Metro 2034

CHAPTER 16 In the Cage

In pitch darkness a person’s other senses become more acute. Smells become more vivid, sounds become louder and more three-dimensional. The only sound in the punishment cell was from someone or other scratching at the floor, and there was an unbearable stench of stale urine.

After drinking so much, the musician didn’t even seem able to feel his own pain. He carried on muttering something to himself under his breath for a while, then he stopped responding and started snuffling. He wasn’t alarmed that their pursuers were bound to catch up with them now. He wasn’t bothered about what would happen to Sasha, without any papers or justification for trying to cross the Hansa border. And of course, he was absolutely indifferent to the fate of Tula.

‘I hate you,’ Sasha said quietly.

He couldn’t care less about that either.

Soon a little hole appeared in the absolute gloom enveloping the cell – it was the glass spyhole in the door. Everything else remained invisible, but even this tiny gap was enough for Sasha: carefully groping her way through the blackness, she crept over to the door and unleashed her light little fists on it. The door responded by rumbling, but the moment Sasha stopped hammering it, silence returned. The guards refused to hear the din or Sasha’s shouts.

Time flowed on as slow as syrup.

How long would they hold them prisoner? Maybe Leonid had deliberately brought her here? Maybe he wanted to separate her from the old man and from Hunter? Tear her out of the team and lure her into a trap? And all of this only in order to…

Sasha started crying, burying her face in her sleeve – it absorbed the moisture and the sounds.

‘Have you ever seen the stars?’ asked a voice that still wasn’t sober.

She didn’t answer.

‘I’ve only ever seen them in photographs too,’ the musician told her. ‘The sun can barely break though the dust and the clouds, and they’re not strong enough for that. But your crying woke me up just now and I thought I’d suddenly seen a real star.’

‘It’s the spyhole,’ she answered, after swallowing her tears.

‘I know. But here’s the interesting thing…’ Leonid coughed. ‘Who was it that used to watch us from the sky, with a thousand eyes? And why did he turn his back on us?’

‘There never was anyone there!’ said Sasha, shaking her head abruptly.

‘But I’ve always wanted to believe that someone was keeping an eye on us,’ the musician said thoughtfully.

‘No one’s bothered about us, not even in this cell!’ she exclaimed and the tears welled up in her eyes again. ‘Did you arrange this specially? So we’d be too late?’ She started hammering on the door again.

‘If you don’t think there’s anyone there, why bother knocking?’ asked Leonid.

‘You couldn’t give a damn if all those sick people die!’

‘So that’s the impression I give, is it? That’s a shame,’ he sighed. ‘But as far as I can see, you’re not so desperate to get to those sick people either. You’re afraid that if your lover goes off to kill them, he’ll get infected himself, and there isn’t any cure…’

‘That’s not true!’ Sasha had to stop herself from hitting him.

‘It is, it’s true…’ said Leonid, mimicking her squeaky voice. ‘What’s so special about him?’

Sasha didn’t want to explain anything to him, she didn’t want to talk to him at all. But she couldn’t hold back.

‘He needs me! He really needs me, without me he’s doomed. But you don’t need me. You just haven’t got anyone to play with.’

‘Okay, let’s suppose he does need you. Not exactly desperately, but he wouldn’t say no. But what do you need him for, this ravenous wolf? Do you find villains attractive? Or do you want to save his lost soul?’

Sasha lapsed into silence. She was stung by how easily the musician could read her feelings. Perhaps there was nothing special about them? Or was it because she didn’t know how to hide them? That subtle, intangible something that she couldn’t even frame in words sounded quite banal, even crass, on his lips.

‘I hate you,’ she forced out at last.

‘That’s okay, I’m not so fond of me either,’ Leonid chuckled.

Sasha sat down on the floor and her tears started flowing again, first from anger, then from helplessness. She wasn’t going to give up, just as long as something still depended on her. But now, isolated in this cell, with a companion who was deaf to her hopes and fears, she had no chance of being heard any longer. Shouting was pointless. Banging on the door was pointless. There was no one she could try to convince. Everything was pointless.

