Metro 2034

CHAPTER 5 Memory

Sasha ran over to the window and flung the shutters wide open, letting in the fresh air and the tentative light. The wooden window ledge hung over the very edge of a bottomless precipice, filled with delicate morning mist that would disperse with the first rays of sunshine, and then the view from the window would extend beyond the gorge to the distant mountain spurs with their covering of pine trees and the green meadows extending between them, the matchbox country houses scattered across the valley and the cartridge cases of the bell towers.

The early morning was her time. She could sense the approach of day and always rose before the sun did, waking half an hour ahead of dawn in order to walk up onto the mountain. Behind their warm, cosy little shack, kept so clean that it positively gleamed, a stony track with yellow flowers along its edges wound its way up the slope. Crumbs of stone scattered downwards from under her feet, and in the few minutes it took to reach the summit Sasha sometimes fell several times, bruising her knees.

Lost in thought, Sasha wiped the damp breath of night off the window ledge with her sleeve. She had been dreaming of something gloomy, dark and bad, something that cancelled out the entire carefree life she had now, but the final traces of her alarming visions evaporated with the first touch of the cool wind on her skin. And now she couldn’t be bothered to remember what had distressed her so badly in her dream. She had to hurry to the summit to greet the sun and then hurry home, slithering down the track – to cook breakfast and wake her father, to pack the bundle for his journey. And then, while he was hunting, Sasha would have the whole day to herself, and she could chase the clumsy dragonflies and flying cockroaches through the meadow flowers, as yellow as the patterned panels in the Metro carriages.

She tiptoed across the squeaky floorboards, opened the door a crack and laughed quietly.

It was years since Sasha’s father had seen such a happy smile on her face, and he hated the idea of waking her up. His leg had swollen and gone numb. The bleeding hadn’t stopped at all. They said that bites from the wandering dogs didn’t heal.

Should he call her? But he’d been away from home for more than twenty-four hours – before he went to the garages, he’d decided to visit one of the high-rise, concrete-panel termite nests two blocks away from the station, clambered up to the sixteenth floor and then passed out. And all that time Sasha hadn’t slept a wink – his daughter never went to sleep until he came back from his ‘stroll’. ‘Let her rest,’ he thought. ‘It’s all lies. Nothing’s going to happen.’ He would have liked to know what she was seeing in her dream right now. He could never completely escape, even in his dreams. Only very rarely did his subconscious release him for a couple of hours for a visit to his carefree youth. Usually he was forced to wander through the familiar dead houses with their scrapedout interiors, and a good dream was one in which he suddenly discovered an untouched apartment full of appliances and books that had somehow miraculously survived intact. As he fell asleep, he always asked to be taken back into the past. He longed most of all to find himself in that time when he had just met Sasha’s mother: when he was only twenty years old and already commanded the garrison of the station, which all its inhabitants still thought of as a temporary refuge, not the general barracks for a slave-labour mine in which they were serving a life sentence.

But instead of that he was tossed back into the more recent past, into the thick of those events five years ago. To the day that had sealed his fate and – even more terribly – his daughter’s fate. In his rational mind he had accepted his defeat and his exile, but he only had to fall into a doze for his heart to start demanding revenge.

Once again he was standing in front of a line of his soldiers with their Kalashnikovs at the ready – in that situation, the Makarov pistol to which his officer’s rank entitled him was worse than useless, except perhaps to shoot himself. Apart from the twenty or so machine-gunners behind his back, there was no one left at the station who was still loyal to him.

The crowd surged and seethed, growing larger and larger, swaying the barrier to and fro with dozens of hands. Then, at a flourish of some invisible conductor’s baton, the ragged hubbub swelled into a coordinated chorus. So far they were only demanding his dismissal, but in another minute they would want his head.

This was no spontaneous demonstration: it was the work of provocateurs sent in from the outside. At this stage it was pointless even trying to identify them and liquidate them one by one. The only thing he could do now to halt the rebellion and maintain his grip on power was order his men to open fire on the crowd. It still wasn’t too late for that.

His fingers clutched an invisible gun butt, the pupils of his eyes raced about under his swollen eyelids, his lips moved, uttering inaudible orders. The black puddle he was lying in spread wider and wider by the minute, as if it was drawing energy from his departing life.

‘Where are they?’

