Metro 2034

CHAPTER 14 What Else?

Really, what is it that makes man human?

He’s been wandering the earth for more than a million years, but the magical transformation that changed a cunning and gregarious animal into something completely different, something absolutely unprecedented, happened to him only about ten thousand years ago. Just imagine, for ninety-nine per cent of his history, he sheltered in caves and chomped on raw meat. Without knowing how to get warm or make tools and genuine weapons, not even knowing how to talk properly! And the range of feelings he was capable of experiencing didn’t really differentiate him from monkeys and wolves: cold, fear, attachment, anxiety, gratification.

How was he able, in the space of a few centuries, to learn to build and think and record his own thoughts, to alter the matter around him and invent things, why did he feel the need to draw, and how did he discover music? How was he able to conquer the entire world and restructure it to suit his requirements? What exactly was it that was added to this animal ten thousand years ago?

Fire? The fact that man was given the ability to tame light and warmth, to carry them with him to cold, uninhabited regions, to roast his prey on campfires in order to satisfy his stomach? But what did that change, apart from allowing him to extend his domain? Rats managed to colonise the entire planet without any fire, and they remained what they were to begin with – quick-witted, gregarious mammals. No, it can’t have been fire; at least, not only fire – the musician was right. Something else… But what? Language? Now there was an undeniable difference from other animals. The precise faceting of rough thoughts into the glittering diamonds of words that can become a universal currency and circulate everywhere. The ability, not so much to express what is going on in your head, as to arrange it in proper sequence: the casting of unstable images, which flow like molten metal, into solid forms. The clarity of mind and coolness of judgement, the ability to transmit orders and knowledge by mouth clearly and unambiguously: which leads to the ability to organise and subordinate, to assemble armies and build states.

But ants manage without words, constructing genuine megalopolises on their own level, inconspicuous though it is to man, and all finding their own places in supremely complicated hierarchies, conveying information and commands to each other with precision, drafting thousands of thousands of soldiers into intrepid legions with iron discipline, which clash head on in the inaudible but remorseless wars of their tiny empires.

Perhaps letters?

Letters, without which the accumulation of knowledge would be impossible? Those bricks out of which the Babylonian Tower of world civilisation, reaching for the heavens, was built? Without which the unbaked clay of the wisdom mastered by one generation would crack and split apart, subside and disintegrate into dust, unable to support its own weight? Without them, every successive generation would have started building the great tower again from the previous level and spent its entire life fumbling with the ruins of the preceding wattle and daub hut before dying in its own turn, without ever erecting the next level. Letters and writing allowed man to export accumulated knowledge beyond the narrow boundaries of his own skull, and so preserve it undistorted for his descendants, relieving them of the need to rediscover what had already been discovered long ago and allowing them to build something of their own on the firm foundation inherited from their ancestors.

But it wasn’t only letters, was it?

If wolves could write, would their civilisation be like man’s? Would they have a civilisation? When a wolf is sated with food, he falls into a state of blissful prostration, devoting his time to endearments and play, until the griping in his belly drives him on again. But when a man is sated with food, a yearning of a different kind, elusive and inexplicable, awakens within him – the same yearning that makes him gaze at the stars for hours on end, scrape ochre onto the walls of his cave, decorate the bow of his war boat with carved figures, slave for centuries to erect stone colossi instead of reinforcing the walls of his fortress, and spend his life on honing his artistry with words instead of perfecting his mastery of the sword. The same yearning that makes a former engine driver’s mate devote the remainder of his life to reading and searching – searching for something and trying to capture it in words… Something special… The yearning that drives a dirty, impoverished crowd to listen to wandering fiddlers in an attempt to satisfy it, that makes kings welcome troubadours and patronise artists, and makes a girl who was born underground gaze for hours at a daub on a packet that once held a teabag. A vague but powerful summons that can drown out even the call of hunger – but only in a human being.

