascist around here. Better to get there sooner, before the alarm is raised, than later.”

  “Antonina?” Rostov asks. “What is our best chance to evade detection? Heading to our rendezvous point, or making our way straight to the factory?”

  I close my eyes and focus first on the twenty-kilometer trek west toward the rendezvous point. A cabin manifests before me—where our informant must be hiding. We trudge through the forest, weary, smeared with dirt and blood and soaked through with rain, then a whistle sounds through the trees, followed by the report of a rifle and the scattering of birds—

  No. Instead, I focus on our approach by foot to the factory. The guards look us over once, twice, reach for their radio—but then something sharp and stinging distorts the image. I think it’s failure consuming us again, but then I see the guards waving us through the gate, an unsettling smile smeared like a thick jelly across both of their faces.

  I open my eyes again. “We should head for the factory now. Before word of our arrival spreads.” We take a circuitous route through the Buchenwald birch forest, putting as unlikely a path between the smoldering wreckage and ourselves as we can. Andrei uses his remote viewing to check back on the plane every five minutes or so, but there are no signs of the German forces having reached it yet. Finally, the forest spills onto a paved road, pockmarked with shrapnel and other signs of recent aerial strikes. A sign marks the entrance to the compound: Konzentrationslager Mittelbau-Dora.

  “Concentration camp?” Andrei asks, wrinkling his nose as he translates the German. “What do they mean by that?”

  “It means they have war prisoners working in the factory.” Rostov straightens his sleeves. “They might come in useful.”

  I swallow down the lump in my throat: the accreted half-heard rumors of mass deportations. Dare I voice the stories in front of this SMERSH officer? I’d be disparaging the fascists, but Comrade Stalin has done much the same as they have. Funny how quickly two like souls, two heads of the same hydra, can turn on each other like they did when Hitler betrayed our pact.

  “Not only war prisoners,” I say. “They’ve deported Jews, Poles, countless other groups as slave labor.”

  Rostov’s eyes narrow into knife slits in his gaunt face. “It’s only a rumor, probably spread by the capitalist fearmongers to cast us in a poor light for initially allying with them—”

  “Aren’t those fearmongers on our side now?” Olga asks, with a roll of her eyes.

  “For now,” Rostov says.

  Andrei’s shifting his weight back and forth, worrying his tongue against his teeth. “Whatever the fascists are up to,” he says, voice watery, “oughtn’t we be getting to work?”

  I raise one eyebrow. He’d struck me as the sort of man who liked to slurp up every bit of knowledge he came across—it was certainly the case when we worked together back in Moscow. Perhaps it cuts too close to what happened to his family.

  Rostov drops the duffel bag he had slung over one shoulder and distributes an officer uniform to Andrei, and secretarial blouses and skirts to Lyubov and me, while Olga gets a more relaxed men’s chauffeur outfit. As we set off down the passage, an iron band winds tighter and tighter around my chest, prickling like the concertina wire that trims the road.

  “Halt!” the guards call out in German, then the first of them storms from his booth. “No one is allowed on the campus today. Where did you come from?”

  Rostov opens his mouth, but Andrei rushes to speak over him, his German surprisingly well-accented. “We have an appointment with Herr Grossman to review the facilities and ensure the Fuhrer’s quota is being met for the forthcoming putsch.”

  The guard’s face wrinkles. “But you are on foot.”

  “Yes, it was the damnedest thing!” Andrei cuts in. “A bloody airplane fell from the sky, scared our chauffeur half to death. Drove us into a ditch.” Andrei touches his forehead, marred with a shallow scrape. Olga, our chauffeur, offers up an apologetic shrug. “You may wish to send a squadron to investigate it. We didn’t see where it crashed, but there could be survivors.”

  The guard snorts. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe such a ludicrous—”

  The throbbing in my head tightens like a screw as Rostov uses his power. White hot needles skewer my thoughts. The guards fall back, faces drooping like wet clay.

  “Please, mein Sturmbahnnfuhrer, right this way.” The first guard stands back to admit us. “Herr Grossman is expecting you.”

  The Mittelwerk factory is set into the side of a hill; we enter the network of tunnels and slope downward along the main path. The Nazis scurry like ants through their tunnels, the black uniforms of overseers and dingy lab coats of scientists. The ravages of war have eaten at every surface—at the burned-out light bulbs no one has bothered to replace, the unfinished floors, the abandoned construction projects and tunnels that lead to nowhere. Rostov said they built this facility only a year ago, when the Allies bombed the first one into nothingness. These tired, slump-shouldered soldiers don’t look too capable of protecting this one from the same fate.

  But what bothers me the most is the smell in the air. The dirt and wet concrete, like the streets after a hard rain—that I expected. The rest of it I did not. It smells of my first-year anatomy lab, when the corpses we’d been dissecting all semester started to flake apart and turn to mush. That smell, that smell clung to us, in our hair and our clothes and our notebooks and pencil cases. That’s the smell that fills these halls, and I don’t know if it’s another vision or if it’s soaking into me right now.

  We meet with Herr Grossman, and with Rostov’s guidance, he happily ushers us into what looks like an eerie cross between a schoolroom and a bomb shelter—ribbed concrete walls, chalkboards, men in lab coats studiously scratching pencils to paper as if they were copying their multiplication tables. I glance at the equations on the chalkboards, but it’s all physics equations, vectors and trajectories—not my forté. Olga, though, has cinched her focus in like a belt after the years of war rations, lips twitching under the brim of the chauffeur cap she hasn
’t removed as she puzzles out the meanings behind the equations.

  I take a lurching step forward, unsteady in heels after our harrowing journey, as a fresh vision comes to me. In my vision, the blackboard fragments and explodes, shrapnel spraying across the room, tearing through tendons and arteries on its own incalculable trajectory—

  Then the vision gives way to a pressure, an intrusion, sharp as a finger pressing into my skull, pushing at my musical shield, my Firebird melody twisting and warping around it. Concentrate on these men. See if any of them appear willing to cooperate with us in the near future.

  It’s Anton Rostov’s voice, drilling past my mental shield. The glare I flash him is meant to melt steel, but he does not even look my way, does not care, does not have time.

  My jaw is wound like a trap as I scan each man in turn.

  Rostov is talking to them calmly, but the visions of possible futures blister out from the scene in front of me—that man diving under a desk, or that one jabbing his finger to my chest, screaming, spitting, sharp. One threatens to scream, scream until help arrives, to march us to the nearest SS officer, a real one. None of these.

  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?”