Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘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!’

The cage was still lying where the fat man had knocked it out of her hands. Its little door was slightly open and the rat had fled. ‘Let him go,’ the girl thought. The rat deserved his freedom too.

There was nothing else for it, so Sasha had put on her kidnapper’s gas mask. She thought there were still traces of his stale breath in it, but she could only be glad he’d taken the mask off before he was shot.

Close to the middle of the bridge, the background radiation spiked again

Sasha rattled about in the immense tarpaulin suit like a cockroach larva in a cocoon – it seemed miraculous that it could stay on her. But the gas mask clung firmly to her face, even though it had been stretched across the fat man’s broad features and drooping jowls. Sasha tried to blow as hard as she could, in order to drive the air predestined for the dead man out through the tubes and filters. But looking around through the perspiring circular lenses, she had an eerie feeling that she had climbed into someone else’s body, not just his protective suit. Only an hour ago the soulless demon who had come for her was in here. And now it was as if, in order to get across the bridge at all, she had been forced to become him and take a look at the world through his eyes. Through the eyes of the men who had banished her and her father to Kolomenskoe and kept them alive there for all these years only because their greed was stronger than their hate. Sasha wondered whether, in order to get lost among people like that, she too would have to wear a black rubber mask and pretend to be someone with no face and no feelings. If only that would help her to change on the inside too, and reset her memories to zero… To genuinely believe that she hadn’t been damaged beyond repair, that she could still start all over again.

Sasha would have liked to think these two men had not picked her up simply by chance, that they had been sent to the station especially for her, but she knew it wasn’t true. She found it hard to decide why they had taken her with them – for amusement, out of pity or to prove something to each other. The few words the old man had tossed to her, like a bone to a dog, seemed to hint at sympathy, but he did everything with wary deference to his companion, held his tongue and seemed afraid of being accused of mere common humanity.

And the other one, after giving permission for the girl to go with them as far as the nearest inhabited station, had never even looked in her direction again. Sasha had deliberately hung back and let him go ahead slightly, so she could study him freely from behind. He obviously sensed her gaze on him, immediately tensing up and jerking his head back, but he didn’t look round – perhaps out of tolerance for a young girl’s curiosity, or perhaps because he didn’t want to show that he was paying any attention to her.

From the powerful build and feral agility of the man with the shaved head, which had made the fat man confuse him with a bear, it was obvious that he was a soldier and a solitary. But it wasn’t just a matter of his height or his massive shoulders. He radiated energy, and it would have been just as palpable if he were short and skinny. A man like that could make almost anyone submit to his will, and he would eliminate anyone who disobeyed without compunction. And long before the girl finally mastered her fear of this man, before she even started trying to make sense of him and herself, the unfamiliar voice of the woman awakening within her told Sasha that she would submit too.

The trolley moved forward at an incredible pace. Homer could hardly feel the resistance of the levers, all the strain was taken by the brigadier. For form’s sake, standing there opposite Hunter, the old man also raised and lowered his hands, but the work cost him no effort at all.

The squat Metro bridge was like a millipede fording the murky, turbid river. The concrete flesh was peeling off its steel bones, its legs were buckling under it, and one of its two backbones had slumped and collapsed. Standard, functional and impermanent, it lacked the slightest trace of elegance – like the residential high-rise developments around it, like all of Moscow’s banal, stereotyped suburbs. But gazing round rapturously as he rode across it, Homer recalled the magical movable bridges of St Petersburg and the burnished metal lacework of Moscow’s Crimea Bridge.

In the twenty years he had lived in the Metro, the old man had only come up to the surface three times, and each time he had tried to observe more than he could possibly see during his short period of leave. Tried to bring his memories to life, focus the lenses of his eyes, already turning cloudy with age, on the city and click the rusting shutter of his visual memory. Tried to store up memories for the future. He might never be up on the surface again, at Kolomenskoe, Rechnoi Vokzal or Tyoply Stan – in those miraculously beautiful places that he and so many other Muscovites used to regard with such unjustified contempt.

Year by year his Moscow was growing older, falling apart, being eroded away. Homer wanted to stroke the decaying Metro bridge in the same way as the girl at Kolomenskoe caressed the man who had bled to death for the last time. And not just the bridge, but the grey crags of the factory buildings too. He wanted to gaze at them in endless adoration, to touch them, so he could feel that he was really there among them and not just dreaming all this. And also, just in case, to say goodbye to them.

The visibility was atrocious, the silvery moonlight couldn’t force its way through the filter of dense clouds, and the old man had to guess at more than he could observe. But that was okay, he was well used to substituting fantasies for reality.

Completely absorbed in his musings, at that moment Homer wasn’t thinking of anything else. He forgot about the legends that he was going to compose and the mysterious diary that had been harrowing his imagination without a break for so many hours. He behaved just like a child on a holiday outing, gazing in delight at the blurred silhouettes of the high-rises, turning his head to and fro, talking out loud to himself.

The others got no pleasure from the journey across the bridge. The brigadier, who had taken the forward-facing position, occasionally froze and peered in the direction of sounds that came flying up from below. Apart from that, his attention was riveted to the distant point, still invisible to his companions, where the tracks burrowed back into the earth. The girl sat behind Hunter, for some reason clutching her salvaged gas mask with both hands.

It was very obvious that she felt uncomfortable up on the surface. While the team was walking through the tunnel, the girl had seemed quite tall, but the moment they stepped out into the open she shrank into herself, as if she had withdrawn into an invisible shell, and not even the tarpaulin suit taken from the corpse made her seem any bigger, although it was hideously large for her. She was indifferent to the beautiful views from the bridge and most of the time she looked straight down at the floor in front of her.

They rode through the ruins of Technopark Station, which was being built, with careless haste, just before the war – it had crumbled away, not because of the nuclear strikes, but simply from the passage of time – and finally approached the tunnel. In the pale darkness of the night, its entrance was black with an absolute blackness. For Homer, his suit was transformed into a genuine suit of armour, and he was a medieval knight, riding into a fantastic fairytale cave, straight into the dragon’s lair. The noise of the nighttime city was left behind on the threshold of the beast’s abode, at the point where Hunter ordered them to abandon the trolley. All that could be heard now was the tentative rustling of three travellers’ footsteps and their sparse words, fractured by an echo that stumbled across the tunnel liners. But there was something unusual about the quality of sound in this tunnel. Even Homer could clearly sense the enclosed nature of the space, as if they had walked in through the neck of a glass bottle.