Metro 2034

CHAPTER 13 One Story

He took her by the hand, helped her up and tugged her along after him. Then he let go of her, seeming to come to his senses. His eyes were concealed behind special smoked glass and Sasha couldn’t see them.

‘Keep up with me! It’s getting dark quickly, we have to get out of here in time,’ he droned through his filters. Then he rushed on, without even glancing at her again.

‘Hunter,’ the girl called to him, straining to recognise her rescuer through the steamed-up lenses of her gas mask.

He pretended he couldn’t hear her and there was nothing Sasha could do but run after him as fast as her legs would carry her. Of course, he was angry with her: this was the third time he’d had to give the stupid little girl a hand. But he had come up here, come up here for her sake, so how could there be any more doubt…?

The man with the shaved head wasn’t planning on going anywhere near the beasts’ lair that had been Sasha’s way out of the Metro: he knew different paths. He turned right off the main road and ducked into an archway, dashed past the rusty iron skeletons of flat boxes that looked like market kiosks for dwarfs, frightened off a blurred shadow with a shot from his gun and stopped in front of a small brick sentry box with heavy bars over the windows. He turned a key in a massive padlock. A shelter? No, the sentry box turned out to be a blind: inside the door a concrete stairway zigzagged down into the depths.

Hanging the lock back up on the inside, her rescuer switched on his flashlight and tramped down the steps. Time had peeled the green-and-white paint off the walls and they were covered with names and dates: in, out, in, out… The man scribbled something illegible of his own. Probably everyone who used the secret way up onto the surface had to write down here when he left and when he came back. Only under many names there was no date of return.

The descent broke off sooner than Sasha was expecting: although the steps ran on downwards, the man with the shaved head halted at a nondescript little cast-iron door, and smashed his fist against it. A few seconds later a bolt grated on the other side and the door was opened by a man with dishevelled hair and a sparse little beard, wearing blue trousers with baggy knees.

‘Who’s this then?’ he asked, looking perplexed.

‘Someone I picked up on the Ring,’ Hunter boomed. ‘He almost got eaten by the birds, I was only just in time with the grenade launcher. Hey kid, how did you get out there?’

He flung back his hood and tugged off his gas mask…

The man standing in front of Sasha was a stranger: close-cropped light brown hair, a pale face with grey eyes, a squashed nose that looked as if it had been broken. And she had persuaded herself not to notice anything, telling herself she was wrong when she thought he moved too easily for a wounded man, that his walk was wrong, not feral enough, and the suit looked different… She suddenly felt stifled and pulled her own mask off too.

Fifteen minutes later Sasha was already inside the Hansa frontier.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t let you stay here without any documents.’ She could hear a note of genuine regret in her rescuer’s voice. ‘Maybe this evening… you know… well, in the passage?’

She shook her head without speaking and smiled.

Where should she go now?

To him? There was still time!

But Sasha couldn’t get over her annoyance with Hunter for not saving her this time too… And she had something else in mind that she didn’t want to put off any longer.

The delicate, enticing cadences of the wonderful music found a way to her through the hubbub of the crowd, the scraping of shoes and the roaring of the traders. She thought it was the same melody that had cast its spell on her the day before. As she stepped towards it, Sasha felt as if she was making her way again towards that opening that radiated an unearthly glow. Only where did it lead to this time?

The musician was surrounded by a tight-packed ring of dozens of listeners. Sasha had to push her way through until the crowd spat her out into the empty circle. The melody drew these people to him and at the same time held them at a distance, as if they too were flying towards the light, but afraid of singeing their wings.

Sasha wasn’t afraid.

He was young, slim and incredibly good looking. A little bit fragile, perhaps, but his well-groomed face wasn’t soft and his green eyes didn’t look naïve. His dark hair was untrimmed, but it lay neatly on his head. His unostentatious clothes looked too clean for this station and made him stand out against the human mishmash of Pavelets. His instrument looked a bit like the kind of whistles that people made for children out of narrow plastic insulation pipes, but it was large and black, with brass keys, imposingly elegant and obviously very expensive. The sounds that the musician drew from it seemed to belong to a different world and a different time. Like the instrument itself… Like its owner.

He caught Sasha’s glance in the very first moment, let it go and immediately caught it again. She was embarrassed: she didn’t find his attention unpleasant, but it was his music she had come here for.

