But no one can bend the rules quite like me.
The truck takes a sharp turn and slows to a stop. Someone unlatches the back for us. The soldier stands, hunched over, and prods me with the butt of his rifle. I shoot him a frosty look. We hop down into a bland, pathetic courtyard overrun with weeds and surrounded by high concrete walls. Razor wire frosts the top of the walls, softened by a fine dusting of snow.
I try to gauge the walls’ height. The razor wire doesn’t scare me, not if I’m bundled up for winter already. A few cuts and scrapes. The blood trail I’d leave behind could be a problem. I scan the courtyard, but it’s thick with armed guards.
Careful, Yulia. Your mind isn’t a safe hiding place anymore. I push down thoughts of escape as Major Kruzenko marches our way.
“Come, come,” she calls to me, holding out her hand like I’m a schoolgirl who needs to be herded everywhere. I wrap my arms around my chest—the scratchy white blouse, sweater, and wool skirt she gave me aren’t nearly warm enough for late September—and stomp past her. We round the truck and I stare up. And up.
The building is an old Georgian-style mansion—the sort that once housed princes and countesses, those long-extinct fairy-tale creatures. The walls are robin’s-egg blue, though the plaster has chipped in places to show its gray flesh. White stones scale the corners and windows; the slate roof billows and peaks over three stories. Rusty water stains trail from window corners like tears, and cracks spider up the fa?ade. Someone has taken a chisel and hammer to the frontispiece above the entryway, marring the old Romanov seal of a two-headed eagle—the symbol of the imperial family before the Communist Party took over.
“The house is yours to roam.” Major Kruzenko opens the front door. No lock, no electronic callbox, just a heavy wooden door, its carved face worn smooth. It creaks when it opens—not a good escape route. “Your room is on the third floor, with the other girls. Take some time to get acquainted with everyone. We’ll start our lessons for the day soon.”
The stench of mold overwhelms me as we enter the dark foyer. A chandelier hangs overhead, but it’s been stripped of its crystals; only half of the fake candles screwed into its sockets are lit, and all are capped in dust. Wood planks squeal and shift beneath us. The grand staircase ascends into darkness, its marble steps sagging in the center, worn down by decades of feet.
“Yeah, it’s a shithole.”
I whirl to my right. A blond boy leans against a nearby doorway, watching me like he might watch a pigeon at the park: with bored indifference. Then he hoists his head high, showing off his chiseled everyman face. I know it from countless Stalin-era murals, the kinds slathered across Moscow as tribute to the Communist state: muscle-bound factory workers with a perfect curl of hair in the center of their foreheads and chins that could hammer rivets into place. My gut does a quick gymnast tumble, and I don’t even like blonds.
“Never hurts to try.” He laughs to himself.
I stare at him. “Try what?”
Major Kruzenko cuts him off before he can answer. “Sergei, since you are here, would you please show Yulia Andreevna around before class?”
“Sure.” He shoves off the doorway with his foot and stretches to his full height. He’s a beast. Hulking shoulders, thighs like tree trunks—and it’s all muscle, over two meters of it. “Hockey,” he says, casting a glance at me over his shoulder. “I was going to play for Spartak before…” His gaze slides toward Major Kruzenko, and he trails off.
“Sergei Antonovich!” Major Kruzenko’s voice is piercing as icicles. “Stop reading the poor girl’s mind.”
My cheeks instantly flush. I can’t let my thoughts stray for a moment here. But the more I look at Sergei, the more I’m compelled to think everything about him that I wouldn’t want him to hear me think. Horrible things that I wouldn’t think otherwise, if I weren’t worried about him overhearing—
“It’s all right.” He smiles at me, and it feels like the sun’s rays slipping around dense clouds. The sun? I’m comparing some smug boy’s grin to the sun? Bozhe moi, Yulia. “The less you want to think of something, the harder it becomes to think of anything else.”
“Wonderful,” I mutter.
“It’ll get better.” He leads me through the archway. “First stop: our extensive library.”
Near-empty bookshelves grin back at us like a toothless old babushka. “I thought we’re taking classes here?” I glance at a few of the titles—all Leninist-Marxist political theory, economic dissertations proving the perfectness of the Communist system, historical accounts of the Great Patriotic War against fascist Germany (Uncle Stalin did not believe “World War II” adequately described our quest for revenge). The bookshelves are hairy with dust.
Sergei shrugs. “It’s not that sort of school.”