Authors: Lindsay Smith
I am leaning forward now, imagining how it might feel to hold a fiery feather in my hand and watch it shimmer with red and gold.
“The hunter had fallen in love, you see, with one of Koschei’s princesses, kept locked up in his realm, and sought to free her from Koschei’s grasp. But when he battled Koschei, he found that Koschei could not be killed. The hunter lay wounded and dying, clutching the firebird’s feather, heartbroken because he’d never know the princess’s love.
“But when he held the feather, it summoned the firebird to him. She told him the secret to defeating Koschei—she told him where he kept his soul, so the hunter could go destroy it. He smashed the egg that held Koschei’s soul, and Koschei was Undying no more. The hunter and the princess lived happily ever after.”
Mama runs the feather against the side of my face. “Do you understand, then, the firebird’s lesson?” she asks.
Zhenya is busy picking his nose, so I answer for both of us. “Sure. You think if we hold on to this feather, someday the bird it fell off of will show up and help us defeat an evil sorcerer.”
“No.” Mama tosses the feather back into the snow and hoists Zhenya to his feet. “I’m telling you to pay attention. Because no matter how tiny, how weightless, how inconsequential something may seem, you never know when you can use that knowledge or that thing. One day it might just save your life.”
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY’S
headquarters, unlike the very public KGB building looming over the heart of Moscow, is shrouded in trees in northern Virginia and padded with horse stables and palatial French mansions. Papa drives us for what seems like forever along the cliffs overlooking the Potomac to reach it. “Remember,” he tells me as we wind through the forest, “this location is secret.”
And then we pass the gatehouse swarming with men with machine guns.
The building itself is more Soviet than I’d expected: squat, cobbled from concrete slabs, swerving and contoured in that space-age style. Closed-circuit cameras whine as they twist from the awning to follow our approach. Valentin closes his hand around mine while Papa strides ahead of us, whistling again, his flared trousers skimming the steps.
I swallow my breath as we enter the gleaming main corridor. Marble everywhere—blue, gray, and white. The Agency’s seal—an eagle (only one-headed, unlike our mutant double-headed Russian eagles) clutching a shield to its breast—winks at me in silver trim from the center of the floor. To my right, brass stars spangle the marble wall in perfectly even lines.
Papa swings his arm toward the wall of stars. “The Memorial Wall,” he says in English. “Each star is for an agent who has died in the line of duty.”
The line of duty, I suspect, includes battling Russian spies.
“Well, I’m off. Have fun, you crazy kids.” Papa looks at me for a moment. I will his lips to press against my forehead. There was a time in my life when he couldn’t stop fawning over me—when he walked me to grade school every morning and scooped me into his arms whenever he came home. I thought it was the real Papa, leaking out of the standard-issue Soviet man for a brief moment before pouring himself back in. But now, with no one to hide himself from, he merely turns and walks down the hall, whistling to himself.
The security guard hands me a badge to dangle around my neck—my photograph, with my full name and nationality typed beneath it. They’ve added a superfluous
j
to the English spelling of my name.
Yulija
. Now everyone’s going to butcher the pronunciation.
Valentin holds up his own badge. “Valentine,” he says. Like the American holiday. We laugh nervously, a quick snorting sound. His fingers brush against the nape of my neck as he helps me slide my badge into place, leaving a warm trail of our shared music on my skin. I’m not alone. As disorienting as our new life is, I can survive here.
“Miss Chernina!” A fluted column of a woman, rich olive skin melting into a tweedy Jackie Kennedy–style skirt and blazer, clips toward us on heeled oxfords. “Cindy Conrad. Call me Cindy.” She pumps her right hand toward me like a piston. I shake, but her strength far exceeds mine, and my hand flails in hers as her raucous blues music shield spills onto me. “It’s not my real name. Come along; I work with the girls separately in the mornings.”
I seize Valentin’s wrist, leaning back from Cindy. “Wait—why are we separated?” I meet Valentin’s eyes. “I’d be more comfortable if Valentin were to—help translate, or explain—”
Cindy smirks. “That’s very sweet. But we do things rather differently here than you might be used to, and part of that is keeping the genders separated. For propriety’s sake, you know.” Another dainty laugh. “What do you think this is—a public high school?”
