Lynne was still sobbing beside me, and I felt close to despair myself. Sure, I was determined to save Mom, but that didn’t do any good if I didn’t know what to do.
And then, out of nowhere, I did know.
Thirty
I JOSTLED LYNNE’S FOOT WITH MY TOE. WHEN THAT DIDN’T WORK, I kicked her ankle.
“Ou—” She swallowed a yelp of pain, but Rona looked back suspiciously at us anyhow.
“What’s going on back there?” Rona growled.
“Um, nothing,” I said quickly. “You wouldn’t mind if we went to sleep, would you?”
Rona gazed at us with narrowed eyes, then seemed to decide sleep was harmless.
“Be my guest,” she said, smiling at the irony of her words.
I motioned to Lynne to lean forward and prop her head against the seats in front of us, just like kids do sleeping on the school bus.
“What are you doing?” Lynne whispered.
I tilted my head back, to see over the seat. Rona’s ears were less than a foot from my mouth. Even with the plane’s noises, I couldn’t be absolutely certain that she wouldn’t hear me. And I had to be certain.
“Nothing,” I said in a louder-than-usual whisper. “Just going to sleep.”
Maybe it was just my imagination, but the corner of Rona’s mouth I could see seemed to curve up a little—a slight smile of glee at being able to eavesdrop on us.
But behind the seat I grabbed Lynne’s hand, being careful not to make the handcuffs clank. Then, with my finger, I began to trace invisible letters into her palm. At first Lynne squinted in confusion, but then she nodded, just a little, not enough to be noticed from the front seat.
H-Y-P, I began. I felt like Anne Sullivan teaching words to Helen Keller. I felt brilliant for thinking of this way to communicate.
When I’d finally finished the important first nine letters, Lynne held up a finger to stop me and stealthily reached behind her back. She struggled silently with something that was out of my sight. Then she brought out a pen and a sheet of paper.
HYPNOTIZE? she wrote in big letters.
I gave her a grimace that could only begin to show my disgust: How could she have let me spell out that whole, tedious word before reminding me she had pen and paper in her backpack? I felt like a fool. I grabbed the pen from her hand and scrawled, Hypnotize me and tell me to remember everything. Tell me that every part of my brain is now open to me.
Lynne read my note, and instantly I began scribbling over the letters until every word I’d written was covered over, indecipherable. Only then did I look over at Lynne, who gave me back a puzzled squint.
Why? she mouthed silently. I could tell she was thinking that the full extent of her brainpower would probably be worth a lot more than mine. But she didn’t possess my parents’ memories, didn’t hold in her brain the ticking time bomb that could change the world.
I hesitated for a second, remembering how Mom had protested when I’d suggested to her that I should recover my parents’ memories to save us. I wasn’t totally certain that remembering could help us; I only knew that I could do nothing without it. And if there was even a chance that I could save Mom, I was going to take it.
I’ll tell you later, I wrote to Lynne. Just don’t let them know what we’re doing. I drew an arrow directed toward the front seat of the plane, as if Lynne needed help figuring out who “them” was. And I underlined the word “don’t” about six times. Then, once again, I inked over everything I’d written.
Lynne gave an almost invisible shrug and nodded.
Now? she wrote on the paper.
As soon as we have a chance, I wrote back.
Thirty-One
LYNNE AND I BOTH SLUMPED IN OUR SEATS, JERKING BACK UP EVERY few minutes in our best imitations of people trying to sleep in an uncomfortable place. She leaned right for a while as I leaned left; her head bobbed against the front seat while mine slid down against the back. If we get out of this alive, we both deserve Best Actress Oscars, I thought dimly, then had to fight not to giggle and ruin everything. Oscars were like peanuts—not the least bit funny unless your life depended on not laughing.
