He tried to think about how he was going to get to Polis, he tried to make a plan, but slowly a burning pain and fatigue was spreading in his muscles, rising from his bent legs through the small of his back, into his arms and pushing any complicated thoughts right out of his head.

Hot, salty sweat dripped onto his forehead, at first slowly, in tiny droplets, and then the drops had grown and became heavier, flowing down his face, getting into his eyes, and there was no chance of wiping them away because Zhenya was on the other side of the mechanism, and if Artyom released the handle then it would land all the effort on Zhenya. Blood was pounding louder and louder in his ears, and Artyom remembered that when he was little he liked to adopt an uncomfortable pose in order to hear the blood pounding in his ears because the sound reminded him of the steps of soldiers on parade. And if he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was a marshal leading the parade and faithful divisions were passing him, measuring their paces, and saluting him. That’s how it was described in books about the army.

Finally, the commander said, without turning around:

‘OK, guys, come down and change places. We’ve reached half way.’

Artyom exchanged glances with Zhenya and he jumped off the cart, and they both, without speaking, sat on the rails, even though they were supposed to be going to the rear of the cart.

The commander looked at them attentively and said sympathetically:

‘Milksops…’

‘Milksops,’ Zhenya admitted readily.

‘Get up, get up, there’ll be no sitting here. It’s time to go. I’ll tell you a good little story.’

‘We can also tell you a few stories!’ Zhenya confidently declared, not wanting to get up.

‘Yes, I know all your stories. About the dark ones, about the mutants… About your little mushrooms, of course. But there are a few tales you’ve never heard. Yes, indeed, and they might not even be tales – it’s just that no one is able to confirm them… That is, there have been people who have tried to confirm the stories, but they couldn’t tell us for sure.’

For Artyom, this short speech had been enough to give him a second wind. Now any information about what happened beyond the Prospect Mir station had great meaning for him. He hurried to get up from the rails and, transferring his machine gun from his back to his chest, he took up his place behind the cart.

With a little shove, the wheels started singing their plaintive song again. The group moved forward. The commander was looking ahead, peering watchfully into the darkness because not everything was audible.

‘I’m interested, what does your generation know about the metro anyway?’ the commander was saying. ‘You tell each other such tales. Someone went somewhere, someone made it all up. One tells the wrong thing to the next who whispers it to a third, who, in turn, stretches the story over a cup of tea with a fourth person, who pretends that it was his own adventure. That’s the main problem with the metro: there aren’t any reliable communication lines. It isn’t possible to get from one end to the other quickly. You can’t get through in some places, it’s partitioned in others where some crap is going on, and the conditions change every day. Do you think that this metro system is all that big? Well, you can get from one end to the other in an hour by train. And it takes people weeks to do that now, and that’s if they make it. And you never know what is waiting for you at every turn. So, we’ve set off for Rizhskaya with humanitarian aid… But the problem is that no one – me and the duty officer included – no one is prepared to guarantee that when we get there, we won’t be met with heavy fire. Or that we won’t find a burnt-out station without a living soul in it. Or that it won’t suddenly become clear that Rizhskaya has joined forces with the Hansa and therefore there’s no passage to the rest of the metro left to us anymore, ever again. There’s no exact information… We received some data yesterday – but everything is out of date by evening and you can’t rely on it the next day. It’s just like going through quicksand using a hundred-year-old map. It takes so long for messengers to get through with the messages they carry that it often happens that the information’s not needed anymore or it’s already unreliable. The truth is distorted. People have never lived under these conditions… And it’s scary to think of what will happen when there isn’t any fuel for the generators, and there isn’t electricity anymore. Have you read Wells’ The Time Machine? Well, there they had these Morlocks…’

This was already the second such conversation in the last two days, and Artyom already knew about the Morlocks and about Herbert Wells, and he didn’t want to hear about it all over again. So, disregarding Zhenya’s protests, he resolutely turned the conversation back to its original direction.

‘So, what does your generation know about the metro?’

‘Mm… Talking about the devilry in the tunnels is bad luck… And about Metro- 2 and the invisible observers? I won’t talk about that either. But I can tell you something interesting about who lives where. So, do you know, for example, that at the place that used to be Pushkinskaya station – where there’s another two pedestrian passages to Chekhovskaya and Tverskaya – that the fascists have now taken that?’

‘What – what fascists?’ Zhenya asked, puzzled.

‘Real fascists. A while ago, when we still lived there,’ the commander pointed upwards, ‘there were fascists. There were also skinheads who called themselves the RNE, and others who were against immigration, and there were all kinds of different types, since that was the trend in those days. Only a fool knows what these acronyms mean, now no one remembers, and they themselves probably don’t even remember. And then, it seemed, they disappeared. You heard and saw nothing of them. And suddenly, a little while ago, they turned up again. “The metro is for Russians!” Have you heard of that? Or, they say: “‘Do a good deed – clean up the metro!” And they threw all the non-Russians out of Pushkinskaya, and then from Chekhovskaya and Tverskaya. In the end they became rabid and started punishing people. They have a Reich there now. The fourth or the fifth… Something like that. They haven’t crawled any further yet, but our generation still remembers the twentieth century. And what fascists are… The mutants from the Filevskaya line, basically, exist in actual fact… And our dark ones, what are they worth? And there are various sectarians, satanists, communists… It’s a chamber of curiosities. That’s what it is.’

They went past the broken down door to an abandoned administrative room. Maybe it was a lavatory or maybe before it was a refuge… Full of furniture: iron bunk-beds and crude plumbing – it was all stolen long ago and nowadays no one tried to get into those dark empty rooms scattered along the length of the tunnels. There’s nothing there… But truth is, you never know!

There was a weak blinking light ahead. They were approaching Alekseevskaya. The station was minimally populated, and the patrol consisted of one person, at the fiftieth-metre – they couldn’t allow themselves to go any further. The commander gave the order to stop at forty metres from the fire that had been lit by the patrol at Alekseevskaya – and he turned his flashlight on and off several times in a precise sequence, giving the patrol a signal. A black figure was delineated by the light of the flames – a scout was coming towards them. From far off, the scout yelled, ‘Halt! Don’t approach!’

Artyom asked himself: Could it be possible that one day they wouldn’t be recognized at a station with whom they considered themselves to have friendly relations, and they would be met with hostility?

The person was approaching them slowly. He was dressed in torn camouflage trousers and a quilted jacket which displayed the letter ‘A’ in bold – apparently from the first letter in the station’s name. His hollow cheeks were unshaven, and his eyes gleamed suspiciously, and his hands were nervously stroking the body of an automatic machine gun that was hanging from his neck. He looked them right in the face and smiled – he recognized them and, with a little wave showing his trust, he pushed the machine gun onto his back.