‘Thank God! I’ve found you…’

Homer pushed his way through to her, sweaty and panting.

‘How is he?’ Sasha asked immediately.

‘Do you really…?’ the old man began, then stopped short and said something else instead: ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What? Where to?’ Sasha felt as if her heart was squeezed in someone’s fist.

‘He left. Took all his things and went. Most likely he’s gone to Dobrynin…’

‘And he didn’t leave anything?’ she asked timidly, already guessing what Homer’s answer would be.

‘Not a thing,’ the old man said with a nod.

People started hissing furiously at them and Homer stopped talking. He listened to the melody, all the time glancing suspiciously from the musician to the girl and back again. He needn’t have worried: she was thinking about something completely different.

Hunter may have driven her away and run off as soon as he could, but Sasha was starting to grasp the strange rules that he followed. If the man with the shaved head really had taken all his things, absolutely all of them, that meant he simply wanted her to be more tenacious, not to give up and come and find him. And that was what she would do anyway, yes she would. If only…

‘And the knife?’ she whispered to the old man. ‘Did he take my knife with him? The black one?’

‘It’s not in the ward,’ Homer said with a shrug.

‘That means he took it!’

Even this paltry sign was enough for Sasha.

The flute-player was definitely talented and as skilled in his art as if he had been playing in a conservatory only yesterday. The case of his instrument was lying open for donations, and there were enough cartridges in it to feed the population of a small station – or to slaughter every last one of them. This was genuine recognition, Homer thought with a sad little smile

The melody seemed vaguely familiar to the old man, but try as he might to remember what it was and where he could have heard it – in an old film, in a concert on the radio? – he couldn’t recall. There was something unusual about the melody: once you casually tuned in to its wavelength, you couldn’t tear yourself away from it; you felt you absolutely had to listen right to the end, and then applaud the musician before he started playing again.

Prokofiev? Shostakovich? In any case Homer’s knowledge of music was too meagre for a really serious attempt to guess the composer. But whoever had written down those notes, the flute player was doing more than just perform them, he was filling them with new resonance and new meaning, bringing them to life. Talent. Yes, talent, and for that Homer was prepared to forgive this young lad for the teasing glances that he tossed Sasha’s way every now and then, like someone tossing a crumpled paper ball to a kitten.

But now it was time to take the girl away from him. The old man waited until the musical blossom faded and the musician surrendered to the applause of his audience, then grabbed hold of Sasha’s damp protective suit that still smelled of bleach and dragged her out of the circle.

‘My things are packed, I’m going after him,’ he said and paused.

‘So am I,’ the girl said quickly.

‘Do you realise what you’re getting involved in?’ Homer asked in a low voice.

‘I know everything. I overheard it all.’ She looked at him defiantly. ‘An epidemic, right? And he wants to cremate everyone. Dead or alive. The whole station,’ said Sasha, without turning her eyes away.

‘And why do you want to go to a man like that?’ the old man asked, genuinely curious.

Sasha didn’t answer: she carried on walking in silence for a while until they reached an empty, secluded corner of the hall.

‘My father died. Because of me. I’m to blame. There’s nothing I can do to bring him back to life. But there are people there who are still alive. Who can still be saved. And I have to try. I owe it to him,’ she concluded slowly and awkwardly.

‘Saved from whom? From what? The sickness is incurable, you heard that,’ the old man responded bitterly.

‘From our friend. He’s more terrible than any sickness. More deadly.’ The girl sighed. ‘At least diseases leave some hope. Someone always recovers. One in a thousand.’

‘How? What makes you think you can do it?’ asked Homer, gazing at her intently.

‘I’ve already done it once,’ she replied uncertainly.

Was the girl overestimating her strength? Was she deceiving herself by imagining that the callous and relentless brigadier shared her feelings? Homer didn’t want to dishearten Sasha, but it was best to warn her now.

‘Do you know what I found in his ward?’ The old man carefully took the battered compact out of his pocket and handed it to Sasha. ‘Did you do that to it?’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘That means it was Hunter…’

The girl slowly opened the little box and found her reflection in one of the shards of glass. She pondered for a moment, recalling her last conversation with the man with the shaved head and what he said in the dark room when she came to give him the knife. And she recalled Hunter’s face, covered in blood, as he took those ponderous steps towards her, so that the monster with its razorsharp claws already raised to strike would leave Sasha and kill him instead.