Jerked out of the dark waters of oblivion, Homer started flapping about like a perch caught on a bright spinner, gasping convulsively and gaping at the brigadier with wild, crazy eyes. The massive, cyclopean bulks of the twilight guardians of Nagornaya were still there, crowding together in front of his eyes, reaching out to him with those long, articulated fingers that could easily tear off his leg or crush his ribs. They surrounded the old man every time he closed his eyes, and they melted away slowly and reluctantly when he opened them again. Homer tried to jump to his feet, but the hand that was gently squeezing his shoulder turned back into the steely hook that had dragged him out of his nightmare. Gradually moderating his breathing, he focused on the face furrowed with scars, on the dark eyes that glimmered with an oily mechanical glint… Hunter? Alive? The old man cautiously turned his head to the left, then to the right, afraid of finding himself back at the bewitched station.

No, they were in the middle of a clear, empty tunnel – the fog that blanketed the approaches to Nagornaya was barely even noticeable here. Hunter must have carried him for almost half a kilometre, Homer calculated feverishly. Feeling calmer now, he allowed himself go limp, but still asked again, to make sure:

‘Where are they?’

‘There’s no one here. You’re safe.’

‘Those creatures… Did they attack me? Knock me out?’ The old man grimaced and rubbed the smarting lump on the back of his head.

‘I hit you. I had to, to stop your hysterics. You could have shot me, firing like that.’

Hunter finally released his vice-like grip, straightened up stiffly and ran one hand along his broad officer’s belt. On the opposite side from the holster with his Stechkin revolver was a leather case, with some purpose that wasn’t clear. The brigadier clicked a button and took out a flat copper flask. He shook it, opened it and took a large swallow, without offering Homer any. Then he squeezed his eyes shut for a second, apparently in pleasure. The old man felt a chilly shudder when he saw that the brigadier’s left eye couldn’t even close properly.

‘But where’s Ahmed? What happened to Ahmed?’ asked Homer, suddenly remembering and starting to shake again.

‘He’s dead,’ the brigadier said indifferently.

‘He’s dead,’ the old man repeated resignedly.

When the monster tore his comrade’s hand out of his, Homer had realised no living soul could ever wriggle out of those claws. He’d just been lucky that Nagornaya’s choice had not fallen on him. The old man looked round again – somehow he couldn’t believe straight away that Ahmed had disappeared forever. Homer looked at his own palm – it was torn and bleeding. He hadn’t been able to hold on. He suddenly felt short of air.

‘But Ahmed knew he was doomed,’ he said quietly. ‘Why did they take him, and not me?’

‘There was a lot of life in him,’ the brigadier replied. ‘They feed on human lives.’

‘It’s not fair,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘He’s got little children, he still has so much to live for! He had… And I’m just a wanderer, tumbleweed.’

‘Well, would you eat dry moss?’ asked Hunter, breaking off the conversation and setting Homer on his feet in one swift movement. ‘That’s it, let’s go. Or we might be too late.’

Trotting awkwardly after Hunter, who had moved up into a jog, the old man racked his brains, trying to figure out how they could have gone back to Nagornaya. The station had drugged them with its narcotic exhalations, like some predatory orchid, luring them back to itself. They hadn’t turned back at all – Homer could have sworn to that. He was almost prepared to believe in the spatial distortions that he once loved to tell stories about to his gullible comrades in the watch, but then he realised it was all much simpler than that. The old man stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: the reversing tunnel! A few hundred metres beyond Nagornaya, between the bores of the right and left tunnels, a single-track line branched off, running off to the side at a narrow angle: it was for reversing the direction of trains. Feeling their way along the wall, first they’d got onto the parallel line, and then – when the wall disappeared – they’d turned back towards the station by mistake. ‘Nothing mystical about it,’ Homer thought uncertainly. But there was something else he wanted to get clear.

‘Hey!’ he called to Hunter. ‘Wait!’

Hunter carried on marching forwards as if he was deaf, and the old man had to fight his breathlessness and pick up his own pace. Drawing level with the brigadier, Homer tried to glance into his eyes and blurted out:

‘Why did you abandon us?’

‘I abandoned you?’

The old man thought he heard a note of mockery in the passionless, metallic voice, and he bit his tongue. It was true, he and Ahmed were the ones who had fled from the station, leaving the brigadier to face the demons alone.

Remembering how furiously and yet fruitlessly Hunter had fought at Nagornaya, Homer couldn’t rid himself of the impression that the inhabitants of the station had simply rejected the battle that the brigadier tried to impose on them. Were they afraid? Or did they sense a kindred spirit in him? The old man plucked up his courage: there was one question left, the simplest of all.