Through half-closed lids, I monitored Rona’s every move in the front. I began counting silently between every glance she directed back at us. When I made it to five hundred without having to start over, I silently slid my head toward Lynne’s. I felt like I was moving at the rate of an inch an hour. Finally, finally, my head came to rest against Lynne’s shoulder. Her head pitched forward, aided by a little turbulence that threw the whole plane up, then down. When she stopped moving, her face was hidden against my hair, her mouth only inches from my ear. I dug my elbow in her side.
“Is it safe?” she whispered.
I made my head bob up and down, hoping anyone looking from the front would believe I was only moving with the plane’s rocking.
“Give me your key then,” she whispered again.
It took me a minute to understand, but then I slid my hand in and out of my pocket, pulling forth the car key this time. I slipped the key into Lynne’s grasp, and she let it dangle against the seat, out of Rona’s sight. Lynne lifted her hand a little, and the key swung back and forth, back and forth.
“Watch that,” Lynne whispered. “Don’t think about anything except the key.”
But it wasn’t as easy to empty my mind as it had been the last time I was hypnotized. I’d had nothing on my mind to begin with that Friday night. Now I had to let go of my fear of Rona, my worries about Mom, my confusion about my past, my terror of my parents’ minds. That one stupid swinging key couldn’t compete at all for my attention. I thought about Mom trying to leave that key for me, trying to give me an escape. I saw Mom’s face on that key, Mom’s fate hanging in the balance. Mom, Mom, Mom.
“You are getting sleepy,” Lynne whispered. “You are letting go.”
I wasn’t letting go. I couldn’t let myself be overtaken by my parents’ memories. I couldn’t let go of Mom. But I had to let go to save her….
I don’t remember what Lynne said after that. The next thing I was aware of was Lynne shaking me.
“Wake up,” she said. “I think we’re almost there.”
I sat up, disoriented. Almost where? My neck was stiff; my arm had gone numb from being pressed against the seat. My head ached. The plane’s engine rumbled behind me.
“You’ve been sleeping for hours,” Lynne said. “You even slept through our refueling stop in—I don’t know. I guess it was Kansas, someplace.”
She sounded resentful, as if I’d been off having a picnic while she’d been facing terror and torture. She even made Kansas sound dangerous. Refueling stop? I thought. That meant I’d probably slept through a refueling stop on my flight to California, too. So much was happening that I wasn’t aware of. I was so disoriented, I could barely figure out which way was up.
“Well?” Lynne whispered. “Did it work?”
She shouldn’t have risked speaking so openly, I thought crabbily. Rona could turn around at any time. And what did Lynne mean, “Did it work?”
Then I remembered. Tentatively, like someone groping for a light switch in the dark, I searched my mind. Hello? Tori? Alexei? Anybody there? Anything you might want to tell me?
Their names must have been the link. In seconds I was overwhelmed with memories. I knew the value of pi to twenty-five digits. I knew Crythian, Russian, German, and French. I knew how to make a human mind into a computer and vice versa. I knew what it was like to be hungry for days on end, in danger of starvation. I knew rocks and fields and mountains I’d never seen.
I knew my parents.
And I knew who Mom really was.
Thirty-Two
I DIDN’T REALIZE I WAS CRYING UNTIL LYNNE LEANED OVER AND whispered, urgently, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. Even if I hadn’t had Rona to worry about, I wouldn’t have been able to utter a word just then.
Everything was so clear, so vivid, as if I had live
d it myself. I knew I was still me, Kira Landon, but I had them in me too. I latched on to something familiar, the overlap between all of our memories: the room that Toria had carried me to, to send me out into safety.
I knew now that that room was four blocks east and one block south of the stone castle where we lived. The room had once been the home of a family of five, but they were all dead now, killed in the fighting in Crythe. Killed because of Toria and Alexei’s discoveries.
Toria felt guilty about that. I could now remember, from her perspective, how she’d carried me through the streets: The whole way, she’d been agonizing over the Miloffs’ deaths, other Crythians’ deaths, and the deaths she knew were still to come. But she was also clutching me, telling me that I would be safe, that Mama and Papa would never let anything bad happen to their little Kira.
