Metro 2034

CHAPTER 7 The Voyage

As the trolley passed through the long section of tunnel marked with bright-yellow paint on the floor and walls, the helmsman couldn’t pretend any longer not to hear the radiation dosimeter clicking faster and faster. He took hold of the brake and muttered apologetically.

‘Comrade Colonel, we can’t go any further without protection.’

‘Let’s go just another hundred metres,’ Denis Mikhailovich suggested gently, turning to face him. ‘I’ll release you from watch duty for a week afterwards, as a hazard bonus.’

‘But this is the extreme limit, Comrade Colonel,’ the helmsman whined, still not daring to reduce speed.

‘Stop,’ Hunter ordered. ‘We’ll walk on from here. He’s quite right, the radiation level is really getting too high.’

The brake blocks squealed, the lantern hanging on the frame swayed, and the trolley came to a halt. The brigadier and the old man, who were sitting with their legs dangling over the edge, climbed down onto the tracks. The heavy protective suits, made of lead-impregnated fabric, looked like deep-sea divers’ outfits. They were incredibly expensive and rare – probably less than two dozen of them could be found in the entire Metro. The two at Sebastopol had almost never been used, they’d just been waiting for their time to come. These suits of armour could absorb the fiercest radiation, but they turned even simple walking into a difficult task – at least they did for Homer.

Denis Mikhailovich left the trolley and walked on with them for a few minutes, swapping phrases with Hunter – snatches of speech that were deliberately clipped and crumpled, so that Homer couldn’t unfold and interpret them.

‘Where will you get them?’ he asked the brigadier gruffly.

‘They’ll give me them. They won’t have any choice,’ Hunter boomed, looking straight ahead.

‘Everyone stopped expecting you back ages ago. For them you’re dead. Dead, you understand?’

Hunter stopped for a moment and spoke in a low voice, as if he were talking to himself, not the perimeter commander.

‘If only it was all that simple…’

‘And desertion from the Order – that means a fate worse than death.’

Without answering, the brigadier swung his hand up, simultaneously saluting the colonel and lopping off an invisible anchor cable. Denis Mikhailovich took the hint and stayed behind on the dockside while the brigadier and the old man moved slowly away from the shore, as if they were fighting a reverse current, and set off on their great voyage across the seas of darkness.

The colonel lowered his hand from his temple and signalled to the helmsman to start the engine. He felt desolate, left with no one to issue ultimatums to and no one to wage battle against. As the military commander of an island lost in one of those dark seas, all he could hope for now was that the little expedition wouldn’t get lost out there and would return home some day – from the other side, proving in its own small way that the world really was round.

The final guard post, located in the stretch of tunnel immediately after Kakhovka, had been almost deserted. For as long as the old man could remember, no one had ever attacked Sebastopol from the east.

Now the patch of yellow seemed less like a marker, dividing the endless concrete intestine into arbitrary sections, than a cosmic lift, connecting two planets that were hundreds of light years apart. Beyond it, the inhabitable space of Earth was imperceptibly replaced by a dead lunar landscape, and the apparent resemblance between them was a deception.

As he focused on setting one foot in front of the other in his incredibly heavy boots and listened to his own strenuous breathing, penned into a complex system of fluted tubes and filters, Homer imagined he was an astronaut who had landed on a satellite of some distant star. Indulging in this puerile fantasy made it easier for him to adjust to the weight of his suit – he could explain that by the high gravity – as well as the fact that they would be the only living creatures in the tunnels for kilometres ahead.

All the scientists and science-fiction writers never got their forecasts of the future right, thought the old man. By the year 2034 the human race should have been master of half the galaxy, or at least the solar system, for a long time already – Homer had been promised that when he was a child. But the science-fiction writers and the scientists had both started from the premise that humanity was rational and consistent. As if it didn’t consist of several billions of lazy, frivolous individuals who were easily distracted, but was some kind of beehive, endowed with collective reason and a unified will. As if, when it set about conquering space, it had really intended to take the task seriously and not abandon it halfway when the game got boring, turning its attention to electronics and then moving on to biotechnology, without ever achieving any really impressive results in anything. Except, perhaps, for nuclear physics.

So here he was, a wingless astronaut, a nonviable life-form without his cumbersome protective suit, an alien on his own planet, exploring and conquering the tunnels from Kakhovka to Kashira. And he and all the other survivors could simply forget about anything more ambitious than that.

It was strange: here, beyond the yellow marker, his body groaned under the fifty per cent increase in the force of gravity, but his soul was soaring, weightless. The day before, when he said goodbye to Elena before the expedition to Tula, he was still counting on coming back. But when Hunter named Homer again, choosing him as his partner for the second time in a row, the old man had realised there was no way he could weasel out of it. His insistent prayers to be tested and enlightened had finally been heard, and trying to back out now would be stupid and unmanly. He couldn’t treat his life’s work as a part-time job. It was pointless to play coy with destiny, promising to devote himself to his work wholeheartedly a bit later on, the next time around… There might not be any next time, and if he didn’t set his mind to it now, what would he carry on living for afterwards? To end his days as the unknown Nikolai Ivanovich, a local crackpot, a drooling old storyteller with an erratic smile? But to make the transition from a grotesque caricature of Homer to the genuine article, from an obsessive fantasist to a maker of myths, to rise out of the ashes renewed, first he would have to cremate his former self. He realised that if he carried on doubting and started pandering to his yearning for a home and a woman, if he constantly looked back, he was certain to miss something very important up ahead. He had to wield the knife.

It would be difficult for him to return from this new expedition unharmed, or even to return at all. And though he felt terribly sorry for Elena, who couldn’t believe at first that Homer had reappeared at the station alive and well after only one day away, and then cried when she failed to change his mind and saw him off again into oblivion, this time he hadn’t promised her anything. As he hugged Elena tight against him, he looked over her shoulder at the clock. He had to go. Homer knew it wasn’t easy to amputate more than ten years of life just like that, he was bound to suffer phantom pains after the loss. He had expected to feel the urge to look round all the time, but once he stepped beyond that thick yellow boundary marker, it was as if he had really died, and his soul had soared free, breaking out of both of its ponderous, unwieldy, physical shells. He had escaped.

Hunter didn’t seem to be hampered at all by his protective suit. The loose clothing bulked out his muscular, wolfish figure, transforming it into an amorphous colossus, but without reducing its agility. He walked along side by side with the panting old man, but only because he was still keeping a close eye on him after Nakhimov Prospect.

After what Homer had seen at Nagatino, Nagornaya and Tula, agreeing to carry on roaming the tunnels with Hunter hadn’t been an easy decision. But he had found a way to convince himself: the long-awaited metamorphoses heralding his rebirth had begun while he was with the brigadier. And it didn’t matter why Hunter had dragged him along again – to set the old man on the right path or to use him for spare rations. The most important thing for Homer now was not to let this new condition slip away, to exploit it while he still could, to invent things and write them down.

And another thing. When Hunter asked him to come, Homer seemed to sense that the brigadier needed him in almost exactly the same way – not in order to guide him through the tunnels and warn him about the dangers. Perhaps in nourishing the old man’s energies, the brigadier was also taking something from Homer, without asking permission. But what could he possibly need?

Hunter’s apparent lack of emotion could no longer deceive the old man. Under the crust of that paralysed face, magma was seething, occasionally splashing out through the craters of those smouldering eyes that didn’t close. He was in turmoil. He was searching for something too.

Hunter seemed to fit the role of the future book’s epic hero. Homer had hesitated for a while and then, after the first few trials, accepted him. But there were many things about the brigadier’s character, such as his passion for killing living things, the words he left unspoken, and his miserly gestures, that made the old man wary. Hunter was like those killers who taunted and provoked the police detectives, wanting to be unmasked. Homer didn’t know if Hunter saw him as a confessor, a biographer or an organ donor, but he sensed that this strange relationship of dependence was developing into something mutual, growing stronger than fear. And Homer was haunted by the feeling that Hunter was putting off a very important conversation. Sometimes the brigadier turned to him as if he was about to ask something, and never actually spoke. But then, perhaps the old man was merely indulging in wishful thinking and Hunter was leading him on deeper into the tunnels so that he could wring an unwanted witness’s neck. More and more often the brigadier’s eyes turned to probe the old man’s knapsack, with the fateful diary lying in the bottom of it. He couldn’t see it, but he seemed to guess that some object hidden in the knapsack attracted Homer’s thoughts like a magnet, and he was tracking those thoughts, gradually closing in on the notepad. The old man tried not to think about the diary, but it was futile.

There had been almost no time to pack for the journey, and Homer had only been able to hide away with the diary for a few minutes, not long enough to moisten and unstick the pages fused together with blood. But the old man had leafed rapidly through the other pages, criss-crossed haphazardly with hasty, fragmentary entries. The timeline was disrupted, as if the writer had to struggle to catch the words and had simply set them down on paper wherever he could. To render them meaningful, the old man had to arrange them in the right order.

‘We have no lines of communication. The phone is dead. Perhaps it’s sabotage. One of the exiles, in revenge? Before we got here.’

‘The situation is hopeless. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we ask Sebastopol, we’ll be condemning our own men. We have to endure it… For how long?’

‘They won’t let me go… They’ve gone insane. If not me, then who? Make a run for it!’

And there was something else too. Immediately after the final entry, calling for the idea of storming Tula to be abandoned, there was a blurred signature, sealed with a bloody fingerprint, like reddish-brown sealing wax. It was a name that Homer had heard before, one he had often spoken himself. The diary belonged to the signal officer of the team sent to Tula a week before.

They passed the opening of a track leading to an engine depot, which would certainly have been plundered, if not for the intense radiation here. For some reason the black, wilted branch line leading to it had been screened off by someone with sections of steel reinforcement bars, welded together rather clumsily and very clearly in a hurry. A metal plate attached to the bars with wire bore a grinning skull and the remains of a warning written in red paint, but it had either faded with time or been scraped off. Homer’s gaze drew him past the barred entrance, deep into this dark well, and he barely managed to scramble back out. The line probably hadn’t always been as empty of life as they believed at Sebastopol, he thought to himself.

They passed through Warsaw Station – a terrible, eerie place, rusty and mouldy, like a drowned man fished out of the water. The walls, patterned in squares of tiles, were oozing murky water. Through the half-open lips of the hermetic doors a cold wind blew in from the surface, as if someone huge had set his mouth to them from the outside and was giving the station artificial respiration. Their radiation meters fluttered hysterically, telling them they had to get out of there immediately.

Closer to Kashira one of the instruments broke down, and the figures on the other were jammed against the very edge of the display. Homer felt a bitter taste on his tongue.

‘Where’s the epicentre?’

It was incredibly difficult to make out the brigadier’s voice, as if Homer had his head lowered into a bath full of water. He stopped – in order to make the best of this short break – and gestured to the south-east with his glove.

‘Besides Kantemirovo Station. We think the roof of the entrance pavilion or a ventilation shaft was pierced. No one knows for certain.’

‘So Kantemirovo’s deserted then?’

‘And always has been. After Kolomenskoe the entire line’s empty.’

‘But I was told…’ Hunter said, then broke off, gesturing to Homer to be quiet, while he tuned in to his subtle, invisible wavelengths. ‘Does anyone know what’s happening at Kashira?’ he asked eventually.

‘How could they?’ The old man wasn’t sure he’d managed to give an ironic note to the adenoidal boom that emerged from his breathing filters like a trombone snorting.

‘I’ll tell you. The radiation there’s so bad, we’ll both be fried to a crisp before we even reach the station. Nothing will do any good. We can’t go that way. We’re turning back.’

‘Back? To Sebastopol?’

‘Yes. I’ll go up onto the surface and try to get there overland,’ Hunter replied thoughtfully, already figuring out his route.

‘Are you going to go alone?’ Homer asked cautiously.

‘I can’t keep rescuing you all the time. I’ll have enough to do saving my own skin. And two of us wouldn’t get through anyway. Even for me there’s no guarantee.’

‘You don’t understand, I need to go with you, I have to…’ Homer cast around frantically for a reason, a toehold in logic.

‘You have to die with meaning?’ the brigadier concluded for him indifferently – although Homer knew perfectly well that it was really the filters in the gas mask, screening out any contaminants, letting in only tasteless, sterile air and letting out only soulless, mechanical voices.

The old man squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to recall everything he knew about the contaminated lower end of the Zamoskvorechie branch, about the route from Sebastopol to Serpukhov. Anything at all in order to avoid turning back, to avoid returning to his meagre life, to his false pregnancy with a great novel and timeless legends.

‘Follow me!’ he wheezed suddenly and set off, hobbling with an agility that surprised even him, to the east – toward Kashira, into the very mouth of hell.

She dreamed she was scraping a file across one loop of the steel shackles chaining her to a wall. The file squealed and kept slipping off, and even when she already thought its blade had bitten half a millimetre into the steel, the moment she stopped working, the shallow, almost invisible groove closed up as she watched. But Sasha didn’t despair: she took up her tool again, skinning her palms as she filed away at the unyielding metal, maintaining a strict, regular rhythm. The important thing was not to lose the rhythm, not to stop working even for an instant. In the tight grip of the fetters her ankles had swollen up and gone numb. Sasha realised that even if she could defeat the metal, she still wouldn’t be able to run away, because her legs would refuse to obey her.

Sasha woke up and raised her eyelids with a struggle. The shackles had not been a mere dream: her wrists were restrained by handcuffs. She was lying on the dirty floor of an old mining trolley that squealed with excruciating monotony as it crept slowly along. There was a dirty piece of rag stuffed in her mouth and the side of her head was throbbing and bleeding.

‘He didn’t kill me,’ she thought. ‘Why not?’

From where she was lying all she could see was a small section of the ceiling – the welded joints of tunnel liners drifting by in an irregular patch of light: the trolley was moving along a tunnel. While she tried to get her shackled hands out from behind her back, the liners were replaced by flaking white paint. That alarmed Sasha: what station was this?

It was a bad place, not just quiet, but desolate; not just deserted, but lifeless, and completely dark. For some reason she had thought every station on the other side of the bridge was full of people and the air everywhere was filled with their shouting and hubbub. So she must have been wrong about that.

The ceiling above Sasha stopped moving. Grunting and swearing, her kidnapper clambered down onto the platform and strolled about with his metal-tipped heels scraping, as if he was studying the surroundings. Then, obviously having removed his gas mask, he growled in a deep, amiable-sounding voice.

‘So here we are then. After all these years!’

Releasing all the air out of his lungs in a long, lingering sigh, he hit out hard at some bulky inanimate object – no, he kicked it with his boot: it looked like a sack, but what was it stuffed with?

When Sasha realised the answer, she sank her teeth into the stinking rag and started bellowing, arching up her body as if she was having a fit. She knew where the fat man in tarpaulin had brought her and who he was talking to like that.

It was ludicrous even to hope he could get away from Hunter. Moving like a lion, the brigadier overtook the old man in a few long bounds, grabbed hold of his shoulder and shook him painfully.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘We only have to go a little bit further,’ Homer wheezed. ‘I’ve remembered! There’s an access passage from here straight to the Zamoskvorechie Line, just before Kashira Station. We can go through it straight to the tunnel, so we won’t have to go into the station. We’ll bypass it and come straight out to Kolomenskoe. It shouldn’t be very far. Please…’

Seizing his chance, he tried to break free again, but stumbled over the bellbottoms of his trousers and fell flat onto the rails with a crash. He got up again immediately and tried to jerk forward, but Hunter easily held him still on the spot, like a rat on a string, and turned the old man to face him. Leaning down so that the lenses of their gas masks were on the same level, he glanced deep into Homer for a few seconds and then released his grip.

‘All right.’

And now the brigadier dragged him along, not halting again for a single moment. The blood pounding in Homer’s ears drowned out the frenetic chattering of the dosimeters, his legs turned stiff and numb, almost refusing to obey him, his lungs were straining so hard they smarted painfully and felt as if they were about to burst.

