“I’m sorry.” I suppress a hiccup. “I couldn’t keep up—”
“It wasn’t you.” Valentin’s hand is still closed around mine and squeezing tighter. “The Veter team member you thought had been talking with the scrubber. I think it’s more than just—”
I catch a flash of lightning in the crowd—feel it more than see it, ripping through my mind. I spot a dark-haired woman I recognize from our briefings on the Veter 1 team. According to the records, she and Natalya Gruzova were close friends. Is her mind so thoroughly scrubbed that she stings like this? But then I try to look at the man she’d been dancing with and he sets my eyes on fire—
I double over, nearly falling again. Valentin holds me firm and turns me away from the dance floor. “Don’t look at him.”
I force my eyes shut but the man’s brilliance is reverberating in my brain, it’s ricocheting like a bullet, it’s throbbing through my veins. Waves of white light crash across my eyelids. I try to reach out with my thoughts to sense him, but he sends my mind scattering. Logic and words peel off of me.
“Come with me.” Valentin swallows loudly. “If that—that thing … is the American scrubber … Well, he makes Rostov look weak.” Valentin’s face is pale under a veil of sweat. “And Yulia?”
“You saw something,” I whisper.
Valentin drags me off the dance floor, shoving through the drunken crowd. “He’s not here just to work on Natalya’s friend.” He pulls me into a stairwell and licked his chapped lips. “He’s searching for you.”
CHAPTER 23
PAVEL, MY GUARD, hovers over me. Watching him is like hearing an echo; his face trails behind his movements, and his words dot his face like breath in the winter air. The American sunshine man radiates somewhere over my shoulder; my bared back is already peeling with a burn.
“Get her out of here.” Pavel’s voice dances before me. “Don’t let her back into the main room. I’ll alert the others.”
Someone’s hand closes tight on my arm and faces swirl before me like little galaxies, exploding into balls of nothingness and radiation. “Too much Shampanskoye,” another guard says from the end of a comet’s tail. We’re orbiting the party like a Sputnik satellite, snapping little spy photographs.
“Please, Yulia, you have to shake it off.” Valentin helps me sit on the stone steps; we’re facing a massive painting of Tchaikovsky, surrounded by Karl Marx, Stalin, Lenin, and a sea of faceless farmers harvesting wheat as rays of sunshine and music soar overhead. They fly through the cosmos with me, shrouded by a planet’s umbra, safe from the scrubber’s glow. “Focus on your mental shield—try to keep it in your head—”
“What’s going on?” Footsteps pound down the staircase toward us. I flop backward against the sharp stairs and see Sergei from upside down. Shostakovich cinches around my thoughts.
“The scrubber’s here with one of Gruzova’s co-workers.” Valentin’s voice turns stony. “I think he hurt Yulia.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
Sergei pushes his hand under my shoulder blades and props me back up. “Scrubbers are dangerous. She should steer clear of them. All of them.” There’s an edge to his voice, cutting through the haze.
Valentin’s cheeks burn darkly. “I would never do that to her.”
“But you could. Maybe you did it by accident.” Sergei crouches down on my other side and snaps his fingers in front of me. “Yulia? Null, one, two. Follow the sound of my voice.”
There is no galaxy, no blinding sun. My head throbs and the marble is too firm against my hipbones, and I’m sinking back down to earth. I smack Sergei’s hand out of my face. “I’m fine. Just a little dizzy, is all.” I nestle into Shostakovich’s sawing strings section. “I didn’t even get a good look at the guy.”
“As well you didn’t. If he was targeting you…” Valentin grimaces.
“Don’t scare her.” Sergei won’t take his hand off my shoulder. It weighs on me like lead. “Bad enough she had to dance with you, flatfoot.”
Valentin sets his lips in a straight line. “I’d better get back. I want to help our guards hunt him down.”
“I’m not some weak thing you have to protect.” I rub my temples. Now that my adrenaline has faded, there’s a sharp pain rooting around in my skull. It treads a familiar path through constricted blood vessels, though I can’t recall ever feeling this pain before.
“I know you aren’t, but I’d rather he try to scrub me than get ahold of you. You work with touch, and if he were to … grab your arm, or something—”
I nod, halfhearted, at Valentin. “Fine. Do what you have to do.”