Thirty-Three
Camp Peary, Virginia
Music was already playing in the great room when Nadiya descended the next morning. Sunlight, false as it was, poured through
the windows and doused everything in the lodge in gold. Or maybe it was the buoyant feeling in her chest that made everything
seem vivid and luminous.
She had left Giselle sleeping upstairs, her hair fanned out across the pillow. It had been hard for Nadiya to pull her gaze
away. She wanted to keep looking at the gentle flush of Giselle’s cheeks, the delicate bow of her lips. She wanted to keep
thinking about how they had felt against her mouth.
The person she had been last night was vulnerable with longing and reckless with desire.
“I didn’t think I would ever get a chance to do that,” Giselle whispered, when they had broken the kiss.
“Me either,” Nadiya admitted.
The corner of Giselle’s mouth quivered. “I was willing to wait, though.”
“How long?”
“However long it took, I think.”
That bubbly, joyous feeling soared up in her.
Now the music led her to the small alcove near the kitchen, where Nadiya was not surprised to find Klaudia already awake.
She hadn’t returned to their room last night, as far as Nadiya knew, and judging from the blankets folded neatly on the couch,
Nadiya suspected that Klaudia had slept there.
In the alcove, Klaudia sat at the head of the table, which was strewn from end to end with papers and books.
The contents of every folder had been removed and arranged into piles.
Of the books that were lying open, Nadiya could see paragraphs that had been marked and quotes that had been underlined.
It looked half like the work of a master statesman and half, she had to admit, like the work of a madwoman.
“Did you sleep at all?” Nadiya asked.
“For a bit,” Klaudia replied, without looking up.
“You’re going to keel over from exhaustion at some point.”
“Unlikely.”
Nadiya lowered herself into the chair beside Klaudia’s. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “For rescuing us. I’m sorry that I
messed up.”
Finally, Klaudia lifted her head.
“Deckard is a liar,” she said. “You didn’t make some fatal error. He was just looking for a reason.”
The baldness of her words surprised Nadiya. “How do you know?”
“He claims he took you and Julian because of your interactions with the man in the bowler hat—because you looked suspicious to him. But that’s not what happened with Julian and me.
I spoke Russian to him. I looked suspicious.
Julian threw the snowball to”—she paused a moment, glancing away—“to protect me.”
Nadiya didn’t find it hard to believe, given the puppy-dog way Julian followed her, stared at her. “So what was the point?”
“To keep you and Julian in line, surely,” said Klaudia. “He identified that you two were the most defiant. But it was also
a test for me. Specifically.”
Slowly, Nadiya nodded. She glanced around the table, but felt her thoughts returning again and again to the same place.
“Look,” she said carefully, “I know that what I told you before seems hard to believe—impossible, even—but I swear, that’s what happened. When I bumped into the man in the bowler hat, the hologram, he was solid.”
A shadow passed over Klaudia’s face. She was silent for so long that Nadiya began to regret bringing it up, and then—
“I believe you,” said Klaudia.
The music swelled in the air.
“You do?”
“There’s something else going on that Deckard is keeping from us. Plenty of things, I’m sure. I’m trying to get a sense of
what’s coming next. I think he’s going to try and test one of us again . . . maybe you.”
Nadiya’s stomach clenched. “Okay. Well, can I help?”
Klaudia reached for one of the books on the table and passed it to her. “Start with this.”
“All right,” said Nadiya. “But I don’t have your mind—or Giselle’s.”
“But you have more insight into Dr. Iver’s mind than either of us. He’s a part of this, too.”
Hearing his name was like a blow. She had not thought about him—she had been trying not to think about him—since they had arrived in Traumstadt. She could not reconcile what Deckard had done with Dr. Iver’s insistence
that he cared for her. And he did care for her; he had to. Why else would he have taken her in after her parents’ murders? Why else would he have comforted
her, trained her, turned her into someone who would never have to be afraid again?
Memories of the previous night flashed across her vision. That helpless terror. Nadiya had to squeeze her eyes shut and shake
her head to banish them.
She took the book from Klaudia and flipped back to the first page. Klaudia had already underlined a quote there.
England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves.
In my boyish days she was the universe to me.