‘He didn’t do it because of me. It’s because of the mirror,’ she said resolutely.

‘What’s the mirror got to do with it?’ the old man asked, raising one eyebrow.

‘It’s like you said,’ Sasha answered, slamming the lid closed. ‘Sometimes it helps to see yourself from the outside. It helps to understand a lot about yourself,’ she said, mimicking the old man’s tone of voice.

‘You think Hunter doesn’t know who he is? Or that he’s still suffering because of his appearance? And that’s why he broke it?’ Homer asked with a condescending chuckle.

‘It’s not a matter of his appearance,’ said the girl, leaning back against a column.

‘Hunter knows perfectly well who he is. And he obviously doesn’t like to be reminded about it,’ said the old man, answering his own question.

‘Perhaps he’d forgotten?’ she objected. ‘I sometimes get the feeling that he’s always trying to remember something… Or that he’s chained to a heavy freight car that’s running down a slope into the darkness, and no one will help him to stop it. I can’t explain it. I just feel it when I look at him.’ Sasha frowned. ‘No one else sees it, but I do. That’s why I told you that time that he needs me.’

‘So that’s why he left you,’ Homer remarked cruelly.

‘I was the one who left him,’ the girl said, knitting her brows stubbornly. ‘And now I have to catch up with him, before it’s too late. They’re still alive. They can still be saved,’ she repeated insistently. ‘And he can still be saved too.’

‘Who do you want to save him from?’ ask Homer, jerking his head up.

She looked at him mistrustfully – did the old man really still not understand, after she had tried so hard?

‘From the man in the mirror.’

‘Is this place taken?’

Sasha started and stopped absent-mindedly prodding at her mushroom casserole with her fork. The green-eyed musician was standing beside her with a tray in his hands. The old man had gone off somewhere for a moment, and his place was empty.

‘Yes.’

‘A solution can always be found!’ He put down his tray, jerked across a free stool from the next table and sat down on Sasha’s left before she could protest.

‘Just remember I didn’t invite you,’ she warned him.

‘Will granddad scold you then?’ the musician asked with a knowing wink. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Leonid.’

‘He’s not my granddad,’ said Sasha, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.

‘So that’s the way it is?’ asked Leonid, stuffing his mouth as full as he could and arching up one eyebrow.

‘You’re brazen,’ she remarked.

‘I’m assertive,’ he said, raising his fork in the air didactically.

‘You’re too sure of yourself,’ Sasha said with a smile.

‘I believe in people in general, and myself in particular,’ he mumbled indistinctly as he chewed.

The old man came back, stood behind the intruder and pulled a sour face, but sat down on his own stool anyway.

‘Aren’t you feeling a bit crowded, Sasha?’ he enquired peevishly, looking straight past the musician.

‘Sasha!’ the musician repeated triumphantly, glancing up from his bowl. ‘Pleased to meet you. Let me remind you that my name’s Leonid.’

‘Nikolai Ivanovich,’ Homer introduced himself, squinting at the young man sullenly. ‘What was that melody you were playing today? It sounded familiar…’

‘That’s not surprising, this is the third day I’ve been playing it here,’ the young man replied. ‘Actually it’s my own composition.’

‘Yours?’ said Sasha, putting down her knife and fork. ‘What’s it called?’

‘It’s not called anything,’ Leonid said with a shrug. ‘I hadn’t really thought about a title for it. How can I transcribe it in letters? And what for, anyway?’

‘It’s very beautiful,’ the girl admitted. ‘Really incredibly beautiful.’

‘Then I can name it in your honour,’ the quick-witted musician replied. ‘You’re worthy of it.’

‘No, don’t,’ she said and shook her head. ‘Leave it as it is, without any name. There’s a point to that.’

‘And there’s a definite point in dedicating it to you, too.’ He tried to laugh, but choked and started coughing.

‘Well, are you ready?’ The old man picked up Sasha’s tray and stood up. ‘It’s time. Excuse us, please, young man…’

‘That’s all right! I’ve finished eating already. May I see the young lady on her way?’

‘We’re leaving,’ Homer said abruptly.

