Metro 2034

CHAPTER 11 Gifts

‘Report!’

Whatever else about him, the commander certainly knew how to take a man by surprise. Legends circulated about him in the garrison: supposedly the former mercenary had been famous for his skill in handling cold weapons and his ability to dissolve into the darkness. At one time, before he settled down at Sebastopol, he used to massacre entire enemy guard posts singlehanded if the sentries demonstrated even the slightest carelessness.

Artyom jumped up, squeezed the receiver against his ear with his shoulder, saluted and stopped counting rather regretfully. The commander walked over to the duty roster, checked his watch, made a note of the time – 9:22 – beside the date – 3 November – signed it and turned to Artyom expectantly.

‘Silence. I mean, there’s no one there.’

‘They don’t answer?’ said the commander, chewing on his lips; he worked his neck muscles and cracked the vertebrae. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What don’t you believe?’ Artyom asked cautiously.

‘That Dobrynin’s been taken out so fast. Is the epidemic already in Hansa then? Can you imagine the bedlam that must have broken out, if the Ring’s infected?’

‘But we don’t know, do we?’ Artyom responded uncertainly. ‘Maybe it’s started already. We’ve got no contact with them.’

‘What if the lines are damaged?’ The commander leaned down and drummed his fingers on the table.

‘Then it would be like with base.’ Artyom jerked his head in the direction of the tunnel that led to Sebastopol. ‘I dial, and it’s completely dead. But with them at least I get the signal. The equipment’s working.’

‘Base clearly doesn’t need us, since no one comes to our door any more. Or maybe there simply isn’t any base left. And no Dobrynin either,’ the commander said flatly. ‘Listen, Popov… If there’s no one left there, then we’ll all croak soon. And that makes our quarantine pointless. Maybe we should just drop it, what do you think?’ he asked and chewed on his lips again.

‘Definitely not, the quarantine’s essential,’ said Artyom, crossing himself in fright at his own heresy and recalling the commander’s manner of first shooting deserters in the stomach and reading them their sentence afterwards.

‘Essential,’ the commander repeated thoughtfully. ‘Another three feel ill today. Two locals and one of ours. Akopov. And Aksyonov died.’

‘Aksyonov?’ Artyom gulped hard and squeezed his eyes shut.

‘He smashed his head open against a rail. Said the pain was really bad,’ the commander went on in the same even tone. ‘And he’s not the first. It must be one hell of a headache for a man to spend half an hour down on his knees, trying to crack his skull, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Artyom suddenly felt sick.

‘No nausea? No weakness?’ the commander asked considerately, pointing his flashlight into Artyom’s face. ‘Open your mouth. Say “aaaaa”. Good man. I tell you what, Popov, you get through to Dobrynin, and get them to tell you Hansa has a vaccine and the medical brigades will be here soon. And they’ll save all of us who are healthy. And they’ll cure everyone who’s sick. And we won’t be stuck here in this hell for all eternity. And we’ll all go back home to our wives. You’ll back to your Galya. And I’ll go back to Alyona and Vera. Got that, Popov?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Artyom, nodding vehemently.

‘At ease.’

His machete had broken off at the handle, unable to support the weight of creature that collapsed onto it. The blade had pierced so deep into the carcass that they didn’t even try to extract it. And the man with the shaved head, covered in slashes from the beasts’ claws, still hadn’t come round after almost three days.

There was nothing Sasha could do to help him, but she had to see him anyway. If only to say thank you. Even if he couldn’t hear her. But the doctors wouldn’t allow the girl into his ward. They said that all the injured man needed now was peace and quiet

Sasha didn’t know for certain why the man with the shaved head had killed those men on the trolley. If he had fired in order to save her, she could absolve him, but although she honestly tried to believe it, she couldn’t. Another explanation was more plausible: it was easier for him to kill than to ask for anything.

But at Pavelets everything had been completely different. There was no doubt about it: he had come for Sasha and even been prepared to die for her. Did that mean she hadn’t been wrong after all, and some kind of connection really had started developing between them?

When he called to her that time back at Kolomenskoe, she was expecting a bullet, not an invitation to move on together. But when she submitted and looked round, she had noticed the change in him immediately, even though his frightening face was still as impassive as ever: it was in his eyes, as if someone else had suddenly peeped out through the loopholes of those motionless black pupils. Someone who felt curious about her.

