I close my hand around his wrist as he stares forward with unfocused eyes. “Show me. If it’s too painful—”
He shakes his head. “Everyone needs their secrets. Just as you didn’t want me stepping into your dreams, I can’t just show you these things.”
“You are asking for a lot of trust,” I say. The blood from my nose has dried; I can feel it crackling as I move my lips to speak.
“It has always been your choice.”
I look out the window, at the weak orange hue of morning reflected on endless concrete hell. My last morning as a prisoner, if I choose it. My last morning of keeping my mother and brother safe. “Valentin.”
He runs his finger along my arm. “Mm?”
“Did you really write that song for me?” His touch makes me dizzy. It makes me believe, foolishly, that we can accomplish this mad plan.
“Of course,” he says. “It’s what you sound like.”
“But my music barriers don’t sound like that.”
“I didn’t mean your barriers,” he says. “I meant you. Yulia.”
It’s too personal, to let the sound of me be exposed. My essence shouldn’t be out in the open for any passing hotel guest to hear. But what could they know? Only Valya knows me. Only Valya hears the silences that I can’t hide.
I twist around and kiss him fiercely, desperately. I want to kiss him now in case I may never again. It tastes like a beginning, but I fear it’s farewell.
“Yulia,” he murmurs, pulling back. “Someone might see us.” His voice doesn’t indicate that this is a remotely terrible thing.
I seize him by the arm and slide down to the floor in front of the sofa with him. “Is that better?”
He wraps his arms around me and pulls me against him. His elbow was tailored for my palm; my nose was crafted for the hollow of his collarbone. He’s searing hot, a coal just plucked from the fire. I want to keep that warmth for myself. I want Valentin’s music in my veins.
“Let’s run away,” he whispers, soft as silk.
He kisses like the dawn. My hands stroke his stomach, his arms, and he sets me on fire; he claims my hair for his own as his lips explore my neck. The music dripping off him like fervent sweat mingles with my own and we are protected, sealed, locked forever in this symphony, in the sounds of Yulia and Valentin.
CHAPTER 39
WE ARRIVE AT the Krampnitz air base later in the morning. Its iced fields are glossy in the sun, and the brick and concrete buildings cluster around the airstrip like hunch-shouldered guards. The smell of jet fuel sears my nostrils as soon as Rostov rips open the van’s door. “All personnel are on duty today, patrolling the perimeter and the observation rooms,” Rostov explains as we climb from the van. “But if the scrubber is here, or any of the Americans, your duty is to find them at all costs.”
I stop at the entrance to the main administrative building. The faded mosaic over the door depicts a black eagle, fringes of feathers dangling from its wings, clutching a swastika. I cringe. I’m not looking forward to whatever memories I stir up on my sweep.
Rostov and Valentin head off to question the guards and look for any of the tell-tale electrified thought patterns my father leaves in his wake. I trail down one thick plaster wall and back up the other side, fighting to keep my observations grounded in this decade, but nothing leaps out at me. Uniformed officers and men zipped up in flight suits running back and forth, heeled secretaries shuttling stacks of folders, the crackle and beep of radar, Morse code, Sputnik satellites screeching from the vacuum of space.
A tense moment in the control room: a woman’s voice screaming through the speakers, begging and pleading and crying out for mercy. I pause and tilt my head. When did we try to send a woman into space? It must have been another secret launch, much like the one we’re about to witness. Victories get slathered across the front page of Pravda and bragged about across the globe. Failures are erased, blipped from existence, a speck on the radar one moment and gone the next.
“Find something?” Pavel asks, appearing behind me. I lurch nearly out of myself, then clamp my fists. Of course he’s here. I’ve had too little sleep and there are too many thoughts racing around in my head.
“It’s nothing,” I tell him, and storm down another corridor.
I take a wrong turn into the locker room, where Misha is chatting up a group of flight techs as they help the cosmonauts strap into their elaborate suits. A pale blue thermal costume, then a bright orange padded enclosure. The techs scrub at their faces, attaching wires and nodes and strange caps, doing their best to work while answering Misha’s ramblings with pointed one-word replies.
One of the techs glances up at me as he snaps on the cosmonaut’s bulky glove. Familiarity itches at me: something in that quick flutter of eyes, up and then back down. Papa? No. This man isn’t a radioactive wave scouring through me. I can see his features just fine. No rolling tide of faces and shapes.