“Not a problem, my sunbeam.” He tweaks her nose, then looks at me. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll retrace the businessman’s steps. See what he’s been doing here.”
Ivan’s guard unlocks the alley door for us, and settles in for a lengthy standing session. “Try not to be seen,” he grunts from under his scarf. “Best if we don’t have to send a team after you kids.”
The stench of oil and tar nearly knocks us flat as we pull open the door. We shake salt and ice from our boots, and strip down to our base outfits: the Soviet standard-issue gray that works better than camouflage in factories and ration lines. None of the workers so much as glance up from the assembly line. I take in the alien contours of machinery, the impossible mechanical arms reaching and grabbing every which way—
And suck in my breath. There is no rattle of seamless automation. The clanging noises come from the workers crawling over the metallic, holey carapaces that might someday turn into Party officials’ limousines. They ratchet valves into place by hand, with comically large wrenches; at a far station, a babushka with a dowager hump wrestles stitched pieces of leather from an uncooperative sewing machine. What good, then, are these Stalinist monstrosities of pipes and hydraulics jutting every which way?
“They really needed a whole factory for this?” Ivan mutters. “No wonder it takes seven years to get a car.”
“Let’s be quick. Ivan? I think the babushkas are looking our way,” I say.
“Of course.” He brings his fingers to his forehead—as if his mind is this great muscle and our work is causing him physical strain—then he motions along the wall. “Move quickly. You’re clear.”
Larissa and I scamper along the wall, hopping over dilapidated crates and metal bins full of tubes, pistons. I keep my hands tangled in my stripped-away coat, not ready yet to sink in. We find a small nook beside a thicket of metal towers. They look like intricate machinery, but there is no telltale hum of electric currents; a cord is bundled in hooks on one side, felted with thick dust.
Larissa slumps against the wall and catches her breath. “This team will be taking their lunch break soon. Start here, then move toward the foreman’s office. He won’t return until after we’re gone.”
I dump my coat at her feet as she twists a lock of hair around her fingers and take a deep breath. I flatten my hand on the cold, silent steel and sink into its memories.
Day after day at the factory, the constant clatter and clang. I see the missing wildling darting in and out of frame, scuffling along as he settles disputes between workers and shuttles to his locker and back. But one day, a white haze blurs the edges of the memories; it pulls me with a familiar, dreaded tug.
The scrubber.
A man is walking the floor, pointing to the various assembly bays and describing their purpose. “The workers are much happier to contribute to the State, you see, than fat cat industry bosses like in your country.”
“I’m not here for politics.”
The voice nearly jars me out of the memory. At once it sounds so typically Russian, perhaps with a southern Baltic lilt—but as soon as I think that, my mind’s infected with doubt. Of course this person is not Russian—he is just well educated. Oxford, probably. Didn’t they say something about an English businessman? Yes, it makes perfect sense.
He rounds the corner and it’s like an atom bomb going off. I am splitting apart, molecule by molecule, scattering into blissful, white nothingness. They say that we are made of stardust, of fragments from the cosmos. His radiance makes me believe. Even with time separating us, his power burns me away, strips me down to raw genetic code.
No, Yulia. Fight past his noise. Concentrate.
“And that is the extent of the factory,” the boy says. In the background, someone swears as a faulty valve slices into his arm.
“I’m afraid it is not.” The scrubber turns, and the boy’s smile fades as the scrubber’s glow falls across him. “There is a worker I would like to meet. Dmitri Shadov. You know him?”
“I’m sorry, comrade, but I am the only person authorized to speak to foreigners—”
The scrubber smiles. I cannot describe how I sense this through his white-hot glow, but the smile fills me with warmth. I can see it in the boy’s eyes. He, too, wants to trust this man; he will walk headlong into whatever the scrubber asks of him.
“I will make you a deal.” The scrubber leans forward. “I will speak to Dmitri today, and you will not stop me.”
“Perfect,” the boy says, flustered. “Yes, I should have thought of this myself. Hey! Dmitri! A visitor for you.”
The missing wildling looks up from the auto body. He’s a strapping fellow, dark-haired and packed with hard-earned muscle. He lowers his mallet. With each step forward, his pace slows. Does he feel the radiation, too?