Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘Got any money left?’ the man on guard at the door asked bluntly.

‘A little bit,’ said Leonid, setting five cartridges on his outstretched palm.

‘Give it here. Kostya’s decided to shop you. He thinks you’re a Red agent. If he’s right – there’s a passage through to your line here – well, you should know. If he’s wrong, you can wait here for a bit, until counter-intelligence comes for you, and barter with them.’

‘Unmasked me, have you?’ said Leonid, trying to suppress his hiccups. ‘Okay! So be it… We’ll be back again! Thanks for the assistance!’ He flung his arm up in an unfamiliar greeting. ‘Listen… To hell with that passage. Just take us to the tunnel, will you?

The musician grabbed Sasha and set off in front at an amazing pace, even though he was stumbling.

‘How kind of him!’ he muttered under his breath. ‘There’s a passage through to your line here… How would you like to go up on the surface? Forty metres down. As if he didn’t know everything there was blocked off ages ago…’

‘Where are we going?’ Sasha didn’t understand anything at all now.

‘What do you mean, where? To the Red Line! You heard – they’ve caught an agent provocateur, exposed him…’ Leonid muttered.

‘Are you a Red?’

‘My dear girl! Don’t ask me any questions right now! I can either think or run. And running’s what we need more… Our friend will raise the alarm any moment now… And he’ll shoot us for resisting arrest… Money’s not enough for us, we want a medal too…’

They dived into the tunnel, leaving the guard outside. They ran forward towards Kiev Station, hugging the wall. We won’t have time to get to the station anyway, thought Sasha. If the musician was right, and the second guard was already pointing out which way the fugitives had gone…

Then suddenly Leonid turned left into a well-lit side tunnel – as confidently as if he was walking home. A few minutes later flags, metal gratings and sandbags heaped up into machine-gun nests appeared ahead in the distance and they heard dogs barking. A frontier post? Had they already been warned about the fugitives? How was he planning to get out of here? And whose territory started on the other side of the barricades?

‘I’m from Albert Mikhailovich,’ said the musician, thrusting a strange-looking document under the sentry’s nose. ‘I need to get across to the other side.’

‘The usual rate,’ said the sentry, glancing inside the hard binding. ‘Where are the papers for the young lady?’

‘Let’s make it double,’ said Leonid, turning out his pockets and shaking out the last cartridges. ‘And you didn’t see the young lady, okay?’

‘Let’s just do without “let’s make it”,’ said the border guard, putting on a stern air. ‘D’you think you’re at the market? This is a law-abiding state!’

‘Oh don’t be like that!’ the musician exclaimed in mock fright. ‘I just thought, since it’s a market economy, we could bargain… I didn’t know there was a difference…’

Five minutes later Sasha and Leonid – mauled and dishevelled, with a graze on his cheekbone and a bleeding nose – were tossed into a tiny little room with tiled walls.

The iron door clanged shut.

Darkness fell.

In pitch darkness a person’s other senses become more acute. Smells become more vivid, sounds become louder and more three-dimensional. The only sound in the punishment cell was from someone or other scratching at the floor, and there was an unbearable stench of stale urine.

After drinking so much, the musician didn’t even seem able to feel his own pain. He carried on muttering something to himself under his breath for a while, then he stopped responding and started snuffling. He wasn’t alarmed that their pursuers were bound to catch up with them now. He wasn’t bothered about what would happen to Sasha, without any papers or justification for trying to cross the Hansa border. And of course, he was absolutely indifferent to the fate of Tula.

‘I hate you,’ Sasha said quietly.

He couldn’t care less about that either.

Soon a little hole appeared in the absolute gloom enveloping the cell – it was the glass spyhole in the door. Everything else remained invisible, but even this tiny gap was enough for Sasha: carefully groping her way through the blackness, she crept over to the door and unleashed her light little fists on it. The door responded by rumbling, but the moment Sasha stopped hammering it, silence returned. The guards refused to hear the din or Sasha’s shouts.

Time flowed on as slow as syrup.

How long would they hold them prisoner? Maybe Leonid had deliberately brought her here? Maybe he wanted to separate her from the old man and from Hunter? Tear her out of the team and lure her into a trap? And all of this only in order to…

Sasha started crying, burying her face in her sleeve – it absorbed the moisture and the sounds.

‘Have you ever seen the stars?’ asked a voice that still wasn’t sober.

She didn’t answer.

‘I’ve only ever seen them in photographs too,’ the musician told her. ‘The sun can barely break though the dust and the clouds, and they’re not strong enough for that. But your crying woke me up just now and I thought I’d suddenly seen a real star.’

‘It’s the spyhole,’ she answered, after swallowing her tears.

‘I know. But here’s the interesting thing…’ Leonid coughed. ‘Who was it that used to watch us from the sky, with a thousand eyes? And why did he turn his back on us?’

‘There never was anyone there!’ said Sasha, shaking her head abruptly.

‘But I’ve always wanted to believe that someone was keeping an eye on us,’ the musician said thoughtfully.

‘No one’s bothered about us, not even in this cell!’ she exclaimed and the tears welled up in her eyes again. ‘Did you arrange this specially? So we’d be too late?’ She started hammering on the door again.

‘If you don’t think there’s anyone there, why bother knocking?’ asked Leonid.

‘You couldn’t give a damn if all those sick people die!’

‘So that’s the impression I give, is it? That’s a shame,’ he sighed. ‘But as far as I can see, you’re not so desperate to get to those sick people either. You’re afraid that if your lover goes off to kill them, he’ll get infected himself, and there isn’t any cure…’

‘That’s not true!’ Sasha had to stop herself from hitting him.

‘It is, it’s true…’ said Leonid, mimicking her squeaky voice. ‘What’s so special about him?’

Sasha didn’t want to explain anything to him, she didn’t want to talk to him at all. But she couldn’t hold back.

‘He needs me! He really needs me, without me he’s doomed. But you don’t need me. You just haven’t got anyone to play with.’

‘Okay, let’s suppose he does need you. Not exactly desperately, but he wouldn’t say no. But what do you need him for, this ravenous wolf? Do you find villains attractive? Or do you want to save his lost soul?’

Sasha lapsed into silence. She was stung by how easily the musician could read her feelings. Perhaps there was nothing special about them? Or was it because she didn’t know how to hide them? That subtle, intangible something that she couldn’t even frame in words sounded quite banal, even crass, on his lips.

‘I hate you,’ she forced out at last.

‘That’s okay, I’m not so fond of me either,’ Leonid chuckled.

Sasha sat down on the floor and her tears started flowing again, first from anger, then from helplessness. She wasn’t going to give up, just as long as something still depended on her. But now, isolated in this cell, with a companion who was deaf to her hopes and fears, she had no chance of being heard any longer. Shouting was pointless. Banging on the door was pointless. There was no one she could try to convince. Everything was pointless.