And then suddenly a picture appeared in front of her eyes for a moment: tall buildings, a green sky, clouds scudding along, people laughing. And the hot, wet drops on her cheeks seemed like drops of that summer rain the old man had told her about. A second later the apparition disappeared, leaving only a light, magical mood behind.

‘I want a miracle,’ Sasha told herself stubbornly, biting on her lower lip.

And immediately a tumbler switch clicked loudly in the corridor, and the cell was flooded with unbearably bright light.

A blissful aura of peace and prosperity extended out for dozens of metres from the entrance to the marble shrine that was the sacred capital of the Metro – together with the white radiance of the mercury lamps. They weren’t sparing with light in Polis, because they believed in its magic. An abundance of light reminded people of their former lives, of those distant times when man was not yet a night animal, not yet a predator. And even barbarians from the periphery behaved with restraint here.

The checkpoint on the border of Polis was more like the front entrance of an old Soviet ministry than an armoured guard post: a table, a chair, two officers in clean staff uniforms, wearing their peaked caps. A check of documents, an inspection of personal effects. The old man fished his passport out of his pocket. Visas had supposedly been abolished, so there shouldn’t be any problems. He handed the little green folder to an officer and squinted sideways at the brigadier. Absorbed in his own thoughts, Hunter didn’t seem to have heard the border guard’s question. And did he have passport in any case, Homer wondered doubtfully. But if he didn’t, what had he been hoping for, hurrying here so fast?

‘I’m asking you for the last time,’ said the officer, placing one hand on his gleaming holster, ‘present your documents or leave Polis territory immediately!’

Homer wasn’t sure if the brigadier still hadn’t understood what they wanted from him and simply reacted to the movement of the fingers creeping towards the press stud of the holster. Instantly emerging from his strange dormant state, Hunter flung his open hand forward with lightning speed, staving in the sentry’s Adam’s apple. The man wheezed, turned blue and collapsed flat on his back, together with his chair. The other man tried to bolt, but the old man knew he wouldn’t make it. The implacable burnished pistol appeared in Hunter’s hand like an ace out of a cardsharp’s sleeve and…

‘Wait!’

The brigadier hesitated for a second, and that was enough for the fleeing soldier to scramble out onto the platform, go tumbling over and hide from the bullets.

‘Leave them! We have to get to Tula! You must… You asked me to remind you… Wait!’ The old man gasped for breath, not knowing what to say.

‘To Tula…’ Hunter repeated dully. ‘Yes, best to be patient until we get to Tula. You’re right.’ He sank down heavily onto a chair, put his heavy revolver down beside him and lowered his head. Seizing the moment, Homer raised his hands in the air and ran forward towards the guards who were darting out of the archways.

‘Don’t shoot! He surrenders! Don’t shoot! In the name of all that’s holy…’

But even so they twisted his arms behind his back and hurriedly tore off his respirator before allowing him to explain. The brigadier, who had fallen back into his strange lethargy, didn’t interfere. He allowed them to disarm him and walked submissively through into the holding cell. He sat down on a bunk, looked up, found the old man and gasped out:

‘You need to find a certain man here. He’s called Miller. Bring him here. I’ll wait…’

Homer nodded, fastidiously gathered up his things and started squeezing his way through the sentries and curious bystanders crowding round the door, when suddenly he heard his name called.

‘Homer!’

The old man froze in astonishment: Hunter had never called him by name before. He walked back to the lengths of reinforcing rods welded into unconvincing prison bars and looked enquiringly at Hunter, who was hugging himself with his massive hands, as if he were shivering with cold. And the brigadier spoke to him in a dull, lifeless voice:

‘Not for long.’

The door opened and a soldier looked in timidly – the same one who had lashed the musician across the face several hours earlier. A kick in the backside sent him flying into the cell and he almost tumbled over onto the floor, then straightened up and looked round uncertainly.