Someone to whom she now owed her life. She wondered if she should let him have the silver ring as a hint, the way her mother once did, but she was afraid the man with the shaved head wouldn’t understand the sign. How else could she thank him? To give him a knife to replace the one he had broken defending her was the very least that Sasha could do. When she was struck by this simple idea and stopped dead in front of the bladesmith’s counter, imagining how she would hand him his new knife, how he would look at her and what he would say, she hadn’t forgotten even for a moment that she was planning to buy a killer a weapon that he would use to slit throats and slash open stomachs.

In that moment, for her he wasn’t a bandit, but a hero, not a murderer, but a warrior; and above all, he was a man. And there was another thought, unspoken, not even clearly formulated as yet, swirling round in her head: his knife was broken, he was wounded, he couldn’t wake up. Perhaps if he had a knife that was whole… It was like an amulet… She went ahead and bought it.

So now, standing by his bed, hiding the gift behind her back, Sasha was waiting for him to sense her, or at least sense the presence of the blade. The man with the shaved head twitched and snorted, he started hawking up words, but he didn’t come round: the darkness held him too tight in its grip. Until now Sasha had never spoken his name even to herself, let alone out loud. Before she called him in a loud voice, she whispered that name, as if she was trying it out, and finally made up her mind.

‘Hunter!’

The man with the shaved head went quiet and listened, as if she was somewhere unimaginably far away, and her voice only reached him as a faint echo, but he still didn’t respond. Sasha spoke the name again, louder, more insistently. She wasn’t going to back off until he opened his eyes. She wanted to be his tunnel spark.

Someone in the corridor called out in surprise, boots started scraping across the floor out there and Sasha squatted down and put the knife on the locker at the head of the bed, in order not to waste any more time.

‘This is for you,’ she said.

Steely fingers closed round Sasha’s wrist in a grip powerful enough to crush her bones. The injured man managed to raise his eyelids a little, but his gaze wandered about mindlessly without coming to rest on anything.

‘Thank you,’ said the girl, not even attempting to free her hand from the trap it was clasped in.

‘What are you doing here?’

A large, strapping man in a greasy white coat darted up to her and pricked the man with the shaved head in the arm with a syringe. The patient went limp and the orderly tugged Sasha sharply to her feet, hissing through his clenched teeth.

‘What’s wrong with you, don’t you understand? In his condition… The doctor strictly forbade…’

‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand! He has to have something to cling on to, and your jabs only make him loosen his grip.’

He shoved Sasha hard towards the door, but after flying a few metres, she swung round and flashed her eyes at him stubbornly.

‘Don’t let me see you in here again! And what’s this?’ he asked, spotting the knife.

‘That’s his… I brought it for him…’ Sasha said and hesitated. ‘If not for him… those creatures would have torn me to pieces.’

‘The doctor will tear me to pieces if he finds out,’ the orderly snarled. ‘Come on, get out of here!’

But Sasha lingered for another moment, turning back to Hunter, who was sunk deep in his curative coma, and finished what she was saying anyway.

‘Thank you. You saved me.’

She strode out of the ward and suddenly heard a quiet, cracked voice say:

‘I only wanted to kill it… The monster…’

The door slammed in her face and the key scraped in the lock.

No, that wasn’t what the knife was intended for, Homer realised immediately. It was enough just to hear the way the girl called the brigadier’s name as he floundered in the quagmire of his delirium – insistently, tenderly, plaintively. On the very point of intervening, the old man halted in confusion and pulled back: he didn’t need to save anyone here. The only way he could help was by making himself scarce as quickly as possible, in order not to frighten Sasha off.

Who could say, perhaps she was right? After all, at Nagornaya, Hunter had completely forgotten about his companions, abandoning them to be torn apart by the phantom giants. But in this battle… Could the girl really mean something to the brigadier after all?

Lost in thought, Homer wandered off along the corridor to his own ward. An orderly tramping in the opposite direction shouldered him aside, but the old man didn’t even notice. It was time to give Sasha the little trifle he had bought for her at the market, Homer told himself. It looked as if it might come in useful soon.

He took the little package out of the desk drawer and twirled it in his hands. The girl came bursting into the room a few minutes later – tense, distressed and angry. She clambered onto her bed, pulled her legs up and stared into the corner. Homer waited to see if the storm would break or pass over. Sasha didn’t say anything, she just started biting her nails. The time had come for decisive action.

‘I’ve got a present for you,’ the old man said, getting up from the desk and putting the package on the blanket beside the girl.

‘What for?’ she asked clattering her claws without peeping out of her shell.

‘What do people generally give each other presents for?’

