Escape from Memory by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

numbers or words and reciting them back perfectly. What he did was nothing a five-year-old Crythian couldn’t do, but the rest of the world was amazed. He was written up in psychology texts. They called him ‘S.’” The problem was, once he’d memorized allthose meaningless numbers and words, he couldn’t get them out of his mind. And so the psychologists taught him to forget.”
    Mom looked sad all of a sudden, and I couldn’t think why.
    “And then?” I prompted her. I was getting stiff sitting on the cold floor. I shifted around, trying to sit sideways, but there was no way to get comfortable on the bare concrete.
    “S was probably the reason Crythe came to the attention of the Soviet government. Or maybe not. It was years later, during the height of the Cold War … When they came to Crythe, they didn’t explain. But since I left, I’ve done research. I read everything I could find about S. And I can just picture some Soviet leader coming across reports of his amazing feats, saying, ‘Eureka! This has military applications!’ Back then, that’s all the Soviets and the Americans ever thought about, the military and having better weapons than the other side.”
    She was confusing me. “Since when is memory a weapon?” I asked.
    Mom frowned, making me feel more ignorant than ever.
    “Think about it,” she said. “If you were a military leader, wouldn’t you love to have pilots who needed to be told only once how to operate their planes? Or soldiers who could carry around complicated battle plans in their heads? Or electronics operators who never had to write down secret codes? Or—”
    “Okay” I said. “I get it.”
    Mom shook her head, as if shaking off my impatience. She pulled her hair back from her face, held it tight at the back of her head, released it.
    “I was four years old when they came to Crythe,” she finally said. She had a faraway look in her eye, as if there were a movie playing out on the opposite wall. All I saw was blank cinderblocks. “The Soviet officials came in jeeps—I’d never seen a jeep before,” she said dreamily. “They began testing us, testing us all. And we were all too stupid or too naive or too proud to play dumb. We kids begged our Aunt Memories to train us harder than ever. We were like small-town starlets, dreaming of Hollywood.”
    I couldn’t help dreading whatever she was going to say next.
    “They picked twenty-five people, mostly kids. My sister Toria was the youngest. Just six.”
    “Toria? You mean Victoriana? My my—” I couldn’t say it, couldn’t even get my lips to press together for the “m” in “mother”
    Mom tore her gaze away from the invisible scene on the back wall and focused her eyes on me.
    “Yes,” she said. “Your mother was chosen. So was your father. Alexei was eight.”
    She gave me time to let that sink in. Or maybe she was giving herself time. I glanced down briefly, and when I looked back at her she was staring at the back wall again.
    “I was so jealous,” she said. “Mama said I was too young, but I was the typical little sister—convinced that anything Toria could do, I could do too.
    “Then we found out they were taking the twenty-five away….”
    I shivered. This was scarier than the ghost stories my friends and I told at sleepovers. Mom certainly looked haunted. She sat silent for a long time. I didn’t prompt her to continue. Finally, she gave a little sigh and went on.
    “When they came back, there were only six of them. Toria and Alexei would never tell us what they’d witnessed. They were strong, strong people. They’d lost a decade of their lives—mostof their childhoods—to that horrible experiment. I think they were the only ones who returned sane. The other four were older. Men. They’d been in the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, and they still believed they were fighting it. You know the Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome? I think that was what they had, only