The blinding scrubber’s face parts with a glossy white smile. “Let’s have a word in here, Dmitri. We won’t take long.”
They duck into the office. Hot noise flashes from the cracks around the door, jolting me backward, nearly breaking my contact with the machine. I grit my teeth against the static storm and wait it out, wait for that door to open, ready to flinch away from the flash burn of the scrubber’s radioactive smile.
Dmitri staggers out first, his head like a ball of shrapnel. His gaze roves the factory, not really seeing it before him. The scrubber—bozhe moi, but I can’t look at him dead on—claps Dmitri on the shoulder. “We are agreed, then?”
Dmitri’s eyes water as he stares, unblinking. “Gorky Park,” he says, like he’s reciting it. “Thursday. Noon.”
*
“Absolutely not,” Major Kruzenko roars. “I am not putting you anywhere near that scrubber. He is targeting us, Yulia. It wouldn’t be safe.”
I clench my teeth as Major Kruzenko paces her office. “But he’s going to do something to the wildling—something more than he already has. Either finish the job he started on his brain in the factory, or…” I can’t finish the awful thought. “It’s our best chance to catch them and help this poor Dmitri.”
Kruzenko pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales slowly. “We will send a team. But I do not want any of you near him. It’s simply too dangerous.”
I can’t argue with her reasons. I know how it feels to be wiped clean, even if only at a distance, by these monsters. But there is something compelling me toward this meeting—no. I am not being compelled like a puppet on the scrubber’s strings. I want to believe this determination is mine alone, my need to protect Dmitri, and not a seed planted in my thoughts. I don’t want to examine it further. I don’t want to consider the possibility that the scrubber has turned my thoughts deeper down; set in motion this need inside me, drawing me to him like a moth to flame.
I will protect the last wildling, and Kruzenko won’t keep me from it.
CHAPTER 28
WHEN I FIND MYSELF in another vivid dream, the first since I’d learned what Valentin and Rostov are doing, I scream and beg through a soundless throat to wake up. But I am transparent, voiceless, trapped on a train; I feel as pale as the fog beyond the train window that masks the countryside. Papa sits on the bottom bunk in the crowded sleeper car, sipping vodka from the glass and pewter tea mugs—podstakanniks—which all Russian trains provide. Moonlight catches the glossy surface of his playing cards, a red glow pulsing between his lips.
“What troubles you, comrade?” Papa asks, in his gruff but quiet voice. I thought that I’d forgotten it, but there it is, hanging in the air, as familiar as his eternal cloud of cigarette smoke.
“A friend.” The figure on the bunk opposite him sits too deep in the sleeper cabin’s darkness for me to see. “She thinks I’ve betrayed her, but she doesn’t know the whole story.”
“Betrayal is a tricky thing. Some might say I’ve betrayed my family. That I sent them down a treasonous track. But I think they know that whatever I do, I have their best interests in mind.” Papa sets one card onto the deck.
“I think the problem is that she resents having the choice taken from her.” The figure counters Papa’s card, and they both take another sip.
Valya? I whisper, but my voice is drowned out by the alcohol and smoke so thick in the night.
“That’s my girl for you. She’d rather make her own mistakes.”
Valentin leans forward and catches the glint of moonlight on his glasses. “She may never forgive me for doing this—scouring her dreams under Rostov’s orders, sifting through her memories for clues as to where you might have gone.”
Papa takes another drag before answering. “Sounds like Rostov, all right.”
Valentin scoops up the cards and shuffles them. In the still, dead night, it sounds like machine gun fire. “It helps me, though, that you kept it all from her. It makes my work easy. When I tell Rostov that there’s nothing, it’s not a lie. I wouldn’t tell him anything regardless, but as you know, he has his … ways.”
“We hid it from her, her mother and I,” Papa said. “For her own safety.”
Valentin sighs. “It would appear you’re not the only ones. There are parts of her mind—I don’t know if it’s something Rostov has done, or…” For a moment, I almost think he looks at me, but it must be the light playing on his glasses. Again, I feel that sore patch inside my head like a fading bruise. Rostov. It has to be. But some of the spots feel older, more battered than the rest.
“You could help her,” Papa says, “but I doubt she’ll let you.” He lays out his hand of cards. “I win again.”
Valentin smirks and digs in his pockets. “At least it’s only dream money.” He drops a wad of rubles on the tabletop.