“You’re all right. Everything’s okay,” she repeated again and again, and she knew she was saying it to comfort herself as much as her child.
The cobblestones were slippery, and Toria was glad that it was too dark to tell whether she was skidding on rainwater or blood. Her shoes were heavy wooden clogs—peasant wear, not the business pumps she always wore to meet with all the computer experts. She did not want to be a computer expert anymore; if she had to die, she would die a peasant.
At last she reached the heavy wood door. She blinked back tears to smile at her daughter—to smile at me—and force out a cheerful-sounding “And here we are! Just the door we wanted!”
But I twisted up my face, and Toria could see that I was planning to cry myself, that I knew that something was wrong.
“Shh, shh, none of that,” Toria said, a little sharply. But inside she was proud that I was not so easily fooled. You’re a smart one, she thought, and then wondered sadly, and how much pain will that bring you?
My toddler body weighed her down as she climbed up the stairs. But once inside the room, Toria relaxed a little. Surely we were safe here, for now. Surely no one had followed, no one saw. She paced back and forth on the plain pine floor, until my head drooped to her shoulder, my eyes slid shut, my mouth fell open in sleep. And still Toria stood and swayed, holding me, not wanting to put me down for what might be the very last time.
“Oh, Kira,” she said with a sigh.
I knew then how much my mother loved me. I knew it as a toddler, sleeping on her shoulder, and I knew it now, a teenager on a plane in danger.
At last my mother’s trance was broken by the sound of the door opening. She cowered against the wall, holding her breath, until she heard a voice call softly, “Toria?”
It was Alexei, her husband, my father. He switched on a flashlight as soon as he shut the door. The glow illuminated only a small space, but it was enough: I could see his face as she saw it, and I could see her face as he saw it. The worry lines that had been etched into their faces the past few years were erased by the dim light. He looked at her and remembered a skipping girl playing in mountains that were now a hemisphere away; she looked at him and remembered a young boy tossing stones in a stream. Alexei was tall and dark, swarthily handsome. He didn’t look any more like the photo Mom once showed me of him than a piece of paper looks like a tree. Which wasn’t to say that the photo was a fake—it was just too flat, too two-dimensional.
Toria bore a startling resemblance to her sister. I could see that if they’d been any closer in age, they might have been mistaken for identical twins. Toria had the same rope of hair down her back, the same intent eyes, the same firm jaw.
“Everything is ready” Alexei said softly.
“Except us,” Toria countered. “How can we? How can we send our only child away?”
“How can we let her die with us?” Alexei let the question hang in the air. “When there’s even a chance—”
“But…” Toria wanted to argue their fates, defend their lives. She wanted there still to be time to change their minds.
“Sophia will take care of her,” Alexei said, and turned away, unable to look at his sleeping child. Because if he did, he would break down and agree with his wife.
Toria gently placed me on the floor and tucked my blanket around me. “Give me the computer,” Toria said. “We should get this over with before Sophia gets here.”
Alexei pulled a laptop out of his cloak and handed it to his wife. She hit keys quickly without looking, rapid strings of complicated sequences. Then she stopped.
“There is no way this will endanger her?” she asked.
“We’ve been over this again and again,” Alexei said. “No one will even know, except her and Sophia. But when—I mean, if—we are killed, we’ll want our daughter to know….”
I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t had my parents’ minds in mine. Not knowing something was worse than torture for them. It was something that had been beat into them, not in Crythe, but in the Soviet camp where they’d spent most of their childhood. They were desperate to save their daughter from ignorance.
Toria ran a wire from the computer to a tiny bare spot on the back of her scalp. Alexei had implanted a computer port on her brain, just as she had installed one on his.
“This always makes me feel like Frankenstein,” she muttered, grimacing at the awkwardness of reaching over her shoulder. She looked like a woman doing nothing more startling than pulling a zipper up that last stubborn inch.
But she and Alexei both knew what was about to happen. He moved to her side to help.