‘To repay them,’ Sasha replied confidently. ‘For something good they’ve done for them, or something they’re going to ask for later.’

‘Then let’s just say I’m repaying you for the good things you’ve already done for me,’ Homer said with a smile. ‘I don’t have anything else to ask you for.’

‘I haven’t done anything for you,’ the girl objected.

‘What about my book? I’ve already put you in it. I have to repay you, I don’t want to be in debt. Come on now, open it,’ he said, allowing a faint note of humorous irritation into his voice.

‘I don’t like being in debt either,’ said Sasha, tearing open the wrapping. ‘What’s this? Oh!’

She was holding a red plastic disc, a flat little box that opened into two halves. It had once been a cheap powder compact, only now the two compartments, for powder and rouge, had been empty for a long time. But on the other hand, the little mirror on the inside of the lid was still in perfect condition.

‘I can see better in this than in a puddle,’ said Sasha gaping at the compact with funny, wide-open, eyes as she studied her own reflection. ‘What did you give me it for?’

‘Sometimes it can be useful to see yourself from the outside,’ Homer chuckled. ‘It helps to understand a lot of things about yourself.’

‘And what do I need to understand about myself?’ she asked warily.

‘There are people who’ve never seen their own reflection and all their lives they think they’re someone different. It can often be hard to see clearly from the inside, and there’s no one in here to give them a hint… So until they stumble across a mirror by accident, they’ll carry on making the same mistake. And even when they do look at a reflection, they often can’t believe that it’s themselves they’re seeing.’

‘And who do I see in the mirror?’ she asked insistently.

‘You tell me,’ he said, crossing his arms.

‘Myself… Well… a girl.’ Just to make sure, she presented first one cheek and then the other to the little mirror.

‘A young woman,’ Homer corrected her. ‘And a rather scruffy one.’

She twisted and turned for a little bit longer, then flashed her eyes at Homer, intending to ask him something, but changed her mind and said nothing, then finally screwed up her courage after all and blurted out something that made the old man gag.

‘Am I ugly?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ he said, struggling to prevent the corners of his lips from spreading into a smile. ‘I can’t see under all the dirt.’

‘So that’s what’s wrong?’ Sasha’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You mean men can’t sense a woman’s beauty? You need to have everything shown to you and explained?’

‘That’s probably right. And it’s often used to deceive us,’ Homer laughed. ‘Painting can work genuine miracles with a woman’s face. But in your case we’re not talking about restoring the portrait, it’s more like an archaeological excavation. It’s hard to judge how beautiful an antique statue is from a foot sticking up out of the ground. Although it almost certainly is very beautiful,’ he added condescendingly.

‘What does “antique” mean?’ asked Sasha, suspecting a trick.

‘Ancient,’ said Homer, carrying on with his joke.

‘I’m only seventeen!’ she protested.

‘They’ll discover that later. When they dig you up.’

The old man sat back down at the desk with an imperturbable air, opened the exercise book at the last full page and started reading his notes, gradually turning more and more sombre.

If they dug her up. The girl, and him, and everyone else. There was a time when he used to amuse himself with thoughts like that: what if, in thousands of years’ time, archaeologists studying the ruins of old Moscow, when even its name had been forgotten, were to come across one of the entrances to the underground labyrinth? They’d probably think they’d found a gigantic mass burial site – it was unlikely to occur to anyone that people could actually have lived in these dark catacombs. A culture that was once highly developed had obviously degenerated in the twilight of its existence, they would decide: these people buried their leaders in vaults, together with all their possessions, weapons, servants and concubines.

He still had eighty-something pages left in his exercise book. Would that be enough to fit both worlds into – the one lying on the surface and the one in the Metro?

‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying?’ said the girl, shaking his arm.

‘What? Sorry, I was lost in thought.’ He rubbed his forehead.

‘Are ancient statues really beautiful? I mean, is what people used to think was beautiful before still beautiful today?’

‘Yes,’ the old man said with shrug.

‘And will it still be tomorrow?’

‘Probably. If there’s anyone here to appreciate it.’

Sasha started pondering and fell silent. Homer slipped back into the rut of his own grim reflections and didn’t try to force the conversation.

‘You mean beauty doesn’t exist without people?’ Sasha asked eventually, puzzled.

‘Probably not,’ he replied absentmindedly. ‘If there’s no one to see it… After all, animals aren’t capable, are they?’

‘And if animals are different from people because they can’t see the difference between what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,’ Sasha pondered, ‘does that mean people can’t exist without beauty either?’