‘Tell me, Hunter, back there in Nagornaya… Why didn’t they touch you?’

Several minutes passed in heavy, painful silence – Homer didn’t dare to insist – until the brigadier finally gave him a brief, morose, almost inaudible answer.

‘They couldn’t stomach me.’

‘Beauty will save the world,’ her father used to joke.

Sasha would blush and hide the empty plastic packet that once contained powdered tea in the breast pocket of her overalls. This little square of plastic, which, against all the odds, had kept its aroma of green tea, was her greatest treasure. It was also a reminder that the universe was not confined to the headless trunk of their station with its four stumps of tunnel, dug at a depth of twenty metres below the graveyard city of Moscow. It was a magical portal that could transport Sasha through decades of time and across thousands of kilometres. And there was something else, something boundlessly important. In the damp climate here, any paper faded and withered as rapidly as a consumptive. The mould and putrefaction devoured more than just the books and magazines – they exterminated the past itself. Without images or records of events, human memory was left like a lame man without crutches – it stumbled about in confusion and lost its way.

But that little packet was made of plastic impervious to mildew and time. Sasha’s father once told her it would be thousands of years before it started to decompose. That meant her descendants would be able to pass it on as an heirloom, she thought. It was an absolutely genuine picture, even if it was a miniature. The golden border, still as bright as the day the little packet came off the production line, framed a view that took Sasha’s breath away. Sheer cliff faces submerged in dreamy mist, wide-spreading pine trees clinging to the almost vertical slopes, tumultuous waterfalls crashing down from the heights into the abyss, a scarlet glow in the sky and the sun just on the point of rising… Sasha had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.

She could sit for ages with the packet laid out on her palm, admiring it, and her gaze was drawn right into that early morning mist shrouding the distant mountains. Although she devoured all the books that her father found before she sold them on for cartridges, the words she read in them were not enough to describe the way she felt when she gazed at those centimetre-high cliffs and breathed the scent of those painted pine trees. The impossibility of this dream world – which was also what made it so incredibly attractive… The sweet yearning and eternal anticipation of what the sun would see for the first time… The endless re-examination – what could be hidden behind the idiotic block of colour with the name of the brand of tea on it? An unusual tree? An eagle’s nest? A little house clinging to the slope, where she and her father could live?

Her father had brought Sasha the little packet when she was not yet five – and it was full then, a great rarity! He wanted to amaze his daughter with genuine tea. She drank it stoically, like medicine, but she was genuinely astounded by the plastic packet. At the time he had had to explain to her what the naïve picture showed: a generalised landscape from a mountainous Chinese province, perfectly suited for printing on packs of tea. But ten years later Sasha still examined her present just as wonderingly as on the day she first received it.

Her father, however, thought the packet was Sasha’s pitiful substitute for the whole world. And when his daughter fell into a blissful trance, contemplating this daubed fantasy by some failed artist, he felt as if she was rebuking him for her own meagre, homeless life. He always tried to repress the impulse, but he could never hold out for long: barely even concealing his irritation, he asked Sasha for the hundredth time what she saw in a scrap of packaging from a gramme of tea dust.

And she hid the little masterpiece in the pocket of her overalls and answered awkwardly: ‘Dad… I think it’s so beautiful!’

If not for Hunter, who didn’t stop for a second all the way to Nagatino, Homer would have taken three times as long to cover the distance. He would never have risked dashing self-assuredly through these tunnels like that.

Their team had paid a terrible toll for the passage through Nagornaya – but two out of three had survived. And all three would have survived, if they hadn’t lost their way in the fog. The charge was no higher than usual; nothing had happened to them at Nakhimov Prospect or Nagornaya that hadn’t happened there before.

So the problem lay in the stretches of tunnel that led to Tula? They were quiet now, but it was a bad silence, filled with tension. Hunter could sense danger hundreds of metres away, it was true, he could tell what to expect at stations he’d never been to before – but what if his intuition betrayed him down in these tunnels, just as it had betrayed many experienced soldiers before him?

Maybe it was Nagatino, moving closer with every step they took, that held the answer to the riddle? Struggling to restrain his wild thoughts, which were churning rapidly because he was walking too fast, Homer tried to imagine what could be waiting for them at the station he used to love so much. The old man with an unquenchable passion for collecting myths could easily picture the scene if the legendary Embassy of Satan had been set up at Nagatino or it had been gnawed away by rats migrating in search of food through their own tunnels, inaccessible to humans.