When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labors, the earth’s very center was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was a fable—
Love for one’s country, one’s homeland, so powerful it ruled both a man’s waking mind and his dreams. This was all a test
of patriotism as much as it was a test of skill and ingenuity. Nadiya picked anxiously at one of her nails.
She flipped forward another few pages and then immediately understood why Klaudia had told her to start with this book in particular. She had underlined another quote there.
Evadne was a plaything she could in no way fear.
Nadiya looked down at the cuff on her wrist, where the name EVADNE had been engraved. Their code names had not been chosen randomly. If there was indeed a test planned for her, maybe this
book—The Last Man by Mary Shelley—held some crucial clues. Shifting the cuff slightly, Nadiya noticed that there was a red mark swelling under
it.
Beneath the music, which sounded orchestral and vaguely familiar, Nadiya heard the faint humming of static. She peered through
the doorway that led back into the great room. From her vantage point she could just barely glimpse the television, which
was gray and flickering with static.
Turning back toward Klaudia, she asked, “How long has it been like that?”
“Since we got back, I think,” Klaudia said. “Deckard put his little clue up on the screen. But by the time we returned, it was just static. I tried all the dials. It’s stuck.”
“No more press conferences from Hauke to watch?”
Klaudia set down her pen. “I suppose not,” she said. “Though Deckard must have meant something by showing us the first one.
I don’t believe a single element of this simulation has been placed here arbitrarily.”
“Definitely not.” Nadiya remembered the article about Satow’s kidnapping. “Satow was a doctor at a Soviet lab. Do you think—”
She cut herself off, arrested by the same confusion that always emerged when she thought about her father. At least his face
was clearer to her now: the wide dark eyes so like her own, the silver cross gleaming at his throat. She remembered . . .
she remembered that he kept it tucked into the collar of his shirt whenever he went to work.
To most people, science and religion don’t mix. His voice in her mind was rich and deep, raspy with a hint of amusement. They claim it’s a clash of principles. But really, I think they don’t want to imagine that God might judge them for what they’ve
done, in the name of progress and knowledge.
At eight or nine, it had been too sophisticated a notion for her to comprehend. Now it made her throat tighten.
Klaudia was watching her steadily.
“My father was a doctor, too,” Nadiya said. “You know that. You saw it in my file. He worked in a CIA lab. Maybe it’s just
a coincidence, but . . .”
“At this point, I wouldn’t write off anything as a coincidence.” Klaudia’s gaze sharpened. “I’m sure it’s not easy, but anything
you can remember could be useful.”
“Right.” Nadiya shut her eyes, as if she could will some memory to emerge from the blackness. But every time she saw so much
as a flash of color, it dissipated again. “I’m sorry. I wish I could. . . .”
“You were very young,” Klaudia said, her voice surprisingly gentle. “At that age, trauma can significantly alter the structure and chemistry of the brain.”
Nadiya didn’t like to imagine that—her mind being reshaped like clay by invisible hands, its ridges and creases all mangled,
its pathways diverted. “Yeah. Well, sorry again. I’ll keep trying to think.”
Klaudia nodded and returned to her paper. Nadiya gazed down at the book, but her vision kept swimming, blurring all the words.
This wasn’t her domain, anyway. She missed the reassuring weight of a pistol in her hands and the accompanying adrenaline
racing through her veins.
The sound of footsteps made her lift her head. Julian and Giselle entered the alcove, Crispin trailing a few paces behind
them.
“Good morning,” Giselle said. Upon seeing her, hearing her voice, Nadiya felt her heart skip a beat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean to sleep in so late.”
“It’s fine,” said Klaudia. “Rest is a necessity. It was a long night.”
“A necessity for you, too,” said Julian. “How long have you been awake?”
Klaudia’s eyes flickered, but she didn’t answer the question. “Sit down,” she said. “We need to figure out our next steps.”
Obediently, Giselle, Julian, and Crispin all pulled out chairs and dropped into them. Julian reached for one of the papers—a
map of Traumstadt, showing both elevation and false lines of latitude and longitude.
“The whole arena isn’t even half a mile,” he said. “We could hope to just get lucky.”
“By doing what?” Nadiya asked. “Knocking on doors and asking all the holograms if they happened to see a mysterious cube?”
“Well, I would try and charm them first. Maybe they’d invite me in for tea.”