A lean-bodied soldier wearing glasses was standing in the doorway. The shoulder tabs on his tunic were covered with stars, his sparse, light-brown hair was sleeked back.

‘Gone on, you dumb beast,’ he hissed.

‘I… It’s…’ the border guard bleated.

‘Don’t be shy,’ the officer encouraged him.

‘I apologise for what I did. And you… you… I can’t do it.’

‘That’s an extra ten days.’

‘Hit me,’ the soldier said to Leonid, not knowing which way to look.

‘Ah, Albert Mikhailovich!’ said the musician, screwing up his eyes and smiling. ‘I was starting to get tired of waiting.’

‘Good evening,’ said the officer, also hitching up the corners of his lips. ‘See, I’ve come to restore justice. Are we going to take our revenge?’

‘I have to take care of my hands,’ said the musician, getting up and kneading his waist. ‘I think you can punish him.’

‘With all due severity,’ said Albert Mikhailovich, nodding. ‘A month in the guardhouse. And naturally, I add my apologies to this blockhead’s.’

‘Well, don’t get too spiteful with him,’ said Leonid, rubbing his bruised jaw.

‘Is this going to remain just between the two of us?’ The officer’s metallic voice grated treacherously, giving him away.

‘As you can see, I’m smuggling something out,’ the musician said with a brief nod in Sasha’s direction. ‘Can you relax the rules a bit?’

‘We’ll arrange it,’ Albert Mikhailovich promised.

They left the guilty border guard right there in the cell: after closing the bolt, the officer led them along a narrow corridor.

‘I won’t go any further with you,’ Sasha told the musician in a loud voice.

‘What if I told you that we really are going to that Emerald City?’ Leonid asked her after a moment’s pause, speaking in a voice so low she could barely hear it. ‘If I told you it’s no accident that I know more about it than your granddad? That I’ve seen it for myself, and not just seen it? That I’ve been there, and not just there…’

‘You’re lying!’

‘You know what?’ Leonid asked her angrily. ‘When you ask for a miracle, you have to be prepared to believe in it. Or you’ll miss it when it comes.’

‘And you also have to know how to tell miracles from conjuring tricks,’ Sasha snarled back. ‘You taught me that.’

‘I knew from the very beginning that they’d let us go,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that I didn’t want to hurry things.’

‘You just wanted to drag things out and waste time!’

‘But I wasn’t lying to you. There is a cure for the disease!’

They reached the frontier post. The officer, who had occasionally looked round at them curiously, handed the musician his belongings and returned his cartridges and documents.

‘Right then, Leonid Nikolaevich,’ he said, saluting. ‘Are we taking the contraband with us or leaving it with the customs?’

‘Taking it.’

‘In that case, peace and blessings upon you both,’ said Albert Mikhailovich. He accompanied them past a triple row of fortifications, past teams of machine-gunners who leapt up off their seats, past metal grilles and tank traps welded together out of rails. ‘I suppose no problems will arise with importation?’

‘We’ll break through,’ Leonid told him with a smile. ‘I shouldn’t say this to you, but honest bureaucrats don’t exist, and the harsher the regime, the lower the price. You just have to know who to pay it to.’

‘I think the magic word will be enough for you,’ the officer chuckled.

‘It doesn’t work on everyone yet,’ said Leonid, touching his cheekbone again. ‘As they say, I’m not a magician yet, I’m still studying.’

‘It will be a pleasure to do business with you… When you complete your studies.’ Albert Mikhailovich bowed his head, swung round and strode away.

The last soldier opened a small gate through the thick bars of a grille that blocked off the tunnel from top to bottom. The stretch of line that began beyond it was brightly lit, and its walls were scorched in some places and chipped in others, as if from long fire-fights: at the far end of it they could see new bands of fortifications and the broad swathes of banners stretched between the floor and the ceiling. The sight of them was enough to set Sasha’s heart pounding.

‘Whose frontier post is this?’ she asked, coming to a sharp halt.