‘Great! So am I. Going to Dobrynin.’ The musician put on an innocent air. ‘Are you by any chance going my way?’

‘Yes we are,’ said Sasha, surprising even herself. She tried not to look in Homer’s direction and her gaze kept slipping across to Leonid.

There was something light and easy about him, a good-humoured affability. Like a little boy fencing with a twig, he struck with light jabs that didn’t hurt and were impossible to feel angry about. And he presented his hints to Sasha so affectedly and amusingly, that she never even thought of taking them seriously. And what was wrong with him liking her?

And then, she had fallen in love with his music long before she met him. And the temptation of taking this magic with her on her journey was simply too great.

It was all down to the music, no doubt about that. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, this damned youth enticed innocent souls with that sleek flute of his and used his gift to debauch all the girls he could get his hands on. Now he was trying to get his hands on Alexandra, and Homer didn’t know what to do about it!

The old man found it hard to swallow Leonid’s brash jokes, and before long they started sticking in his throat. And Homer was also annoyed by how quickly the musician had managed to reach an agreement with the obstinate Hansa boss for the three of them to be allowed to walk the stretch of the Circle Line to Dobrynin, even without any documents! The musician had walked into the spacious offices of the station commandant – a bald, aging dandy with a moustache like a cockroach’s whiskers – with his heavy flute case full of cartridges, and come back out smiling, with his load lightened.

Homer had to admit that Leonid’s diplomatic abilities had come in handy at just the right moment for them: the motor trolley on which they had arrived at Pavelets had disappeared from the parking area at the same time as Hunter disappeared, and going the long way round could have taken them up to a week. But what provoked the old man’s suspicions most of all was the flippant way the minstrel had uprooted himself from a profitable station and parted with all his savings, just so that he could set off into the tunnels after Homer’s Sasha. In different circumstances, this flippancy would have been a sign of being in love, but in this case the old man could see nothing but frivolous intentions and the habit of rapid conquests.

Yes, little by little Homer was turning into a crotchety chaperon. But he had good reasons to be on his guard and grounds for jealousy. The last thing he needed now was for the muse who had been miraculously restored to him to run off with a wandering minstrel! With an absolutely superfluous character, who had no place waiting for him in the novel, but had simply dragged in his own stool and churlishly seated himself right smack in the middle of it.

‘Is there really no one left anywhere on Earth?’

The trio was striding towards Dobrynin, accompanied by three guards: the correct use of cartridges could make even the boldest dreams come true.

The girl, who had just given the others a gushing account of her expedition to the surface, broke off and turned sad. Homer and the musician exchanged glances: Who would be first to dash in and console her?

‘Is there life beyond the Moscow Orbital Highway?’ the old man snorted. ‘Does the new generation wonder about that?’

‘Of course it does,’ Leonid declared confidently. ‘The trouble is that no one else survived, there’s simply no contact!’

‘Well I, for instance, have heard that somewhere beyond Taganka Station there’s a secret passage that leads to a certain curious tunnel,’ said the old man. ‘A normal-enough looking tunnel, six metres in diameter, only without any rails. It lies deep, forty or even fifty metres below ground. And it runs way off to the east…’

‘Would that be the tunnel that leads to the bunkers in the Urals?’ Leonid interrupted. ‘And is this the story about the man who wandered into it by accident, then came back with a supply of food and…’

‘Walked for a week with short halts, then his provisions started to run out and he had to turn back. There was still no sign of the tunnel coming to an end,’ Homer concluded scrappily, put off his folk-narrative tone. ‘Yes, according to the rumours it leads to the Urals bunkers, where there could still be someone left alive.’

‘That’s not very likely,’ said the musician, yawning.

‘And then an acquaintance of mine in Polis told me how one of the local radio operators had established contact with the crew of a tank who had battened down their hatches and withdrawn to somewhere so remote that no one ever even thought of bombing it,’ said the old man, ostentatiously speaking to Sasha.

‘Yeah, right,’ said Leonid, nodding. ‘That’s a well-known story too. When they ran out of fuel, they buried the tank in the ground on a hill, and laid out a whole farm around it. And for a few more years they talked to Polis on the radio in the evenings.’

‘Until the radio broke down,’ Homer concluded irritably.

