Page 14 of Broken Embers

“She danced?” Yelena asks hopefully and is not amused when I snort at the thought of my sister dancing.

I love Tara but, fuck, that girl has no coordination and no want to even try and correct it.

“Hell no!” I shake my head. “Tara is as uncoordinated as a drunk elephant and about as destructive too.”

“That is not a nice thing to say,” Yelena says, indignantly. “Maybe she just never wanted to show how superior she was.”

“Nooo.” Sabrina shakes her head. “She was a terrible dancer.” I smile. “But, Tara, is so musically gifted. She can pick up any instrument and just… play.”

“What instruments did she train with?” Yelena asks.

“The better question is which ones she didn’t.” I smile remembering my sister’s love of music and the way she could pick up and play an… my eyes widen.Fuck. Was she genetically modified? Is that why Tara is so good with instruments?I don’t know anyone to have ever won a debate against Tara, and she was phenomenal with math and the sciences. Like me Tara has a photographic memory. I shake the thought off continuing. “She loved the piano and cello the most though.”

“Really?” Yelena says.

I nod. “I was six and Tara nine when we went to a restaurant for my mother’s birthday. She wanted to go to this fancy ass place. They had a pianist there and she was playing while we ate and then he played some Beethoven song that really struck Tara. She hummed it the whole way home. The following day she demanded my parents take her to a music store. I had to get dragged with it.” I roll my eyes. I’m not going to tell her I was the one who encouraged Tara to make my parents take her. “She found a piano. She said it called to her when my father asked why that one.” I sigh. “Tara sat down at it and played the song she’d heard at the restaurant the night before. Much to the delight of the store owner who was even more shocked and delighted upon learning Tara had never touched a musical instrument in her life.”

“What song?” Yelena demands, leaning forward. “What Beethoven song?”

“Some Beethoven crap,” I mutter, keeping my voice light, waving my hand in the air. “I don’t know. I’m not a fucking musician and I can’t stand that classical shit.”

I know exactly what it was. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29 in B–flat major, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’. One of the hardest fucking piano pieces in existence.

But I’m not about to hand that little tidbit over. Not here. Not now, when I suspect my sister was a guinea pig in some freaky genetic experiment. I have to stop my hand from going instinctively to my stomach. What would she say if she found out about me? Another thought leaves me cold—holy fuck.

Yelena said my mother and father fled Russia to protect me from becoming part of the same experiment Tara was a part of. Fuck! I have to try and control my breathing as panic starts to claw at my throat and the horrible thought swirls through my mind—am I like I am because I’m also genetically modified?Maybe my mother was being experimented on without even knowing. I swallow. If I am, then that would mean my baby… I block the thought from my mind.Stop it Sabrina. You’re being paranoid.Yelena already as much as clarified that my mother and father left Russia before I became a human guinea pig for these mad fucked up geneticist.

When I get out of here, I’m going to expose this fucking hellhole.

“Beethoven crap?” Yelena repeats, her accent thickening around the words as she yanks me from my panic-inducing thoughts. Her eyes blaze. “Beethoven is not… crap! His work is not easy to play, especially since some of his pieces are the most challenging piano pieces. And for a child to just…” She swallows. “Incredible. That is incredible. I need to know what piece it was.”

“Didn’t he write that ‘Chopsticks’ song they teach kids?” I say, deadpan.

Yelena’s face freezes in open horror. “That was Chopin,” she hisses, like I’ve just insulted her firstborn—I guess if she’s not lying about being Tara’s biological mother in a way I did.

She flips open another folder and shoves it toward me. “I guess I cannot expect much from a student who never got an A-plus in her life.”

“I did,” I say outraged. “I got an A-plus for participation once. I have a few B pluses too. Those must all be in there if those are my transcripts,” I say brightly, biting back laughter.

I watch her eyebrows twitch as she scans my records. I can see how she’s judging me, thinking I’m nothing and that I’m not as bright as she or my sister. Or my mother… Fuck how did I not see that. Although I have always felt my mother had so much more potential than just being a dancer.

And I always wondered why my father, with his superior military skills, never joined the US Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force. I know now. It also explains my mother’s aversion to traveling anywhere that needed a passport—they were hiding.

“You were good at ballet,” she mutters. “Gymnastics, basketball, baseball...”

“And soccer,” I add. “I can ice skate, too.” I purse my lips. “I was pretty good at ice skating, but I wanted to play ice hockey. My parents refused to let me play, so I quit skating.”

Yelena frowns. “You wanted to play hockey? That barbaric sport?”

“You’re a geneticist working in a secret black site experimenting on kids,” I shoot back. “What you do is probably even more barbaric than playing ice hockey.”

She sniffs, clearly unimpressed. “I am enhancing human potential. That sport seeks to destroy it.”

“Only if you get body-checked into the boards,” I quip.

Her mouth tightens. “Leonid must have tried to turn you into the son he always wanted.”

“Nope,” I say, shaking my head. “But he loved that I was a tomboy and loved my dolls just as much as I did hunting, fishing, and learning how to gut, skin, or scale them.”

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