THE TRAIN STATIONTHEY HAD GONEback to Svetlana’s apartment because they could think of no other place to go.The door was sealed with a black spider-star, but Andrei unceremoniously kicked it in. It was freezing inside because the central heating had been turned off. It was routinely done when an entire apartment block had to be written off as a nest of the Enemy.Otherwise, her family’s possessions had been left untouched. There was food in the larder, and the kitchen stove still worked. They made giant mugs of tea and ate bread and sausage, huddling under heaps of blankets.Svetlana had lived in this apartment since the day she was born. Her textbooks still lay in an untidy heap on the desk in the corner of the living room that doubled as a dining table when her parents were on different shifts and the family did not eat together. The paper flowers she had made, scorched by the power of the Voice, drooped in the vase made of a jam jar. She could see into the kitchen where
COMRADE KRASNOVSHE WOKE UPwhen the rocking of the train suddenly stopped. Muzzily, she lifted her head, marveling at the empty space around her. Then, she realized she had almost half the berth to herself because Andrei was gone.She was instantly alert, her heart hammering. The people below murmured uneasily. The twins on her berth still huddled together, keeping as far away from her as possible. The naked bulb above swayed in the smoky air but at least electricity gave some protection against the Enemy who might be hiding in the mass of the passengers.“Where are we?” she asked the twins, but they did not respond. They merely stared at her as if she had spoken in a foreign language.Where was Andrei? Had he left while she was sleeping? Svetlana bit her lip, torn between relief and consternation. Since their twilight meeting, her life had been a string of disasters, and she still was not sure of who he was. Not one of the Enemy, this was certain, but her previous explanatio
THE FISTSWRAPPED UP INtheir outer clothing again, they followed Krasnov and Vadim into the hush of the village. It was not evening yet, but the glassy air had a subtle admixture of darkness in it like ink dissolving in water. The sun was a pale pink smear on the white sky.Krasnov was explaining the situation in the village and Svetlana listened with pleasure, reassured by the firm cadences of his speech. It was blasphemy to compare any man’s voice with the Voice, but she thought, privately, that if anybody’s could measure up, it would be Krasnov’s. Perhaps it was better not to dwell too much on what he was saying. It was just too grim.“We fulfilled our grain and milk quota early in the fall. Everything was just fine. And then ... this disease. People dying. We requested help from Blue Meadow—that’s the regional center—and they promised to send people but then ... communication lines are down. I personally fried one damager, but who knows how many are
INTO THE WASTELANDSTRAINS DID NOTrun anymore.They had spent a day at the Little Wells station, huddling around the small tin stove that filled the waiting-room with soporific heat. Outside, the ragged icicles were melting and dripping, fat drops of water drumming on the asphalt. The air smelled raw and tender. A thaw had come.They spoke little. After the confrontations with the Fists, Andrei seemed to have withdrawn into himself. He spent most of the time cleaning and reassembling the black fire-stick that he called the Nagant.Svetlana was repulsed by its oily sheen that resembled an Enemy’s skin, its aura of sly darkness. She had seen how deadly it could be, but Andrei told her that it only held two more shots to fire. What use was such a weapon compared with the generosity of Light? But Svetlana did not tell him that. The distance between them seemed to be growing with every empty minute they spent waiting for the train that did not come.Krasnov, laid up in his shabby
THE PITTHE COILING STEAMclosed around them like a fog bank—a suffocating blankness that stank of hot iron and rust. They groped through, holding hands.Svetlana’s face burned with the heat.Then the blankness ended abruptly. They stepped out and found themselves on the lip of a large excavation surrounded by a belt of raw earth. There were several skeletal watchtowers around the excavation, each topped with a revolving searchlight. Their illumination looked like a mockery of the buttery warmth of electricity: harsh and lifeless. The howling seemed to come from these towers or rather from the searchlights, as if this dead glare screamed its own unnaturalness into the night.Svetlana’s fingers closed convulsively around Krasnov’s electric torch, but she did not turn it on. The sense that they were being watched by mocking and hostile eyes was overwhelming.She lingered, frightened of approaching the excavation, seeing what it contained. Andrei stepped forward and looked down.
TRAITORSTHE CELL WAS FILTHY.There was dry vomit on the floor where its previous inhabitant had emptied his or her guts. The bucket in the corner filled the tiny space with stench. At least, it was too cold for flies. Svetlana could imagine the cell buzzing with insects in summer.She sat on the edge of the bunk that held a scrunched-up dirty blanket which she refused to touch, overwhelmed by the disgust toward its no-doubt-dead-now previous user. It was as if the blanket crawled with the detritus of the body that refused to recognize its demise.She was cold, though, so cold that after a while the idea of snuggling into this corpse-blanket began to appear rational. Why not? Would she be better off frozen to death? Didn’t she owe it to her city, her family, and the Voice to survive and learn as much as possible? A three-candles girl, almost an adult, there were more important things in life than getting a little dirt over her clothes, which were not the cleanest to begin with.St
TWO SHOTSSHE WAS SNIFFLINGinto his shoulder, while his familiar smell—sawdust and wool—dispelled the stench of the prison cell, and his familiar hands patted her back awkwardly, just as they had done in the long-ago childhood when her greatest sorrows had been a lost sand-bucket or a slingshot from the neighborhood’s bad boy. These hands had made everything all right then.“Daddy,” she sobbed.“Come on, Sveta, you are a big girl now. Everything will be fine. Don’t cry.”His voice sounded pinched somehow and she instantly felt ashamed. Surely, his tribulations had been worse than hers.“Mama ... ” she whispered.“Your mother is here too. You are going to see her soon.”She straightened up, tried to wipe her eyes, smearing tears and snot all over her face. It sounded like a dream. Could it be a dream? No, it was all too rough, too real. She was cold, and hungry, and in need of a bath—and her father was here!“Mama is here?”“Yes. We are going to her now.”He
ON THE MARCHTHEY HAD BEENmarching for two days now. They had been marching for two days now through unstable weather. Brief periods of thaw interspersed with blasts of icy air from the north froze the slush into a slippery mudflat. At least they were lucky it did not snow, even though a snowstorm could bring warmer air in its wake. But they needed visibility.On the way they found several burnt villages. They were so thoroughly ransacked that not even a trace of the Enemy-hidden food remained. Nor was there an Enemy to be seen. They had all joined the Wulfstan troops.The gaunt-faced soldiers had instantly accepted Andrei as one of their own. They shared hand-rolled makhorka cigarettes, and easy banter, and a swallow of homemade throat-burning spirits from a milk bottle in the evening. They did not quite know what to make of Svetlana and treated her with an almost ridiculous courtesy. It suited her just fine because it kept them at a distance. She did not feel like talking to