‘Oh, yes they can,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘Lots of people don’t need it at all.’

The girl put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a strange object: a little square of polythene or plastic with a design on it. Sasha held it out to Homer timidly, and yet somehow proudly, as if she were revealing a great treasure to him.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘You tell me,’ she said with a sly smile.

‘Well now,’ he said, carefully taking the little square from her, reading the words on it and handing it back, ‘it’s the outside package from a tea bag. With a little picture.’

‘With a painting,’ she corrected him. ‘With a beautiful painting. If not for it, I would have… turned into an animal.’

Homer looked at her, feeling his eyes filling up with tears and his breath faltering. You sentimental old fool, he thought, chastising himself. He cleared his throat and sighed.

‘Haven’t you ever gone up onto the surface, into the city? Apart from this time?’

‘Why?’ asked Sasha, putting the little packet away. ‘Do you want to tell me everything up there isn’t like it is in the painting? That things like that don’t even exist? I know all that already. I know what the city looks like – the buildings, the bridge, the river. Creepy and empty.’

‘On the contrary,’ the old man responded. ‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than that city. But you… you’re judging the entire Metro from a single sleeper. I probably can’t even describe it to you. Buildings higher than any cliffs. Broad avenues, teeming like mountain torrents. The sky that’s always bright, the glowing mist… A vainglorious city, living for the moment – like every one of its inhabitants. Crazy and chaotic. Made up entirely of contradictory combinations, constructed without any plans. Not eternal, because eternity is too cold and static. But so alive!’ He clenched his fist and then waved his arm in the air. ‘You can’t understand that. You have to see it for yourself…’

And at that moment he really believed that if Sasha went up onto the surface, the ghost of that city would reveal itself to her too; he believed that, completely forgetting that for that to happen, she would have had to know the city when it was still alive.

The old man managed to arrange things somehow, and she was allowed inside the borders of Hansa: they led her right through the station with an armed guard, as if they were taking her to be shot, all the way to the service area, where the local bathhouse was.

The only thing the two Pavelets stations had in common was the name, as if two sisters had been separated at birth and one had ended up in a rich family, and the other had been raised at a hungry way station or in the tunnels. The station on the radial Zamoskvorechie Line had turned out a bit bawdy and frivolous, but light and airy. The station on the Circle Line was low and squat, well lit and polished until it shone, making its house-proud, stingy character obvious from the very first glance. At this time of day there weren’t many people about – probably everyone who didn’t work there preferred the fairground atmosphere of the radial line station to the grave severity of the one on the Circle.

She was the only person in the changing room. Walls covered in neat yellow tiles, a floor of chipped, multifaceted stoneware slabs, little painted metal lockers for shoes and clothes, electric bulbs dangling on shaggy wires, two benches upholstered with roughly trimmed imitation leather… Everything inside her quivered in delight.

The skinny female attendant with a moustache handed her an incredibly white towel and a hard little brick of grey soap and allowed her to lock the shower cabin with the bolt. The little squares on the waffle towel and the nauseating soapy smell – it all belonged to the far-distant past, when Sasha was a commandant’s beloved, pampered little daughter. She had forgotten that all these things still existed somewhere.

Sasha unfastened her overalls that were stiff with dirt and clambered out of them as quickly as she could. She pulled off her singlet, took off her shorts and skipped over to the rust-coated pipe with its improvised showerhead. With a great effort, her fingers slipping over the scorching valve wheel, she released the hot water… It was boiling! Squeezing up against the wall to escape from the scalding spray, she twisted the other wheel. Eventually she managed to mix cold and hot in the right proportions, stopped dancing about and dissolved into the water.

And all the dust, soot, machine oil and blood flowed down through the grille of the drain with the bubbling water, along with Sasha’s and other people’s weariness and despair, guilt and anxiety. It was quite a while before the water ran clear.

Would this be enough for the old man to stop teasing her, Sasha wondered, examining her pink, steamed feet as if they belonged to someone else and studying her unfamiliar white palms. Would it be enough for men to notice her beauty? Perhaps Homer was right and it was stupid of her to go to the wounded man without tidying herself up first? She would probably have to learn about that kind of thing.

Would he notice how Sasha had changed? She screwed in the valve wheels, shuffled through into the changing room and opened the mirror she had been given… Yes, it was impossible not to notice it.