Is it not this call that expands man’s range of feelings beyond those accessible to other animals, giving him in addition the ability to dream, the audacity to hope, and the courage to show mercy? Love and compassion, which man often regards as his distinctive qualities, were not discovered by him. A dog is capable of loving and being compassionate: when its master is ill, it stays with him and whines. A dog can even suffer boredom and perceive the meaning of its own life in another creature: if its master is dying, it is sometimes prepared to perish, simply to remain with him. But it doesn’t have dreams and aspirations.

So it’s a yearning for beauty and the ability to appreciate it? The remarkable ability to take pleasure in combinations of colours, sequences of sounds, the angles of lines and the elegance of verbal structures? To extract from them a sweet vibration that wrings the heart and soul. That rouses any soul, whether it is bloated with fat or hard and calloused or seamed with scars, and helps it purge itself of extraneous excrescences.

Perhaps. But not only that.

In order to drown out the stuttering bursts of sub-machine-gun fire and the despairing howls of naked, bound human beings, other human beings played the majestic operas of Wagner at full volume. No contradiction arose: one thing merely emphasised the other. Then what else?

And even if man does survive as a biological species in this present-day hell, will he preserve this fragile, almost impalpable, but undoubtedly real particle of his essential being? The spark that ten thousand years ago transformed a half-starving beast with a dull gaze into a creature of a new order? Into a being tormented more by hunger of the soul than hunger of the flesh? A rebellious being, fluctuating eternally between spiritual grandeur and ignominy, between an inexplicable mercy quite inappropriate for predators and an unjustifiable cruelty unequalled even in the soulless world of insects. Who erects magnificent palaces and paints incredible canvases, rivalling the Creator in his ability to synthesise pure beauty – and invents gas chambers and hydrogen bombs in order to annihilate everything that he himself has created and economically annihilate his own fellows. Who painstakingly builds sandcastles on the beach and blithely destroys them. Did that spark transform him into a being who knows no limits in anything? An irrepressibly restless being who doesn’t know how to satisfy his strange hunger, but devotes his entire life to the attempt to do it? Into man? Will this remain in him? Will this remain after him?

Or will it be lost in his past, merely a brief peak in the graph of history, leaving man to revert from this strange one-per-cent deviation to his perennial torpidity, an habitual, customary state of stagnation, in which innumerable generations follow each other, chewing the cud without even raising their eyes from the ground, and the passing of ten years or a hundred or five hundred thousand is equally imperceptible?

What else?

‘Is it true?’

‘What exactly?’ Leonid asked her with a smile.

‘About the Emerald City? About the Ark? That there is a place like that in the Metro?’ Sasha asked pensively, looking down at her feet.

‘There are rumours,’ he replied evasively.

‘It would be great to get in there someday,’ she said slowly. ‘You know when I was walking up on the surface, I felt so sad for people. So bitter that they made just one mistake… And they’ll never be able to put everything back the way it used to be. And it was so good there… probably.’

‘A mistake? No, it was an absolutely heinous crime,’ the musician replied seriously. ‘To destroy the entire world, to kill six billion people – is that a mistake?’

‘Even so… You and I deserve forgiveness, don’t we? So does everyone else. Everyone should be given a chance to make himself over and do everything over again, to try again one more time, even if it’s the last one…’ She paused. ‘I’d like so much to see what it’s really like up there… I wasn’t interested before. I was simply afraid, and everything on the surface seemed ugly to me… But it turns out I just went up in the wrong place. It’s so stupid. That city up there is like my life before. There’s no future in it. Only memories – and they’re not mine… Only ghosts. And I understood something very important while I was there, you know…’ Sasha hesitated. ‘Hope is like blood. While it still flows through your veins, you’re alive. I want to hope.’

‘But why do you want to go to the Emerald City?’ the musician asked.

‘I want to see, to feel what it was like to live before… You said yourself… I suppose the people there really must be very different. People who haven’t forgotten yesterday and who will definitely have a tomorrow must be quite, quite different.’

