Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Sasha wasn’t afraid.

He was young, slim and incredibly good looking. A little bit fragile, perhaps, but his well-groomed face wasn’t soft and his green eyes didn’t look naïve. His dark hair was untrimmed, but it lay neatly on his head. His unostentatious clothes looked too clean for this station and made him stand out against the human mishmash of Pavelets. His instrument looked a bit like the kind of whistles that people made for children out of narrow plastic insulation pipes, but it was large and black, with brass keys, imposingly elegant and obviously very expensive. The sounds that the musician drew from it seemed to belong to a different world and a different time. Like the instrument itself… Like its owner.

He caught Sasha’s glance in the very first moment, let it go and immediately caught it again. She was embarrassed: she didn’t find his attention unpleasant, but it was his music she had come here for.

‘Thank God! I’ve found you…’

Homer pushed his way through to her, sweaty and panting.

‘How is he?’ Sasha asked immediately.

‘Do you really…?’ the old man began, then stopped short and said something else instead: ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What? Where to?’ Sasha felt as if her heart was squeezed in someone’s fist.

‘He left. Took all his things and went. Most likely he’s gone to Dobrynin…’

‘And he didn’t leave anything?’ she asked timidly, already guessing what Homer’s answer would be.

‘Not a thing,’ the old man said with a nod.

People started hissing furiously at them and Homer stopped talking. He listened to the melody, all the time glancing suspiciously from the musician to the girl and back again. He needn’t have worried: she was thinking about something completely different.

Hunter may have driven her away and run off as soon as he could, but Sasha was starting to grasp the strange rules that he followed. If the man with the shaved head really had taken all his things, absolutely all of them, that meant he simply wanted her to be more tenacious, not to give up and come and find him. And that was what she would do anyway, yes she would. If only…

‘And the knife?’ she whispered to the old man. ‘Did he take my knife with him? The black one?’

‘It’s not in the ward,’ Homer said with a shrug.

‘That means he took it!’

Even this paltry sign was enough for Sasha.

The flute-player was definitely talented and as skilled in his art as if he had been playing in a conservatory only yesterday. The case of his instrument was lying open for donations, and there were enough cartridges in it to feed the population of a small station – or to slaughter every last one of them. This was genuine recognition, Homer thought with a sad little smile

The melody seemed vaguely familiar to the old man, but try as he might to remember what it was and where he could have heard it – in an old film, in a concert on the radio? – he couldn’t recall. There was something unusual about the melody: once you casually tuned in to its wavelength, you couldn’t tear yourself away from it; you felt you absolutely had to listen right to the end, and then applaud the musician before he started playing again.

Prokofiev? Shostakovich? In any case Homer’s knowledge of music was too meagre for a really serious attempt to guess the composer. But whoever had written down those notes, the flute player was doing more than just perform them, he was filling them with new resonance and new meaning, bringing them to life. Talent. Yes, talent, and for that Homer was prepared to forgive this young lad for the teasing glances that he tossed Sasha’s way every now and then, like someone tossing a crumpled paper ball to a kitten.

But now it was time to take the girl away from him. The old man waited until the musical blossom faded and the musician surrendered to the applause of his audience, then grabbed hold of Sasha’s damp protective suit that still smelled of bleach and dragged her out of the circle.

‘My things are packed, I’m going after him,’ he said and paused.

‘So am I,’ the girl said quickly.

‘Do you realise what you’re getting involved in?’ Homer asked in a low voice.

‘I know everything. I overheard it all.’ She looked at him defiantly. ‘An epidemic, right? And he wants to cremate everyone. Dead or alive. The whole station,’ said Sasha, without turning her eyes away.

‘And why do you want to go to a man like that?’ the old man asked, genuinely curious.

Sasha didn’t answer: she carried on walking in silence for a while until they reached an empty, secluded corner of the hall.

‘My father died. Because of me. I’m to blame. There’s nothing I can do to bring him back to life. But there are people there who are still alive. Who can still be saved. And I have to try. I owe it to him,’ she concluded slowly and awkwardly.

‘Saved from whom? From what? The sickness is incurable, you heard that,’ the old man responded bitterly.

‘From our friend. He’s more terrible than any sickness. More deadly.’ The girl sighed. ‘At least diseases leave some hope. Someone always recovers. One in a thousand.’

‘How? What makes you think you can do it?’ asked Homer, gazing at her intently.

‘I’ve already done it once,’ she replied uncertainly.

Was the girl overestimating her strength? Was she deceiving herself by imagining that the callous and relentless brigadier shared her feelings? Homer didn’t want to dishearten Sasha, but it was best to warn her now.

‘Do you know what I found in his ward?’ The old man carefully took the battered compact out of his pocket and handed it to Sasha. ‘Did you do that to it?’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘That means it was Hunter…’

The girl slowly opened the little box and found her reflection in one of the shards of glass. She pondered for a moment, recalling her last conversation with the man with the shaved head and what he said in the dark room when she came to give him the knife. And she recalled Hunter’s face, covered in blood, as he took those ponderous steps towards her, so that the monster with its razorsharp claws already raised to strike would leave Sasha and kill him instead.

‘He didn’t do it because of me. It’s because of the mirror,’ she said resolutely.

‘What’s the mirror got to do with it?’ the old man asked, raising one eyebrow.

‘It’s like you said,’ Sasha answered, slamming the lid closed. ‘Sometimes it helps to see yourself from the outside. It helps to understand a lot about yourself,’ she said, mimicking the old man’s tone of voice.

‘You think Hunter doesn’t know who he is? Or that he’s still suffering because of his appearance? And that’s why he broke it?’ Homer asked with a condescending chuckle.

‘It’s not a matter of his appearance,’ said the girl, leaning back against a column.

‘Hunter knows perfectly well who he is. And he obviously doesn’t like to be reminded about it,’ said the old man, answering his own question.

‘Perhaps he’d forgotten?’ she objected. ‘I sometimes get the feeling that he’s always trying to remember something… Or that he’s chained to a heavy freight car that’s running down a slope into the darkness, and no one will help him to stop it. I can’t explain it. I just feel it when I look at him.’ Sasha frowned. ‘No one else sees it, but I do. That’s why I told you that time that he needs me.’

‘So that’s why he left you,’ Homer remarked cruelly.

‘I was the one who left him,’ the girl said, knitting her brows stubbornly. ‘And now I have to catch up with him, before it’s too late. They’re still alive. They can still be saved,’ she repeated insistently. ‘And he can still be saved too.’