There’s a commotion on the couch; Ivan hovers over Larissa, arms plunging around her, but she pushes him away. “Not now,” she murmurs, looking back at me.
Ivan sighs and gets up to crank the volume dial on the brand-new television set: Larissa’s reward for selling me out. KVN, Larissa’s favorite show, is too loud, making it hard for me to read. It’s an endless parade of bulbous Russian men performing lopsided comedy routines. All the jokes are safe, boring; the audience laughs at the ridiculous antics the performers get into while waiting in line for rations, but no one is laughing at the lines, the rations, the absurdity of our daily life. Ivan wheezes and chuckles along with the audience. The laughter crashes and swells in my head, like a wave sloshing back and forth. It emits an endless too-bright color display of teeth and throats rolling with laughter, and Ivan’s laughing with it, and the fact that they’re laughing only makes them laugh more—
A hand closes on my arm. “Yulia.” Larissa peeks up over the chair arm, watching me with wide blue eyes.
I narrow my eyes at her, though the look she’s giving me is an achingly good mirror of Zhenya’s when he knew he’d disappointed me in some way. “What do you want?”
Ivan laughs again at KVN; Larissa tugs at my wrist. “Let’s talk somewhere else.”
I let her guide me out of the living room and into our classroom, where Major Kruzenko has taped up photographs of all of Natalya Gruzova’s colleagues and friends on one side of a blackboard. Larissa flips the blackboard over and starts scratching out names on the reverse side: Chernina, Yulia Andreevna. Sorokhin, Valentin Borisovich. She adds the rest of our team members’ names, then lists out code names for John and Jane Does.
“The dossiers you saw in Gruzova’s apartment,” she explains. “I want to help you find them.”
“And who says I want your help?” I ask.
Larissa starts scribbling additional information in a grid: profession, address, last known location. “No one.” She shrugs. “But you won’t get far on your own.”
She passes me a stack of folders: Rostov’s typed reports on everything he recovered about the wildlings from interrogating Gruzova. They’re all around our age—fourteen to twenty. Young enough to be aware of their powers, but likely without any real mastery. Factory workers, a railway technician, polytechnical students—nothing high profile, just cogs in the Soviet machinery. Just remote enough that the KGB can’t find them and bring them in without our help.
Larissa twirls the piece of chalk between her fingers. “When I was ten, my math teacher held me after class. He was convinced I’d cheated on my test. I hadn’t—I just saw strange things happen when I wrote down answers. I could already see the teacher’s writing on the test, marking it correct or not.”
“So you reworked your answers until you got the right mark?” I ask.
“Yeah. I wasn’t the best student, so of course he was suspicious. He started lecturing me, but I found I knew the words he was about to say right before he said them. I started answering accusations he hadn’t yet made.” She gazes off, lips easing into a smile. “I’m sure it was his report that tipped off the KGB. I didn’t know well enough to hide what I was.”
I stare at the grid again. Factory workers. It’s far too broad. We’ll need a way to narrow it down. “You think these wildlings have probably slipped up, too.”
She nods. “Not enough to get brought in, but I’d bet there are some reports that could point us in the right direction. Let’s you and I figure out what we’re looking for, then we can present it to Kruzenko.”
“Good idea.” I smile—then stop myself. “I guess you’re pretty good at bringing people in.”
Her hand tightens around the chalk; I hear a soft snap. “I’m doing this to keep those wildlings from getting hurt. You know that, right?” She shakes her head. “It was the same for you.”
“Spare me.”
“Yulia. You don’t know what I saw.” Her gaze is hollowed out. “The American scrubber—he’s not like Rostov, ripping your thoughts out all at once. He’s corrosive. A slow poison. You don’t understand what I was saving you from. All I could taste was blood when I tried to see you going to him…”
Anger surges through me, but I’m haunted by Natalya Gruzova, her thoughts sputtering out as she tried to cling to sanity. I try to swallow down this constriction at my throat—this emotion at the crossroads of anger and relief. “We can’t live like this forever,” I say.