They strolled slowly round the hall of Dobrynin Station, under the watchful eyes of the sentries. Homer had left them alone with obvious reluctance, and now he had been delayed for some reason. Hunter still hadn’t put in an appearance.

Sasha saw hints in the marble features of Dobrynin’s marble hall. The large, marble-faced arches leading to the tracks alternated with small, decorative, blank arches. Large, small, large again, small again. Like a man and a woman holding hands, a man and a woman… And she suddenly wanted to put her hand into a broad, strong, male palm too. To shelter in it, if only for a short while.

‘You can build a new life here too,’ Leonid told the girl, winking at her. ‘You don’t necessarily have to go somewhere and search for something… It can be enough just to look round.’

‘And what will I see?’

‘Me,’ he said, lowering his eyes in theatrical modesty.

‘I’ve already seen you. And heard you,’ said Sasha, returning his smile at last. ‘I like what I heard, like everyone else… Don’t you need your cartridges at all? You gave away so many to get them to let us through here.’

‘I only need enough for my food. And I always have enough. It’s stupid to play for money.’

‘Then what do you play for?’

‘For the music.’ He laughed. ‘For the people. No, that’s not right either. For what the music does to the people.’

‘And what does it do to them?’

‘Well actually – anything at all,’ said Leonid, turning serious again. ‘I have music that will make people love and music that will make them weep.’

‘And the music you were playing the last time…’ Sasha looked at him suspiciously. ‘The music without a name. What does that make people do?’

‘This one?’ he asked and whistled the introduction. ‘It doesn’t make them do anything. It just takes away pain.’

‘Hey, mate!’

Homer closed the exercise book and squirmed on the uncomfortable wooden bench. The duty orderly was ensconced behind a little counter with a surface that was almost completely taken up by three old black telephones without buttons or discs. The little red light on one of the phones was winking amicably.

‘Andrei Andreevich is free now. He’s got two minutes for you from the moment you walk in. Don’t mumble, get straight to the point,’ the duty orderly admonished the old man strictly.

‘Two minutes won’t be enough,’ Homer sighed.

‘I warned you,’ the other man said with a shrug.

Even five minutes wasn’t enough. He didn’t have any real idea of where to start, or how to finish, or what questions to ask and what to ask for, but, apart from the commandant of Dobrynin Station, he had no one else to turn to right now.

But Andrei Andreevich, a large, fat man in a uniform tunic that didn’t close across his stomach, was already furious and streaming with sweat, and he didn’t listen to the old man for long.

‘Don’t you understand, or what? I’ve got a force majeure situation here, eight men have been mown down, and you start talking to me about some epidemic or other! There isn’t anything here! That’s enough, stop wasting my time! Either you clear out of here yourself, or…’ Like a sperm whale leaping out of the water, the commandant launched his meaty carcass forward, almost overturning the desk he was sitting at. The duty orderly glanced into the office enquiringly. Homer also got up off the low, hard chair for visitors.

‘I’ll go. But then why did you send forces into Serpukhov?’

‘What business is that of yours?’

‘They say in the station…’

‘What do they say? What do they say? You know what? To make sure you don’t go spreading panic around here… Pasha, come on, stick him in the cage!’

In the twinkling of an eye Homer was tossed out into the reception area and the duty orderly dragged the stubbornly resisting old man into a narrow side corridor, alternating reproaches with slaps to his face.

Between two slaps Homer’s respirator came off; he tried to hold his breath, but immediately received a jab to the solar plexus that set him coughing. The sperm whale surfaced in the doorway of his office, filling the opening completely.

‘Let him stay there for now, we’ll get to the bottom of this later… And who are you? By appointment?’ he barked at the next visitor.

Homer had already turned towards him.

Hunter was standing there stock still with his arms crossed, just three steps away from him. He was a wearing somebody else’s uniform that was tight on him and hiding his face in the shadow of the raised visor of his helmet. He showed no sign of recognising the old man and no intention of intervening. Homer had expected him to be smeared with blood, like a butcher, but the only crimson spot on the brigadier’s clothes was the small stain over his own wound. Hunter shifted his stony gaze to the station commandant, and suddenly started moving towards him slowly, as if he intended to walk straight through the fat man into the office.

The startled commandant started muttering and backed away, opening up the way through. The guard froze expectantly with his arms locked round Homer. Hunter squeezed through the door after the retreating fat man and ended the commandant’s resistance with a single lion’s roar that reduced him to silence. Then he switched to an imperious whisper.

Letting go of the old man, the orderly stole across to the door and stepped inside. A moment later he was swept back out by a torrent of filthy expletives, during which the commandant’s voice broke into a squeal.

‘And let that provocateur go!’ he shouted at the end, as if he was repeating someone else’s order under hypnosis.

Bright red, as if he had been scalded, the orderly closed the door behind him, stomped back to his post at the entrance and stuck his nose into a news flyer printed on wrapping paper. When Homer moved determinedly past his desk in the direction of the commandant’s office, he just huddled down even lower behind his little newspaper, to indicate that what happened from now on had nothing to do with him.

Homer glanced triumphantly at the guard covering his shame with the news sheet: at last he could take a proper look at the phones. The one that was winking all the time had a piece of dirty-white plaster stuck to it, on which someone had scrawled a single word with a ballpoint pen:

‘Tula’.

‘We maintain contact with the Order,’ said the commandant of Dobrynin Station, sweating and cracking his fists, but not daring to raise his eyes to the brigadier. ‘And no one has warned us about this operation. I can’t take this decision on my own.’

‘Then call Central,’ said Hunter. ‘You have time to agree things. But not much.’

‘They won’t give approval. This will endanger the stability of Hansa… Surely you know that comes before anything else for Hansa? And we’ve got everything under control.’

‘What damned stability? If measures aren’t taken…’

‘The situation is stable, I don’t understand what you find unsatisfactory,’ said Andrei Andreevich, shaking his heavy head obstinately. ‘All the exits are covered by guns. A mouse couldn’t get through. Let’s wait for everything to resolve itself.’

‘Nothing will resolve itself!’ Hunter bellowed. ‘If you wait, all that will happen is that someone will get out and run across the surface or find a roundabout route. The station has to be purged! By the book! I don’t understand why you haven’t done it yourselves yet!’

‘But there could be people there who are still well. How do you imagine it happening? Do I order my lads to shoot everyone in Tula and incinerate them? What about the sectarians’ train? And maybe clean out Serpukhov at the same time? Half the men here have kept women there, and illegitimate children… No, let me tell you something! We’re not fascists here. War’s war, but this… Killing sick people… Even when there was swine fever at Belorussia, they took the pigs into different corners one at a time, so that if one was infected, it died, and if it was healthy, it could live, instead of just slaughtering them all indiscriminately.’

‘Those were pigs, these are people,’ the brigadier said flatly.

‘No, no,’ said the commandant and started shaking his head again, splashing sweat about. ‘I can’t do that… It would be on my conscience afterwards. And I… I don’t want the dreams that would come afterwards.’

‘You won’t have to do it yourself. For that there are men who don’t have dreams. All you’ll do is let us pass through your station. Nothing more.’

‘I sent couriers to Polis, to find out about a vaccine,’ said Andrei Andreevich, wiping away his perspiration with his sleeve. ‘There is hope that…’

‘There is no vaccine! There is no hope! Stop burying your head in the sand! Why don’t I see any medical units from Central here? Why do you refuse to call them and ask for the green light to let a cohort of the Order through?’

The commandant remained obstinately silent; for some reason he tried to fasten the buttons on his tunic, fumbling at them with his slippery fingers and then giving up. He walked over to a shabby sideboard, splashed out a glass of some smelly alcoholic infusion for himself and downed it in one.