Yes, if the old man had found himself in these stretches of tunnel on his own, he would have moved far more slowly, but nothing would have made him turn back. During the years spent at Sebastopol, Homer had forgotten how to fear death. He had set off on this expedition, well aware that it could be his last adventure, and he was prepared to give all the time he had left for it.

But barely half an hour after his encounter with the monsters at Nagornaya, he had already forgotten his terror. And beyond that, he could sense a vague, timid stirring somewhere inside himself, somewhere in the depths of his soul. Something was being born, or awakening – the thing he had been waiting for, asking for. The thing he had sought for in his most dangerous expeditions, the thing he couldn’t find at home.

So now he had a cogent reason for struggling with all his might to postpone death for a while. He couldn’t allow himself to die before he had completed his work. The Final War had been much fiercer and more violent than any that preceded it – which was why it had been over in a matter of days. Three entire generations had passed since World War Two, and its final veterans had gone to their eternal sleep, leaving the living without any real fear of the memory of war. From being a form of mass insanity that deprived millions of people of everything that was human, it had once again become a standard instrument of politics. The stakes had been raised too fast, there simply wasn’t enough time to make correct decisions. The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons had been brushed aside in passing, in the heat of the moment: the shotgun hung on the wall in the first act of the drama had been fired after all in the penultimate act. And it didn’t matter any longer who had pressed the fateful button first.

Almost all the major cities on earth had simultaneously been reduced to rubble and ash. Those few cities that were protected by anti-rocket defence shields also gave up the ghost, although at first sight they appeared almost untouched: hard radiation, military poisons and biological weapons wiped out their populations. The fragile radio contact established between the scattered handfuls of survivors was finally broken off only a few years later, and from then on for the inhabitants of the Metro the world ended at the frontier stations on the inhabited lines.

The Earth, which had seemed so thoroughly studied and so small, had once again become the boundless ocean of chaos and obscurity that it used to be in ancient times. One by one, the tiny islands of civilisation sank into its murky depths: deprived of oil and electric power, man rapidly reverted to a wild state. An era of stagnation was beginning.

For centuries scientists had lovingly restored the fabric of history from scraps of papyruses and parchments that they discovered, from fragments of legal codes and old folios. With the invention of printing and the appearance of newspapers, the presses had carried on weaving the fabric out of events covered by the newspapers. There were no gaps in the chronicles of the last two centuries: every gesture and every utterance of the leaders who controlled the destinies of the world had been thoroughly documented. Then suddenly, in a single instant all the world’s printing presses had been destroyed or abandoned forever.

The looms of history had stopped weaving. Few had any interest in it, in a world with no future. The broad fabric came to a sudden end, leaving only a slim thread intact.

For the first few years after the catastrophe Homer – who was still Nikolai Ivanovich then – roamed through the overcrowded stations, desperately hoping to find his family in one of them. When hope departed, he carried on wandering, orphaned and lost, through the darkness of the Metro, not knowing what to do with himself in this afterlife. Existence had lost its meaning, the ball of thread that could have shown him, like Ariadne, the right path to follow through the endless labyrinth of tunnels, had fallen from his grasp.

Pining for times gone by, he started collecting magazines that allowed him to remember a bit, to dream a bit. As he pondered the question of whether the apocalypse could have been avoided, he became fascinated by the articles and analyses in newspapers. Then he started writing a bit himself, imitating the news articles, and describing events at the stations where he had been.

And so it happened that Nikolai Ivanovich picked up a new guiding thread to replace the one he had lost: he decided to become a chronicler, the author of a modern history – from the End of the World to his own end. His haphazard and purposeless collecting acquired meaning. Now he had to make a painstaking effort to restore the damaged fabric of time and continue weaving it by hand. Other people regarded Nikolai Ivanovich’s passion as harmless eccentricity. He would happily hand over a day’s ration for old newspapers, and at every station destiny took him to, he fitted out his own little corner, transforming it into a genuine archive. He joined the watches, because round the campfires at three hundred metres from the station, stern-faced men started telling tall stories, and Nikolai Ivanovich could fish information out of them about what was happening at the far end of the Metro. He collated and compared dozens of rumours in order to sift the facts out of them, then neatly filed the facts away in his school exercise books. The work was a good way of occupying his mind, but Nikolai Ivanovich was always haunted by the feeling that he was doing it in vain. After he died, the terse news reports collected with such loving care in the herbariums of his exercise books would simply crumble into dust without proper care. If he failed to come back from watch duty some day, his newspapers and chronicles would be used for lighting fires, and they wouldn’t last long.