The hot water had helped her loosen up and overcome her doubts. The man with the shaved head hadn’t been trying to rebuff her with his strange words about the monster. He simply hadn’t come round yet, and anyway he wasn’t talking to her, he was just carrying on a violent quarrel he was having with someone else in his nightmare. She just had to wait until he surfaced, and be there with him when it happened, so that… So that Hunter would see her straight away and understand everything straight away. And what then? She didn’t have to think about that. He was experienced enough for her to leave everything up to him. Recalling how the man with the shaved head thrashed about in his delirium, Sasha felt, even though she couldn’t explain it, that Hunter was searching for her, because she could calm him, bring him relief from his fever and help him recover his balance. And the more she thought about that, the more feverish she started feeling herself. They took away her filthy overalls, promising to wash them, and gave her a pair of threadbare, light-blue trousers and a sweater with holes in it and a high neck. The new clothes felt tight and awkward – and apart from that, while they were taking her back through the frontier posts to the infirmary, almost every man’s eyes were glued to the trousers and the sweater, and when Sasha reached her own bed, she felt like taking another shower. The old man wasn’t in the room, but she wasn’t left to brood alone for long. A few minutes later the door creaked open and the doctor glanced in.

‘Well now, congratulations. You can visit him. He’s come round.’

‘What date is it?’

The brigadier propped himself up on one elbow, turning his head laboriously to peer at Homer. The old man grabbed at his wrist for some reason, although it was a long time since he had last worn a watch, and shrugged.

‘The second. The second of November,’ the orderly prompted him.

‘Three days,’ said Hunter, slipping down onto the pillow. ‘Three days I’ve been lying here. We’re behind schedule. We have to go.’

‘You won’t get very far,’ said the orderly, trying to reason with him. ‘You’ve got hardly any blood left in you.’

‘We have to go,’ the brigadier repeated, ignoring him. ‘We’re running out of time… The bandits…’ He suddenly broke off. ‘Why do you need the respirator?’

The old man had been preparing for that question; he’d had three whole days to draw up his lines of defence and plan a counter-offensive. Hunter’s unconscious state had spared him the need for superfluous confessions, and now he could replace them with well-considered lies.

‘There aren’t any bandits,’ he whispered, leaning down over the wounded man’s bed. ‘While you were delirious… You were talking all the time. I know everything.’

‘What do you know?’ Hunter grabbed Homer by the collar and jerked the old man towards him.

‘About the epidemic at Tula… Everything’s all right.’ Homer waved his hand imploringly to restrain the orderly, who had come dashing over to drag him off the brigadier. ‘I’ll manage. We need to have a talk, could I ask you, please…’

The orderly reluctantly complied, put the cap back over the needle of his syringe and walked out of the ward, leaving them alone.

‘About Tula,’ said Hunter, still holding the old man in his wild, inflamed stare, but gradually reducing the pressure. ‘Nothing else?’

‘That’s all. The station is the focus of an unidentified airborne infection… Our men have established a quarantine and they’re waiting for help.’

‘Right. Right,’ said the brigadier, letting go of him. ‘Yes. An epidemic. Are you afraid of getting infected?’

‘God helps those who help themselves,’ Homer replied warily.

‘True enough. It’s okay… I didn’t go close, the draught was blowing in their direction… I shouldn’t have it.’

‘Why that story about the bandits? What are you going to do?’ asked the old man, feeling bolder now.

‘First go to Dobrynin and reach an agreement. Then clean out Tula. We need flamethrowers. Otherwise there’s no way…’

‘Burn everyone at the station alive? What about our men?’

The old man was still hoping the remark the brigadier had passed about flamethrowers had been the same kind of decoy manoeuvre as everything else he told the top command at Sebastopol.

‘Why alive? The corpses. There’s no other way. Everyone who’s infected. Everyone they’ve been in contact with. All the air. I’ve heard about this disease…’ Hunter closed his eyes and licked his cracked lips. ‘There’s no cure. There was an outbreak a couple of years ago… Two thousand corpses.’

‘But it stopped, didn’t it?’

‘A blockade. Flamethrowers.’ The brigadier turned his mutilated face towards the old man. ‘There is no other way. If it breaks out… Just one man. It’s the end for everyone. Yes, I lied about the bandits. Otherwise Istomin wouldn’t have allowed me to terminate everyone. He’s too soft. But I’ll take men who don’t ask any questions.’

‘But what if there are men who are immune?’ Homer began timidly. ‘What if there are men there who aren’t sick? I… You said… What if they could still be saved?’

‘There is no immunity. All contacts get infected. There aren’t any healthy men, only tougher ones,’ the brigadier snapped. ‘But it’s only worse for them. They’ll suffer longer. Believe me… It’s what they need, for me to… to be terminated.’