‘Why, you haven’t informed them,’ Hunter guessed. ‘They still don’t know anything about it. You’ve got an epidemic at the next station, and they don’t know anything…’

‘I answer for something like that with my head,’ the commandant said hoarsely. ‘An epidemic in the adjacent station means compulsory retirement. I allowed it to happen… Didn’t prevent it… Created a threat to the stability of Hansa.’

‘In the adjacent station? At Serpukhov?’

‘Everything’s calm there for the time being, but I caught on too late… Didn’t react in time. How could I know?’

‘And how did you explain all this to everyone? The forces at an independent station? The cordoning off of the tunnels?’

‘Bandits… Rebels. It happens everywhere. It’s nothing special.’

‘And now it’s too late to confess,’ the brigadier said with a nod.

‘It’s not retirement now…’ Andrei Andreevich poured himself a second glass and downed it. ‘It’s the death penalty.’

‘And now what?’

‘I’m waiting.’ The commandant lowered his backside onto his desk. ‘I’m waiting. What if…?’

‘Why don’t you answer their calls?’ Homer put in. ‘Your phone’s blowing its top – they’re calling from Tula. What if…?’

‘It’s not blowing its top,’ the commandant replied in a flat, hollow voice. ‘I turned the sound off. It’s just the light blinking. While it still does that, they’re alive.’

‘Why don’t you answer it?’ the old man repeated angrily.

‘What can I tell them? To hang on and be patient? To get well soon? That help is near? To put a bullet through their heads? Talking to the refugees was as much as I could take,’ the commandant yelled, losing control.

‘Shut up immediately,’ Hunter told him in a quiet voice. ‘And listen. I’ll come back in one day with a squadron. I have to be allowed through all the guard posts without hindrance. You will keep Serpukhov Station closed off. We’ll move on to Tula and purge it. If necessary, we’ll purge Serpukhov too. We’ll pretend it’s a small war. You don’t have to inform Central. You won’t have to do anything at all. I’ll do it… I’ll restore stability.’

The exhausted commandant nodded feebly, as limp as a deflated inner tube from a bicycle tyre. He poured out some more infusion for himself, sniffed at it and, before he drank it, asked quietly:

‘But you’ll be up to your elbows in blood. Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘Blood’s easy to wash off with cold water,’ the brigadier told him.

As they were walking out of the office, Andrei Andreevich filled his lungs with air and summoned the duty orderly in a stentorian voice. The orderly dashed inside and the door slammed shut behind him with a crash. Dropping back a little from Hunter, the old man leaned across the counter, grabbed the black receiver off the phone he’d been watching and pressed it to his ear.

‘Hello! Hello! I’m listening!’ he exclaimed in a loud whisper into the sieve of the mouthpiece.

Silence. Not blank silence, as if the line had been cut, it was a silence that hummed, as if the phone was off the hook at the other end, but there was no one to answer Homer. As if someone there had been waiting for him to answer for a very long time, but hadn’t been able to wait any longer. As if now the other receiver was croaking into the ear of a dead man in the old man’s distorted voice.

Hunter glanced ominously at Homer from the doorway and the old man carefully put the phone back down and meekly followed the brigadier out.

‘Popov! Popov! Rise and shine! Get up, quick!’

The powerful beam of the commander’s flashlight pierced straight though his eyelids, flooding his brain with fire. A strong hand shook him by the shoulder and then the back of it smashed into Artyom’s unshaven cheek.

‘Where’s your gun? Take your automatic and follow me, on the double!’ Of course, they dozed with their trousers on, in full gear in fact. Unwinding the tattered rags in which the Kalashnikov that served as his pillow had been wrapped for the night, Artyom tramped off, still swaying, after his commander. How long had he managed to sleep? An hour? Two? His head was buzzing and his throat was dry.

‘It’s starting,’ said the commander, looking back over his shoulder and breathing stale alcohol fumes into Artyom’s face.

‘What’s starting?’ he asked in fright.

‘You’ll see in a moment. Here, take this clip. You’ll need it.’

Tula – a spacious station with no columns which looked like merely the top of a single, unbelievably broad tunnel, was enveloped in almost total darkness. In a few places feeble beams of light were darting about, but there was no order or system to their movements, no sense at all, as if the flashlights were in the hands of little children or monkeys. Only where would monkeys come from here?

Waking instantly and feverishly checking his automatic, Artyom suddenly realised what had happened. They hadn’t been able to hold them! Or maybe it still wasn’t too late?

Another two soldiers, still puffy and hoarse from sleep, darted out of the watch office and joined them. Along the way the commander scraped together the remainder, everyone who could still stand on his feet and hold a gun. Even the ones who were already coughing a bit.

A strange, sinister cry pervaded the thick, stale, expired air. Not a scream, not a howl, not a command… A groan pouring out of hundreds of throats – straining in agony, full of despair and horror. A groan punctuated by a meagre jangling and scraping of iron that came from two, three, ten places at the same time.

The platform was cluttered with torn, sagging tents and capsized kennels for living in, constructed out of sheets of metal and pieces of Metro-carriage cladding, all jumbled together with plywood counters and people’s abandoned belongings. The commander strode on, parting the heaps of garbage like an icebreaker moving through icepacks, with Artyom and the other two trotting along in his wake.

A truncated train standing on the right-hand track loomed up out of the darkness: the light in both carriages was off, the open doors had been clumsily blocked with pieces of mobile barriers, and inside… On the other side of the dark window panes a terrible mishmash of humanity was heaving about, seething and simmering. Dozens of hands had grabbed the bars of the frail barriers and were swaying, shaking and rattling them. Occasionally the machine-gunners in gas masks who were posted at each of the exits skipped up to the black, gaping mouths of the doors and raised their gun butts, but they didn’t dare to beat the prisoners, let alone shoot them. In other places, on the contrary, the sentries tried to reason with the raging human sea squeezed into the metal boxes and calm it down.

But did the people in the carriages still understand anything?

They had been herded into the train because they started running away from the special sections of the tunnels, and because there were already too many of them – more than the healthy men.

The commander rushed past the first carriage, and the second, and then Artyom saw where they were going in such a great hurry. The last door, that was where the abscess had ruptured. Strange creatures had flooded out of the carriage – barely able to stand, mutilated beyond recognition by the swellings on their faces, with puffy, appallingly thick arms and legs. No one had managed to get away yet: all the free sub-machine-gunners were converging on the door.

The commander tore through the cordon and walked forward.

‘I order all patients to return to their places immediately!’ he exclaimed, pulling his officer’s Stechkin pistol out of its holster.

The infected man closest to him raised his cumbersome, swollen head with a struggle, in several stages, and licked his cracked lips.

‘Why are you treating us like this?’

‘You are aware that you are infected with an unknown virus. We’re looking for a cure… You just have to wait for it.’

‘Looking for a cure,’ the man repeated after him. ‘That’s funny.’

‘Get back into the carriage immediately.’ The commander clicked off the safety catch of his revolver. ‘I’ll count to ten, then I’ll shoot to kill. One…’

‘You just don’t want to leave us without hope, so that you can control us. Until we all die anyway…’

‘Two.’

‘It’s a day now since they gave us any water. Why give dead men anything to drink?’

‘The sentries are afraid to approach the bars. Two of them have been infected like that. Three.’

‘There are lots of bodies in the carriages already. We’re trampling on people’s faces. Do you know how a nose crunches? If it’s a child’s, then…’

‘There’s nowhere to put them! We can’t burn them. Four.’

‘The next carriage is so cramped, the dead are still standing beside the living. Shoulder to shoulder.’