‘What do you mean, whose?’ the musician asked, looking at her in amazement. ‘The Red Line’s, of course.’

Ah, how long Homer had dreamed of being back here again, how long it was since he’d been in these wonderful places…

At Borovitskaya Station, that residence of the intelligentsia, with its sweet smell of creosote and cosy little apartments, built right there in the arches, and its reading-room for Brahmin monks in the middle of the hall – long wooden tables piled high with books, low-hanging lamps with fabric shades – and its astoundingly precise reproduction of the spirit of the ‘debating-hall kitchens’ of the crisis period and pre-war years…

At regal Arbat Station, decked out in white and bronze, almost like the chambers of the Kremlin, with its austere manners and brisk military men, who still puffed out their cheeks, as if they weren’t involved at all in the Apocalypse…

At the old, indeed ancient, Lenin Library Station, which they’d never got round to renaming while it still made any kind of sense to rename it, which was already as old as the world when Kolya first arrived in the Metro as a little kid, the Library, with its connecting passage in the form of a romantic captain’s bridge, right in the middle of the platform, with its painstakingly and skilfully restored moulding work on the leaky ceiling…

And at Alexander Gardens, with its perpetually dim lighting, long-limbed and angular, in a way that reminded Homer of some weak-sighted gouty pensioner, constantly reminiscing about his young days in the Komsomol.

Homer had always wondered if the stations were like their creators. Could they be thought of as their designers’ self-portraits? Had they absorbed particles of the people who built them? One thing he knew for certain: each station left its own imprint on the people who lived in it, sharing its character with them and infecting them with its own moods and ailments. But Homer, with his peculiar cast of mind, his eternal pondering, and his incurable nostalgia, belonged, of course, not to stern Sebastopol, but to Polis, as bright as the past itself.

Only life had dictated otherwise.

And even now, when he had finally got here, he didn’t have even a few spare minutes to stroll through these halls, to admire the plaster mouldings and bronze castings, to indulge his fantasies.

He had to run. With a struggle, Hunter had managed to muzzle someone inside himself, to cage that terrible creature that he fed from time to time with human flesh. But once it bent apart the bars of that inner cage, a moment later there would be nothing left of the feeble bars on the outside. Homer had to hurry.

Hunter had asked him to find Miller. Was that a real name or a nickname? Or maybe a password? Spoken aloud, it had produced a startling effect on the sentries: talk of a court martial for the arrested brigadier had dried up, and the handcuffs that were about to be clicked onto Homer’s wrists were put back in the desk drawer. The pot-bellied head of the watch had volunteered to show the old man the way in person.

Homer and his guide walked up a flight of steps and along the connecting passage to Arbat. They stopped at a door guarded by two men in civilian clothes, with faces that stated very clearly that they were professional killers. Behind them he could see a vista of office rooms. The pot-bellied man asked Homer to wait for a moment and tramped off along the corridor. Less than three minutes later, he came back out, looked the old man over in amazement and invited him to go in.

The cramped corridor led them to a surprisingly spacious room with all its walls hung with maps and diagrams or overgrown with notes and coded messages, photographs and sketches. A bony, elderly man with shoulders as wide as if he was wearing a Caucasian felt cloak was enthroned at a broad oak desk. Only his left arm protruded from the tunic thrown across his shoulders, and when Homer looked closely, he realised why: the man’s right arm was almost completely missing. The owner of the office was immensely tall – his eyes were almost on the same level as the eyes of the old man standing facing him.

‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing the pot-bellied officer, who closed the door from the other side with obvious regret. ‘Who are you?’

‘Nikolai Ivanovich Nikolaev,’ the old man said, disconcerted.

‘Drop the clowning. If you come to me, saying that you’re with my very closest comrade, whom I laid to rest a year ago, you must have a reason for it. Who are you?’

‘No one…’ said Homer, with perfect sincerity. ‘But this isn’t about me. It’s true, he’s alive. You just have to come with me, and quickly.’

