The building is an old Georgian-style mansion—the sort that once housed princes and countesses, those long-extinct fairy-tale creatures. The walls are robin’s-egg blue, though the plaster has chipped in places to show its gray flesh. White stones scale the corners and windows; the slate roof billows and peaks over three stories. Rusty water stains trail from window corners like tears, and cracks spider up the façade. Someone has taken a chisel and hammer to the frontispiece above the entryway, marring the old Romanov seal of a two-headed eagle—the symbol of the imperial family before the Communist Party took over.
“The house is yours to roam.” Major Kruzenko opens the front door. No lock, no electronic callbox, just a heavy wooden door, its carved face worn smooth. It creaks when it opens—not a good escape route. “Your room is on the third floor, with the other girls. Take some time to get acquainted with everyone. We’ll start our lessons for the day soon.”
The stench of mold overwhelms me as we enter the dark foyer. A chandelier hangs overhead, but it’s been stripped of its crystals; only half of the fake candles screwed into its sockets are lit, and all are capped in dust. Wood planks squeal and shift beneath us. The grand staircase ascends into darkness, its marble steps sagging in the center, worn down by decades of feet.
“Yeah, it’s a shithole.”
I whirl to my right. A blond boy leans against a nearby doorway, watching me like he might watch a pigeon at the park: with bored indifference. Then he hoists his head high, showing off his chiseled everyman face. I know it from countless Stalin-era murals, the kinds slathered across Moscow as tribute to the Communist state: muscle-bound factory workers with a perfect curl of hair in the center of their foreheads and chins that could hammer rivets into place. My gut does a quick gymnast tumble, and I don’t even like blonds.
“Never hurts to try.” He laughs to himself.
I stare at him. “Try what?”
Major Kruzenko cuts him off before he can answer. “Sergei, since you are here, would you please show Yulia Andreevna around before class?”
“Sure.” He shoves off the doorway with his foot and stretches to his full height. He’s a beast. Hulking shoulders, thighs like tree trunks—and it’s all muscle, over two meters of it. “Hockey,” he says, casting a glance at me over his shoulder. “I was going to play for Spartak before…” His gaze slides toward Major Kruzenko, and he trails off.
“Sergei Antonovich!” Major Kruzenko’s voice is piercing as icicles. “Stop reading the poor girl’s mind.”
My cheeks instantly flush. I can’t let my thoughts stray for a moment here. But the more I look at Sergei, the more I’m compelled to think everything about him that I wouldn’t want him to hear me think. Horrible things that I wouldn’t think otherwise, if I weren’t worried about him overhearing—
“It’s all right.” He smiles at me, and it feels like the sun’s rays slipping around dense clouds. The sun? I’m comparing some smug boy’s grin to the sun? Bozhe moi, Yulia. “The less you want to think of something, the harder it becomes to think of anything else.”
“Wonderful,” I mutter.
“It’ll get better.” He leads me through the archway. “First stop: our extensive library.”
Near-empty bookshelves grin back at us like a toothless old babushka. “I thought we’re taking classes here?” I glance at a few of the titles—all Leninist-Marxist political theory, economic dissertations proving the perfectness of the Communist system, historical accounts of the Great Patriotic War against fascist Germany (Uncle Stalin did not believe “World War II” adequately described our quest for revenge). The bookshelves are hairy with dust.
Sergei shrugs. “It’s not that sort of school.”
“Then what sort of school is it?” I try to match his lazy half-smile, but it feels wrong, like a too-tight boot.
“Spycraft, mostly.” He looks away from me. “We’re training to join the psychic operations wing of the KGB. We use our skills to monitor the Americans and hunt down traitors.”
Like me, I think.
“I’m a remote viewer, myself. I can see inside places without going to them. I’ve never met someone with your particular power. Reading thoughts and memories through touch?”
“A lot of good it did me,” I say. But maybe I can turn it to my advantage still. If I can find out where Mama and Zhenya are being kept …
“I suggest you take it easy,” Sergei says, though I’m not sure if he’s answering my thoughts or not. Bozhe moi. It hurts my head to contemplate it. “Hey, Boris,” he adds, to the lanky uniformed man in the corner of the room. I hadn’t even noticed him. Boris makes no acknowledgment, but his eyes follow Sergei, and as we approach another doorway, Boris glides along behind us. “He’s my pet spider,” Sergei explains. “Anytime I think I’m alone, he comes spinning down on his web.”