They almost missed the black ink blot of the narrow passage. Squeezing into it, they ran for a few more long minutes, until Hunter galloped out into a new tunnel. The brigadier cast a hasty glance around, dived back into the passage and shouted to the old man.

‘Where’s this you’ve brought me to? Have you ever even been here?’

About thirty metres along, to the left of the passage – in the direction they had to follow – the tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling by a thick curtain of something that looked like cobwebs.

Reluctant to waste his breath on talking, Homer simply shook his head. It was absolutely true, he’d never had any reason to come this way before. And this was hardly the moment to tell Hunter all the things he’d heard about this place.

Throwing his automatic back over his shoulder, the brigadier took a long rectangular hatchet, something like a home-made machete, out of his knapsack and slashed at the sticky white lacework. The dried-out skeletons of flying cockroaches that were stuck in the nets started quivering and rustling like hoarse little bells. The edges of the ragged wound that had been inflicted immediately closed together, as if it was healing up. Turning back the semi-transparent fabric of the web and sticking his flashlight inside, the brigadier lit up the passage. It would take them hours to clear it: the multilayered webbing of sticky threads filled every part of the connecting tunnel for as far as the beam of light could reach

Hunter checked his radiation monitor, made a strange guttural sound and started furiously hacking away the threads stretched between the walls of the tunnel. The cobweb yielded slowly, taking more time than they could afford now. In ten minutes they only managed to move about thirty metres forward, and the threads were woven ever more tightly, choking the passage like a plug of cotton wool.

Finally, at an overgrown ventilation shaft with an ugly two-headed skeleton lying on the sleepers below it, the brigadier flung his hatchet down on the floor. They were stuck in the web, just like the cockroaches, and even if the creature that wove these nets had perished long ago and wouldn’t come for them, they would die soon anyway – from the radiation.

In the few moments while Hunter was trying to decide what to do, the old man remembered something else he had once heard about this tunnel. Going down on one knee, he knocked a few cartridges out of his spare clip, twisted the bullets out using a pen-knife and shook the powder into his palm. Hunter didn’t need any explanations: a few minutes later, back at the beginning of the connecting tunnel, they tipped a heap of grey granules onto a small pad of cotton wool and held a cigarette lighter to it.

The gunpowder snorted and started smoking, and suddenly something incredible happened: the flame from the powder spread out in all directions at once, climbing right up the walls to the distant ceiling, invading all the space of the tunnel. It dashed inwards, devouring the cobweb, a roaring, blazing ring of fire, lighting up the grimy tunnel liners and leaving behind only occasional burnt tatters dangling from the ceiling. The hoop of flame moved towards Kolomenskoe, shrinking rapidly and sucking in air like a gigantic piston. Then the tunnel swerved and the flames disappeared round the bend, trailing bright crimson flashes behind them.

And from the far distance, breaking through the regular drone of the fire, came a call that wasn’t human, something between a despairing howl and a strident hiss. Although Homer, hypnotised by the spectacle, could easily have imagined it.

Hunter tossed the hatchet back into his knapsack and took out two new, unopened canisters for gas masks.

‘I was keeping them for the way back,’ he said, changing his own filter and handing the second canister to the old man. ‘After that fire, the pollution in there now is like the place had just been bombed.’

The old man nodded. When the flames swirled upwards, they’d stirred up radioactive particles that had been settling into the cobweb for years, eating their way into its threads. The black vacuum of the tunnel was now filled with deadly molecules, suspended in the air like millions of tiny underwater mines, and they had blocked off the voyagers’ navigable channel. There was no possible way to avoid them.

They had to break straight through.

‘If only your dad could see you now,’ the fat man scolded her derisively.

Sasha was sitting directly opposite her father’s overturned body, which was lying face down in the blood. Both straps of her overalls had been tugged down off her shoulders, revealing a washed-out singlet with a picture of some jolly little animal. Her kidnapper wouldn’t let her see his face, he seared her eyes with a brilliant beam of light every time she tried to look up. He’d taken the rag out of her mouth, but Sasha still had no intention of asking him for anything.

