Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Very many things, but not everything. Not his juvenile urge to plunge into the epicentre of the hurricane every time, in order to see what things were really like in there – and this at the age of almost sixty! And not the frivolity with which he accepted any assignment from his superiors, forgetting that he had barely escaped with his life and managed to scramble back home after one of his recent expeditions.

Not the thought that she might lose him and be left all alone again. After seeing Homer off to the watch – his turn to stand duty came round once a week – she never stayed at home. To escape from her distressing thoughts, she called on neighbours, or went to work even when it wasn’t her shift. The male indifference to death seemed stupid, egotistic and criminal to her.

It was pure chance that he found her at home: she had dropped in to change after work, and now she froze just as she was, with her arms threaded into the sleeves of her darned woollen sweater. Her dark hair, visibly streaked with grey – although she wasn’t even fifty yet – was tangled, her brown eyes were bright with fear.

‘Kolya, has something happened? Aren’t you on duty until late?’

Homer suddenly lost all desire to tell her about the decision that had been taken. He hesitated: maybe if he just calmed her down for the time being, he could slip the news into the talk over dinner?

‘Only don’t you even think of lying,’ she warned him, catching his wandering gaze.

‘You know, Lena… The thing is…’ he began.

‘Has someone…?’ – she asked the most important question immediately, about the most terrible thing of all, not wishing even to pronounce the word ‘died’, as if she believed her dark thoughts might materialise as reality.

‘No! No,’ said Homer with a shake of his head. ‘They just took me off duty. They’re sending me to Serpukhov,’ he added in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘But isn’t it…?’ Elena said and faltered. ‘Isn’t that… Have they come back then? That’s where…’

‘Oh, come on, it’s all a load of nonsense. There’s nothing there,’ he said hastily.

Elena turned away, walked over to the table, shifted the salt-cellar from one spot to another and straightened out a fold in the tablecloth.

‘I had a dream,’ she said and coughed to clear the hoarseness out of her voice.

‘You have them all the time.’

‘A bad dream,’ she went on stubbornly and suddenly broke into pitiful sobs.

‘Oh come on, now. What can I do? It’s an order,’ he mumbled, stroking her fingers and floundering as he realised his entire well-prepared speech wasn’t worth a damn.

‘Let that one-eyed bastard go himself,’ she yelled furiously through her tears, jerking her hand away. ‘Let that other fiend go, in his little beret! All they ever do is give orders. What does he care? All his life he’s slept with a machine-gun beside him instead of a woman. What does he know?’

Once you’ve reduced a woman to tears, you can only demean yourself by turning round and trying to console her. Homer felt ashamed, and genuinely sorry for Elena, but it would have been all too easy now to break down, promise to refuse the assignment, reassure her and dry her tears, only to regret later missing his chance – this chance that had fallen to him, which could be the last one in a life that was already unusually long by today’s standards.

So he said nothing.

It was already time to go, gather the officers together and brief them, but the colonel carried on sitting in Istomin’s office, taking no notice of the cigarette smoke that usually irritated and tempted him so badly.

While the station commandant whispered something thoughtfully, running one finger over his battle-scarred map of the Metro, Denis Mikhailovich kept trying to understand why Hunter wanted to do this. There could be only one thing behind his mysterious appearance at Sebastopol, his desire to settle here and even the cautious way in which the brigadier almost always showed up at the station wearing his helmet to conceal his face: Istomin must be right, Hunter was on the run from someone after all. In order to earn extra points, he had made the southern guard post his base: by doing the work of an entire brigade, he was gradually making himself indispensable. At this stage, no matter who demanded that they hand him over, no matter what reward they offered for his head, neither Istomin nor the colonel would even think of letting them have him.

He had chosen the perfect place to hide. There were no outsiders at Sebastopol and, unlike the garrulous shuttle traders from other stations, the local convoy merchants weren’t loose-tongued, they never gossiped when they got out into the Greater Metro. In this little Sparta, clinging to its patch of earth at the very end of the world, the qualities valued most highly were reliability and ferocity in battle. And people here knew how to keep secrets.

But then why would Hunter abandon everything, volunteer for this expedition and set out for Hansa, risking being recognised? Even Istomin wouldn’t have had the heart to assign him a sortie like this. Somehow the colonel didn’t believe the brigadier was really alarmed about the fate of the missing scouts. And he wasn’t fighting for Sebastopol out of love for the station, but for reasons of his own, known only to him.

Maybe he was on a mission? That would explain a lot: his sudden arrival, his secrecy, the obstinacy with which he spent the nights in a sleeping bag in the tunnels, his decision to set out for Serpukhov Station immediately. But then why had he asked the colonel not to let anyone else know? Who could have sent him, if not them ?

Who else?

The colonel forced himself to ignore the desire to take a drag from Istomin’s cigarette. No, it was impossible. Hunter – one of the pillars of The Order ? The man to whom tens, maybe hundreds of them owed their lives, including Denis Mikhailovich himself?

‘ That man couldn’t…’ he objected cautiously to himself. ‘But was the Hunter who returned from the abyss still that man?’ And if he was acting on instructions from someone… Could he have received some kind of signal now? Did this mean that the disappearance of the armaments convoys and the three scouts was no coincidence, but part of a carefully planned operation? But then what part was the brigadier playing in it?

The colonel shook his head briskly to and fro, as if he were trying to toss off the leeches of doubt that had fastened onto it and were rapidly swelling up with blood. How could he think like this about a man who had saved his life? Especially since, so far, Hunter had served the station impeccably and given no reason at all to doubt him. And Denis Mikhailovich, refusing to label the man a ‘spy’ or a ‘saboteur’ even in his thoughts, took a decision.

‘Let’s have a cup of tea, and then I’ll go to and talk to the men,’ he declared with exaggerated cheerfulness, cracking his knuckles. Istomin tore himself away from the map and gave a weary smile. He was just reaching out to his ancient disc-dial phone to summon his orderly when the phone started ringing. The two men glanced sharply at each other, startled – it was a week since they had heard that sound: if the duty orderly wanted to report something, he always knocked at the door, and no one else at the station could call the commandant directly.

‘Istomin here,’ he said warily.

‘Vladimir Ivanovich, I’ve got Tula Station on the line,’ the operator jabbered. ‘Only it’s very hard to hear anything. I think it’s our men but the connection…’

‘Just put it through, will you?’ the commandant roared, slamming his fist down hard on the desk and setting the telephone jangling pitifully.