Nadiya resisted the urge to smile and wondered where along the way she had stopped finding Julian Joyce-Young III entirely insufferable. Maybe when she had seen the vulnerable boy beneath all the old-money arrogance and roguish bravado.
Giselle leaned over the table to examine the map she had drawn for Klaudia, with the addresses in Cyrillic letters. “It’s
strange, isn’t it, to use letters for the addresses instead of numbers?”
“It’s definitely unusual in America,” said Klaudia, “but it could be typical in Germany. I don’t know. I’ve been looking for
patterns in the letters, some association between them. So far I don’t see anything.”
Giselle squinted. “Maybe it’s a cipher.”
“A cipher?” Nadiya echoed.
“Dr. Iver put me in a cryptography class for a week when I first came to Valeran,” Giselle said. “I don’t think he really
expected me to learn anything, but I remember the professor talking about some simple methods of, um, encryption.” Her voice
was halting. “He taught us a simple substitution cipher called ROT13. It’s where you replace each letter with the thirteenth
letter after it in the alphabet.”
“The Russian alphabet has thirty-three letters,” Klaudia said, “not twenty-six.”
“ROT . . . 16?” Giselle tried.
Klaudia took one of the manila folders and tore it into evenly sized squares—thirty-three of them. On each one she wrote a
Cyrillic letter. She arranged them in order in front of Giselle.
Even having seen proof of her abilities before, Nadiya was still impressed by how swiftly Giselle laid out the scraps in rows
of five to represent each of the addresses. Then, like pulling a slot machine, she cycled through the alphabet, shifting the
letters one by one in order.
Admittedly, Nadiya was also paying very close attention to the way her delicate fingers maneuvered the papers, as well as
the stray lock of auburn hair brushing her cheek.
Klaudia watched Giselle carefully, shaking her head at each five-letter arrangement. The hope was that eventually it would spell out something significant, a clue. But as the moments wore on, accompanied by the swirling of the orchestral music, Nadiya’s hope began to fade.
“Wait,” said Klaudia suddenly, shooting out a hand.
Giselle paused. Klaudia stared down at the latest arrangement of letters. Being Russian, they held no significance to anyone
else, but all four of them leaned over the table in tandem, holding one collective breath.
Klaudia picked up the pen. The very air seemed to ripple in anticipation. She took the sheet of paper upon which Giselle had
drawn the houses, and marked one of them with a star. Then, in careful, blocky letters, she spelled out S-A-T-O-W.
Only Nadiya reacted, a gasp slipping from her mouth. Giselle and Julian looked at Klaudia in bewilderment.
“There’s no equivalent to the English W in Russian,” Klaudia said. “But this is the way his name is rendered in the Russian alphabet. I saw it during Hauke’s subtitled
speech.” She gestured toward the television in the great room.
“Whose name?” Giselle asked.
“Dr. Satow,” Nadiya said. Her pulse was skipping. “He was an East German doctor who defected to the West. Then, a couple of
weeks ago, he was kidnapped by the Soviets during a visit to his hometown.” Which she was now certain the whole simulation
was modeled after.
“The article,” said Julian. “Dr. Iver forwarded it to the entire school. I knew there was some reason he wanted us all to
see it.”
“I remember now.” Giselle’s eyes clouded briefly. “ ‘Every effort will be made to retrieve Dr. Satow, both for his own safety
and for the recovery of the sensitive information he possesses.’ ”
“Shit.” Julian let out a breath. “Shit.”
Nadiya looked at Klaudia. There was a terrible, sinking feeling in her stomach. “So this has been Deckard’s mission for us
the whole time.”
Klaudia’s expression was bleak. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, Crispin spoke up.
“The music will mask some of your words,” he said, voice low, “but it’s not a perfect method. For more . . . important conversations,
you might want to consider finding another place to meet.”
“Right,” said Julian. His eyes flickered a moment with consideration. “Surely, Deckard hasn’t bugged all of Traumstadt.”
Crispin shook his head silently.
“Great,” said Nadiya, without enthusiasm. “Then let’s just go—”
“No,” Crispin blurted. “Don’t say it out loud. They’ll be able to track you.”
Right. Nadiya glanced toward Klaudia, who looked uncharacteristically lost in thought. She was considering how to gently prod her
when Julian spoke up.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Crispin and I will go and you can meet us there.” He looked pointedly at Klaudia. “I’ll leave
you a message.”