Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Shooting at it was pointless, and Sasha wouldn’t have had enough time even to raise her automatic. She took a hesitant step backwards, towards the way out. The monster gave a low moan and swayed towards the girl. But nothing happened. The monster stayed where it was, keeping its blind, intent gaze fixed on Sasha. She ventured another step. And another. Without turning her back on the beast, without showing it her fear, she gradually moved closer to the way out. The creature plodded after Sasha as if it were spellbound, hanging back just a little, as if it were seeing her to the door.

It was only when the girl, now only ten metres away from the unbearable glow of that gap, couldn’t stand it any more and broke into a run, that the beast roared and dashed forward too. Sasha flew outside, squeezed her eyes shut and dashed on, unable to see anything, until she stumbled and went tumbling across the rough, hard ground. She waited for the monster to overtake her and tear her to shreds, but for some reason her pursuer allowed her to get away. A long, lingering minute passed, and then another. There was silence all around.

Sasha didn’t open her eyes until she had fumbled in her bag and found the home-made glasses she had bought from the sentry – two dark glass bottle-bottoms set in metal rings and mounted on a length of twine. The glasses had to be pulled on over a gas mask, so that the transparent green discs sat precisely on top of the peepholes in the rubber. Now she could look. Slowly parting her eyelids and peeping suspiciously out of the corners of her eyes at first, then gazing more boldly, Sasha looked round at the strange place she had ended up in.

Above her head was the sky. The real sky, bright and immense. Giving more light than any searchlight, illuminated in an even green colour all the way across, masked by low clouds in places and in others opening up into a bottomless abyss.

The sun! She saw it through an attenuated veil of cloud: a round disc the size of a detonator cap, polished to a spotless white and so bright that Sasha felt as if it would burn a hole in her glasses in another moment. She turned her eyes away in fright, waited for a little while and then stole another glance at it. She fancied there was something rather disappointing about it: after all, it was just a blinding hole in the sky, why should it be worshipped like a god? And yet it was enchanting, it attracted and excited her. The opening of the exit from the beasts’ lair had shone almost as brightly for eyes accustomed to darkness; what if, Sasha suddenly thought, the sun was exactly the same kind of way out, an exit leading to a place where it was never, ever dark… And if you could fly to it, you could escape from the earth, in exactly the same way as she had just escaped from under the earth? And the sun also gave out a weak, barely perceptible warmth, as if it were alive.

Sasha was standing in the middle of a bare, stony open space, surrounded by ancient, half-ruined buildings, so high that the black gaps of their windows were piled up in almost ten rows. The number of buildings was almost infinite, they crowded together, concealing each another from Sasha as they jostled to get a better look at her. Peeking out from behind the tall buildings were even higher ones, and behind them she could distinguish the vague outlines of absolutely huge buildings. It was incredible, but Sasha could see them all!

It wasn’t important that they were tinted a silly-looking green, like the ground under her feet, like the air itself and the insanely glowing, bottomless sky – she could see such unimaginably vast distances now.

No matter how long Sasha had trained her eyes to see in the dark, that was not what they were intended for. At night-time all she could see from the cliff beside the Metro bridge were the ugly structures standing a few hundred metres away from the hermetic door. After that the darkness was laid on too thickly and even though Sasha had been born underground, her gaze couldn’t scrape through it.

The girl had never seriously wondered before just how big the world she lived in was. But when she did think about it, Sasha had always imagined a small cocoon of twilight, several hundred metres in each direction, and beyond that a precipice that was final, the edge of the universe, the beginning of absolute darkness.

Although she knew the earth was actually far bigger than that, Sasha couldn’t imagine what it looked like. And now she realised there was no way she could have done that anyway – simply because it was impossible to picture it, never having seen anything like it before. And the strange thing was that somehow she didn’t feel at all afraid to stand in the middle of this boundless wasteland. Before, when she crept out of the tunnel onto the cliff, she felt as if she had been dragged out of her protective shell, but now it seemed more like an eggshell that she had finally hatched out of. By daylight any danger could be spotted at a great distance, and Sasha would have more than enough time to hide or prepare to defend herself. There was also another timid feeling that she was unfamiliar with – as if she had come home. The draught drove tangles of prickly branches across the barren space, whistled dejectedly in the crevices between the buildings and shoved Sasha in the back, demanding that she be more daring, ordering her to set out and explore this new world.

She really had no choice anyway: to get back down into the Metro, she would have to go back into the building swarming with those fearsome creatures – only they weren’t sleeping anymore. Sometimes white bodies flickered momentarily in the dark wells of the entrances and immediately disappeared: they obviously de-tested the daylight. But what would happen when night fell? She had to get as far away from here as possible before that happened if she intended to see at least something of what the old man had described so vividly, before she died.

And Sasha moved on.

She had never felt so little before. She couldn’t believe that these gigantic buildings could have been built by people the same height as she was. Why did they need all this? Probably the final generations before the war had degenerated and shrunk in size… nature had prepared them for a harsh existence in the cramped tunnels and stations. But these buildings had been erected by the present squat human beings’ ancestors – as mighty, tall and statuesque as the buildings they lived in.

She came to a broad open patch: the buildings moved apart here and the ground was covered with a cracked grey crust that looked like stone. In a single bound the world became even more immense: from here Sasha had a view of distances that thrilled her heart and set her head spinning.

Squatting down by the mildewed, mossy walls of a castle with a blunt clock tower that propped up the clouds, she tried to picture to herself how this city must have looked before life abandoned it.

Striding along the road – and there was no doubt that it was a road – were tall, beautiful people in bright-patterned clothes that made the most festive costumes of the residents of Pavelets look wretched and stupid. Scurrying along in the vivid crowd were cars, exactly like the carriages of the Metro’s trains, but absolutely tiny, only big enough for four passengers. The buildings weren’t so sombre: their windows weren’t black, gaping holes, they glittered with cleanly washed glass. And Sasha saw light little bridges running between facing houses here and there at various heights. And the sky wasn’t so empty – incredibly huge aeroplanes drifted slowly across it, with their bellies almost touching the roofs. Her father had explained to her that they didn’t have to flap anything in order to fly, but they appeared to Sasha as lazy behemoths with fluttering dragonfly wings that were almost invisible and only shimmered slightly in the greenish rays of the sun.