‘As an enemy spy, who has viciously betrayed his people,’ he began.

In Artyom’s head there was a dance of thought fragments and images that said wait, it’s too early, I haven’t yet managed to do what I had to do, and then Hunter’s strict face appeared before his eyes and disappeared immediately in the crimson twilight of the station, then Sukhoi’s tender gaze appeared and vanished too. Mikhail Porfirevich… ‘You will die’… the dark ones… they can’t… Wait! And over all this, interrupting his memories, the words, his desires, shrouding them in a stuffy dense haze, hung a great thirst. Something to drink…

‘… degenerate, who discredits his own nation…’ the voice continued to burble.

Suddenly there were shouts in the tunnel and a burst of machine gun fire, and then a loud bang and everything went quiet. The soldiers grabbed their machine guns. Their superior in black turned nervously and quickly said, ‘Punishment by death. Go ahead!’ And he gave the signal.

The executioner grunted and pulled the rope, planting his feet on the cross-ties. The boards slipped away from Artyom’s feet, though he tried to keep touching them, so that he could stay on the scaffold, but they moved further off and it was getting harder and harder to stand. The rope was dragging him back, towards death, and he didn’t want it, he didn’t want to die…

Then the floor slipped out from under him and the loop tightened from the weight of his body. It squeezed his neck, cut into his windpipe, and a rattle issued from his throat. His sight lost its sharpness, and everything was twisted inside him. His body was begging for air, but he couldn’t inhale, no matter what he tried, and his body started to coil, convulsively, and there was an awful tickling feeling in his stomach. The station clouded with a poisonous yellow smoke and gunshots roared nearby, and then he lost consciousness.

‘Hey, hangman! Come on, come on now. Don’t pretend. We’ve felt your pulse so you can’t feign death.’ And he was hit across the cheeks, bringing him round.

‘I refuse to do mouth-to-mouth on him again!’ the other person said.

This time Artyom was absolutely sure that it was a dream, the last seconds of unconsciousness before the end. Death was so close, and the moment her iron fist closed around his neck was as indisputable as the moment the floor fell away from underneath him and he hung over the rails.

‘That’s enough blinking, you’ll be fine!’ the first voice insisted. ‘We got you out of the loop so you could enjoy life again and you’re rolling all over the floor on your face!’

Someone shook him hard. Artyom shyly opened an eye and then closed it, having decided that he was probably in the process of dying prematurely and that the afterlife had already begun. A being was leaning over him and it looked a bit like a person but it was so unusual looking that it reminded Artyom of Khan’s calculations about where souls go when they are separated from their transitory bodies. The skin of the being was a matte-yellow, which you could even see in the light of a lantern nearby, and instead of eyes, he had narrow slits, as though a sculptor who was sculpting a person out of a tree had almost finished the face, but had only made an outline of the eyes, and he forgot to chip open the eyes so it could look out onto the world. The face was round with high cheek bones and Artyom had never seen anything like it.

‘No, this is not working,’ someone declared resolutely from above and they sprayed water in his face.

Artyom swallowed it convulsively and stretched out his hands for the bottle. At first he just held onto the neck of the bottle and only after that did he get up and look around.

He was rushing through a dark tunnel with head-spinning speed, lying on a section car that was no less than two metres long. There was a light smell of burning in the air, and Artyom thought with astonishment that it must be fuelled with petrol. There were four people apart from him sitting on the section car, and there was a big, brown dog with a black undercoat. One of them was the guy who had hit Artyom across the cheeks. There was a bearded guy in a hat with ear-flaps that had a red star sewn onto it and onto his quilted jacket too. He had a long machine gun dangling down his back, one just like the ‘hoe’ that Artyom had before, but there was a bayonet-knife screwed onto its barrel. The third person was a big fellow whose face Artyom didn’t see at once but when he did, he almost jumped off the car: his skin was very dark. Artyom looked at it a bit more and calmed down. He wasn’t a dark one, his shade of skin wasn’t the same as theirs – and he had a normal, human face with slightly out-turned lips and a flattened nose like a boxer’s. The last guy had a relatively regular appearance but he had a beautiful brace face and a strong chin – which reminded him of something on a poster at Pushkinskaya. He was dressed in a beautiful leather coat, which was tied with a wide belt with two rows of holes in it and an officer’s sword belt, and from the belt hung a holster of impressive size. There was a Degtyaryov machine gun at the back of the section car and a fluttering red flag. When a beam from the lantern accidentally fell on the flag, he could see that it wasn’t really a flag but a ragged piece of material with the red and black face of a bearded man on it. All this seemed more like some kind of terrible delirium than the miraculous rescue that Hunter had made for him when he ruthlessly cut his way through Pushkinskaya.

‘He’s regained consciousness!’ the narrow-eyed man said joyfully. ‘So, hangman, what did they get you for?’

He spoke totally without accent, his pronunciation was no different than Artyom’s or Sukhoi’s. That was very strange – hearing pure Russian speech from such an unusual being. Artyom couldn’t shed the feeling that this was some kind of farce and the narrow-eyed man was only moving his lips while the bearded guy or the man in the leather coat spoke from behind him.

‘I shot one of their officers,’ he admitted reluctantly.

‘Well, good for you! You’re just the kind we like! That’s what they deserve!’ the man with the high cheek bones said enthusiastically, and the big, dark-skinned guy who was sitting at the front turned to Artyom and raised his eyebrows respectfully. Artyom thought that this guy must mispronounce words.

‘That means we didn’t create such a scene for nothing.’ He smiled broadly. He also had a flawless accent, so that Artyom was confused and now didn’t know what to think.

‘What’s your name, hero?’ the handsome man in leather asked him and Artyom introduced himself.

‘I’m comrade Rusakov. This is comrade Bonsai.’ He pointed to the narrow-eyed man. ‘This is comrade Maxim.’ The dark-skinned one grinned again. ‘And this is comrade Fyodor.’

The dog came last. Artyom wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been called ‘comrade’ too. But the dog was simply called Karatsyupa. Artyom shook their hands one by one, the strong, dry hand of comrade Rusakov, the narrow, firm palm of comrade Bonsai, Maxim’s black shovel of a hand and the fleshy hand of comrade Fyodor. He earnestly tried to remember all their names especially the hard to pronounce ‘Karatsyupa.’ But it seemed that they called each other different names anyway. They addressed the main guy as ‘comrade commissar,’ and the dark-skinned one they called Maximka or Lumumba, the narrow-eyed one was simply ‘Bonsai’ and the bearded one with the hat with ear-flaps they called ‘Uncle Fyodor.’

‘Welcome to the First International Red Fighting Brigade of the Moscow Metropolitan in the name of Ernesto Che Guevara!’ comrade Rusakov triumphantly announced.

Artyom thanked him and fell silent, looking around. The name was very long and the ending of it generally blended into something quite unclear – for a while, the red colour had had an effect on Artyom not unlike its effect on a bull and the word ‘brigade’ was associated for him with Zhenya’s stories about the gangster lawlessness somewhere near Shabolovskaya. Most of all, he was intrigued by the face trembling on the cloth in the wind and he timidly asked: