His jaw ticked. She’d seen it before, but never directed at her. “You know, for someone who speaks so much about equality, you are quick to take the chance for it from those you don’t agree with. Alyona was a sweet girl who did the best she could with the life she was given. Who knows what she may have done later if her life hadn’t been sacrificed?”

Nadya leaned toward him. Tapped a finger to his chest. “You sound as though you . . . liked her. Alyona.”

He didn’t so much as flinch. “She was like a sister to me. Would have been a sister to me, as of today. And it isn’t right what was done to her. She shouldn’t have paid the price for my brother’s opinions.”

Had he been blaming her for that all this time? “Oh, don’t start with all the morality nonsense. I thought you were above such sentiments. What’s right is what works—”

“And it didn’t.” He spun away. “Her death was senseless and ineffectual. All it accomplished was driving my brother here. She should have been one of the people you fight for, Nadya. One of the women who deserves a chance at more from life. But she was denied that.”

“Sacrifices have to be made sometimes.” Nadya straightened her spine, planted her hands on her hips.

“I know. But how do we keep from becoming just like the tyrants, then? Isn’t that the same thing they always said, when we were dying on the front lines?” He stopped at the window, staring down at the street below, as if looking out where strangers walked would make clear all the mysteries of humanity.

Didn’t he remember that they’d already made sense of it? “The difference is that we’re not serving just ourselves—we’re serving everyone.”

“Everyone but those we don’t like or agree with, you mean.” He leaned his shoulder against the peeling wallpaper by the window frame.

She eased up behind him, the question scorching her tongue. Fear of the answer scorching her heart. “Are you doubting the party, Evgeni? Doubting all we stand for, all we’ve been working for?”

“No.” He turned enough to look at her. And somehow, his eyes were clear. Easy. “But Batya used to say that the difference between a wise man and a fool was not that the wise man was right and the fool wrong—but that the fool always assumed himself right, and the wise man would wonder if he could be wrong. We cannot learn from our mistakes and grow wiser if we never admit to the times we’ve chosen the wrong path.”