‘Five.’

‘For God’s sake, shoot me, will you? I know there isn’t any cure. I’m going to die soon. Then I won’t feel my insides being scraped raw with coarse sandpaper and soaked in alcohol…’

‘Six.’

‘And set alight. It feels like my head’s full of worms that are eating away my brain and my soul bit by bit from the inside… Yum-yum, crunch, crunch, crunch…’

‘Seven!’

‘You idiot! Let us out of here! Let us die like human beings. What makes you think you have the right to torture us like this? You know that you’re probably already…’

‘Eight! This is all a safety measure. So that others can survive. I’m prepared to croak, but not one of you plague dogs is going to leave here. Get ready!’

Artyom flung up his automatic and set the sight on the nearest sick person. Oh God, he thought it was a woman… Swollen breasts stuck out under the T-shirt that was dried into a reddish-brown crust. He blinked and turned his gun barrel towards a shambling old man. The crowd of monsters started muttering and pulled back at first, trying to squeeze back in through the door, but it couldn’t – more and more infected people were oozing out of the carriage like fresh pus, groaning and weeping.

‘You sadist! What are you doing! You’re going to shoot living people! We’re not zombies!’

‘Nine!’ The commander’s voice turned dull and hollow.

‘Just let us go!’ the sick man yelled hoarsely, reaching his arms out towards the commander as if he were conducting a choir, and the whole crowd surged forward, following the sweep of his fingers.

‘Fire!’

People started flowing towards Leonid immediately, the moment he put his lips to his instrument. The first sounds drawn out of the barrel of his flute were tentative and impure, but still enough to set the people gathered around smiling and clapping in approval, and when the flute’s voice grew firmer, the faces of his listeners were transformed, as if the dirt had fallen away from them.

This time Sasha was awarded a place of distinction – beside the musician. Now Leonid was not the only one with dozens of eyes gazing at him intently, some of the admiring stares came her way. At first this made the girl feel awkward – after all, she didn’t deserve their attention and gratitude, but then the melody picked her up off the granite floor and carried her along with it, distracting her from her surroundings, in the same way that a good book or a story told by someone can captivate you and make you forget about everything.

The same melody floated through the air again – Leonid’s own composition, untitled. He started and ended every one of his performances with it. It could smooth out wrinkles and whisk the dust off the windowpanes of glazed eyes, lighting little icon lamps on the other side of them. Sasha already knew the melody, but Leonid opened up new, mysterious little doors in it, discovering new harmonies, and the music sounded new and different. As if she had been gazing at the sky for a long, long time, and suddenly, through an opening in the white clouds, she had glimpsed a boundless, bottomless, delicate-green expanse.

Suddenly she felt a prick that startled her and brought her back down under the ground ahead of schedule. Sasha spun round in fright. So that was it… Towering above the crowd, Hunter was standing slightly behind the other listeners with his head thrown back. The sharp, barbed blade of his gaze was thrust into her, and if he released his grip briefly, it was only in order to stab the musician too. Leonid took no notice of the man with the shaved head – or at least, he gave no sign that anything was interfering with his playing.

Strangely enough, Hunter didn’t leave, and he didn’t make any attempt to take her away or break off the performance. He waited until the final notes, then moved back and disappeared. Abandoning Leonid, Sasha immediately forced her way into the crowd, trying to keep up with the man with the shaved head. He stopped not far away, in front of a bench on which Homer was sitting, looking dejected.

‘You heard everything,’ he said in a husky voice. ‘I’m leaving. Will you go with me?’

‘Where to?’ asked the old man, smiling as the girl walked up to them. ‘She knows everything,’ he explained to the man with the shaved head.

Hunter stabbed Sasha again with his barbed gaze, then nodded without saying anything to her.

‘Not far,’ he said, shifting his head to speak to the old man. ‘But I… I don’t want to be left alone.’

‘Take me with you,’ said Sasha, seizing her chance.

