Her chapped lips pull back into something like a smile. “Yulia, but we both know that isn’t true. You aren’t just anything.”
I squirm away from that awful smile. My wrist brushes the chair arm, and there’s a candle-flicker memory of terrifying pain—but it is quickly, mercifully gone. “No. I’m just another person you’ve chosen to harass. You want to arrest me over things my parents have done? Careless things they might have said?” I roll my shoulders. A Russian shrug, a dismissal, a shifting of blame—What do you want from me, this is just how things are. “You’d have to imprison the whole country if that’s such a crime.”
Her gaze drifts away from me, and she stands perfectly still, like she’s watching a memory. “You see things sometimes,” she says, suddenly somber. “Things that can’t be seen.”
I stop squirming around.
“You think it’s your imagination, or a phantom déjà vu. Sometimes it appears to come true, but not enough to make you believe. Coincidence. Anything more would be searching for patterns where there are none,” she says.
I realize that my mouth is hanging open, and I hurriedly shut it. She can’t possibly know about that. I barely believe it myself.
“Do you ever think about these occurrences? Do you ever wonder if there is a power behind them?”
I shake my head. A word comes to me to describe my trick sometimes, but it seems like a castoff of our superstitious past. The realms of magic, religion, mysticism—things beyond the laws of science—died in a dank basement with the last emperor. Bullet to the brainpan—flatten these outdated beliefs with tank treads.
“Psychic. That’s the word you’re looking for,” she says.
I don’t like the way she’s looking at me: her smile is too genuine, too familiar. I jerk my head away and stare at the tile wall. I can see my reflection in it, but it’s blunted, all shadow and light.
“Touch the necklace—see for yourself that it’s your mother’s. I know you can do this.” She holds it out to me again, Saint George dancing on the end of the chain. “See through it to the past it contains.”
I curl my hands into fists; my nails burrow into my palms. She is guessing wildly, or making things up. “Who are you?” I ask.
“I represent the First Chief Directorate for the Committee of State Security—”
“Committee of State Security—” Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti— “KGB, I know that much,” I say.
She sighs—delicate, measured—and stuffs the necklace back into her pocket. “My name? Why don’t you try to see it for yourself?”
I look back at her with my eyebrows furrowed.
“It’s very simple. You look at me, and then you imagine stepping inside.”
“You—you want me to read your thoughts.” I squeeze my eyes shut before she can nod. “No. It’s not possible—”
“Yulia. I know all about your ability.” She chuckles. “You’re quite easy to read, yourself.”
That slams my heart into my throat. My eyes fly open like she’s thrown cold water on me. “You can’t really mean—”
“You have a skill. Others, like me, have similar skills—but none quite like yours. So you will work for me, and I will help you refine it.” This time when she smiles, the patient motherly look is completely gone, and all that’s left are her cold, animal teeth bared at me in dominance. “Otherwise, as you know—we have ways of dealing with people who commit crimes against the State.”
CHAPTER 5
THE COVERED TRUCK BED SMELLS like rotted cabbage and wilted lettuce. The soldier on the bench across from me holds an AK-47 across his lap, casually, like it is no more threatening than a walking cane; but his eyes are unlit matches, and his arms, his steady fingers, are full of energy waiting to be unleashed. He is potential; he is a threat. But when our knees bang together, I get a whiff of his thoughts—the kielbasa sandwich awaiting him for lunch and the nightclub dancer awaiting him for dinner. He isn’t plotting my execution just yet, and I mean to keep it that way.
My red-haired interrogator, Comrade Major Lyubov Grigorievna Kruzenko, says I’ll be living with six other teenaged children who are, she claims, like me. (I tried plucking her name from her mind, as she asked, but she was sitting across the room from me. I heard nothing save anguished cries muffled through concrete.) She is our instructor as psychic spies. She drilled me for two hours in the interrogation room until I could read her thoughts without direct contact, her face looming directly before mine with a thin, too-satisfied grin. As our instructor she’ll help us develop our skills to eventually work for the KGB as psychic spies. Classes, field trips, meals—she makes it sound like the Komsomol summer camps I attended as a little girl, but I think of the Siberian gulags instead—the life-sentence permafrost prisons. For there is a steep price to pay if I disobey; I must play along to keep Mama and Zhenya safe.