Maybe Washington isn’t so different from Russia in that sense.
“How about you, Judd?” Donna looks over her shoulder at the lumbering hulk. Shoulders not built for a standard-width door frame, and arms aching to escape the sleeves of his too-tight plaid shirt. In silhouette, he looks like Sergei, which sends a nervous current running down my spine. But he’s got sun-blasted freckles all over his face and arms, and his wispy hair dances like a flame in the wind.
“What?” Judd grunts. He looks down at Donna, who barely reaches his ribcage.
But she smiles, and twists the already-curled tip of her ponytail around one finger. “I imagine city life is totally different from Kansas or wherever it is you’re from.”
“Indiana.” Judd shrugs—even a simple movement from him is an earthquake. “Doesn’t matter to me where I am. I do what I was made to do.”
I don’t see that straining concentration that I usually see in dedicated mindreaders—always filtering the air around them, scooping up the thoughts of passersby and pitching whatever they don’t need. “And what is it you were made to do?” I ask.
He snorts, like a laugh with his mouth closed, and a big grin pushes up his cheeks. “You’ll see.”
Again, I’m reminded of Sergei—the hulking gait that makes me feel so fragile and tiny in comparison. Sergei could be watching me right now, a thought that chills me even further. I’m not safely behind an electrical shield.
Donna stops us at the edge of the block and checks the address of the shop front against something scrawled in loopy handwriting on her left palm. “Here we go,” she says, drawing back her shoulders. Donna, nervous? I tamp out my own spark of nerves and follow her inside the diner.
A waitress nearly runs us down, both of her arms spread wide with dishes scaling them like plated armor. “Comin’ through!” she shouts. Donna leaps back with a squeak. Another waitress glances our way from behind the low breakfast counter situated down an aisle of bright turquoise booths.
“Grab a seat wherever,” she shouts to us, gesturing with a giant glass pot of coffee.
Donna hesitates a moment, gaze sweeping across the diner, then she eases into a smile and sidles up to the counter. “Actually, I’m supposed to meet one of my big sister’s friends here.”
The waitress’s eyes flick to us from under her blue eyelids, and then turn back to the mug she’s refilling. I look over the man at the counter. He’s thin, and his suit doesn’t fit right, but he smiles just as much as he should on his lunch break, and there’s a half-finished crossword puzzle folded beside his plate. I let my shoulder rub against his as we crowd around the gap in the counter. Though I can’t make out all the thick English phrases, his thoughts flicker and swirl like any other person’s, without any sign of panic, paranoia, or deceit.
“Well, who’s your sister’s friend? I know most the regulars.” She tops off the man’s mug, and turns back to us. Her name badge reads “Peggy,” which is short for something, but I can’t remember what.
“Um, Anna, I think…?” Donna tugs at her ponytail. “She’s supposed to talk to me about typing school?”
Peggy’s smile is gone. Her mouth compresses until all that shows is her off-color lip liner. “Yeah, I know who you mean. She ain’t around right now.”
Donna throws her hands up. “Gee, that’s just swell. Can you believe my sister? Probably told her the wrong time.” Her stance shifts suddenly, like a mirror image of Peggy’s—tight mouth, curved spine, playful tilt to her head.
“You’re welcome to wait.” Peggy slaps three laminated menus onto the counter. “Herb, settle up, I got payin’ customers who need a chair.”
The man at the counter—Herb—looks up from his crossword puzzle. “C’mon, Pegs, I don’t get paid ’til Friday. Can’t you put it on my tab?”
Peggy rolls her eyes, spins to the cash register, and pulls out a coffee-stained ledger. Something passes between Judd and Donna that I’m not privy to: a thought bundled up in a shared code, maybe, or a familiar language built from running multiple missions together. I wonder if I’ll ever find that level of comfort working with them. I settle onto the sticky vinyl stool and bat away the bland memories that reach for me from its surface.
