Skandal by Lindsay Smith Page A

first.
    “Nobody’s happy with the civil war in Vietnam, of course—the commie northerners have to be contained. We don’t want the Red Tide sweeping even further across Asia, but we’re not keen to fight another Korean War anytime soon. That was a waste of time and money and lives, and we ended up back where we started from.” He sighs. “What else is there…?”
    Saxton drones on, discussing the minutiae of the NATO proceedings. I hear Cindy’s and Saxton’s banter as though I’m a remote viewer, watching through Yulia’s eyes. The strife in Vietnam—Papa made a comment, the other day, that it’s just the sort of situation a man like Rostov loves to exploit. The Viet Cong have taken a broken government and tried to piece it back together with blood-soaked red tape. When Rostov sunk his claws into my mind, I saw his lust for strife and for the glory he thought could only come from a world consumed in the Soviet ideals. Wherever revolutionaries seek power, Rostov’s shadow is sure to stretch behind them.
    “Yulia? Can you read the courier’s documents?”
    I glance around the table—they’ve been carrying on and I fell behind. Me—they’re talking about me.
    “Maybe you can glean something from the documents—see if someone’s been pursuing them—”
    Her words dissolve into a static buzz like the disrupters she placed. We’re grasping for answers, hunting for these scrubbers. They want me to hunt for them by sifting through layers and layers of red tape, one shadow-thin coating of a memory at a time—
    “Senator Saxton.” I sit upright as all eyes snap to me. Like my improper outfit, there’s no use in hiding who I am or what I’m doing. I might as well wear it with pride. “Your secretary—has she been trained in mental shielding?”
    “ Yes ,” Donna says, as if she was just going to make this point herself. “ We noticed something odd—”
    “Of course we didn’t train her.” Saxton’s gaze fixes on me as he speaks, like now that my accent has revealed me as the outsider, he must keep me in sight at all times or I’ll vanish into the night. “She doesn’t know enough to warrant it—she doesn’t have a clearance or anything. If we train too many folks, they become targets.”
    I take a deep breath. If I’m wrong, I might undo all my efforts to become a part of this team, but I have to take that risk. I have to stop these scrubbers. I look the senator square in the eye. “Then who did?”
    Senator Saxton gapes at me. “Young lady, you’re not seriously suggesting I’ve been harboring a spy in my own office—”
    The locked door handle rattles. “It’s Anna! I have your sandwiches!”
    “Wait,” I say, though Cindy’s already halfway standing. I need to prove it to him—to everyone. “Please. Let me see if I am right. Donna, can you listen to her thoughts from here?”
    Donna throws me the sort of withering look I imagine she’s thrown many a would-be suitor. “Of course I can.”
    “Good. What about you, Cindy?”
    She hesitates, mouth open. “My powers don’t quite work that way, but—”
    “Well, if you can, listen closely.” I force a smile to rival Cindy’s. “Trust me.”
    Cindy unlocks the door for Anna. Anna works around the table, depositing wrapped sandwiches, plastic utensils, and uncapped glass bottles of Coca-Cola with vicious precision. When she reaches me, though, I swing my hand wide as I grab my bottle, setting it on a trajectory to spill all over her fuzzy sweater.
    Anna shrieks as the brown syrup sloshes onto her stomach—but as my arm swings against her, her circuit loop of thoughts keeps rolling. Not so much as a blip of panic as she rights the bottle before it can spill further. She grabs for the napkins as her thoughts complete the sentence.
    Pause.
    One, two, three.
    And then, her thoughts acknowledge what happened, carefully controlled and fully worded, where any other person’s thoughts would be skittering like a seismograph’s