Valentin squeezes my hand. “I’ll be right down the hall if you need anything.
Tebye obyeshayu.
”
I promise.
Cindy trails a warm perfume from her like a censer as we wind through the CIA’s bowels, her caramel-colored bun bobbing high above everyone else. Though I can tell she’s slowed her pace to accommodate my limp, we’re still moving at a decent clip. I’m amazed how much noise these marble halls contain, circling a lush courtyard where young cardiganed secretaries lounge and smoke and drink from Styrofoam coffee cups. Everyone’s talking to someone as they trot from one corridor to the next, sometimes frantic, sometimes giddy. But everyone I brush against—down to the dowdy old woman stocking a breakfast cart—hums with a different melody.
“Everyone has a musical shield?” I ask Cindy, taking care to add an upward inflection to make it a question. Winnie told me my accent makes everything sound like I’m conducting an interrogation.
“We have many psychic safeguards in place—standard training for all CIA employees. He may be a real pistol to work with, but your father has been a godsend for our operational security, let me tell you!” She glances back at me. “You sound like quite the firebrand yourself. I heard about the number you did on Rostov and his ‘Hound’ back in Berlin. We’ll be needing more of that resourcefulness.”
There’s a current running through the building, a hum just on the horizon of my hearing like an electrified fence. It’s similar to the vibration in Papa’s townhouse, the by-product of living with two scrubbers. But no one we pass seems to be the source; aside from Cindy, I don’t sense that prick and tingle of psychic prowess.
“I don’t know how much your father and Valentin have told you about our work here. Hopefully not much, since it’s highly classified!” She says it with a smile, but I suspect she’s not joking. “Last year, we partnered with the Department of Education to include a psychic battery and examination in their high school testing—that’s how we found your teammates. They’re all around your age. We do have a few older operatives who volunteered their unique services for America. By and large, though, our program is new, which makes it exciting. We haven’t yet gotten regulated to death.” Her gaze rakes across me. “I’ve seen all kinds of psychics, but I’ve never met anyone with an ability quite like yours.”
My touch—she means my touch. I cement my hands to my sides. “Did you also … ‘volunteer your services’?” I ask, hoping to shift attention away from me. She looks like the ‘Ivy League Spooks’ Winnie’s warned me about. They come from New England money and New England colleges—they have wealth coded into their DNA as surely as psychic powers are coded in mine. They created the Central Intelligence Agency seventeen years ago, after World War II, to put their college educations to good use. I start fabricating a backstory for Cindy. Finishing school and horseback-riding lessons and dinner parties with the Kennedys. College degree, a rare thing for women in America, I hear. Clapboard beach homes on—what did Winnie say again?—Martha’s Vineyard. The Hamptons.
Cindy smiles again—it’s like a camera flash going off—and herds me into an elevator. “They found me telling fortunes in a New Orleans brothel.”
“Brothel,” I echo. I’m not sure if Winnie and I went over this word, but I think it has something to do with soup.
“A whorehouse,” she says, not missing a beat. “I had the mystical voodoo priestess shtick down pat. Good money, too, until I told the wrong mob boss he was going to die.” The elevator doors slide open. “Our office is right this way.”
I clamp my dangling jaw shut. So much for Ivy League Spook. I watch Cindy’s measured, flawless stride down the corridor, looking for any hint of whatever sort of girl deals with prostitutes and mob bosses, but it’s all 18 karat–plated confidence and command. I admire her for the transformation she must have undergone, but her seemingly effortless ability to suppress her past also tightens a fear in me, like a clock’s spring winding up.
Our “office” looks more like the Bali beatnik jazz lounge Valentin and I visited last week than the sober black leather and wood-paneled affair I’d anticipated. Fringed velvet curtains sweep down from the drop ceiling, tucked under the asbestos tiles to anchor them. They turn the large room into a claustrophobic labyrinth. All the fluorescent lighting tracks have been draped with thin sheets of silk in various colors, casting kaleidoscope swirls around the den.
“Ladies! Our new friend is here!” Cindy flutters toward a marble-topped bar and pours herself a glass of something amber and reeking of smoke.