‘But what do you need that for?’ the old man asked, moving back from the bed just to be on the safe side.

Hunter lowered his eyelids wearily, and Homer noticed once again that the eye on the mutilated half of his face didn’t close completely. The brigadier’s answer took so long to come that the old man was about to run for the doctor. But then, forcing out the words slowly and separately, as if a hypnotist had sent him back into the infinitely distant past for his lost memories, he said through his clenched teeth:

‘I must. Protect people. Eliminate any danger. That’s all. I’m for.’

Had he found the knife? Had he realised it was for him? What if he didn’t guess, or didn’t see it was a promise? She flew along the corridor, trying to drive away the thoughts that were tormenting her, still not knowing what she would say to him. What a pity that he had regained consciousness before she was at his bedside!

Sasha heard almost the entire conversation – she froze in the doorway and shrank back when the subject of killings came up. Of course, she couldn’t decipher everything, but she didn’t need to. She’d already heard all the most important things. There was no point in waiting any longer, and she knocked loudly.

As the old man got up to greet her, his face was a cramped mask of despair. Homer moved as laboriously as if he too had been given a debilitating injection, and the wicks had been unscrewed from the lamps of his eyes. He answered Sasha with a limp nod – as if someone had tugged on a hanged man’s rope from above.

The girl sat right on the edge of the still-warm stool, bit her lip and held her breath before stepping into this new, unexplored tunnel.

‘Did you like my knife?’

‘Knife?’ The man with the shaved head looked round and his gaze ran into the burnished black blade: he stared warily at Sasha without touching it. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘It’s for you.’ She felt as if someone had blown steam into her face.

‘Yours got broken. When you… Thank you…’

‘A strange present. I’d never accept anything like that from anyone,’ he said after a heavy silence. She thought she could hear a half-hint in his words, something important left unsaid, and she accepted the game, but without knowing all the rules, and started groping around for words. It all came out awkward and wrong, but then Sasha’s tongue was a completely inadequate tool for describing what was going on inside her.

‘Do you feel that I have a piece of you too? The part that was torn out of you… That you were looking for? That I could give it back to you?’

‘What are you babbling about?’ he asked. A dash of cold water in her face.

‘No, you do feel it,’ Sasha insisted, cringing on the stool. ‘That you’ll be complete with me. That I can be with you and I must. Otherwise why did you take me with you?’

‘I gave in to my partner.’ His voice was colourless and blank.

‘Why did you protect me from the men on the trolley?’

‘I would have killed them in any case.’

‘Then why did you save me from the beast at the station?’

‘I had to wipe them all out.’

‘I wish it had eaten me!’

‘Are you annoyed because you’re still alive?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Then take a walk up the escalator, there are plenty more of them up there.’

‘I… You want me to…’

‘I don’t want anything from you.’

‘I’ll help you to stop!’

‘You’re clinging on to me.’

‘Don’t you feel that…?’

‘I don’t feel anything.’ The taste of his words was like rusty water.

Not even the terrible claw of that white monster could have wounded her so badly. Sasha jumped up, cut to the quick, and dashed out of the ward. Luckily her room was empty. She huddled up in the corner, curled into a tight ball. She looked for the mirror in her pocket – she wanted to throw it out – but didn’t find it: she must have dropped it beside the bed of the man with the shaved head.

When her tears dried up, she already knew what to do. It didn’t take her long to get ready. The old man would forgive her for stealing his gun – he would probably forgive her anything at all. The tarpaulin protective suit, cleaned and decontaminated, was waiting for her in the closet, dangling helplessly from a hook. As if some wizard had disembowelled the dead fat man and cursed him after death to follow Sasha everywhere and do her will. She clambered into it, dashed out into the corridor, rushed along the passage and up onto the platform. Somewhere along the way a rivulet of magical music licked at her, music from the same source that she hadn’t identified last time. She didn’t have a spare minute to search for it this time either. Halting for only a brief moment, Sasha overcame the temptation and moved on towards the goal of her trek.

In the daytime there was only one sentry on duty at the escalator: the creatures from the surface never bothered the station during daylight hours. It took her less than five minutes to come to an understanding: the way up here was always open, but it was impossible to come down the escalator. Leaving the amenable sentry a half-empty sub-machine-gun clip, Sasha set her foot on the first step of the stairway that led straight up to the sky.

She hitched up her sagging trousers and began her ascent.