“Do we all have—er, pet spiders?” And can they read minds as well? Have they heard me thinking about escape? My chest tightens.
Sergei chuckles. “You’ll have one you know by name. It’s the ones they change around you have to watch out for. Right, Boris?”
Boris grimaces and positions himself in the doorway.
We enter a cavernous, window-and mirror-lined room that must have hosted balls in the Imperial days. Velvet ropes dangle from the ceiling, bereft of their chandeliers like leashes missing their dogs; channels on the walls that once housed gold leaf have been stripped bare. The bank of windows looks onto a desolate stone terrace along the house’s side, full of weedy flowerbeds and dry, leaf-smeared fountains. The same high concrete walls from the front yard block the rest of the view. I curse under my breath as a pair of guards patrol through the yard. Missile silos have less security than this.
At the far end of the ballroom, someone plays a soft Tchaikovsky waltz on a battered baby grand. The piano isn’t as out of tune as I’d expected. Two teens waltz around the piano: a boy and girl, slender without looking starved, with soft brown hair and matching French noses. I suck in my breath—the twins from the market. They’re dressed in far nicer wool and cashmere than the scratchy tweed and cotton on Sergei and me. Little crescents of perspiration lurk under their arms as they twirl, carefree, smug.
“Misha? Masha?” Sergei calls. “Our twins,” he tells me. Of course their names match—I can’t help but grin at their parents’ cruelty. “Though I believe you’ve already met.”
My jaw tenses and I manage a curt nod. I can’t think about anything around them. Nothing is safe.
Misha—or Mikhail, I assume—saunters toward us. “The little trapped rat. Not worth the effort, if you ask me.”
“If you were dumb enough to get caught, you have no place here,” Masha says.
“Then what’s your excuse?” I ask.
Masha eyes me with sudden wolfish dominance. “How long have you known you were a psychic? You’re not a very good one. I mean, you didn’t even see us coming.”
I shrink back from her, which I realize a second too late is about the worst thing I could have done. “It took you five years to find me. What’s that say about you?”
Masha scrutinizes me for a minute more. The piano music has stopped. She breaks the gaze first; relieved, I lower my head and stare at the decades of scuffmarks gouged into the floor. It doesn’t matter, these people don’t matter. As soon as I find out where Mama and Zhenya are, I can leave this all behind, and—
Shit.
Masha’s face lights up, triumphant. “You can scheme all you want. You won’t get far.” She wrinkles her perfect nose, glancing toward the piano. “No one ever does.”
Sergei nudges my shoulder with his own, though he has to stoop down to do it. “Just ignore them. I do.”
Misha jabs his thumb toward Sergei, eyes still on me. “You think this hockey hooligan will protect you? I used to think I couldn’t read Sergei’s thoughts until I realized he didn’t have any.” He shares a smirk with Masha and they strut out of the ballroom.
“Can you believe they actually
want to do this work? I figure that’s punishment enough.” Sergei’s face is flushed, but he keeps his half grin lacquered to his face. “Come on, tour isn’t over.”
We circle the piano, revealing a dark-featured boy seated at it, hands steady as a surgeon’s above the keys, as if stopping the music has frozen him, too. Sergei sighs and leans against the splintering piano. “And this is Valentin.”
Valentin’s deep cherry-pit eyes watch me from behind thick-framed glasses; he nods once at me and scrubs his black hair. He has a large frame like Sergei’s, but his muscles are lean and withdrawn. Something about him reminds me of the brooding photographs of Russian composers and poets in Aunt Nadia’s encyclopedias.
“You play very well,” I tell him. “Was that Tchaikovsky?”
He looks down like the compliment was too much to bear. “It was supposed to be Swan Lake, but … it’s out of tune.”
I shouldn’t act like I care. I don’t need any friends here; I’ll be gone at the first sign of gaps in the security. But something in his musical phrasing reminded me of the old Kondrashin piano recordings Papa and Zhenya and I listened to, Zhenya dutifully transcribing the notes in his private notation. “Have you been playing for long?”
His dark eyes meet mine again. I know that tightness around them well—the look I gave to anyone who noticed me, the slip of a girl darting along Moscow’s streets. I don’t blame him for not trusting me; I’ll use whatever and whoever I can to escape.
“All my life.” He eases his posture; I uncoil in turn. “My mother taught me so I could accompany her when she played violin.”
“She must be very proud of you,” I tell him. But it was the wrong thing to say. He drops his head and the tension returns.
