‘Only when I was little. But otherwise not,’ Artyom admitted.

‘Well, why don’t I get you up to speed then? Basically, there aren’t any guard posts there, they don’t need them. There’s a market there, and no one lives there so everything is fine. But there’s a passage there to the Ring, which means to the Hansa… A radial station which doesn’t belong to anyone, but the Hansa soldiers patrol it, to keep order. Therefore you have to behave yourself, got it? Or else they’ll send you to hell and they’ll deny you access to all their stations. So when we get there, you crawl onto the platform and sit quietly. And that samovar of yours,’ he nodded at Artyom’s machine gun, ‘don’t go waving it around. I have a… I have to sort something out with someone so you’ll have to sit and wait. We’ll go to Prospect, we’ll have a talk about how to get through that damn passage to Sukharevskaya.’

Bourbon went silent again and Artyom was left to himself. The tunnel wasn’t too bad here, the ground was a little damp, and there was a dark, thin stream following the rails, headed in the same direction as they were. But, after a while, there was a quiet rustle and squeaking sound which sounded to Artyom like a nail scratching along glass and it made him wince in aversion. The little beasts weren’t visible yet but their presence could already be felt.

‘Rats!’ Artyom spat out the vile word, feeling a chill pass along his skin. They still visited his nightmares, although his memories of that terrible dark moment when his mother and their entire station were drowned in a flood of rats were almost erased from his memory. Were they actually erased? No, they had just gone deeper, like a needle that wasn’t pulled out but gets stuck in the body. It travels around, having been pushed in by an insufficiently trained doctor. At first it will hide and stay still but after a time an unknown force will set it in motion and it will make its pernicious way through the arteries, the nerve ganglions, ripping up vital organs and dooming its carrier to intolerable torment.

The memory of that time, of the blind fury and insatiable cruelty of those beasts, of the experiences of horror that the steel needle left deep in his subconscious only came to disturb Artyom at night. And the mere sight of them, even the vague smell of them, created a sort of electrical discharge in him, forcing his body to shudder in reflex. For Artyom and for his stepfather, and maybe for the other four who escaped with them on the trolley that day, rats were something much more frightening and loathsome than for the other inhabitants of the metro.

There were almost no rats at VDNKh: there were traps everywhere and poison had been spread around so Artyom had become unused to them. But they swarmed through the rest of the metro, and he’d forgotten about that or, rather, avoided thinking about it when he had taken the decision to go on this journey.

‘What’s up boy – you afraid of rats?’ Bourbon inquired maliciously. ‘Don’t like them? You’re painfully spoilt… but get used to it. They’re everywhere… But that’s OK, it’s good even: you won’t go hungry,’ he added and winked while Artyom was starting to feel nauseous. ‘But really,’ Bourbon continued seriously, ‘you’re better to be afraid where there’s no rats. If there’s no rats then there’s been some bad trouble. And if there’s no people either then you want to be afraid. But if the rats are running then everything’s normal. Business as usual. Get it?’

There’re people and there’re people and Artyom definitely didn’t want to share his suffering with this guy. So he nodded and didn’t say anything. There weren’t that many rats, and they ran away from the light of the flashlight and you hardly noticed them. But all the same one of them managed to get underfoot and Artyom stepped on something soft and slippery only to hear a shrill squeal. Artyom lost his balance and almost fell face down with all his equipment…

‘Don’t be afraid boy, don’t be afraid,’ Bourbon cheered him up. ‘It gets worse. There’s a couple of passages in this shit-hole teeming with them and you have to walk on the rails. And you’re walking and crunching them underfoot.’ And he snorted meanly for effect.

Artyom frowned. He was silent but he was squeezing his fists. He would have punched Bourbon right in his grinning face with pleasure!

Suddenly an indecipherable din came from far off and Artyom immediately forgot the insult and clasped the handle of his automatic weapon and looked at Bourbon questioningly.

‘Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. We’re coming up to Prospect,’ Bourbon reassured him and patted him patronizingly on the shoulder.

Even though he’d warned Artyom that there were no guard posts at Prospect Mir, this was all very unusual for Artyom – to just go straight into another station without first seeing the weak light of a fire designating the border, without any obstacles along the way. When they got to the tunnel’s exit, the din got louder and a glow of light became noticeable.

Finally, there were some cast-iron stairs to the left and a little bridge which took you up to the level of the platform. Bourbon’s boots rattled up the iron steps and after a few steps the tunnel turned to the left and opened up and they were in the station.

There was a bright white beam of light in their faces: invisible from the tunnel, there was a little table on the side at which sat a man in a strange and unfamiliar old-fashioned, grey uniform, wearing a peak cap.

‘Welcome,’ he greeted them, averting the flashlight. ‘Trading or transit?’

While Bourbon stated the purpose of their visit, Artyom peered at the Prospect Mir metro station before him. On the platform, along the pathways, twilight reigned, but there were arches lighted from the inside with a soft yellow light from which Artyom unexpectedly felt a squeeze in his chest. He wanted to be done with all the formalities and to look at what was going on in the station, there, where the arches were, from which this light was coming, so familiar and comforting that it almost hurt. And though it seemed to Artyom that he hadn’t seen anything like it before, the sight of this light brought him back to the distant past and suddenly a strange image appeared to him: a small home, flooded with warm yellow light, a woman is half-reclined on a wide ottoman and she is reading a book but you can’t see her face amidst the pastel wallpaper and the dark blue square of the window… The vision flashed in front of his mind but melted a second later, leaving him puzzled and excited. What had he just seen? Could it be that the weak light coming from the station could project an old slide of his childhood that had been lost in his subconscious onto an invisible screen? Could that young woman who was peacefully reading a book on the spacious and comfortable ottoman be his mother?

Artyom impatiently thrust his passport at the customs officer after agreeing, despite Bourbon’s objections, to put his machine gun in their storage room for the duration of his visit. Then Artyom hurried along, attracted to the light behind the columns like a moth, towards the light and the din of a bazaar.

Prospect Mir was different from VDNKh, from Alekseevskaya, from Rizhskaya. The prosperity of the Hansa meant that they had better illumination than the emergency lights that gave light to the stations that Artyom had known during his conscious life. No, these weren’t the same lamps that lighted the metro in the old days, they were weak, glowing lights which hung overhead every twenty feet, drawn along a wire that went across the whole station. But for Artyom, who was used to the cloudy-red emergency glow, to the unreliable light of fires, to the weak radiance from tiny pocket flashlights illuminating the inside of tents, the light at this station was totally strange. It was the same light that lit his early childhood, as far back as the time when life was at the surface, and he was charmed to be reminded of something that had long ago ceased to exist for him. So, arriving at the lighted part of the station, Artyom didn’t rush into the rows of traders like the others but leant his back against a column and, partly covering his eyes with his hand, he stood and looked at the lamps, again and again, until there was a sharp pain in his eyes.