The Hound lunges for me and snatches me by the throat in one swift arc. I’m soaring upward to greet the sky. I am a Sputnik satellite. I can look down on my country and my world and laugh at how pitifully small we all are.
My head strikes uneven stone as I come crashing back down to earth.
“You’ve tried to control us—make us your own. But we’re not like your Hound here, blindly following orders!” Valentin throws himself against the Hound’s arm and sinks his teeth in, somewhere high above me. The Hound whips his arm around, flinging Valya away.
Valentin Borisovich Sorokhin. I see that one failed escape was not enough to teach you your place. It’s a pity. You had such promise as a scrubber. You could go much further than even your father did once I’m in charge.
Valya howls. The sound is agonizing enough to shred my heart. I can’t use my legs; I crawl forward on my elbows toward the sound and reach out for him—
“No! Don’t touch me!”
The waves of psychic noise pour from Valya like a jackhammer. Rostov is killing him from the inside out. Turning him into a lovely corpse, formaldehyde and cyanide, like Lenin or Saint Sergei. The cacophony pushes me away from him; it is a physical force, a wave shoving me back into the grip of the Hound.
What monster would do this? The Hound rings hollow as he reaches for me again. He must have once suffered whatever Rostov’s doing to Valentin. His vision and hearing, his thoughts and dreams, emptied out and stuffed back in to fulfill Rostov’s every wish.
Papa’s melody trickles through my nose with blood. I’m sorry, Papa. The Hound snatches me back up; I’m too battered to fight back. I got so close.
The last movement of Papa’s melody breaks inside of me. Papa on the Ferris wheel; Papa leaning over and pressing the melody into me. A message inside the words: “Your power is so great, my Yulia, but you only use it in one direction,” he said. “You let others push their memories and ideas onto you. One day, you must learn to push back.”
The Hound hoists me over his shoulder with a feral growl. Our skin makes contact—I open myself completely for that one second, letting all his rage flood into me.
Then I count. Two, one, null.
And throw both my hands against his bald head.
The Hound’s rage pours back out of me—how his own father treats him, how he’s turned him into a pawn. Envy—the chafe of rough burlap as his brother is rewarded, eating fine meals and playing hockey for cheering crowds. It’s Rostov’s doing. His own father, turning him into a blind, ignorant beast. Let the Hound amplify that.
Valentin’s screams have stopped. I twist around to see why, but my fingers slip—and I can’t risk letting go.
You don’t know anything, Rostov snarls. How could you possibly guess—
“You aren’t the only one who knows a little about genetics.”
My hands are slick with sweat; I dig my nails into his flesh to keep my grip. I have to push, even as the Hound’s thoughts come rushing in. Memories. Emotion. Conflict. Sergei was the only child Rostov and Kruzenko meant to have. The Hound was born with multiple complications, and they only made him worse with their genetic meddling—trying to create the perfect psychic spy.
But he was far from perfect. Locked away in a lab, his own brother and mother terrified to look at him, and his father slowly making a puppet of him. Burning his eyes, bursting his eardrums, until he was reduced to nothing but an extension of his father, a psychic doppelg?nger and homing pigeon.
My touch draws these memories in; my touch pushes them away. I am no longer the memories’ pawn. They are my tool. My weapon and my gift.
The Hound wheezes and whimpers. He reaches back and pries one of my hands loose. The memories are fading. My back smashes against jagged rocks, though I can barely feel it through the tingling void under my skin. Too numb with shock, too empty to fight on. I reach out with my fingers because they’re the only things I can move. Valentin, my primitive mind reminds me. I have to find Valentin.
His skin is cold; my fingertips cling to it out of sheer desperation. His music is gone. His memories and terrors and dreams are a film on his surface, and I catch sight of them without even meaning to.
His father with a glass of vodka in one hand and a Makarov pistol in the other. Valentin swimming through the Black Sea under a melting sun, then he’s sucked under by a wave, torn from his mother’s grip. This must be what he didn’t want to share with me. Everyone deserves their secrets—but the pain they’re causing him right now is just the weapon I need.
Valentin’s anger mingles with what little emotion I can still muster up. It’s like fire on oil. The Hound reaches down to throw me again. I latch my nails into the skin of his forearm. I don’t need to understand Valya’s memories to use them. The Hound buckles backward, wailing at my fresh onslaught.
Music floods the air around us, pouring from Valentin’s motionless body. Bright, bouncing, in perfect harmony:
And when I touch you, I feel happy inside,
It’s such a feeling that this love I can’t hide,