“Yulia Andreevna.” The girl twin speaks my real name from lips that have never felt the rasp of winter. “Too easy. You don’t even make it fun.”
Raisa’s curtain tears down easily in my grip. I swing its rod into the girl’s face. She’s caught off guard, but the boy twin’s hand is there to catch it, like he already knew what I would do. I’m running, leaping over a stack of fabrics from the southern republics, shoving a bucketful of handmade brooms behind me to block the path.
“You can’t run from what you are!” the boy shouts.
I chance a look over my shoulder. Yakov slows the twins, jabbing his box of rusty nails in their faces, but they disentangle from his sales pitch and knock over a little boy with bundled twigs. Who are they? Old schoolmates eager to turn in our family? I’ve cut all ties to our old life—we had to shed those snakeskin memories.
Vlad, the unofficial market guard, stands between me and the wrought-iron gate. I duck around him, but Aunt Nadia’s shoes are a little too big on me and I skid to the side, losing my balance. He seizes the collar of my sweater in his fist. “You bring trouble, comrade?”
I wriggle out of the sweater and launch myself through the gates. My arms immediately prick with gooseflesh; it’s too cold for just a blouse. But I have to ignore it. I have to reach Mama and make sure she’s safe.
“You’ll be sorry!” the girl twin screeches at me as I run past afternoon workers, shuffling out of the Metro stop. If I duck my head and keep my eyes to myself, they’ll provide the perfect camouflage. “Don’t you want to know what you are?”
What I am? I climb down the escalator slowly enough that I don’t raise suspicion. My ratty clothes are lost in the sea of gray-brown-blue. Just another half-starved waif with empty eyes and empty hands. I know just what I am.
I am Yulia Andreevna Chernina, seventeen years old, daughter of former high-ranking Communist Party members. I am a fugitive in my own country. And sometimes I see things that can’t be seen.
CHAPTER 2
OUR SHELL-SHOCKED TANK of a neighbor lumbers toward me on the walkway, stinking of potato vodka and sleeplessness. I don’t like the way his eyes pull from mine, like a magnetic repulsion. It’s a guilty act, one I can’t afford to ignore right now. Like the market, I need every advantage. As he brushes past me, I tighten up my mind—tuning that imaginary radio—and am thrown into his skin.
We are no longer standing in front of 22 Novaya Rodina, where the all-new apartment towers already look beaten and cowed. We are outside Lubyanka Square earlier this morning, standing in the bronze-cast shadow of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of the KGB, the secret police who tell us how to act, who to be. I peer out of the neighbor’s eyes at a KGB officer in a mud-green coat who is smiling just enough to show the edge of his teeth. The officer scribbles in his notebook and says How long have the Chernins been hiding there?
This is the traitor, this neighbor who has reported us to the secret police, sentencing what’s left of my family to death—for what? A bit of spending money? The twins at the market were no accident, though they didn’t look like the usual KaGeBeznik thugs.
The officer lowers his notepad and jams his fist into a pocketful of worn-out rubles. We have been looking for them for some time, you know. The wad of notes dangles below my neighbor’s nose. The Chernins are dangerous people. You were right to come to us.
I should have known, but there’s no time to berate myself—or even this scum—so I fall back into the present and rush past him on the walk, thoughts of Mama pulling me toward the building.
Our building hangs over me as I rush up the too-long walk. It’s made of giant concrete slabs cantilevered into place as if by magic—a Stonehenge for the people, the worker, the State. When Khruschev first built them, the workers were thrilled to leave the old roach-rotted, subdivided mansions that housed three families to a room. But to me, the building is our prison—I only leave it for the market or for a breath without four other bodies pressed against me. The rest of the time, my caged-animal stare could peel the lead paint from the walls. That girl dared to ask me what I am? I am the weed growing through the sidewalk’s cracks, resilient, but knowing I’ll someday be ripped out by the root.
I have to warn Mama. I don’t know how long I’ve lost the twins for, if I’ve lost them at all. I don’t know how many are with them. As I fumble with my key, I strain for the soft fall of boots on cement of a team sneaking around me, guns trained. But there is only me, with every instinct coiled in my genes screaming to save my family.