‘Not like your mother, unfortunately. And I was really hoping…’

The elephantine legs in the blood-smeared knee boots set off again round the column that Sasha was sitting against. Now his voice came from behind her back.

‘Your daddy probably thought that in time everything would be forgotten. But some crimes don’t carry a statute of limitation… Slander. Betrayal.’

His obese figure emerged from the gloom on the other side of her. He stopped, looking down on her father’s body, prodding it contemptuously with his boot. He hacked up spittle and spat out a generous gobbet.

‘It’s a shame the old fellow snuffed it without my help,’ said the fat man, running the beam of his flashlight round the heaps of useless junk that cluttered the bleak, faceless station and halting it on the bicycle with no wheels. ‘A cosy little place you have here. I think if it wasn’t for you, your daddy would have preferred to hang himself.’

While the flashlight was directed away from her, Sasha tried to crawl off to the side, but a second later the beam picked her out of the darkness again.

‘And I can understand him,’ said her kidnapper. With a single bound he was there beside her again. ‘You’ve turned out a fine little girl. It’s just a shame you’re not like your mum. I think he was probably disappointed about that too. Well, never mind,’ he said, knocking her to the floor with the toe of his boot. ‘At least I didn’t waste my time coming all the way through the Metro to get here.’

Sasha shuddered and shook her head.

‘See how unpredictable everything is, Pete,’ he said, talking to Sasha’s father again. ‘There was a time when you used to have your rivals in love court-martialled. Thanks, by the way, for not having me executed, merely banished for life. But life is long, and circumstances change. And not always to your advantage. I’ve come back, even if it has taken me ten years longer than I planned.’

‘It’s never an accident when someone goes back somewhere,’ Sasha whispered, repeating her father’s words

‘How very true that is,’ the fat man jeered. ‘Hey, who’s there?’

At the far end of the platform something bulky and ponderous rustled and fell, then there was a kind of hissing sound and the stealthy footsteps of a large animal. When silence fell again it was a false silence, frayed and tattered. Like her kidnapper, Sasha could sense something moving towards them out of the tunnel.

The fat man snapped the breech of his gun, went down on one knee beside the girl, pressed the butt into his shoulder and ran a trembling spot of light over the closest columns. Hearing the southern tunnels come to life after they had been empty for decades was as spine-chilling as seeing the marble statues waking up in one of the central stations of the Metro.

A blurred shadow flitted across the beam of light just as the beam was turning away – it wasn’t human, though – the shape was wrong and the movements were too agile. But when the light moved back to the spot where the mysterious creature had just been, there was no trace of it. A minute later the beam, fluttering wildly in panic, caught it again – only twenty steps away from them.

‘A bear?’ the fat man whispered in disbelief, pressing the trigger.

Bullets lashed into the columns and started rattling against the walls, but the beast seemed to have dematerialised, and not a single shot found its target. Then the fat man suddenly stopped firing senselessly, dropped his automatic and pressed his hands to his stomach. His flashlight rolled off to one side, casting a cone of light that crept across the floor and lighting up his corpulent, hunched-over figure from below.

A man stepped unhurriedly out of the gloom, walking with incredibly soft, almost soundless steps in his heavy boots. In a protective suit that was too large even for a giant like him, he really could have been taken for a bear. He wasn’t wearing a gas mask: his scar-furrowed face and shaved head looked like a scorched desert. Part of the face, with hard, coarsely defined, manly features, was even rather handsome, but it looked dead somehow, and Sasha couldn’t repress a shudder when she looked at it. The other half was simply repulsive – a complicated tangle of scars transformed it into the half-mask of a folk-tale monster, perfect in its ugly deformity. But even so, apart from the eyes, his appearance was repellent, rather than frightening. A half-crazed, prowling, probing gaze enlivened the stiffened face. Enlivened it, but didn’t bring it to life.

The fat man tried to get to his feet, but immediately collapsed on the floor, screaming in pain, shot through both the knees. Then the gunman squatted down beside him, put the silencer on the end of his long pistol barrel against the fat man’s head and pulled the trigger. The howling broke off instantly. But for a few seconds the echo wandered under the vaults of the station like a lost spirit, bereft of its body.