Herb shuffles off, and Judd claims his stool, pinning me between him and Donna. Donna keeps chatting with Peggy, asking her inane, pointed questions—about Anna, about other customers, about the food—everything. I can’t believe Donna doesn’t see Peggy’s irritation in the hard line of her lips and the puckered skin around her eyes. Finally, Judd orders an enormous platter of pancakes and sausage, and Peggy stalks off.
“What are you doing?” I hiss at Donna. “You’re making her hate you. She isn’t going to tell you anything.”
Donna narrows her eyes at me. “Are you gonna tell me how to do my job? You can’t even hear what she’s thinking, can you?”
I shake my head. “Not without touching her—”
“Then don’t tell me it isn’t working.” Donna bows her head toward mine. “Sure, it’s easier when I can butter someone up and get them to spill everything to me on their own. I barely even have to look at their thoughts when they do. But sometimes, I just know someone’s gonna hate me from the start.” I can smell her acrid bubblegum as she cracks it. “So why fight it? If I can push all their buttons, they won’t tell me what I want to know, but they’ll gosh-darned sure be thinking about all the things they don’t wanna tell me.”
“You make them dislike you on purpose?”
“Why not? I know I’m a likable gal. Who cares what they think?” She winks at me, then straightens back onto her stool, attention roaming across the smoky diner. “Judd? Are you ready?”
“You got it.” He swallows a mouthful of pancakes, then hangs his head in his hands. I frown. Is he praying? Most Americans I’ve seen do that before they eat.
Someone yelps in the kitchen, at the far end of the diner. I turn toward the window in the wall that opens to the fry cooks. A huge tuft of smoke billows out of the hole, black and woolly, then retreats. A few seconds later, a wave of heat hits my face with so much force I can feel my eyelashes curl.
Peggy shrieks at the other end of the counter, then grabs a plastic pitcher of water and runs for the kitchen. Other waitresses are doing the same, joining the stuffy chaos, shouting back and forth. Customers stand up, at the lunch counter or in their booths, craning their necks, commotion rippling across the diner as a smell like burnt meat wafts our way.
Donna swings herself over the counter and swipes the ledger from next to the cash register. “M … Montalban.” She runs one finger down the gridded paper. “Last entry is from two nights ago. She sits in the corner booth at the front—by the windows. Come on, Jules, it’s your turn at bat!”
I glance nervously toward the shouting mass at the kitchen’s entrance as I stand. Another fire, though one far more severe, looms before me when I blink: flames bursting from the Veter 1 space capsule.
“Corner booth,” Donna repeats, flicking her fingers toward the diner’s front.
I shake the memory away and push upstream through the crowd of patrons. The corner booth is abandoned; one red vinyl cushion is split open like a wound, its yellow foam innards bared. I slide onto the booth and run my hands over the table, sinking deep into the stuffing and the memories accumulated on it.
At first, the memories fight me; they form a dense net of fog that pushes against me—the telltale aftermath of a scrubber’s presence. But I press on. The white fog scrapes against my arms and face like brambles and I keep pushing, straining even though I’m surely snared in place. I have to see the memories at the other end of the fog. I have to know our enemy.
Anna Montalban coalesces around me in the booth. Her coffee mug rattles as she sets it back down. I feel a dry, sucking desperation in my throat; it tastes both like cigarette smoke and like the painful absence of cigarette smoke. Anna reaches into her purse and brush her fingers against crinkled cellophane, but jerks her hand bac
k out when someone slides into the booth across from her.
“Se hace tarde,” she says. The words are just shapes to me, but I try to paint them onto my mind. With a roll of her shoulders, Anna looks up and into a face like death. A dark-skinned man sits in the booth, but sickness has washed his skin in vulgar yellow hues; his thick black mustache looks stiff with filth. I can’t hear his thoughts, or rather his shield, but something bitter and rank radiates from him.
“Los Rusos malditos,” the man says with a voice like a bus engine idling. Rusos. I understand that much. Russians.
The man reaches into his breast pocket and offers Anna a cigarette. As she slips one out, I catch a glimpse of something wrapped around the cigarette—black, shiny like microfiche—but she slips it off the cigarette and pockets it before I can look closer.