The man with the shaved head breathed in loudly, clenching his fingers and unclenching them again.

‘Thank you for the knife,’ he said eventually. ‘It came in very useful.’

The girl recoiled, stung, but gathered her courage again immediately.

‘You decide what to do with the knife,’ she objected.

‘I had no choice.’

‘But now you do.’ She bit on her lower slip and frowned.

‘No, I still don’t. If you know, then you must understand. If you really…’

‘Understand what?’

‘How important it is to get to Tula. How important it is for me… As quickly as possible…’

Sasha saw his fingers trembling and a dark patch spreading across his shoulder: she was beginning to feel afraid of this man – and even more afraid for him.

‘You have to stop,’ she told him gently.

‘Out of the question,’ he snapped. ‘It’s not important who does it. So why not me?’

‘Because you’ll destroy yourself.’ The girl touched his hand tentatively and he started, as if he had been stung.

‘I have to. Cowards decide everything here as it is. If I delay any longer, I’ll destroy the whole Metro.’

‘But what if there was another way? If there was a cure? If you didn’t have to do it any longer?’

‘How many times do I have to say it? There aren’t any cures for this fever! Do you really think that I would… That I would…’

‘What would you choose?’ asked Sasha, not letting go of him.

‘There’s nothing to choose from!’ the man with the shaved head exclaimed, shaking off her hand. ‘We’re leaving!’ he barked to the old man.

‘Why don’t you want to take me with you?’ she protested.

‘I’m afraid.’ He said it in a very low voice, almost a whisper, so that no one but Sasha could hear him.

He swung round and strode away, growling curtly to the old man that he had ten minutes before they set out.

‘Am I mistaken or is someone here a bit feverish?’ said a voice behind Sasha’s back.

‘What?’ She spun round and collided with Leonid.

‘I thought I heard you talking about a fever,’ he said with an innocent smile.

‘You misheard.’ She didn’t intend to discuss anything with him right now.

‘And I thought the rumours had been confirmed after all,’ the musician said thoughtfully, as if he were talking to himself.

‘What rumours?’ asked Sasha, frowning.

‘About the quarantine at Serpukhov. About some supposedly incurable disease. About an epidemic…’ He watched her intently, seizing on every movement of her lips and her eyebrows.

‘So how long were you eavesdropping?’ she asked, blushing bright red.

‘I never do it deliberately. It’s just my musical hearing.’ He shrugged and spread his hands.

‘He’s my friend,’ she explained for some reason, nodding in the direction Hunter had gone in.

‘A classy kind of friend,’ he replied enigmatically.

‘Why do you say “supposedly” incurable?’

‘Sasha!’ Homer got up off the bench, keeping a suspicious eye fixed on the musician. ‘Can I have a word? We need to discuss what to do from here on…’

‘Will you let me have just a second?’ said Leonid. Dismissing the old man with a polite smile, he skipped aside and beckoned for the girl to follow him.

Sasha stepped towards him uncertainly: she still had the feeling that the battle with Hunter wasn’t lost yet, that if she didn’t give up now, Hunter wouldn’t have the heart to drive her away again. That she could still help him, even though she didn’t have the slightest idea of how to do it.

‘Maybe I heard about the epidemic much sooner than you did?’ Leonid whispered to her. ‘Maybe this isn’t the first outbreak of the disease? And what if there are some magical tablets that can cure it?’ asked the musician, glancing into her eyes.

‘But he says that there is no cure… That they’ll all have to be…’ Sasha babbled.

‘Liquidated?’ said Leonid, finishing her sentence for her. ‘He… Is that your wonderful friend? Well, that wouldn’t surprise me. But what I’m saying is the opinion of a qualified doctor.’

‘You mean to say…’

‘I mean to say,’ said the musician, putting his hand on Sasha’s shoulder, leaning down to her and breathing gently into her ear, ‘that the illness can be treated. There is a cure.’