‘So now I’m wondering if this is a trap, an idiotic hoax or simply a mistake.’ Miller lit a papyrosa and blew smoke into the old man’s face. ‘If you know his name and you’ve chosen to come to me with this, you must know his story. You must know that we searched for him every day for more than a year. That we lost several men in the process. You must know, damn you, how much he meant to us. Perhaps even that he was my right hand.’ He gave a crooked smile.

‘No, none of that. He doesn’t tell me anything,’ said the old man, pulling his head down into his shoulders. ‘Please, let’s just go to Borovitskaya. There’s not much time.’

‘No, I won’t go running off anywhere. And I have a good reason for that.’

Miller put his hand under the table, made a strange movement with it and moved back in some incredible fashion, without getting up. It took Homer a few seconds to realise that he was sitting in a wheelchair.

‘So let’s talk calmly. I want to understand the meaning of your appearance here.’

‘Lord,’ said the old man, despairing of ever getting through to this blockhead. ‘Please, just believe me. He’s alive. And he’s sitting in the holding cell at Borovitskaya. At least, I hope he’s still there…’

‘I’d like to believe you,’ Miller said and paused to take a deep pull on his papyrosa – the old man heard the cigarette paper crackling as it curled up and caught fire. ‘Only miracles don’t happen. All right. I have my own theories about whose hoax this is. But they’ll be tested by specially trained men.’ He reached for the phone.

‘Why is he so afraid of black men?’ Homer asked unexpectedly, surprising even himself.

Miller cautiously put down the receiver without saying a word into it. He dragged the rest of the papyrosa into his lungs, right down to the end, and spat out the short cardboard butt into an ashtray.

‘Damn you, I’ll take a ride to Borovitskaya,’ he said.

‘I won’t go in there! Let me go! I’d rather stay here…’

Sasha wasn’t joking or being capricious. It would be hard to think of anyone her father had hated more than the Reds. They had taken away his power, they had broken his back, but instead of simply finishing him off, out of pity or sheer prudishness they had condemned him to years of humiliation and torment. Her father hadn’t been able to forgive the people who rebelled against him. He hadn’t been able to forgive the men who inspired the traitors and egged them on, or those who supplied them with weapons and leaflets. The very colour red sent him into paroxysms of furious rage. And although at the end of his life he used to say that he bore no grudges against anyone and didn’t want revenge, Sasha had had the feeling that he was simply making excuses for his own powerlessness.

‘It’s the only way to get there,’ Leonid said in dismay.

‘We were going to Kiev! That’s not where you’ve brought me!’

‘Hansa has been fighting the Red Line for decades, I couldn’t let just anyone know that we were going to the communists… I had to lie.’

‘You can’t do anything without lying.’

‘The door is on the far side of Sport Station, as I said. And Sport is the last station on the Red Line before the ruined Metro bridge, there’s no way to get around that.’

‘How will we get in there? I don’t have a passport,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed warily on the musician.

‘Trust me,’ he said with a smile. ‘One person can always reach a deal with another. Long live corruption!’

Ignoring Sasha’s objections, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her after him. Blazing brightly in the glare of the searchlights in the second line of the frontier post, the gigantic red banners hanging from the ceiling rippled in the tunnel draught, making the girl feel as if she was looking at two glittering red waterfalls. A sign?

If what she had heard about the Line was right, the Reds ought to riddle them with bullets on the approaches… But Leonid strode forward calmly, with his lips set in a confident smile. About thirty metres from the frontier post the broad beam of a searchlight struck his chest. The musician simply set his flute case on the ground and raised his hands in the air. Sasha did the same.

The border inspectors walked up to them, looking sleepy and surprised. It seemed as if they had never met anyone from the other side of the border. This time the musician managed to take the senior officer off to one side before he asked for Sasha’s documents. Leonid whispered something delicately in his ear, there was a faint jingle of brass and the head of the border unit came back spellbound and pacified. He escorted them past the guard posts in person and even put them on a hand trolley that was waiting, ordering the soldiers to go to Frunze Station.