White creeps into the seams of the memory, radiating from the man—the scrubber; the hot, tangy stink of grease from the present-tense diner follows. I grit my teeth and tighten my grasp on the seat cushion. I have to stay in this past. Just a little longer.
The man watches Anna for a minute, eyes bulging out of sunken sockets. I’ve seen that look before—this man, or at least, the man this shadow used to be. Who is he? But as I lose focus on the scene, the empty white vastness cinches around me, those brambles digging into my skin. Later. I’ll have to place him later. He reaches into his breast pocket.
“No.” Anna tenses. “I’ll place the film, but I never agreed to this.”
“It is the most important part. You know what will happen if you don’t.” He brings out a silver cigarette case, letting it flash in the harsh diner lighting. “You or Saxton, Anna. It has to be one of you.”
Her thought-shield unravels for a moment as she struggles to keep calm, but I can feel her hands still twitching in her lap long after she schools her face into calm. “Fine. Give it to me.”
He hands the case to her; she clicks the button on the case’s front just long enough to glimpse inside. The contents are definitely not cigarettes, I can tell that much, but what they are, I can’t say for sure. Long cylinders, with a flash of glass and steel. I think I hear liquid sloshing as she drops the case in her purse.
“Now, remember,” the man says. “I won’t be around by the time you’re finished, but if you don’t use it, they will know—”
The memory shudders. Sirens alternate red and blue through the diner’s glass front, out of sync with the neon blinking OPEN sign. I claw at the white fog, but it’s too thick—it shoves me back into the present. How are these scrubbers so powerful? I’m exhausted from pushing through their barriers; I’m no match for them. I squeeze my eyes shut to clear the afterburn of the overhead lights and stumble toward the counter, an unfamiliar dizziness turning the room into a shifting funhouse around me.
“I saw all I could. We must go.” My words slosh together. I’m rocking from side to side. Dimly, I hear the swell of chatter all around us, screams and stomps and people in thick coats pushing past us—firemen? They are ushering us toward the front door. We must go now, I am sure of this, as sure as I can be of anything with this foggy soup in my head. But Judd is calmly peeling a one-dollar bill out of his wallet and laying it on the counter.
“Oh, don’t get your hammer and sickle in a twist. I dunno how you Russkies do it, but we actually pay for our food here.” He grins, lopsided, and tucks his wallet back into his pocket.
The world shudders around me, and I find myself on the sidewalk, struggling to stay standing upright. I feel glass—cool glass under my palm. We’re outside the diner. I lean against the glass, gasping for breath. The scrubber may be gone, but his grating, agonizing power is still scouring through my system like a disease.
Judd and Donna loom before me. “Well?” Donna asks, keeping her voice under the rapidly multiplying shouts of diners and spectators and firemen. “Anything useful?”
“We’ll see.” I try to read Donna’s expression but she’s swimming before me. “How did you know there would be a fire in the kitchen?”
Donna snorts. “You’re joking, right? The fire is Judd’s power.”
His face burns bright red. “Well, I learn from the best. Mister Sterling can do way bigger blazes than I can.”
I stare at Judd. “You caused that? On purpose?”
“You wanna make somethin’ of it?” He leans forward, teeth bared, freckles swallowed up in his suddenly flushed face.
I don’t like his tone, and I’m not sure what the something is he’s asking me to make, so I ignore the question. “Someone could have gotten hurt!”
“Don’t be such a Pollyanna.” Donna rolls her eyes. “He has better control than that.”
Judd nods. “It’s really easy. I tell the fire where to go, and where not to go. The fire won’t hurt anyone without me telling it to.”
“How can you be sure?” I ask. My palms itch, prickly with sweat; my head spins as I try to stand up from the glass. “Do any of us really know our limits?” You’ll never understand what you’re capable of, Papa’s voice echoes in my head.
“Some of us aren’t afraid to use our powers,” Donna says.
“Well, maybe you should be.”
