My eyes feel like I’ve been rubbing them with wool, and my joints ache, but I shrug. No nosebleed. “I’ll survive.”
Sergei is polishing off what appears to be his third round of breakfast when I enter the dining car. His gaze flicks toward mine. “Yulia,” he says, hunching his shoulders forward as I slide into the booth across from him. “I … I’d brought my official Spartak team photo to show you.” He manages a faint smile. “They used the photo from last year, when I first joined.”
Sergei grins up at me in black and white, wearing a full set of hockey armor, skates, and jersey. He kneels before the goal net with the Spartak logo blazing across his puffed-up chest.
“Congratulations,” I say. “I know how badly you wanted this.”
“You’ll come to my games. Promise? I’ll get you box seats. I’m sure Kruzenko will allow it if I ask her.”
He looks so happy in the photo; there’s a light in his eyes that I’ve never seen, not even when he’s at his most mischievous. “You said this is an older picture?”
“Unfortunately.” He tilts his head. “I don’t look tough enough in it, do I? I’m a lot more muscular now.”
“And you’ve still got your tooth.” I point to his grin—left front tooth and all. His front teeth buckle inward. I’d never noticed it before because it’s less obvious with one of them gone. I look up at him with something dark pulsing through my thoughts. “Sergei … smile for me.”
He pulls back his lips. “Like this?”
Sure enough, his remaining front tooth buckles in. “Your crooked front teeth. That’s hereditary, isn’t it?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Isn’t that your area of expertise?” He studies his grin in the photograph. “Maybe I should ask them to retake the picture. People take you more seriously if you’ve got some injuries, some scars…”
I study Sergei’s stats printed alongside the photo. IVANOV, SERGEI ANTONOVICH. Ivanov is the default Russian name, the great anonymizer, like a Smith for English speakers—no surprise that the KGB would want him under a pseudonym. It’s the patronymic that terrifies me, staring up at me. Antonovich. Son of Anton.
Sergei’s talking, eyebrows drawn down. “Yulia, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. About you and … and Valentin—”
But I can’t listen. I stand up, stepping backward carefully. I wish I could unsee this. Realization is a shattered glass that you can’t unshatter. All you can do is slice yourself on its edges.
“Yulia?” Sergei asks. “Are you listening to me?”
And his teeth—I’ve seen that genetic trait before. “Sorry, Sergei. Maybe another time.”
I lock myself in the bathroom and watch the tracks whir past through the hole in the “toilet.” Sergei’s smile, those chiseled cheekbones and flop of blond hair. I’ve seen that face in fuzzy black and white. And then that tooth—
My fingertips trace the edge of the tiny mirror. Surely she used the restroom at some point in the night. Misha, Masha. Sergei, flexing in the mirror. Masha again. Valentin, refusing to meet his own gaze as he scrubs at his hands.
Kruzenko. She smoothes down her hair and checks her nose—no blood for now. Then she curls back her lip to pick her teeth.
I slump back against the wall and bite down on my fist to keep from crying out. Kruzenko’s son. Son of Anton.
Major General Anton Rostov.
*
East Berlin is a concrete crypt. Everywhere I look, stark, flat buildings rise out of shell-shocked rubble and watch us with broken windows for eyes. The streets hold no cars. The old buildings—from before Stalin seized this land for his own—look safe from one side, but when we pass them, the rest is crumpled by artillery fire, the wreckage blocked off by barbed-wire fences. The few people we pass fix their stares on their feet and hurry past us. Coal smoke and sulfur linger around every corner as we wade through half-melted black slush.
Valentin’s arm presses against mine as we walk. Are you doing all right?
I’ll live, I reply. Papa or no, we have to find our way out.
The streets turn darker gray as the sun evaporates. We trudge, clutching our satchels, silent like the last survivors of a war. Finally, Kruzenko points ahead, to a squat Baroque building of grooved stone with its name spelled in lights, in elaborate German script: the Hotel Kepler.
“Remember, children, we must not discuss our purpose here. Stay on guard,” Kruzenko says.