There are ten beds in two rows, metal-framed and barely more than cots, like the hospital pictures we see from the Great Patriotic War. What must be Masha’s and Larissa’s cots are claimed at opposite corners of the room, but everything else is empty, with sheets piled at the foot of the skimpy mattresses. The whole mansion seems designed for a much larger group.
I march down the aisle to the middle bed on Larissa’s row, my footsteps echoing. I barely know her at all, but she doesn’t offend me nearly as much as Masha. It’s only for a few nights, I tell myself, until I can find out where Mama is. I reach for the folded sheets, coated with a thin film of dust.
“Wait!” they both shout in unison, but I’m already leaning against the bed frame.
Fever runs up one leg and down the other; needles pin my thoughts in place like captured butterflies. It’s like an electrical current arcing across my skin, full of anger, razor blades, panic, dark eyes, pain—
I jump back from the frame and fight to fill my lungs with air that won’t come.
“That was … Anastasia’s bed,” Larissa says, speaking to the floor.
Masha nods, face drained of her usual smugness. “You’d better take another one.”
I grit my teeth. Maybe if I clench them hard enough, it’ll kill the images of blood and electricity. “And what happened to Anastasia?” I ask, but Larissa fiddles with a strand of blond hair while Masha locks up all her belongings in the trunk at the foot of her bed.
“Fine. Forget I asked.” I unfold the sheets on the opposite bed, in Masha’s row. My eyes are on the mattress, but in my peripheral vision, Masha and Larissa exchange a look. Even I can hear their dueling musical barriers swelling to fend me off: a schmaltzy Vladimir Vysotsky fool-the-censor ballad for Larissa and the blurty, chest-puffing national anthem for Masha.
“She was here until a few months ago,” Masha finally says. “She … wasn’t cut out for our work.”
“You mean she went crazy,” Larissa says. “What?” she hisses at Masha, who gives her a dirty look. “It’s true.”
I tuck in the sheets, hospital-corner style, learned from years of helping Mama. “Does that happen a lot?”
“Not as often as you’d think,” Larissa says. Then she moves up my ladder of regard when she looks sideways at Masha and adds, “Only to the ones who try too hard.”
“Girls.” One of the guards steps forward. “It is better not to worry our new friend this way.” His words take on an edge. “You should talk of other things.”
“Shut up, Lev.” Masha says it so casually that even Lev doesn’t know how to react. His puffy lips hang open for a moment before he falls back to the doorway. If her parents are the high-ranking Party officials I suspect they are, maybe Masha can get away with such insolence, but I’ll need to be far more subtle. “It depends on your genetic constitution,” Masha continues, strutting down the aisle in time with the national anthem shield billowing around her. “If you’re strong enough, come from good stock, you’ll have nothing to fear.”
“Good stock?” I laugh. “What are we, cattle?”
They exchange another look over my head.
“Come on. It’s obvious there are supposed to be a lot more of us here.” I flop onto my bed and sneeze as the cloud of dust hits me. “Did they all go crazy?”
“Of course not!” Masha’s anthem swells. “Most of the KGB’s psychics are like my parents—highly decorated psychological spies who served the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War. They stopped Hitler’s fascist forces from taking Leningrad by guiding our supply trucks into the city when it was under siege.” She runs her hand along the metal frame of my cot, and I’m sure the humming her touch leaves behind is intentional. “Their children, like Misha and I, have been monitored from birth.”
“Sounds like fun,” I say. My father never fought in the Great Patriotic War—one of the many privileges we enjoyed in our former life. He stayed shielded in his antiseptic lab, flirting with Mama, enjoying the Party life.
“So most of us are the children of these spies, or other documented psychics’ children. Their powers show up at around eight or nine, and they’re carefully monitored until they’re our age—old enough to be trained. Then there are wildlings, like Larissa, whose powers show up later,” Masha says. “Someone got suspicious about her predictions that always turned out true. They reported her to the KGB, and they brought her in once they discovered what she was.”
Larissa lets her hair fall over her face to hide her crimson cheeks, as if she’s still ashamed at being found out. I grimace. I hadn’t discovered my own powers until the day we moved in with Aunt Nadia. She’d hugged me tight and told me out loud that she would do whatever it took to protect us, but I heard doubt and disgust running through her mind. “So I guess I’m a wildling,” I say.