‘Right, and what about the submarine?’ his rival drawled. ‘The nuclear submarine that was on a long-range mission, and when the strikes and counter-strikes began, it simply didn’t have enough time to move into battle position. And when it did surface, everything had already been over for ages. So then the crew put it on permanent mooring not far from Vladivostok…’

‘And to this day an entire village is powered by its reactor,’ the old man put in. ‘Six months ago I met a man who claimed to be the first mate of that submarine’s captain. He said he’d crossed the entire country on a bicycle, all the way to Moscow. He was travelling for three years.’

‘Did you talk to him in person?’ Leonid asked in polite surprise.

‘In person,’ Homer snarled.

Legends had always been his hobbyhorse, and he simply couldn’t allow this young smart alec to get the better of him. He had one more story left in reserve, a closely guarded one. He had been intending to tell it on a quite different occasion, not waste it in a pointless argument… But seeing Sasha laughing at this grifter’s latest joke, he made up his mind.

‘But have you heard about Polar Dawns?’

‘What dawns?’ asked the musician, turning towards him.

‘Oh, come on now!’ said the old man said, restraining a smile. ‘The Far North, the Kola Peninsula, Polar Dawns City. A Godforsaken place. Fifteen hundred kilometres from Moscow, and at least a thousand to Peter. Nothing anywhere near it except Murmansk, with its navy bases, but even that’s a fair distance away.’

‘The middle of nowhere, basically,’ said Leonid, encouraging him.

‘Far away from the big cities, the secret factories and the military bases. Far away from all the main targets. The cities that our antirocket shield couldn’t defend were reduced to dust and ashes. The ones that had a shield, where the interceptors had time to cut in…’ The old man looked upwards. ‘You know for yourself. But there were other places that no one was aiming at… because they didn’t represent any kind of threat. Polar Dawns, for instance.’

‘No one has any interest in the place now either,’ the musician responded.

‘But they should,’ the old man snapped. ‘Because right next to Polar Dawns was the Kola Atomic Power Station, one of the most powerful in the country. It supplied power to almost the entire north of Russia. Millions of people. Hundreds of factories. I come from those parts myself, from Arkhangelsk. I know what I’m talking about. And I visited that station as a school kid, on a guided tour. A genuine fortress, a state within a state. Its own little army, its own agricultural land, its own farm. They could survive autonomously. Even if there was a nuclear war, it wouldn’t change anything in their life,’ he chuckled darkly.

‘So what you’re trying to say…’

‘Petersburg went, Murmansk went, and Arkhangelsk, millions of people perished… All the factories, along with the cities… reduced to dust and ash. But Polar Dawns City is still there. And the Kola Atomic Power Station wasn’t damaged. Nothing but snow for thousands of kilometres on every side, expanses of snow and ice, wolves and polar bears. No contact with the centre. And they have enough fuel to supply a large city for several years, but for them, even including Polar Dawns, it will last for a hundred years. They’ll easily make it through the winter.’

‘It’s a genuine ark,’ Leonid whispered. ‘And when the flood comes to an end and the waters recede, down from the summit of Mount Ararat…’

‘Exactly,’ the old man said with a nod.

‘How do you know about this?’ There wasn’t a trace of irony or boredom left in the musician’s voice now.

‘I used to work as a radio operator once,’ Homer replied evasively. ‘I really wanted to find at least one person alive in my own native parts.’

‘Will they hold out for long there, in the north?’

‘I’m sure they will. Of course, the last time I was in contact was about two years ago. But can you imagine what that means – another entire century with electricity? In the warmth? With medical equipment, with computers, with electronic libraries on disks? There’s no way you could know about that… There are only a couple of computers in the entire Metro, and they’re no more than toys. And this is the capital,’ the old man laughed bitterly. ‘And if there are still people left somewhere – not solitary individuals, I mean, but at least villages… They’ve been back in the seventeenth century for a long time already, or maybe even the Stone Age. Wooden spills for light, cattle, witchcraft, every third child dying at birth. Abacuses and birch-bark manuscripts. And apart from the two nearest farms, there’s nothing else in the world. Empty land and desolation. Wolves, bears, mutants. Why, the whole of modern civilisation is built on electricity. When the power runs out, the stations will die, and that’s it. Billions of people took centuries to construct this building, brick by brick, and it’s all been reduced to dust. Start all over again. Only can we do it? But there they have a breathing space, a whole century! You were right, it’s Noah’s Ark. An almost unlimited supply of energy! Oil has to be extracted and processed, gas has to be drilled for and pumped through thousands of kilometres of pipes! Do we have to go back to steam engines, then? Or even further? I’ll tell you what,’ he said, taking Sasha by the hand. ‘People aren’t in any danger. People are as resilient as cockroaches. But civilisation – that’s what I’d like to preserve.’