One of the curtains billows as something moves behind it; a hand wraps around it from behind and shoves it back. One girl steps forward, short and lithe, her eyes contracting as she studies me. “I’m Donna. Donna Willoughsby,” she says. “Boy, have we been waiting for you.”
Donna’s glossy blond hair sweeps into a ponytail that forms a perfect inverted question mark. Her skin looks brushed with powdered sunlight; her smile could jam radio frequencies—she looks exactly like I imagine the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl,” though instead of a scandalous bikini, she wears a fluffy turquoise skirt and creamy blouse, with a faint rose cardigan draped demurely over her shoulders.
“It is nice to meet you. I’m Yulia.” My right hand twitches at my side. Should I move in to shake? I lurch forward, but then realize I look like a shambling beast from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and decide against it.
“
Dobro pozhalovat
,” Donna tells me, in a Russian accent that’s not flawless, but still cheerful. “I understand you’ve been working with Sergeant Davis?”
“She’s the best,” I say. “Anything I … misspeak? Is entirely my own fault.”
Donna takes my arm in hers, like I’m her oldest, dearest confidant. “She’s good. But she isn’t one of us. Don’t ever forget that.”
At first, I think she means because Winnie’s colored, and I try to find the right words to protest, but then another possibility strikes me—a divide between psychics and the rest. I don’t think of myself as better than non-psychics. I envy them. I lust after their simple, unguarded lives, never stumbling across secrets they wish they could forget, never causing harm with a thought, a touch.
Donna pulls me onto a plush couch, inflated like some space capsule cushion, that threatens to swallow us whole. Another girl swims out of its depths, looking at first like a spider—just arms and legs flailing around. Then a torso emerges, and a mop of black hair that she smoothes into a bouncy, frothy bob. Her features vanish behind rhinestone-flecked catseye glasses.
“I’m, uh, Marylou,” she says, the words tiny and fragile when exposed to the air. I reach out to shake with her, but her fingers just crumple against mine for an awkward second before she yanks back and forces a pained smile to her lips.
“Marylou’s a remote viewer,” Donna says. I look over Marylou again—the fringed bangs and glasses to hide her face, and the shapeless black dress that suppresses her tall, pudgy body. She certainly looks like the kind of girl who prefers to be as far removed from the situation as possible.
“What kind of psychic are you?” I ask Donna.
“Just a mind reader. Nothing special.” She smiles with one side of her mouth—like even she doesn’t believe this. “But I’m really good at getting people to open up their thoughts to me.”
I frown. “Like a scrubber?”
Donna’s smile fades; her eyes turn sharp with annoyance. “I don’t have to
break into
anyone’s head. When I talk to someone, they eagerly offer up the thoughts I need.”
“It’s basic spycraft,” Cindy says, striding toward our enclave. “You make the target more comfortable with you so they’ll tell you things they shouldn’t. Miss Willoughsby is a psychic extension of that process—making them think about whatever it is they’re trying to hide, regardless of what kind of training they’ve received. They may know not to say it out loud, but they’ll sure be thinking about it—and that’s all we really need.”
Some of her words sail past me, but I get the general idea. If Donna seems overly curious in me, I should probably be concerned.
Cindy clasps her hands together. “Now, then! Let’s talk about what I expect from you, Yulia, and introduce you to some of our current projects. First—I expect you to work hard.” She raises her index finger in a count. “I want you to push your abilities to their limits. We know so little about our powers and where our boundaries truly lie, and I expect them to be stretched.”
I grimace, thinking of the aching emptiness I felt when I forced the Hound’s emotions back onto him. The boundaries I’ve placed on myself—on my powers—are what keep me safe right now. I want to help Mama. I don’t want to be a weapon. But I give her a nod.
“Second, you must work
smart
. Don’t ever think this is easy work, that you’re punching a time clock, reading a few minds, punching out. We need to constantly find new ways to use our powers, as well as creative solutions to problems that our powers
can’t
fix.
“Third, this isn’t Junior League. I’m not running a charm school. It is my sincere hope that you ladies will get along with one another, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn if you hate each other’s guts.” Cindy smiles; Marylou and Donna giggle, and I suspect this is another cultural reference I’ve just missed. “However, we’re here to work
together
. Russian, American, Martian, I don’t care who or what you are. You work for me, and the mission comes first. Understood?”