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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