‘And have they got real civilisation, then?’

‘Don’t you worry about that. Nuclear engineers, the technical intelligentsia. And their conditions are definitely better than ours are here. Polar Dawns has grown quite a lot in the last twenty years. They set up a transmitter with a repeating message: “Calling all survivors…” and it gives their coordinates. They say people still come crawling in, even now…’

‘Why haven’t I ever heard about this?’ the musician muttered.

‘Not many have. It’s hard to pick up their wavelength here. But you try it sometime if you’ve got a couple of years to spare,’ the old man chuckled. ‘The call sign is “Last Harbour”.’

‘I’d have known about it,’ the young man said seriously, shaking his head. ‘I collect cases like that… You really mean there wasn’t any war there?’

‘How can I put it? Wilderness on all sides, even if there were any villages or small towns nearby, they went wild quickly enough. Sometimes the barbarians attacked. And the animals, of course, if you can call them that. But they had the arsenal to hold them off. All-round defences, a fortified perimeter. Electrified barbed wire, guard towers. A genuine fortress, I tell you. And during the first ten years – the worst time – they put up another barrier, a log stockade. They reconnoitred everything around them, even got as far as Murmansk, two hundred kilometres away. There isn’t any more Murmansk, just a fused crater where it used to be. They were even planning to organise an expedition southwards, to Moscow. I tried to talk them out of it. Why cut the umbilical cord? When the background radiation falls, they’ll be able to bring more land under cultivation – and then… But in the meantime there’s nothing they can do here. This place is just one big graveyard,’ Homer sighed.

‘That would be amusing, if the human race that destroyed itself with the atom, is saved by the atom too.’

‘There’s nothing amusing about it,’ said the old man, giving him a stern glance.

‘It’s like the fire that Prometheus stole,’ the musician explained. ‘The Gods forbade him to give fire to humans. He wanted to drag man out of the mud, the darkness and stagnation…’

‘I’ve read it,’ Homer interrupted acidly. ‘The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.’

‘A prophetic myth,’ Leonid remarked. ‘The Gods had good reason to be against it. They knew how it would end.’

‘But it was fire that made man into man,’ Homer objected.

‘And you reckon that without electricity he’ll turn back into an animal?’ the musician asked.

‘I reckon that without it we’ll be thrown back at least two hundred years. And taking into account that only one in a thousand survived and everything has to be rebuilt, brought back under control and studied all over again – at least five hundred. And maybe we’ll never recover. Why, don’t you agree?’

‘I do,’ Leonid replied. ‘But is it really just a matter of electricity?’

‘Well what do you think it is?’ Homer erupted, throwing his hands up.

The musician gave him a strange, long, lingering glance and shrugged.

The silence dragged on. Homer could definitely regard this outcome of their conversation as a victory for him: the girl had finally stopped devouring the impertinent rogue with her eyes and started thinking about something else. But just as they were getting very close to the station, Leonid suddenly declared:

‘All right. Why don’t I tell you a story?’

The old man tried his best to appear exhausted, but he replied with a gracious nod.

‘They say that beyond Sport Station and before the ruined Sokolniki Bridge, a dead-end tunnel branches off the main one, running down at a steep angle. It ends at a metal grille, with a tightly closed hermetic door behind it. They’ve tried to open the door several times, but never got anywhere. And any solitary travellers who set out to find it almost never come back, and their bodies are found over at the far side of the Metro.’

‘The Emerald City?’ Homer asked, twisting up his face.

‘Everybody knows,’ Leonid carried on, taking no notice, ‘that the Sokolniki Bridge collapsed on the first day and all the stations beyond it were cut off from the Metro. It’s usually believed that no one left on the other side of the bridge was saved, although there’s absolutely no proof of that.’

‘The Emerald City,’ Homer said, waving his hand impatiently.