“It was the only way for us to survive,” he said. And he wasn’t talking about the two of them, Toria and Alexei, but all of Crythe.
“And now we’re making our daughter a freak too,” Toria said coldly.
“It’s reversible,” Alexei said soothingly. “She’ll know how. We’ll give her the knowledge, and she can pick out what she wants to keep.”
Toria pushed the final key on the computer, and that was the last memory she copied.
I felt bereft, realizing I’d come to the end of my mother’s memories, even though she’d given me twenty-four years’ worth before that one. It was almost like witnessing her death.
But Toria hadn’t died then.
From Alexei’s perspective, I could still see her, moving the computer closer to where I lay, pulling out more computer wire. She seemed very businesslike and efficient now that I couldn’t see into the turmoil of her mind. But Alexei saw the tears in her eyes as she bent over me, feeling for the port on my brain that my parents had implanted only hours before, when they’d anesthetized me for a particularly long afternoon nap. They’d designed mine differently from their own: My port would soon be covered over with skin, disappearing as I grew. Theirs were meant to stay accessible for the rest of their lives.
Finally, Toria straightened up.
“Done,” she said. “Your turn now.”
Alexei frowned.
“Shouldn’t Sophia be here by now?” he asked. “The longer we wait, the more dangerous—”
“She’ll come,” Toria answered. Alexei heard the challenge in her voice: Didn’t he trust his sister-in-law? He had nothing against Sophia; it was just that he trusted no one anymore, no one except Toria. After all, he had once trusted Rona Cummins….
Alexei was reaching for the laptop when he heard the dull thud below. He saw his wife stiffen, saw the fear grow in her eyes.
“I’ll go check,” he said, trying to sound brave. His legs felt rubbery as he descended the stairs; he had to remind himself to breathe. He did not expect to live much longer, but that didn’t mean he was eager to die. And his daughter was still up in the room behind him—he couldn’t die until she was safe.
“We’ve made a mess of everything,” he muttered.
He reached the door to the street and put his ear to it. The fighting sounded far away, but how could he tell through such thick wood? Gently, he eased the door open. The sound of the scraping hinges echoed in the empty alley. Alexei winced, terrified that someone would hear and come investigate. Cautiously, he peeked out. Nothing.
/> Then a hand grabbed his ankle.
“Alexei,” a woman’s voice croaked.
It was his sister-in-law, Sophia. She was lying on the ground. Alexei might have mistaken her body for a pile of filthy rags if she hadn’t spoken.
“Save my … memories,” she murmured.
Alexei risked shining the flashlight on her, and he instantly wished he hadn’t. She was lying in a pool of blood. He couldn’t tell if her wounds were from knives or bullets, but there was one fact he couldn’t ignore: She was dying.
“They got me,” she managed to say. “I’m … sorry. Should have been here for … Kira. So … sorry. Just … save my memories. Please. Please save my memories.”
Alexei could admire her determination to get to the room, to him and her sister, but at the same time, heartlessly, he worried that she’d left a trail—a trail of blood to lead their enemies directly to them.
“Lets’ get you inside,” he said grimly. “Maybe we can find a bandage.”
His suggestion was so ludicrous that Sophia actually laughed.
Alexei pulled Sophia up the stairs, leaving a stream of blood behind them, a zigzag of drops on every step. She wouldn’t last much longer.
“My memories,” she was still insisting. “Save—”
They reached the room. Toria was standing in the corner with the laptop held high over her head, ready to whack any unwanted intruder. When she saw Sophia, her arms sagged; even her backbone seemed to melt.
“No,” she whispered. Her voice rose to a scream. “No! Not her!”
And Alexei understood suddenly that Toria had suggested her sister take Kira for two reasons: so that Kira would be safe, and so that Sophia would be too. And now Sophia was about to die, and it was, once again, Toria and Alexei’s fault.
Toria bent beside her sister, pulling off clothing, feeling for wounds. In seconds, her hands were as bloody as her sister’s shirt.
“Save …,” Sophia managed to say.