Nothing would be left of the pages that had darkened over the years but smoke and soot: the atoms would form new compounds and assume a different form. Matter is almost indestructible. But what he wanted to preserve for posterity, the elusive, ephemeral substance that dwelt on the newspaper pages, would vanish forever, completely. That was the way a man was made: the content of his school textbooks survived in his memory until the final examinations and no longer. And forgetting everything he had learned off by rote gave him a feeling of genuine relief. ‘The memory of man is like sand in the desert,’ thought Nikolai Ivanovich. ‘Numbers, dates and the names of secondary political figures remain in it no longer than notes written on a sand dune with a stick. It all gets swept away and covered over, not a trace is left.’

In some miraculous fashion, the only things that were preserved were those capable of capturing the human imagination, setting the heart beating faster and engaging people’s minds and feelings. The gripping story of a great hero and his love could outlive the story of an entire civilisation, infecting the human brain like a virus that was transmitted from fathers to children over hundreds of generations.

It was this realisation that led the old man to his deliberate transformation from a self-styled scholar into an alchemist, from Nikolai Ivanovich into Homer. And now his nights were devoted, not to compiling chronicles, but to searching for the formula of immortality. A storyline that would be as long-lived as the Odyssey, a hero with a lifespan to rival Gilgamesh. Homer would try to thread the knowledge he had accumulated onto this storyline. And in a world where all the paper had been squandered for heat, where the past was gladly sacrificed for a single moment in the present, the legend of a hero like that could infect people and rescue them from mass amnesia.

But the mystical formula wouldn’t come to him. The hero refused to be born into the world. Rewriting newspaper articles could not possibly have prepared the old man for making myths. For breathing life into golems, transforming invention into enthralling reality. Torn-out and crumpled sheets of paper filled with uncompleted first chapters of the future saga, with unconvincing characters who lacked life, transformed his desktop into an abortion clinic. The only fruits of his nocturnal vigils were the dark circles under his eyes and the bite marks on his lips.

However, Homer refused to abandon his new destiny. He tried not to think that he was simply not born for this, that creating universes required a talent that he had been denied.

It’s just the inspiration that’s lacking – that was what he told himself. And where could he draw inspiration from in a stuffy station, locked into the routine of drinking tea at home and agricultural work? Even the watches and patrols were routine, and they took him on them less and less often because of his age. He needed a shake-up, an adventure, intense passions. Perhaps then the pressure would sweep clear the blocked channels in his mind and he would be able to create?

Even in the most difficult times people had never completely abandoned Nagatino. It wasn’t really fit for habitation: nothing grew here and the exits to the surface were closed off. But many found the station useful for staying out of sight and lying low for a while, for sitting out disgrace or as a secluded spot with a lover. Right now, though, it was empty.

Hunter flew soundlessly up a ladder that should have creaked obstinately and stopped on the platform. Homer followed him, puffing and panting, looking round warily. The hall was dark, and dust hung in the air, shimmering silver in the beams of their flashlights. Scattered sparsely across the floor were the heaps of rags and cardboard on which visitors to Nagatino usually spent the night.

The old man leaned back against a column and slid down it slowly. There was a time when Nagatino, with its elegant coloured panels, assembled out of various kinds of marble, had been one of his favourite stations. But now, dark and lifeless, it resembled its former self no more than a ceramic photo on a gravestone resembles the person who had the photo taken for a passport a hundred years ago, never suspecting that he was not just gazing into a camera lens, but into eternity.

‘Not a soul,’ Homer murmured disappointedly.

‘There is one,’ the brigadier objected, pointing at him.

‘I meant…’ the old man began, but Hunter stopped him with a gesture of his hand.

At the far end of the platform, where the colonnade came to an end and even the brigadier’s searchlight could barely reach, something was crawling out slowly onto the platform.

