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Anton gives me a long look, and he and the other man move away from Barron and me. I push on into the large ballroom, past laughing laborers from who knows how many families. I wonder how many of them are runaways, how many of them slipped out of some normal life in Kansas or one of the Carolinas to come to the big city and be recruited by Zacharov. Barron follows me, his hand pressing against my shoulder blades. It feels like a threat.
Up on the little stage on the other side of the ballroom, a woman in a pale pink suit is speaking into the podium microphone. “You might ask yourselves why we here in New York need to give funds to stop a proposition that’s going to affect New Jersey. Shouldn’t we save our money in case we need to fight that same fight here, in our own state? Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, if Proposition 2 passes in one place, especially in a place where so many of us have relatives and family, then it will spread. We need to defend the rights of our neighbors to privacy, so that there will be someone left to defend ours.”
A girl in a black dress, her brown curls pulled back with rhinestone clips and her smile a little too wide, brushes against me. She looks great, and I have to stop myself from telling her so.
“Hi,” Daneca says languorously. “Remember me?”
I somehow manage not to roll my eyes at her over-the-top performance. “This is my brother Barron. Barron, this is Dani.”
Barron looks between us. “Hey, Dani.”
“I beat him at chess when his school came up to play my school,” she says, embellishing on the simpler cover story we came up with yesterday.
“Oh, yeah?” He relaxes a little and grins. “So you’re a very smart girl.”
She blanches. Barron looks sharp in his suit, with his cold eyes and angelic curls. I don’t think that Daneca’s used to slick sociopaths like him flirting with her; she stumbles over her words. “Smart enough to—smart enough.”
“Can I talk to her for a minute?” I ask him. “Alone.”
He nods. “I’ll get some food. Just watch the time, player.”
“Right,” I say.
He grips my shoulder. His fingers dig into the knotted muscles in a way that feels good. Brotherly. “You’re ready, right?”
“I will be,” I say, but I have to look away. I don’t want him to know how much it hurts for him to act kind now, when none of it’s true.
“Tough guy,” he says, and walks off toward the samovars of tea, and the trays heaped with dilled herring, with fish glistening in the ruby glaze of pomegranate sauce, and with about a million different kinds of piroshki.
Daneca leans into me, presses a blood packet wrapped with wires under my jacket, and whispers, “We got the stuff to Lila.”
I look up involuntarily. The knots in my stomach pull tighter. “Did you talk to her?”
Daneca shakes her head. “Sam’s with her now. She’s really not happy that all we could get in is a pretend gun that Sam is still gluing together.”
I picture Lila’s sharp-edged smile. “She knows what she’s got to do?”
Daneca nods. “Knowing Sam, he’s overexplaining it. He wanted me to make sure you were okay with reattaching your wires to the trigger mechanism.”
“I think so. I—”
“Cassel Sharpe,” someone says, and I turn. Grandad is wearing a brown suit and a hat turned at a rakish angle, feather pin through the band. “The hell are you doing here? You better have some peach of an explanation.”
Yesterday when we went over the plan again and again, I never thought about Grandad showing up. Because I’m an idiot, basically—an idiot with poor planning skills. Of course he’s here. Where else would he be?
Seriously, what else could go wrong?
“Barron brought me,” I say. “Aren’t I allowed out on a school night? Come on, this is practically a family event.”
He looks around the room, like he’s looking for his own shadow. “You should go on home. Right now.”
“Okay,” I say, placatingly, holding up my hands. “Just let me get something to eat and I’ll go.”
Daneca backs away from us, heading in the direction of the bar. She gives me a wink that seems to indicate she thinks I have things under control. That’s an outrageous assumption and I am outraged by it.
“No,” he says. “You are going to get your ass out on the sidewalk, and I am going to drive you home.”
“What’s wrong? I’m not getting in any trouble.”
