‘Great, guys! How are you doing? Is it you guys heading to Rizhskaya? We know, we know, they warned us. Let’s go!’

The commander started to ask the patrolman something but it was inaudible, and Artyom, hoping that he also wouldn’t be heard, said quietly to Zhenya:

‘He looks overworked and underfed. I don’t think they want to join forces with us because they’re having the good life.’

‘Well, so what?’ His friend responded. ‘We also have our interests in the matter. If our administration is pursuing it then it means there’s something they want from it. It’s not out of charity that we are coming to feed them.’

They went past the campfire at the fiftieth-metre where a second patrolman was sitting, dressed just like the one who had met them, and their cart rolled towards the station. Alekseevskaya was badly lighted and the people that lived there looked sad and seemed to speak little. At VDNKh, they looked on guests with friendliness. The group stopped in the middle of the platform and the commander announced a smoking break. Artyom and Zhenya stayed on the cart to protect it and the others were called to the fireside.

‘I’ve never heard about the fascists and the Reich,’ Artyom said.

‘I’ve heard that there were fascists somewhere in the underground, ’ Zhenya answered, ‘but they only said that they were at Novokuznetskaya.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Lekha did,’ Zhenya admitted reluctantly.

‘He’s told you a lot of other interesting things,’ Artyom reminded him.

‘But there really are fascists there! The guy just got the wrong place. He wasn’t lying OK?!’ Zhenya said in defence. Artyom became silent and sank into thought. The smoking break at Alekseevskaya was supposed to last no less than a half hour. The commander was having some kind of conversation with the local leader – probably about the future cooperation. Afterwards, they were supposed to push on forward, so that they would make it to Rizhkaya by day’s end. They would spend the night there, decide what needed deciding, and look at the newly discovered cable, and then they would send a messenger back to ask for their next instructions. If the cable could be used for communication between three stations then it made sense to unwind it and to open up a telephone connection. But if it looks unusable then it would be necessary to return to the station at once.

So Artyom had dispensation for no more than two days. During this time, it would be necessary to invent a pretext under which it would be possible to get though the external cordons of Rizhskaya, who were even more suspicious and nit-picking than the external patrols at VDNKh. Their lack of trust was totally understandable: there, in the south, the wider metro system began, and the southern cordon of Rizhskaya was subjected to attacks pretty often. And though the dangers that were threatening the population of Rizhskaya were not as mysterious and frightening as those hanging over VDNKh, they were different in their amazing variation. The fighters that defended the southern approach to Rizhskaya never knew what to expect, and therefore they had to be ready for everything.

Two tunnels go from Rizhskaya to Prospect Mir. To collapse one of them for some reason didn’t seem possible, and the Rizhskys had to put blockades up in both. But this took such a toll on their forces that it became vitally important for them to at least secure the northern tunnel. They joined forces with Alekseevskaya and more importantly, with VDNKh, and shifted the burden of defence in the northern direction onto them, which provided some peace in the tunnels between stations, so that they could focus on their domestic goals. And at VDNKh, they saw this as an opportunity to widen their sphere of influence.

In light of the imminent union, the outposts of Rizhskaya were showing increased vigilance: it was necessary to prove to their future allies that they could be counted on to defend the southern borders. That’s why it seemed a particularly difficult task to get through the cordons in either direction. And Artyom had a maximum of two days to figure it out.

However, despite the complexities, it didn’t seem impossible. The question lay in what he would do after that. Even if he got through the southern outposts, it would be necessary still to find a sufficiently safe route to Polis. Since he had had to make an urgent decision, he hadn’t had time in VDNKh to think about his next moves to make it to Polis. At home, he could have asked traders he knew about the dangers out there, without raising suspicions. And he knew that he would raise suspicions immediately if he asked Zhenya or anyone else in the group about the way to Polis – and Zhenya would definitely know that Artyom was up to something. He didn’t have friends at Alekseevskaya or at Rizhskaya, and he couldn’t trust mere acquaintances with these questions either.

Having taken advantage of the fact that Zhenya walked off to chat with a girl who was sitting nearby on the platform, Artyom furtively got a tiny map of the metro out of his rucksack. It was printed on the back of a card with charred edges that was advertising a market fair (that had been and gone long ago), and he circled Polis a few times with a pencil.

The way to Polis looked easy and short. In the ancient, mythical times that the commander had been describing when people didn’t have to carry weapons, and they went from station to station, even if they had to change trains and take another line – in the times, when the journey from one end to the opposite end, didn’t take more than an hour – in the times when the tunnels were only populated by rattling and rushing trains – back then the distance between VDNKh and Polis would have been quick and clear.

It was directly along the line to Turgenevskaya and from there a pedestrian tunnel to Chistye Prudy, as it was called on the old map, which Artyom was examining. Or take the Kirovskaya line and the Red Line, the Sokolnicheskaya line – straight to Polis… In the era of trains and fluorescent light, such a trip would take about thirty minutes. But ever since the words ‘Red Line’ had been written in capital letters, and the red calico banner had hung over the pedestrian tunnel to Chistye Prudy, there was no point even thinking of a short-cut to Polis.

The leadership of the Red Line had abandoned attempts to force the population of the whole metro to be happy by forcing Soviet power on them, and it had adopted a new doctrine which established communism along a separate line of the metro system. Though it had been unable to dispense with its original dream and continued to call the metro system the ‘V. I. Lenin Metropolitan’ it had taken no practical steps to pursue the grand plan for a while.

But despite the seemingly peaceful behaviour of the regime, its internal paranoid nature hadn’t changed at all. Hundreds of agents of the internal security service, like in the old days, with a certain nostalgia for the KGB, constantly and diligently watched the happy inhabitants of the Red Line, and their interest in guests from other lines was unending. Without the special permission of the management of the ‘Reds’ no one could get to any other station. And the constant monitoring of passports, the total watching and a general clinical suspicion was imposed on the accidental travellers as well as the spies who were sent there. The former were equated with the latter and the fate of both was rather sad. So there was no point in Artyom thinking about getting to Polis through three stations that belonged to the Red Line.

Generally there wasn’t an easy route into the very heart of the metro. To Polis… Just the mere mention of this name in a conversation made Artyom (and most others) fall into a reverential silence. He clearly remembered even now the first time he heard the word in a story told by one of his stepfather’s friends. Afterwards when the guest had left, he asked Sukhoi quietly what the word meant. His stepfather then looked at him carefully and, with a vague sadness in his voice, he said, ‘That, Artyom, is probably the last place on the earth where people live like people. Where they haven’t forgotten what the word “person” means, and, moreover, how the word should sound.’ His stepfather smiled sadly and added, ‘That is a City.’