They started working the levers, puffing and panting, as they got the trolley started. Sasha frowned as she studied the clothes and the faces of these men her father had taught her to call enemies. Nothing unusual. Padded jackets; blotchy, washed-out caps with stars pinned to them, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks… No, they didn’t have glossy skin, like the Hansa patrolmen, but they were certainly no less human. They had a gleam of absolutely boyish curiosity in their eyes, a feeling that was apparently completely unknown to those who lived on the Circle. These two had almost certainly never heard about what happened at Avtozavod Station almost ten years earlier. Were they Sasha’s enemies? Was it even possible to hate people you didn’t know, not just formally, but genuinely?

Not daring to strike up a conversation with their passengers, the soldiers merely grunted regularly as they leaned down on the levers.

‘How did you manage it?’ Sasha asked.

‘Hypnosis,’ said Leonid, winking at her.

‘But what were those documents you showed them?’ she asked, looking at the musician suspiciously. ‘How can they get you allowed in everywhere?’

‘Different passports for different occasions,’ he replied evasively.

‘Who are you?’ So that the others wouldn’t hear, Sasha was obliged to sit close beside Leonid.

‘An observer,’ he said with just his lips.

If Sasha hadn’t clamped her mouth shut, the questions would have come pouring out, but the soldiers were too obviously trying to catch the sense of their conversation, even trying to make the levers creak as quietly as possible. She had to wait until Frunze Station – withered, faded and pale, rouged with red flags. Pockmarked mosaics on the walls, columns nibbled on by time… Ceiling vaults like dark millponds, with feeble light bulbs dangling from wires stretched between the columns at a height slightly above the heads of the short local inhabitants, in order not to let a single ray of precious light go to waste. It was incredibly clean here: several cleaning ladies were scurrying around the platform at the same time. The station was crowded, but the strange thing was that whichever way Sasha looked, everyone started fidgeting and bustling about, although behind her back all the movement immediately ceased and subdued voices started murmuring. The moment she looked back, the murmuring stopped and people went back to their business. And no one wanted to look into her eyes, as if there was something indecent about it.

‘Are strangers unusual here?’ she asked, looking at Leonid.

‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ the musician said with a shrug.

‘Where are you at home?’

‘Where people aren’t so deadly serious,’ he laughed. ‘Where they understand that a man can’t be saved with just food. Where they don’t want to forget yesterday, even though the memories are painful.’

‘Tell me about the Emerald City,’ Sasha said in a quiet voice. ‘Why do they… Why do you hide?’

‘The rulers of the City don’t trust the inhabitants of the Metro.’

Leonid broke off to explain himself to the sentries on duty at the entrance to the tunnel and then, as he and Sasha dived into the intense darkness, he set a little light on the wick of an oil lamp with a metal cigarette lighter and continued.

‘They don’t trust them, because the people in the Metro are gradually losing their human nature. And because they still have among them the people who started that terrible war, although they’re afraid to admit it, even to their friends. Because the people in the Metro are beyond redemption. They can only be feared, avoided and observed. If they find out about the Emerald City, they’ll just gobble it down and puke it up, the same way they gobble everything they get their hands on. All the canvases of the great artists will be burnt. All the paper, and everything that was on it, will be burnt. The only society that has achieved justice and equality will be annihilated. Drained bloodless, the University building will collapse. The Great Ark will founder and sink. And there’ll be nothing left. Vandals…’

‘Why do you think we can’t change?’ asked Sasha, feeling offended.

‘Not everyone thinks that,’ said Leonid, giving her a sideways glance. ‘Some are trying to do something.’

‘They’re not trying very hard,’ Sasha sighed, ‘if even my old Homer hasn’t heard about them.’

‘But then some people have actually heard them,’ he remarked suggestively.

‘You mean… the music?’ Sasha guessed. ‘Are you one of those who hope to change us? But how?’

