Her father had always been convinced that people were given signs. They just had to know how to spot them and read them. Sasha glanced up and froze in astonishment. If someone wanted to send her a sign at this very moment, they couldn’t possibly have thought of anything more eloquent.
Not far from the broken-off bridge, an old round tower with an elaborate tip rose up out of the dark thickets; it was the tallest building in the area. The years had not treated it kindly: deep cracks snaked across its walls and the tower was listing dangerously. It would have collapsed long ago, if not for a miracle. Why hadn’t she noticed it sooner?
The building was girded round by an absolutely gigantic bind-weed plant. Of course, its trunk was many times thinner than the tower, but it was more than thick enough and strong enough to hold up the building that was falling apart. The amazing plant wound round the tower in a spiral: thinner branches ran off from the main trunk, and even thinner ones ran off from them, and all together they formed a net that prevented the building from crumbling.
Of course the bindweed had once been as weak and flexible as the youngest and most tender of its shoots was now. It had once clutched at the ledges and balconies of a tower that seemed eternal and indestructible. If the tower hadn’t been so tall, the bindweed wouldn’t have grown so large.
As Sasha gazed spellbound at that rescued building, everything acquired meaning for her again and the desire to fight returned. It was strange, after all, absolutely nothing had changed in her life. But suddenly, despite everything, a tiny shoot of that bindweed had broken through the grey crust of despair in her soul – a green shoot of hope. There might be some things that she could never put right, some deeds that were impossible to undo, that could never be retracted. But in this story there were still many things that she could change, even if she didn’t yet know how. The important thing was that her strength had come back to her.
And now it seemed to Sasha that she had also guessed the reason why the grim monster had let her get away unharmed: someone invisible had held the ferocious beast back on a chain in order to give the girl another chance.
And she was grateful for that. She was ready to forgive, ready to assert what she believed and fight for it again. And all she needed from Hunter was the very slightest hint. Just one more sign.
The setting sun suddenly went out, but immediately flared up again. Sasha flung her head back just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the black silhouette that had hurtled over her head, obscuring the sun’s light for an instant and immediately disappearing from view.
A shrill whistling sound and an ear-splitting howl sliced through the air as the massive hulk lunged down at Sasha out of the sky, missing by only a tiny margin. At the last moment, instinct prompted the girl to fling herself full length on the ground, and that was the only thing that saved her. The outlandish monster skidded along the ground on its outstretched leathery wings, then gave a mighty flap to gain height and started turning in a broad half-circle as it moved in for another attack.
Sasha grabbed her automatic, but immediately abandoned the idea as useless. Not even a burst fired pointblank could knock a carcass like that off course, and it was senseless even to think of bringing it down – she would have to hit it in the first place! The girl dashed back towards the open space from which she had set out on her brief journey, without even thinking about how to get back into the Metro.
The flying monster gave its hunting call and came hurtling at her again. Sasha got her feet tangled in the fat man’s trousers and tumbled face down onto the road, but squirmed round and fired a short, snarling burst. The bullets discouraged the beast, but they didn’t do it any harm at all. In the few seconds she had won herself, the girl managed to get to her feet and dash towards the nearest buildings, realising at last where to find cover from the predator.
There were two shadows circling now, keeping themselves in the air with heavy flaps of broad, webbed wings. Sasha’s calculation was simple: to squeeze up against the wall of any building. The flying monsters were too large and unwieldy to get her there: and after that . . . She had nowhere to run to in any case.
She made it! She pressed herself against the wall, hoping that the beasts would give up on her. But they didn’t; they had cornered more inventive prey than this before. First one and then the other of the nightmarish creatures landed on the ground about twenty steps away from the girl and started moving towards her, dragging their folded wings behind them.
A burst of automatic fire didn’t frighten, but only infuriated them; the bullets seemed to lodge in their thick, matted fur without reaching the flesh. The beast closer to Sasha snarled balefully, revealing crooked, needle-sharp teeth under the black lip on its upturned snout.
‘Get down!’
Sasha didn’t even bother wondering where the distant voice had come from, she just flung herself face down on the ground. There was a loud explosion very close to her and she was buffeted and scorched by a blast of hot air. A second blast followed immediately, and that was followed by frenzied squealing and the receding sound of flapping wings.
She raised her head timidly, coughed to force the dust out of her lungs and looked around. Not far away the road was gashed open by a fresh crater and splattered with dark, oily blood. A scorched leathery wing, torn out by the roots, was lying near her, with several more charred, shapeless chunks beside it.
A man with a massive, powerful figure, dressed in a heavy protective suit, was striding steadily across the stony space towards Sasha, holding himself erect.
Hunter!
CHAPTER 13
One Story
He took her by the hand, helped her up and tugged her along after him. Then he let go of her, seeming to come to his senses. His eyes were concealed behind special smoked glass and Sasha couldn’t see them.
‘Keep up with me! It’s getting dark quickly, we have to get out of here in time,’ he droned through his filters. Then he rushed on, without even glancing at her again.
‘Hunter,’ the girl called to him, straining to recognise her rescuer through the steamed-up lenses of her gas mask.
He pretended he couldn’t hear her and there was nothing Sasha could do but run after him as fast as her legs would carry her. Of course, he was angry with her: this was the third time he’d had to give the stupid little girl a hand. But he had come up here, come up here for her sake, so how could there be any more doubt . . . ?
The man with the shaved head wasn’t planning on going anywhere near the beasts’ lair that had been Sasha’s way out of the Metro: he knew different paths. He turned right off the main road and ducked into an archway, dashed past the rusty iron skeletons of flat boxes that looked like market kiosks for dwarfs, frightened off a blurred shadow with a shot from his gun and stopped in front of a small brick sentry box with heavy bars over the windows. He turned a key in a massive padlock. A shelter? No, the sentry box turned out to be a blind: inside the door a concrete stairway zigzagged down into the depths.
Hanging the lock back up on the inside, her rescuer switched on his flashlight and tramped down the steps. Time had peeled the green-and-white paint off the walls and they were covered with names and dates: in, out, in, out . . . The man scribbled something illegible of his own. Probably everyone who used the secret way up onto the surface had to write down here when he left and when he came back. Only under many names there was no date of return.
The descent broke off sooner than Sasha was expecting: although the steps ran on downwards, the man with the shaved head halted at a nondescript little cast-iron door, and smashed his fist against it. A few seconds later a bolt grated on the other side and the door was opened by a man with dishevelled hair and a sparse little beard, wearing blue trousers with baggy knees.
‘Who’s this then?’ he asked, looking perplexed.
‘Someone I picked up on the Ring,’ Hunter boomed. ‘He almost got eaten by the birds, I was only just in time with the grenade launcher. Hey kid, how did you get out th
ere?’
He flung back his hood and tugged off his gas mask . . .
The man standing in front of Sasha was a stranger: close-cropped light brown hair, a pale face with grey eyes, a squashed nose that looked as if it had been broken. And she had persuaded herself not to notice anything, telling herself she was wrong when she thought he moved too easily for a wounded man, that his walk was wrong, not feral enough, and the suit looked different . . . She suddenly felt stifled and pulled her own mask off too.
Fifteen minutes later Sasha was already inside the Hansa frontier.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t let you stay here without any documents.’ She could hear a note of genuine regret in her rescuer’s voice. ‘Maybe this evening . . . you know . . . well, in the passage?’
She shook her head without speaking and smiled.
Where should she go now?
To him? There was still time!
But Sasha couldn’t get over her annoyance with Hunter for not saving her this time too . . . And she had something else in mind that she didn’t want to put off any longer.
The delicate, enticing cadences of the wonderful music found a way to her through the hubbub of the crowd, the scraping of shoes and the roaring of the traders. She thought it was the same melody that had cast its spell on her the day before. As she stepped towards it, Sasha felt as if she was making her way again towards that opening that radiated an unearthly glow. Only where did it lead to this time?
The musician was surrounded by a tight-packed ring of dozens of listeners. Sasha had to push her way through until the crowd spat her out into the empty circle. The melody drew these people to him and at the same time held them at a distance, as if they too were flying towards the light, but afraid of singeing their wings.
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.’
‘Who do you want to save him from?’ ask Homer, jerking his head up.
She looked at him mistrustfully – did the old man really still not understand, after she had tried so hard?
‘From the man in the mirror.’
‘Is this place taken?’
Sasha started and stopped absent-mindedly prodding at her mushroom casserole with her fork. The green-eyed musician was standing beside her with a tray in his hands. The old man had gone off somewhere for a moment, and his place was empty.