Homer tumbled over onto his side, braced his hands against the platform and got up awkwardly. Hunter’s flashlight went out and the brigadier himself seemed to vanish into thin air. Sweating with fear, the old man fumbled at the safety catch and pressed the trembling butt of his automatic hard into his shoulder. He heard the faint pops of two shots in the distance. Feeling bolder, he stuck his head out from behind the column and then hurried forward.

Hunter was standing fully erect in the centre of the platform, with an amorphous, wizened figure squirming pitifully at his feet. It looked as if it had been assembled out of cardboard boxes and rags, and barely even resembled a human being at all, but it was one – ageless and sexless, so dirty that only the eyes could clearly be made out on its face, it whined inarticulately and tried to crawl away from the brigadier towering up over it. It looked as if it had been shot in both legs.

‘Where are the people? Why isn’t there anyone here?’ asked Hunter, setting his boot on the train of tattered, stinking rags trailing after the tramp.

‘They’ve all gone… They left me. I’m all alone here,’ the tramp hissed, scraping at the slippery granite with his hands, but not moving from the spot.

‘Where did they go to?’

‘Tula…’

‘What’s happening there?’ Homer put in as he came up to them.

‘How should I know?’ the filthy creature said with a crooked grin. ‘Everyone who went there just disappeared. Ask them. But I don’t have any strength for staggering through the tunnels. I’ll die here.’

‘Why did they go?’ the brigadier persisted.

‘They were frightened, boss. The station’s deserted, they decided to break out. No one came back.’

‘No one at all?’ asked Hunter, raising his gun barrel.

‘No one… Only one,’ said the tramp, correcting himself when he spotted the raised gun and shrivelling up like an ant in the sun’s rays under a lens. ‘He was going to Nagornaya. I was asleep. Maybe I imagined it.’

‘When?’

‘I haven’t got a watch,’ said the tramp, shaking his head. ‘Maybe yesterday, maybe a week ago.’

The questions had dried up, but the pistol barrel was still staring into the tramp’s eyes. Hunter stopped speaking, as if his spring had suddenly run down. And he was breathing strangely, as if the conversation with the tramp had cost him too much of his strength.

‘Can I…?’ the tramp began.

‘Here, eat that!’ the brigadier snarled, and before Homer realised what was happening, he squeezed the trigger twice.

Black blood from the bullet holes in his forehead flooded the unfortunate victim’s staring eyes. Flattened against the ground by the bullets, he disintegrated again into a heap of rags and cardboard. Without looking up, Hunter inserted four more cartridges into the clip of his Stechkin and jumped down onto the tracks.

‘We’ll find out everything for ourselves soon enough,’ he shouted to Homer.

Ignoring his feeling of disgust, the old man leaned down over the body, took a scrap of material and covered the tramp’s shattered head with it.

‘Why did you kill him?’ he asked feebly.

‘Ask yourself that,’ Hunter replied in a hollow voice.

Now, even if he clenched all his willpower into a single tight fist, all he could do was raise and lower his eyelids. It was strange that he’d woken up at all… During the hour he’d been oblivious, the numbness had crept across his entire body like a crust of ice. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his chest seemed to be weighed down by something massively heavy. He couldn’t even say goodbye to his daughter, and that was the only thing worth coming round for, without following that old battle all the way to the end.

Sasha wasn’t smiling any longer. Now she was dreaming of something alarming, curled up tight on her makeshift bed and hugging herself, with a scowl on her face. Ever since she was a little child her father had woken her if he saw she was being tormented by nightmares, but now it took all his strength just to blink slowly.

And then even that became too exhausting.

To hold out until Sasha woke up he would have to carry on fighting. He had never stopped fighting for over twenty years, every day, every minute – and he was deadly tired of it. Tired of battling, tired of hiding, tired of hunting. Arguing, asserting, hoping, lying.

Only two desires remained in his fading consciousness: he wanted to look into Sasha’s eyes at least one more time, and he wanted to find peace. But he couldn’t manage either. Alternating with reality, images from the past starting flickering in front of his eyes again. He had to take a final decision. Break or be broken. Punish or repent… The guardsmen had closed ranks. Every one of them was loyal to him personally. Every one of them was willing to die now, torn to pieces by the mob, or to fire on unarmed people. He was the commander of the last unconquered station, the president of a confederation that no longer existed. For them his authority was indisputable, he was infallible, and any order he gave would be carried out immediately, without a second thought. He would take responsibility for everything, just as he had always done.

