Masha pauses as the national anthem builds back up around her thoughts. Then she forces her sweetest spun-sugar grin to her lips and tilts her head just so, a poster girl for the Komsomol youth. “I guess you are,” she says.
But Masha’s made a mistake. She may have elite KGB spy training in her blood, but she has not learned how to survive—not like a “ration rat” like me. I don’t need to read her mind to see the signs that she’s lying. Shostakovich hammers around me. Liar. Liar. The word screams through my thoughts, screeches across the violins.
But what is she lying about—and why?
“Girls?” Major Kruzenko’s voice floats upstairs. “Come downstairs, it’s time for dinner!”
A cold fist grips my heart as I follow Masha and Larissa down the staircase, two guards sauntering along behind us. What does Masha know about me that I don’t? I never told Mama or anyone else about my ability—the KGB can’t possibly have been monitoring us for years, or they would have arrested us before now. But I never noticed any sort of ability when I was eight or nine, when Masha said the “legacy” psychics discovered theirs. My parents were doctors—glorified teachers, really—not psychic spies. They spent their days at the clinic training children with mental disorders to become just another cog in the Soviet machine. Surely they never noticed that I—
I crash into someone at the base of the stairs. Valentin looks down at me, his burning eyes wrenched open wide. But I barely see them—I’m tangled in the sight I saw when we collided, vivid even through his musical shield.
I saw myself.
Larissa seizes my wrist, her hand oozing with her Vysotsky song, and yanks me away from him. “Let’s get a good seat.” Valentin stands motionless at the base of the stairs, staring at us and adjusting his glasses like I’ve stunned him. The folk ballad circles lazily around Larissa. “Be careful with Valentin,” she whispers. “He’s powerful, but sometimes, he has trouble controlling it.
“And the rest of us don’t?”
She grunts; a dizzying blur of images drifts off her skin to mine, too fast for me to sort through. “Not like him. He’s going to end up just like the colonel someday.”
“Who is the colonel—” But I stop short as we round the corner to the dining room, painted in caustic baby blue. Staring us down from the opposite end of the banquet table is the gaunt, too-tall, furious man I saw through the documents. The man who knows my mother’s name.
I hear Kruzenko’s voice behind him. “You must be cautious with her. We aren’t used to guarding against touch,” she says, the angled double doors sheltering her from view. “There is far worse she could have learned.”
“Colonel Rostov,” Larissa squeaks. He turns away from Kruzenko. Larissa drops my hand and stands straight as a piston, snapping gearlike into a salute. The colonel strides down the length of the dining table.
Something about him makes it hurt to look at him—it’s like looking at the sun, too bright to stare at directly, searing my eyes, making me itch all over. The closer he draws, the more the feeling swells. My stomach churns and there’s this sharp, twisting pain in my head.
It’s the buzzing I heard in Kruzenko’s thoughts this morning, cutting through her mental shield like a bone saw. Is this his power, this way of splitting straight through someone’s mind, so they’re exposed even after they’re away from him? No mental barrier could possibly repel that. I’m trying to focus on Shostakovich but this pain, this noise—it’s like someone’s scrubbing the inside of my skull with steel wool. Those onyx eyes flash at me from the deep recesses of his face. He walks like a tiger—sinuous, confident, crisp.
“Comrade Chernina. I am pleased to have you join us.” He stops half a meter from me. I try not to double over as my stomach protests. “A shame your mother is not seeing reason, like you have.”
“What are you doing to my mother?” It’s all I can manage to say. That awful steel scritch-scritch-scratch consumes all sound. His words are trimmed in razor wire.
“It’s very sad.” He examines his fingernails, though they’re perfectly clean. “She does not want to resume her old research. Who knows why? It was good, fulfilling work, helping the mentally ill. She was a Party member, she received extra rations, all the medical access she required for your brother. He really needs special attention, doesn’t he? A bit of a borscht-for-brains.” His gaze rakes over me. “Maybe you can convince her.”