“Valentin here wants to be the next … What’s his name, Valya?” Sergei nudges him in the ribs—none too gently, I suspect. “Dave Barback?”
“Brubeck,” Valentin says to the piano keys.
“Yes! Great American jazz composer, Valya tells me. But no one in the Soviet Union cares about jazz. Colored people music,” Sergei says. I bristle, though I’m not surprised. Most Russians think like Sergei—Africans, Asians, even olive-skinned people like myself from Georgia and the other southern republics are treated suspiciously.
Valentin eyes me with a slight tilt to his head. “My family is Georgian, too.”
“Did I give you permission to read my mind?” I snap. He winces and tucks his hands into his lap.
“Come on, let me show you the view out back,” Sergei says. “Valya won’t follow us out there. He hates the river.”
Sergei pulls me onto the rear balcony of cracked concrete. A long shadow in my periphery marks Boris, moving closer, but Sergei closes the door before he reaches us. My blood races when I realize that this side of the mansion is not hemmed in by the cold concrete wall. But my hope instantly deflates. It’s a sheer drop—the mansion perches on a cliff overlooking the Moskva River. We’re somewhere in the hills of southeastern Moscow. Barges chug through the oily gray water beneath us; the Metro trains clatter across the river bridge. To the north, at the heart of the city, I can make out the peaks of the Seven Sisters—Stalin’s skyscrapers capped in gold and red stars—and the pink turrets of the Novodevichy Monastery jutting defiantly above the river.
“There’s Luzhniki Stadium.” Sergei stands behind me and points around me to the low white pod just opposite the river from us. It looks like an alien craft that could take flight at any moment—sail into the stars like the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin or the Sputnik satellite. “I’m going to play for Spartak there someday. I’ll be the greatest hockey player in the world.”
I don’t mean to, but I can feel the sadness sheening his bare arms. They’ve taken something from all of us. For me, it was Mama and Zhenya, and my dreams of studying at Moscow State so I could fix Zhenya someday. What else have they taken from Sergei, besides his hockey career? But when I glance back at him, his face is blank, a frieze of the Worker as He Advances the Motherland, unmoving.
“You want to go to Moscow State?” He swings me around to my left by my shoulders. “Look.”
I stumble back into his dense chest. I can only see the top of the tower over the mansion’s roof, but I know it instantly. It’s the greatest of Stalin’s Seven Sisters; the bright red star and the golden sickle and hammer upon it are perfectly clear. The education I crave is just out of reach.
I scrub at my eyes—they’re moist from the wind, I tell myself—and look away.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says. “I just thought you’d like…”
“It doesn’t matter.” When I find Mama and Zhenya and run away from this place, I’ll have to leave it behind. I’ll keep teaching myself, as I’ve been doing. We’ll keep running; we’ll watch Moscow shrink to a speck over our shoulders. Always running, forever—
Sergei’s hand touches my shoulder. It burns with conflicting emotions: Sadness? Anger? “Yulia, you have to stop thinking about escape. It’s too dangerous.”
“What do you care?” A barge sounds its horn; I peer over the balcony ledge. If it were straight down, I could survive it, but the embankment slopes just enough …
“Maybe I don’t. You wouldn’t be the first to try.” He shrugs. “But believe me, if there’s one thing I’ve learned here … There are worse things than a bullet in the back, a broken neck. What they can do to your brain, or your family’s…”
Sergei flinches; his gaze roves anxiously, unsettled. I step away from him, not liking the sudden darkness I sense on his skin.
“Death would be a mercy,” he says. “For you and your family both.”
About the Author
Lindsay Smith is the author of Cold War era espionage novels Sekret and Skandal. She writes on foreign affairs and lives in Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Lindsay Smith
Sekret
Skandal
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Part One: Dreams
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two: Nightmares
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Part Three: Dreamstrider
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgments
Sekret Teaser
About the Author
Also by Lindsay Smith
Copyright
Text copyright © 2015 by Lindsay Smith
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
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.com
All rights reserved
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Smith, Lindsay, 1984–
Dreamstrider / Lindsay Smith. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “Livia can enter other people’s bodies through their dreams, an ability that makes her an invaluable and dangerous spy for her kingdom.”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62672-042-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62672043-5 (e-book)
[1. Dreams—Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.S65435Dr 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2015011848
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at [email protected].
eISBN 9781626720435
First hardcover edition, 2015
eBook edition, October 2015
Dreamstrider Page 33