If he backed down now, the station would sink into anarchy, and then it would be annexed by the Red Empire that was expanding so fast, frothing over its original boundaries, subjugating more and more new territory. If he ordered his men to open fire on the demonstrators, he would retain his grasp on power – for a while. Or perhaps forever, if he didn’t balk at mass executions and torture.

He raised his automatic and a moment later the line of men repeated his movement. Along the line of the gun’s sight he saw a raging mob, not hundreds of people who had gathered together, but a faceless jumble of humanity. Grinning teeth, gaping eyes, clenched fists.

He clattered the breech of his gun and the line of men did the same.

It was time at last to take destiny by the scruff of the neck. Pointing the barrel of his gun upward, he pressed the trigger and whitewash showered down from the ceiling. The mob fell silent for a moment. He signalled for the soldiers to lower their weapons and took a step forward. It was his final choice.

And at last memory released him.

Sasha was still sleeping. He drew a final breath and tried to glance at her one last time, but he couldn’t even raise his eyelids. And then, instead of imperishable, eternal darkness, he saw before him an impossibly blue sky – as clear and bright as his daughter’s eyes.

‘Halt!’

Homer was so startled, he almost jumped and raised his hands in the air, but just checked himself in time. He was the only one that nasal yell through a megaphone took by surprise – the brigadier wasn’t surprised in the least: huddling down like a cobra before it strikes, he surreptitiously pulled the heavy sub-machine-gun out from behind his back.

Hunter still hadn’t replied to the old man’s question, in fact he’d stopped talking to him at all. To Homer the one-and-a-half-kilometre journey from Nagatino to Tula had seemed as endless as the road to Golgotha. He knew this stretch of tunnel would almost certainly lead him to his death, and it was hard to force himself to walk more quickly. At least now there was time to prepare, and Homer had occupied his mind with memories. He thought about Elena, chided himself for his egotism and begged her forgiveness. He recalled with a luminous sadness that magical day on Tver Street under the light summer rain. He regretted not having made any arrangements for his newspapers before he left. He prepared himself to die – to be torn apart by monsters, devoured by immense rats, poisoned by pollution… What other explanations could he find for the fact that Tula had been transformed into a black hole that sucked everything into it and let nothing back out?

And now, when he heard a normal human voice as they approached Tula, he didn’t know what to think. Had the station simply been captured? But who could grind several assault units from Sebastopol into dust, who would have exterminated all the tramps who converged on the station out of the tunnels and not let even women or old men go?

‘Thirty steps forward!’ said the distant voice.

It sounded incredibly familiar, so familiar that if Homer only had time, he could have identified who it belonged to. Could it be one of the Sebastopolites?

Cradling his Kalashnikov in his arms, Hunter started meekly counting out the steps: at thirty of the brigadier’s steps, the old man had taken fifty. Ahead of him he could vaguely make out a barricade that seemed to be crudely assembled out of random items. And for some reason its defenders weren’t using any light.

‘Turn out the flashlights!’ someone commanded from behind the ragged heap. ‘One of you two – another twenty steps forward.’

Hunter clicked the switch of his flashlight and moved on. Left alone again, Homer didn’t dare disobey the voice. In the sudden darkness he squatted down on a sleeper, as far out of harm’s way as possible, felt warily for the wall and pressed himself against it.

The brigadier’s steps fell silent at the measured distance. Homer heard voices: someone interrogating Hunter in a voice he couldn’t make out and the brigadier barking abrupt replies. The situation was heating up: tense, but restrained tones were replaced by abuse and threats. Hunter seemed to be demanding something from the invisible guards, and they were refusing to do as he wanted.

Now they were shouting at each other, almost at the top of their voices, and Homer thought he would be able to make out the words any moment now. But he heard just one word clearly, the final one:

‘Judgement!’

And then an automatic started stuttering, interrupting the men’s argument, followed by the rumble of an army Pecheneg machinegun, spitting a burst of fire in Homer’s direction. The old man threw himself on the ground, jerking back the breech of his gun, not knowing if he ought to fire, and at whom. But it was all over before he could even take aim.

In the short pauses between the chattering of the guns, the depths of the tunnel echoed to a long, drawn-out scraping sound that Homer could never possibly have confused with anything else. The sound of a hermetic door closing. Confirming his guess, a steel slab weighing tons upon tons slammed home into its groove ahead of him, cutting off the shouting and the rumble of shots at a stroke.

Shutting off the only way out into the Greater Metro.

Severing Sebastopol’s final hope.