Kursed by Lindsay Smith

the shortwave … see if there’s a message waiting for us…”
    But Andrei keeps white-knuckling the steering wheel; no one seems too eager, myself included, to take me up on that suggestion.
    â€œOkay. Really, though.” Olga twists around so she can face Andrei and me, ignoring the doctor curled up in the back. “There is no default plan here. We have to do something.”
    The possibility hangs in the air like a threat of rain, tangy and lush. The option no one wants to voice. Am I only imagining it, or are they thinking it, too? The way we all took the first chance to get away from Rostov that we could. I can’t be the only one.
    Maybe it’s not just Rostov I’m running from. I’ve seen what obeying the Motherland does to me, the way its choices wind around my future like a tourniquet. How it’s forever a choice between staying alive and staying myself, that the two options will never coexist. Oil and water. Rostov isn’t the first to rub my nose in the spineless, soulless choices I’ve made to stay alive, to pursue my research, but he can be the last. I can end it.
    For a moment, I let myself consider it—a future away from the Soviet Union and the ever more restrictive projects passed down to me by Moscow State and the NKVD, where I can study the secret code of my genes without being forced to weaponize that code—turn it into something to threaten and bargain and bribe others with. Does such a future await me, at the end of some unknown choice?
    I’m searching, searching, but the only thing I can see right now is a swirl of colors and noise, nothing coming into focus. At least it’s not darkness. At least there’s something there.
    My voice cuts through the silence. “We don’t have to go back.”
    Now I’ve gone and said it: taken the idea from my mind and given it form, weight. It exists, now.
    It won’t be squashed down.
    Olga drums her fingers against her hollowed-out prosthesis.
    â€œAll right. All right. We can—let’s just get to Berlin, first of all. That’s where the Americans are, the ones Herr Trammel was going to meet.” Andrei flicks on the truck’s headlights, though only one comes on. “Then we can figure out a plan of action from there.”
    â€œComrade Secretary said the Red Army was making a push for Berlin. It’ll fall soon enough,” I say. “And the Americans and British are pressing in from the west. Everyone meets in the middle. Utter chaos.”
    Andrei quirks a smile again. “The perfect place to disappear.”
    Olga slings one arm over the back of the chair and peers at the doctor, passed out on the rear seat. “But what about him?”
    I ask myself a question about his future—but not for me, not for anyone else except that dark-haired girl I’d seen sitting in a classroom, attention rapt as she listens to a white-haired professor. Something in her earnest eyes and hidden face … I’d seen it before, echoing on others’ faces.
    I would see it again.
    â€œFirst, we find out the truth from him,” I say. “Then we decide.”
    *   *   *
    Somewhere a few hours after nightfall, the truck begins to shudder and shake, jarring me from my dreamless sleep. I knew our luck was too good to last, that the visions of blood and a cold-iron grip I’d seen on the plane were coming, but I thought we’d have more time. Andrei turns off the headlights and lets us coast over to the shoulder of the road.
    â€œWell,” Andrei says, “I suppose we’d better find shelter.”
    I listen to the unsettling silence, so foreign to me after the madness of the past few days—no droning prop jet or planes overhead, no crackle of badly shielded electrical wiring, no yelling Politburo officials or NKVD officers or other men trying to get into my head. “Is there a reason we can’t rest here? In