Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Will anything remain after me, in particular?

Homer had a harder time than other people. He genuinely envied those whose faith allowed them to hope for admission into an afterworld. As for him, when he heard it mentioned in conversation, the old man’s thoughts immediately flew back to Nakhimov Prospect. Quite possibly Homer did not consist only of the flesh that would be ground up and digested by the corpseeaters. But even if there was something else in him, that something was not capable of existing apart from the flesh and bone.

What remained after the kings of Egypt? Or after the heroes of Greece? Or after the artists of the Renaissance? Did anything at all remain of them? And did they remain in anything?

But what other immortality is left to man?

Homer reread what he had written, pondered for a moment and then carefully tore the pages out of the exercise book, crumpled them up, put them on a metal plate and set fire to them. A minute later a handful of ash was all that remained of the work on which he had spent the last three hours.

She died.

This was how Sasha had always imagined death: the final ray of light is extinguished, all the voices fall silent, you can’t feel your body, and all that’s left is eternal darkness. The blackness and silence from out of which people emerge and to which they inevitably return. Sasha had heard stories about heaven and about hell, but the Underworld had always seemed perfectly innocuous to her. Eternity spent in total inactivity, absolutely blind and deaf, seemed a hundred times worse to her than any cauldrons of boiling oil.

And then a tiny, trembling flame appeared ahead of her. Sasha reached out to it, but it was impossible to catch: the dancing firefly ran away from her, moved back closer to tease her, and immediately darted away again, tantalising her, luring her after itself.

She knew what it was: the tunnel spark.

Her father used to say that when someone died in the Metro, their soul wandered in confusion through the pitch-dark tangle of tunnels, and every tunnel ended in a dead end. It didn’t understand that it wasn’t attached to a body any longer, that its earthly existence was over. It had to carry on wandering until somewhere far ahead it saw the light of a phantom campfire. And when the soul saw the light, it had to hurry towards it, because it was sent for the soul and would run away, leading the soul to a place where peace was waiting. But sometimes it happened that the little light took mercy on a soul and led it back to its lost body. Other people whispered about people like that, saying they had come back from the next world, although it would be more correct to say the darkness had released them.

The spark called for her to follow, it insisted and Sasha gave in. She couldn’t feel her legs, but they weren’t needed: in order to keep up with the light as it slipped away, all she had to do was not lose sight of it. To keep her eyes fixed on it intently, as if she were trying to win it over, to tame it.

Sasha managed to catch it after all, and the little light dragged the girl through the pitch darkness, through labyrinths of tunnels from which she would never have found a way out, to the final station on the line of her life. Things suddenly started becoming visible up ahead: Sasha fancied her guide was tracing out the contours of some distant room where she was expected.

‘Sasha!’ a voice called out to her, an amazingly familiar voice, although she couldn’t remember who it belonged to.

‘Dad?’ she asked warily, thinking she could hear a note of affectionate warmth in the other person’s voice.

They arrived. The spectral tunnel spark halted, turned into an ordinary flame and hopped onto the wick of a melted, spreading candle, settling down on it comfortably, like a cat that has just come back from a walk.

A cool, calloused palm covered her hand. Hesitantly, afraid of sinking to the bottom again, Sasha detached herself from the little light. Following her into wakefulness, pain stabbed through her torn forearm and her bruised temple started aching. Plain, official furniture surfaced out of the darkness, swaying close by – two chairs, a locker… Sasha herself was lying on a genuine bed, so soft that she couldn’t feel her back at all. As if her body was being returned to her by parts, and some were still waiting for their turn.

‘Sasha?’ the voice repeated.

She turned her eyes to the speaker and jerked her hand away. Sitting at her bedside was the old man she had travelled with on the trolley. There was nothing intrusive in his touch, it didn’t sting or insult her; she took her hand away because she felt ashamed that she could confuse a stranger’s voice with her father’s, and out of resentment that the tunnel spark had led her to the wrong place.

The old man smiled gently. It seemed to be quite enough for him that she had come round. Looking more closely, Sasha noticed a warm glint in his eyes, the kind of glint she had only ever encountered before in the eyes of one man. It wasn’t surprising that she had been deceived. And she suddenly felt awkward in front of the old man.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

And then, recalling her final minutes at Pavelets, she jerked up.

‘What happened to your friend?’

She seemed unable either to laugh or to cry, or perhaps she didn’t have enough strength left for either. The girl was lucky, the monster’s blade-like claws had missed her: that single blow had landed flat. But even that had been enough to leave her unconscious for twenty-four hours. Her life was in no danger now, the doctor assured Homer. The old man hadn’t talked to the doctor about his own troubles. Sasha – while she was unconscious, the old man had got into the habit of calling her that – went limp and slumped back down onto the pillow, and Homer went back to the desk, where the open exercise book, with a full ninety-six pages, was waiting for him. He twirled the pen in his hands and carried on from the place where he had abandoned his newly begun book to go over to the girl when she groaned deliriously.

…the latest convoy had been delayed… delayed beyond any reasonable limit, long enough for the realisation to dawn that this time something terrible and unforeseen had happened, something against which not even heavily-armed, battle-hardened guards and a relationship built up over the years with the leadership of Hansa had been able to protect it.

And all this would not have been so bad, if only the lines of communication were functioning. But something had happened to the telephone line that led to the Circle: contact had been broken off on Monday, and the team sent out to search for the break had drawn a blank.

Homer looked up and started: the girl was standing behind him, deciphering his scribble over his shoulder. She seemed to be held up by nothing but curiosity. Feeling embarrassed, the old man turned the exercise book face down.

‘Is that what you need inspiration for?’ she asked him.

‘I’m still right at the beginning,’ Homer muttered for some reason.

‘And what happened to the convoy?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, starting to draw a frame round the title. ‘The story’s not finished yet. Lie down, you need to rest.’

‘But it’s up to you how you finish the book,’ she objected, without moving from the spot.

‘In this book nothing’s up to me.’ The old man put his pen down on the table. ‘I’m not inventing it, just writing down everything that happens to me.’

‘That means everything depends on you even more,’ the girl said thoughtfully. ‘Will I be in it?’

‘I was just going to ask your permission,’ Homer chuckled.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she replied seriously. ‘But what are you writing it for?’