‘By coercing you into the love of beauty,’ the musician joked.

The wheelchair was pushed by an adjutant, and the old man walked alongside, barely managing to keep up and looking round every now and then at the burly security guard attached to him.

‘If you really don’t know the whole story,’ said Miller, ‘then I’m willing to tell you it. You can amuse your cellmates with it, if I see the wrong man at Borovitskaya… Hunter was one of the Order’s finest warriors, a genuine hunter, in more than just name. His intuition was positively feral, and he dedicated himself to the cause absolutely. He was the one who sniffed out those Black Ones a year and a half ago… At the Economic Achievements Station. Hasn’t anybody heard about that at all?’

‘At Achievements…’ the old man repeated after him absent-mindedly. ‘Well yes, invulnerable mutants who could read people’s minds and make themselves invisible… I thought they were called the Dark Ones?’

‘That’s not important,’ Miller snapped. ‘He was the first to dig up the rumours and sound the alarm, but just then we didn’t have the men or the time… I told him no. I was busy with other matters…’ He gestured with his stump. ‘Hunter went up there on his own. The last time he was in contact with me, he said that those creatures suppressed people’s will and spread terror throughout the district. And Hunter was a simply incredible fighter, a born soldier who was worth an entire platoon all on his own…’

‘I know,’ muttered Homer.

‘And he was never afraid of anything. He sent us a boy with a note saying he was going up onto the surface to deal with the Black Ones. If he disappeared, it meant the threat was worse than he had thought. He disappeared. He was killed. We have our own reporting system. Everyone who’s alive is obliged to let us know every week. Obliged to do so! He hasn’t been in touch for more than a year.’

‘And what about the Black Ones?’

‘We flattened the entire area thoroughly with Whirlwind rocket salvoes. Since then nothing has been heard of the Black Ones either,’ Miller chuckled. ‘They don’t write, they don’t phone in. The exits at Achievements were closed off and life there has returned to normal. That boy also had mental problems, but as far as I know, he’s been restored to health. He lives a normal human life, he got married. But Hunter… He’s on my conscience.’

He trundled down the steel ramp from the steps, startling and scattering the book-loving monks at the bottom of it, then swung round, waited for the panting old man and added:

‘Don’t tell your cellmates that last part.’

A minute later the entire procession finally reached the holding cell. Miller didn’t open the door of the cell: bracing himself on the adjutant, he gritted his teeth, stood up and pressed his eye to the spyhole. A split second was enough.

Absolutely exhausted, as if he had covered the entire distance from Arbat on foot, with his infirmities, Miller fell back into his chair, ran his dead gaze over the old man and pronounced sentence.

‘It’s not him.’

‘I don’t think my music belongs to me,’ Leonid said with sudden seriousness. ‘I don’t understand where it comes into my head from. It seems to me that I’m just a channel… Simply an instrument. In the same way as I put my lips to my flute when I want to play, someone else puts his lips to me – and a melody is born…’

‘Inspiration,’ Sasha whispered.

‘You can call it that.’ He spread his arms in a shrug. ‘Whatever way it is, it doesn’t belong to me. I don’t have any right to keep it inside me. It… travels through people. I start playing, and I see these rich people and beggars gather round, all covered in scabs or shiny and greasy, angry ones and wretched ones and great ones. Everyone. And my music does something to them that tunes them all to the same key. I’m like a tuning fork… I can bring them into harmony, if not for long. And they’ll chime so pure and clear… They’ll sing. How can I explain that?’

‘You explain it very well,’ Sasha said thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I felt myself.’

‘I have to try to plant this in them,’ Leonid added. ‘In some of them it will die, in some it will sprout. I don’t save anyone. I don’t have the authority for that.’

‘But why don’t the other people who live in the City want to help us? Why are even you afraid to admit that you’re doing this?’