‘Everybody also knows that Moscow University was built on unstable ground, which was only able to support the immense building thanks to powerful cold generators working away in its basements, freezing the swampy earth. Without them it would have slid into the river a long time ago.’

‘A stale old cliché,’ the old man put in, realising where all this was leading.

‘More than twenty years have gone by, but for some reason the abandoned building is still standing there…’

‘Because it’s hogwash, that’s why!’

‘Some rumours say that what lies under the University is not just a basement, but a large strategic bomb shelter that goes ten storeys down, and apart from the cold generators, it contains its own nuclear reactor, and living space and connections to the closest Metro stations, and even to Metro-2…’ Leonid made terrible eyes at Sasha and she smiled.

‘I haven’t heard anything new yet,’ Homer growled contemptuously.

‘They say there’s a genuine underground city there,’ the musician continued dreamily. ‘A city in which the inhabitants – of course they didn’t die – have devoted themselves to the collection of lost knowledge, crumb by crumb, and the service of beauty. Sparing no resources, they send out expeditions to the picture galleries, museums and libraries that have survived. And they raise their children so that they don’t lose the sense of beauty either. Peace and harmony reign there, and there are no ideologies apart from enlightenment, and no religions apart from art. There are none of those ugly old-style walls, painted in two drab colours with linseed oil paint. Instead of the crudely barked commands and warning sirens, the loudspeakers broadcast Berlioz, Haydn and Tchaikovsky. And absolutely everyone – just imagine it – can quote Dante from memory. And these people have managed to stay the same as they were. Or no, they’re not the way they were in the twenty-first century, but like people were in ancient times… Well, you’ve read about that in Myths and Legends…’ The musician smiled at the old man as if he was feeble-minded. ‘Free, bold, wise and beautiful. Just. Noble.’

‘I’ve never heard anything of the sort!’ exclaimed Homer, hoping that the cunning devil wouldn’t win the girl over with this.

‘In the Metro,’ said Leonid, looking intently at the old man, ‘this place is known as the Emerald City. But according to the rumours, its inhabitants prefer a different name.’

‘And what’s that?’ Homer erupted.

‘The Ark.’

‘Drivel. Absolute drivel!’ the old man snorted and turned away.

‘Of course it’s drivel,’ the musician responded phlegmatically. ‘It’s just a story…’

Dobrynin had been overrun by chaos.

Homer looked around, perplexed and frightened. Could he be mistaken? Could something like this be happening at one of the calmer stations of the Circle Line? It looked to him as if someone had declared war on Hansa within the last half-hour. Peeping out of the parallel tunnel was a freight trolley with dead bodies piled up on it higgledy-piggledy. Military medical orderlies in aprons were dragging the bodies onto the platform and laying them out on tarpaulin sheets: one had been separated from its head, another one’s face had been reduced to pulp, the intestines were tumbling out of a third…

Homer covered Sasha’s eyes. Leonid filled his lungs with air and turned away.

‘What happened?’ one of the guards assigned to the threesome asked in a frightened voice.

‘It’s our watch from the large junction, with the Special Service Line. Every last man’s here. No one got away. And we don’t know who did it.’ The medical orderly wiped his hand on his apron. ‘Give me a light, will you, brother? My hands are shaking…’

The Special Service Line. A cobweb thread line that ran off behind the Pavelets radial line station, connecting four lines together – Circle, Grey, Orange and Green.

Homer had assumed that Hunter would choose that route, which was the shortest, although it was guarded by reinforced Hansa units.

What was all this bloodshed for? Did they open fire on him first, or did they not even spot him in the gloom of the tunnel? And where was he now? Oh God, another head… How could he do something like this?

Homer remembered the shattered mirror and what Sasha had said. Could she be right after all? Was the brigadier trying to restrain himself, trying to avoid killing unnecessarily, but unable to stop? And when he broke the mirror, was he really trying to strike the hideous, terrifying man that he was gradually turning into…

No, what Hunter had seen in the mirror wasn’t a man, but a genuine monster. That was who he had tried to crush. But he had only shattered the glass, transforming one reflection into dozens.

Or perhaps… The old man watched as the orderlies moved from the trolley to the platform… carrying the eighth man, the last… Perhaps it was the man who was still staring bleakly out of the mirror? The old Hunter? And that Other… was already on the outside?