The noises he feared the most never materialized. He heard the sounds of coughing and complaining instead.

Lucy peeled her hands from her ears. “I was expecting, I don’t know. More flames.”

“I made that mistake once. Tina’s an expert: you could learn a lot from her.” Petrovitch splashed his way to the gap in the brickwork and peered in.

The dust was settling in a fine hissing rain, making shifting shapes and sheets in the light. Valentina appeared next to him and she cast a critical eye over the scene.

“Hmm. Is okay.” She passed the dynamo back to Tabletop and boosted herself up. Her legs wriggled, and she found a handhold to drag herself over the top.

Once she’d gone to inspect the damage she’d caused, Madeleine thought it safe to speak.

“You never did say what you were going to do with Michael once you’d got him out.”

“Didn’t I? We’re back on plan B anyway. Shame, really. Plan A was brilliant, even if I say so myself.” Fine dust was settling on his eyes, and he cried it away. “If Michael’s not in a fit state, I don’t know what I’m going to do instead. It’s taken the NSA months to purge Anarchy from its network; clearly, I’m better than they are, but it’ll still take time.”

“Sam.” She was standing right behind him, pressing into his back. “What were you going to do with Michael?”

Valentina came scrabbling back, a shadow that slowly solidified. “Petrovitch. Come. See.”

“Sorry,” he said to Madeleine, “it’ll have to wait. Shove me up.”

She did so with a little more force than was strictly necessary, and he landed in a heap at Valentina’s feet.

“Yobany stos,” he muttered. “I’m already broken enough.”

Valentina crouched low and led the way back to the tunnel face. Where there had been a slick gray wall was now a gaping black maw. When she settled against the last roof prop, she looked uncommonly pleased with herself.

Petrovitch crawled over her legs and moved his left arm so that it supported itself on the lip of the hole.

The cut was sharp on its outer edge, and grew ragged as it worked its way in. Loose rubble clung to the sides and cracks radiated out. The steel mesh that reinforced the concrete had been severed as neatly as if it had been sawn through. The exposed ends of each bar looked like they’d been melted.

“I thought you said you’d need at least two goes at it.”

“I am better than I thought.”

Petrovitch grinned. The explosion had created a hole that was perfect. “Yeah. Orders of Lenin all round.”

“At least, am good for something.”

“You’re good for lots of things, Tina.” He took a fragment of concrete and dropped it over the edge. Being able to time the fall accurately, he calculated that the bottom of the shaft was only three and a half meters down. “Most of all, you’re a good friend.”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “I must say this now.”

He was busy peering through the hole, checking to see if there was debris clogging the shaft, and how much they might have to shift before getting to Michael. The air inside was cool blue, uniform but for a faint glimmer of brighter notes in a rectangle set into the wall down at the level of the concrete floor. He brought his head back through.

“Sorry?”

“Does not matter.” She started back up the tunnel, but he caught her sleeve.

“Seriously. I use you like a Swiss Army knife and you ask for nothing except the assurance that it’s going to be all right in the end. And even when it looks like it’s one big pile of pizdets, you still believe in me. So you’ve earned the right to say whatever you want, and I’m just going to have to shut up and listen.”

Valentina turned herself back around as Madeleine shouted down to them: “Everything okay?”

“Fine. It’s all fine,” replied Petrovitch, and brought his head close to Valentina’s. “Talk to me, Tina.”

“I would never betray you. You must know this.”

“Yobany stos, of course I know this.”

“I would never do anything that would harm you or Madeleine.”

“I know that too.”

“I have been tempted. I am still tempted. I will still be tempted: by fantasy of you and me making lots of good little communists together. But know this also—Sonja Oshicora will never live to make you her slave: I will kill her first.” She tossed her head back and stared Petrovitch square in the face. “She does not know what love is. We do. Because of this, we will prevail.”

He grabbed her, pulled her close, pressed his dusty lips against her ear. “We can all win. We can all still win. I promise.”

21

There was rope, because Petrovitch had thought he would need rope, but no flashlights, because he had one in his courier bag which he was never without except for now. That he couldn’t remember where it was he last had it troubled him, and he almost delayed everything while he reviewed the last few hours’ video capture.

The string of lights from the tunnel could be dangled through the hole though, even if it did plunge everyone else into darkness. Lucy said she didn’t mind, as long as she could still touch someone else, and that there weren’t any rats.

At the mention of vermin, Madeleine looked at Petrovitch.

“I haven’t seen one down here for months,” he said. He lifted his T-shirt up and Valentina secured the nylon rope to his back brace. She pulled to make sure of her knot, and he growled. “I know people pay good money for that sort of thing, but I’m not one of them.”

“Fall from three meters onto head will kill as quick as fall from thirty.” She adjusted his clothing. “Will hold.”

Madeleine belayed the rope around her waist and checked the loose coil by her side. She braced her feet either side of the hole. “Okay. Taking the strain.”

“This is not how I imagined this happening,” complained Petrovitch. He sat between Madeleine’s legs and folded his left arm across his chest. Valentina and Tabletop lifted him up and fed him into the hole, bit by bit. First as far as his calves, then his thighs, then he was sitting on the very lip of the shaft. He lay back as best he could, and they turned him so he was face to face with the sandy floor.

His legs dangled over the edge.

As he was eased further in, his whole weight fell on his metal-encased arm. He felt the pressure, and blocked the pain. The rope ran in a taut, quivering line over his shoulder. His body was now pulling him down rather than back, and the ends of the rebar were hard against his skin.

“Slowly.” He tried to hang on to the edge of the concrete with his right hand, but he was just fighting against what Madeleine was doing. He surrendered himself to her care, and dangled. All that was left to do was lift his chin so that he didn’t scrape it against the rough-hewn stone.

He was suspended in space, between the floor of the shaft and its undefined top. It was easier to look up than down, so he did, letting his head fall back.

He couldn’t quite make out what it was he was seeing. In infrared, the image made little sense, and in visible light, it was just a vast dark space. It was only when the lights were threaded through that the situation became clear.

Far above him was a confused choke of girders and concrete. The beams had gouged their way down the walls of the shaft, twisting and bending under the immense pressure from above, before locking solid slantwise from one side to the other. Perhaps the first piece to fall had supported the second, and so on, until the blockage had built up layer on layer.

There were a few fist-sized pieces of foundation on the floor of the shaft: otherwise, it was all held in perfect equilibrium above his head.

“Chyort,” he breathed.

Tabletop leaned out over the pit. “You okay?”