He didn’t answer, and he remained silent until the tunnel ran into Sport Station, which was just as faded and withered, affectedly triumphant and mournful at the same time, but it was also low and cramped, so that it weighed down heavily, like tight bandages round the head. This place smelled of smoke and sweat, poverty and pride. Sasha and Leonid were immediately assigned a nark, who loitered exactly ten steps away from them, wherever they went. The girl wanted to move on straight away, but the musician threw cold water on the idea.

‘We can’t go right now. We’ll have to wait a bit’ He settled himself comfortably on a stone bench and clicked the locks on his flute case.

‘Why?’

‘The gates can only be opened at specified times,’ said Leonid, looking away.

‘When?’ Sasha looked round and found a clock. If it was correct, less than half of the time allotted to her was left.

‘I’ll tell you.’

‘You’re dragging things out again!’ She frowned and pulled back from him. ‘First you promise to help, then you try to delay me!’

‘Yes,’ he said, gathering his courage and catching her eye. ‘I want to delay you.’

‘Why? What for?’

‘I’m not playing games with you. Believe me, I could have found someone to play with, and not many would have refused. I think I’ve fallen in love. My, my, how clunky that sounds…’

‘You think… You don’t even think it! You’re just saying it, that’s all.’

‘There is a way to tell love from a game,’ he said seriously.

‘When you deceive someone in order to get them, is that love?’

‘Real love shatters your entire life, it doesn’t give a damn for circumstances, including games with all the rest…’

‘I take a simpler view,’ said Sasha, glowering at him. ‘I’ve never had any life. Take me to the door.’

Leonid stared gravely at the girl, leaned against a column and crossed his arms, fencing himself off from her. He filled his lungs with air several times, as if he was going to rebuke her, but let it back out again without saying anything. Then he wilted, his face darkened and he made a confession:

‘I can’t go with you. They won’t let me back in.’

‘What does that mean?’ Sasha asked mistrustfully.

‘I can’t go back into the Ark. I was banished.’

‘Banished? What for?’

‘For good reason.’ He turned away and started speaking very quietly – even standing just one step away from him, Sasha couldn’t make it all out. ‘I… was insulted by someone. An attendant at a library. He humiliated me in front of witnesses. That night I got drunk and set fire to the library. The attendant and all his family were suffocated by the fumes. It’s a pity we don’t have capital punishment… I deserved it. I was just banished. For life. There’s no way back.’

‘Then what did you bring me here for?’ Sasha clenched her fists. ‘Why did you burn up my time too?’

‘You can try to attract their attention,’ Leonid muttered. ‘The door’s in a side tunnel, and there’s a mark in white paint twenty metres from it. Directly underneath the mark, at ground level, there’s a rubber cover and the button of the bell is underneath that. You have to give three short rings, three long ones and three short ones, that’s the code for returning observers.’

He really did stay at the station – after helping Sasha to make her way past all three guard posts he strolled back. As they parted, he tried to make her take an old sub-machine-gun that he’d got hold of from somewhere, but Sasha wouldn’t have it. Three short rings, three long rings and three short rings – that was all that could be any use to her now. And a lantern.

The tunnels after Sport Station were gloomy and empty. The station was regarded as the last one on the line, and every guard post that the musician showed her through looked more like a small fortress than the one before. But Sasha wasn’t afraid, not at all. The only thing she was thinking about was that in an hour, or an hour and a half, she would be on the threshold of the Emerald City.

And if the City didn’t exist, there was absolutely no point in being afraid.

The side tunnel was exactly where Leonid had promised it would be, blocked by a badly damaged grille, in which Sasha easily found a gap wide enough to get through. And several hundred steps further on it really did end in the steel wall of a hermetic door – ancient and impregnable. Sasha diligently measured out forty of her own steps from it and spotted a white mark on the wall, which was damp, as if it was sweating. She found the cover immediately. Bending back the rubber, she felt for the bell button and checked the watch that the musician had given her. She was in time! She was in time! She waited for a few more agonisingly long minutes and closed her eyes…

Three short rings.

Three long rings.

Three short rings.