WE START OUR first real operation with one of Larissa’s visions: Red Square, a specific date, a member of the Veter 1 engineering team. Too many possibilities, she claims, to pinpoint the exact member. Then Misha and Ivan confirm her vision on a trip to the Academy of Interplanetary Sciences. There’s a traitor in the team’s ranks. He or she is plotting to smuggle secret rocket designs for the Veter 1 out of the academy and deliver them to a waiting American spy in Red Square. But Misha and Ivan can’t get close enough to identify the traitor. Under their cover as a school tour, they have to keep their distance, the thoughts of the Veter 1 team members blurring through the heavy secure doors like snowflakes melting into a single drift.
Now it is my turn to put my skills to use. My first time out of the mansion in the month that I’ve been there, and I can’t be more relieved. While the others edged us closer to the Veter conspiracy, Kruzenko’s been choking me with KGB training manuals. Leave it to the KGB to make even spycraft read as dull as economic dissertations, and anyway, the manuals are ill-suited for our particular type of work. Psychics don’t need complicated routes to lose a pursuer, not when they can read the pursuer’s mind. And it’s not hard to tell an asset is lying when their fear of not being believed is woven through their thoughts.
So I am sent to wander Red Square, that massive pool of people and noise in the Kremlin’s shadow, in hopes of feeling—something. A fresh memory, trailed behind our traitor like a spelunker’s cord. An overwhelming sense of wrongness, of betrayal. I will not be alone, of course. I have a pet spider of my own now, Pavel—ox-shouldered, with a grim reaper face. I suspect there will be others anchored through the crowd. But they are also sending Sergei with me, for reasons unexplained. He won’t be using his remote viewing powers—Masha will cover that from back at the mansion—and his skill at reading the average person’s mind isn’t much better than mine when I’m not touching them. I suspect it has more to do with the smug little grin that wedges onto Kruzenko’s lips when I listen to The Promise, Sergei’s favorite radio drama, with him in the evenings.
Two guards—rifles in hand, naturally—swing open the door to the van. With late autumn sunlight glaring down on us, I stagger out of the van behind Sergei, cupping my hand over my eyes so I can see, and my breath falters a little. We’re at the bottom of Red Square, staring up the spiraling, swimming slope of cobblestones. The high-walled Kremlin fortress bounds us on the left, while the white filigree Universal Store—a grandiose shopping arcade, a memorial to our indulgent Imperialist days—lines our right. Over the horizon are the Easter-egg turrets of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the jagged ziggurat of Vladimir Lenin’s crypt, where he lies stuffed with formaldehyde and wax, preserved and displayed in glass like our saints of old.
And in between it all: thousands upon thousands of people, all their thoughts ready to crash and break upon us like waves, drowning us in their unfiltered, uncensored monologues.
“Well,” Sergei says, turning up the collar on his wool coat, “where should we begin?”
“If you were planning to commit treason, where would you go?” I reply.
He strokes his chin, feigning deep thought. “Probably not Lenin’s tomb. That might be in poor taste.”
I smile despite myself. “Or maybe that’s what they’re hoping we’d think.”
Sergei looks me over, some of the brightness ebbing from his grin. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” He nudges me with his elbow. “Don’t be. You know how to stay in control of your power.”
“Not like this,” I say. But it’s not just the crowds. I want to perform well—convince Kruzenko and Rostov that I deserve to see my family. I just wish I didn’t have to destroy someone else’s life to do it. Someone else’s attempt to stand against the Party. I watch Sergei through the corner of my eye, wondering if he carries this same sense of guilt—if he helped them track me down.
Old women hobble past us with anemic bread loaves and browning lettuce clutched to their chests. Their pantyhose sag around bloated ankles; their scarves are threadbare and frayed. They smell like beets, like the fallen bits of food that cling to the range and burn when it’s turned on again. But then they brush against me.