‘Wait a second with the tea! Instead tell me why the Hansa didn’t colonize the area? You’re right, it’s strange. My stepfather says that there’s a general over-population problem anyway – there isn’t room for everyone anymore. So why would they give up the chance of taking a little more space? It’s not like them!’

‘Ah, so you are interested!? OK, so this stranger went pretty far into it. He was saying that you walk and walk and there isn’t a soul. There’s nothing and no one, like in that tunnel beyond Sukharevskaya. Can you imagine? There’s not even a rat! You just hear water dripping. Abandoned stations just sit there in darkness and no one has ever lived there. And you always have a sense of being in danger. And it’s oppressive… He was walking quickly, and he went through four stations in almost half a day. A desperate person, no doubt. I mean, really, to get into a game like that alone! So, he gets to Sebastopolskaya. There’s a passage to Kakhovskaya. And you know the Kakhovskaya line, there’s only three stations on it. It’s not a line but an unfinished thought. Sort of like an appendix… And he decides to spend the night at Sebastopolskaya. Having worn out his wits, he’s tired… He found some wood chips, laid a fire so it wouldn’t be all so awful, and crawled into his sleeping bag and went to sleep in the middle of the platform. And during the night…’

At this point, Zhenya stood up, stretching, and said with a sadistic smile, ‘OK, I don’t know about you, but I myself really want some tea!’ And, not waiting for an answer, he took the kettle out of the tent, leaving Artyom alone with his impressions from the story.

Artyom, of course, was angry at Zhenya for leaving him there, but he decided to patiently await the end of the story and then he’d give Zhenya a piece of his mind. Suddenly he was reminded of Hunter and his request. It was more like an order, really. But then his thoughts went back to Zhenya’s story.

Having returned with tea, he poured some into a tea-glass which had a rare metal outer-casing, the kind they used to have in trains for tea, and he continued, ‘So he went to sleep next to the fire and there was silence all around – a heavy silence as though his ears were full of cotton. And in the middle of the night there’s a strange sound… a totally sanity-challenging and impossible sound. He was immediately covered in cold sweat, and jumped right up. He heard children’s laughter. Coming from the tunnel. This is four stations from the nearest people! Rats don’t even live there, can you imagine? There was reason to be alarmed… So he jumps up and runs under the arches to the tunnel… And he sees… There’s a train coming into the station. A real train. Its headlights are shining, and blinding him – the wanderer could have been blinded by them so it’s good he covered his eyes with his hand in time. The windows were lit in yellow and there were people inside and this was all going on in total silence! Not a sound! There wasn’t a hum from the engine, not a clatter of wheels. The train glides into the station in total silence… You see? The guy sits down, something’s wrong with his heart. And there’s people in the train windows, like real people who are chatting away inaudibly… The train, wagon by wagon, is going past him, and he sees in the last window of the last wagon, there’s a seven-year-old child looking at him. Looking at him, pointing at him, and laughing… And the laughter was audible. There was such silence that the guy could hear his own heart beating along with this child’s laughter… The train dives into the tunnel, and the laughter gets quieter and quieter… and goes silent in the distance. And again – emptiness. And an absolute and horrifying silence.’ ‘And then he woke up?’ Artyom asked maliciously but with a certain hope in his voice.

‘If only! He rushed back, towards the extinguished fire, quickly gathered up his belongings and ran back to Tulskaya without stopping. He ran the whole way in one hour. It was so scary. You have to think…’

Artyom had gone quiet, frozen by what he’d heard. Silence descended in the tent. Finally, having gathered his wits and coughed, making sure that his voice wouldn’t give him away and crack, Artyom asked Zhenya as indifferently as he could:

‘And what, you believe all that?’

‘Well, it’s not the first time I’ve heard this kind of story about the Serpukhovskaya line,’ Zhenya replied. ‘Only I don’t always tell you them. It’s not possible to talk about these things with you in a normal way. You start interrupting straight away… OK, we’ve sat here for a while you and me, and it’s almost time to go to work. Let’s get ready. We can talk more when we get there.’

Artyom got up reluctantly, dragged himself home – he needed to get a snack to take to work. His stepfather was still sleeping, it was totally quiet at the station: most people had probably been let off work and there was a little time left until the night shift began. He should hurry up. Going past the guest tent, in which Hunter was staying, Artyom saw that the tent flaps were pulled aside and the tent was empty. His heart skipped a beat. Finally he understood that everything he’d discussed with Hunter hadn’t been a dream, that it had actually taken place, and that the development of events could have a direct impact on him. He knew what fate lay before him.

The tea-factory was located in a dead-end, at a blocked exit from the underground, where there were escalators leading upwards. All the work in the factory was done by hand. It was too extravagant to waste precious electric energy on production.

Behind the iron screens that separated the territory of the factory from the rest of the station, there was a metal wire drawn from wall to wall, on which cleaned mushrooms were drying. When it was particularly humid, they made little fires underneath the mushrooms so that they would dry more quickly and wouldn’t get covered in mould. Under the wire there were tables where the workers first cut and then crushed the dried mushrooms. The prepared tea was packed into paper or polyethylene packages – depending on what was available at the station – and they added some extracts and powders to it, the recipe of which was only known to the head of the factory. That was the straightforward process of producing tea. Without the much-needed conversation while you worked your eight-hour shift of cutting and crushing mushroom caps, then it would probably be the most exhausting business.

Artyom worked this shift with Zhenya and a new, shaggy-haired guy called Kirill with whom he’d been on patrol too. Kirill became very animated at the sight of Zhenya – obviously they had met and spoken before – and he quickly took to telling him some story that had apparently been interrupted the last time they spoke. Artyom sat in the middle and wasn’t interested enough to listen so he plunged into his thoughts. The story about the Serpukhovskaya line, that Zhenya had just told him had started to fade in his memory, and his conversation with Hunter surfaced.

What could be done? The orders given to him by Hunter were too serious not to think them over. What if Hunter would not be able to do whatever it was that he intended? He had committed to a completely senseless act, having dared to venture into the enemy’s lair, right into the heat of the fire. The danger he was subjecting himself to was enormous, and he himself didn’t even know its true parameters. He could only guess at what awaited him at the five-hundredth metre where the light of the last fire at the border post grows dim – the last man-made flames to the north of VDNKh. All he knew about the dark ones was what everyone else knew – but no one else was thinking of going out there. In fact, it wasn’t even a known fact that there was a real passageway at the Botanical Gardens where beasts could enter the metro from above.

The likelihood was too great that Hunter wouldn’t be able to complete the mission he’d taken upon himself. Obviously, the danger from the north seemed to be so great and was increasing so quickly that any delay was inadmissible. Hunter probably knew something about its nature that he hadn’t revealed in his meeting with Sukhoi or his conversation with Artyom.