The shot had thrown the fat man’s chin up, and now Sasha’s kidnapper lay there turned towards her. Instead of a face he had a damp, gaping, crimson crater. Sasha huddled back and started whimpering in horror. Slowly and thoughtfully, the terrible gunman turned the gun barrel on her.

Then he looked round and changed his mind: the pistol disappeared into its holster and he stepped back, as if trying to disown what he had done. He opened a flat flask and took a pull from it.

A new character appeared on the small stage illuminated by the dead man’s fading flashlight: an old man who was breathing heavily, clutching at his ribs. He was dressed in the same kind of suit as the killer, and looked absolutely absurd in it. When he caught up with his companion, the old man immediately collapsed on the floor in exhaustion, not even noticing that everything around him was awash with blood. It was only later, when he came round and opened his eyes, that he saw the two mutilated bodies and the mute, terrified girl hemmed in between them.

Homer’s heart had only just calmed down, but now it leapt again. He couldn’t express it in words yet, but he already knew for certain: he had found her. After so many nights spent in fruitless attempts to picture his future heroine, trying to imagine her lips and her wrists, her clothes and her aroma, her movements and her thoughts, he had suddenly met a real person who matched all his requirements perfectly. Of course, until now he had imagined her quite differently… More elegant, more well-rounded and certainly more grown-up. She had turned out to be much more sinewy, she had too many sharp corners and, glancing into her eyes, instead of languorous, enveloping warmth, the old man encountered two cold splinters of ice. She was different, but Homer knew it was his mistake, he had failed to guess what she ought to be like. Her trapped look, her face distorted by fear and her manacled hands intrigued the old man. He might be a master at retelling yarns, but he hadn’t been granted the talent to write tragedies of the kind that this girl must have suffered. Her helplessness and hopelessness, her miraculous rescue and the way her destiny had been woven into their story meant that he was on the right track.

And though she hadn’t spoken a word yet, he was ready in advance to believe her. For after all, apart from everything else, this teenage girl, with her white, tousled, carelessly lopped hair, pointed little ears, soot-smeared cheeks and exposed, sculpted collarbones – surprisingly white and vulnerable – with her childishly plump, bitten lower lip, was beautiful in a very special way.

The old man’s curiosity was mingled with pity and a surprising tenderness. He moved closer and squatted down beside her. She huddled away and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘A little savage,’ he thought. He patted her on the shoulder, not knowing what to say.

‘Time to go,’ Hunter butted in.

‘But what about…?’ Homer asked with a nod at the girl.

‘Never mind. It’s none of our business.’

‘We can’t just abandon her here alone!’

‘Simpler to shoot her,’ the brigadier snapped.

‘I don’t want to go with you,’ the girl said, suddenly pulling herself together. ‘Just take the handcuffs off. He should have the key.’ She pointed to the shattered, faceless mannequin.

In three swift movements Hunter frisked the body and pulled a bunch of steel keys out of an inside pocket. He tossed them to the girl and looked round at the old man.

‘Is that all?’

Still trying to postpone the parting, Homer spoke to the girl.

‘What did that subhuman brute do to you?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, fiddling with the lock. ‘He didn’t have time. He’s not subhuman. Just an ordinary human being. Cruel, stupid, spiteful. Like all of them.’

‘They’re not all like that,’ the old man objected, but without any real conviction.

‘All of them,’ the girl said obstinately, wincing as she got up on her numbed legs. ‘It’s all right. Staying human’s not that easy.’

She’d certainly got over her fright very quickly! She didn’t lower her eyes any more, now she looked at the men with a lowering, challenging gaze. She walked up to one of the corpses, carefully turned it face up, arranged its arms on its chest and kissed it on the forehead. Narrowing her eyes, she turned to Hunter and the corner of her mouth trembled.

‘Thank you.’

Without taking any things or even a weapon, she climbed down onto the tracks and limped off towards the tunnel. The brigadier watched her go with his head lowered, frowning: his hand wandered indecisively along his belt between the knife and the flask. Finally he reached a decision, straightened up and called to her.

‘Wait!’