Donna and Judd exchange another look. I’m tired of their looks, and understanding only half of what they say and do. I’m already sick of running around without any guidance, grasping at straws, at conversations in noisy diners. My mother and these murderous scrubbers and General Rostov are out there somewhere, and I’m too lost to stop them. Another fire truck howls in the distance, cutting through the brain fog that is partly from the scrubber’s memory and partly from the haze that shrouds my every moment in this country, trying to make sense of these people, their words, their intricate spy games …
“There you kids are.” Al Sterling strides toward us, his fedora askew from pushing through the crowd. “Judd? Is this commotion your doing?”
“Yes, sir!” Judd beams at him, red touching his cheeks again.
Al laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “Nice job, kiddo! Really—stellar work. You’re gonna put me out of a job one day.” He turns to me. “Manage to get anything useful for us?”
The man, the scrubber. I know I’ve seen him before. Where does he fit in? He must not have been as sickly looking as he is now, though he’s still fixed in my mind with those hollowed-out eyes, that wilted mustache.
Bozhe moi. It hits me. The restaurant in Georgetown we went to with Papa. I break through the static whiteness and see him now, crashing into me in the hallway of Brasserie Bonaparte. He’s the same man, I’m sure of it. My thoughts buzz. I’m suffocating under all this panic, this pain from pushing too hard past the scrubber’s haze, this inescapable terror that has chased me across the globe. Fear claws at my lungs, pushes at my skin. I can’t hold this all inside.
“Come on, Jules. You must have seen something.” Donna rests her hand on my forearm. “What did you—?”
All my frustration and paranoia bubbles up, surging into her arm where she touches me. It’s a slippery thing, my terror, and this noise, this relentless noise in my head has worn away my strength. I can’t rein it in. In one sharp moment, my emotions turn into an arc of electricity, leaping from my skin to Donna’s.
She howls and leaps back. “What the hell?!” she shrieks, cradling her arm against her chest. “You crazy commie bitch! I’m gonna tell Frank what you did!”
But I am empty now, too empty to find sympathy for her fears. “I didn’t mean to…” I begin, but I trail off. What do I care?
“What did you…?” Donna interrupts herself with a sharp gulp. Her stance transforms from shock to terror—she looks around, frantic with energy, whipping her head every which way. “Oh, God, everyone’s after us. Why can’t we stop them?”
Tears quiver in the corners of her eyes. I see my reflection in them, my emotion: the same fear and frustration I’d felt moments before. Only now, I feel nothing. It’s drained from me and into her. I look straight through her. The thick air of the
street retreats from me and I’m left with nothing but a woolly buzz in my head.
“What did you do to her?” Judd asks, his boyish face turning sharp with suspicion. “You just did something with your mind, didn’t you?”
I shrug. I’m drained. I can’t muster up anything like sympathy or regret. I reach for those emotions, but I have no reserves. “It’s my touch,” I say, but I’m already too bored with this conversation to explain. I just want to sink into the fuzzy white warmth that’s calling my name, promising to strip these petty problems away from me.
“Hey, kiddo?” Al’s rounded eyes peer through the blurred haze of memory. “Did you know your nose is bleeding?”
I almost remember seeing the glistening blood on my fingertip—almost remember shaking with a dry laugh—before I collapse right there on the sidewalk into a milky, vast embrace.
CHAPTER 11
I’M PROPPED UP IN BED, padded on three sides by a thick shell of down pillows. Valentin sits in a chair beside me, his fingers knotted together, his dark hair plastered against his forehead with sweat. I groan, shrugging off the dregs of sleep, and readjust myself so I can see him better. His eyes flick up toward mine; he smiles, fleeting, before his lips soften into their usual murky expression.
“You’re awake.” He says it like he’s convincing himself. I stretch my fingers toward him on the comforter and he closes his hand around mine like a shield.
“One of the scrubbers is working with Anna.” A vein in my head contracts with each beat of my heart, painful and crisp. “I saw him at Brasserie Bonaparte. He gave Anna something at the diner—”
Valentin runs his thumb along the ridge of my knuckles with a whisper of our song, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” The Beatles ease away the panic in my pulse, letting me leech some of his calm and draw it into me. My muscles unclench.
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