Unlike Kitai Gorod, where people showed lively interest in travellers, trying to feed them, to sell them something, to get them to visit somewhere, here everyone seemed preoccupied with their own affairs. They had no business with Artyom, and his sense of loneliness, which at first was displaced by curiosity, grew stronger and stronger.

Trying to ward off a growing depression, he continued observing his surroundings. Artyom expected to see people here who were somehow different, with their own characteristic facial expressions, since life at a station like this could not help but leave its mark. At first glance, people were bustling about, shouting, working, arguing, just like anywhere else. But the more closely he looked, the more the chills went up and down his spine. There was a startling number of young cripples and freaks: one without fingers, one covered with disgusting scabs, with a crude stump in the place of an amputated third hand. The adults were frequently bald and sickly; there were almost no healthy, strong people to be found. Their stunted, deformed look offered a painful contrast to the dark expanse of station in which they lived.

In the middle of the broad platform, there were two rectangular apertures leading into the depths, the passageway crossing over to the Ring, toward the Hansa. But there were neither Hanseatic border guards, nor checkpoints, as there were at Prospect Mir – and someone had once told Artyom that the Hansa held all its neighbouring stations in an iron fist. No, there was clearly something strange going on here.

So he did not venture to the opposite edge of the hall. For starters, he had used five cartridges to buy himself a bowl of chopped, grilled mushrooms and a glass of putrid, bitter-tasting water. He swallowed the muck with disgust, sitting on an overturned plastic box that had once held empty bottles. Then he went over to the train, hoping to get a bit of a rest there, since his strength was failing, and he had been feeling more and more sick as he looked around. But the subway train was quite different from the one at Kitai Gorod: the cars were all torn up and completely empty, with the seats burnt and fused together; the soft leather sofas had been pulled out and carted off somewhere; there were bloodstains everywhere, and cartridge cases gleamed darkly on the floor. This place was clearly not a proper shelter, but more like a fortress that had withstood more than one siege.

Not much time had passed while Artyom looked over the train, but when he returned to the platform, he hardly recognized the station. The counters were empty, the hubbub had died down and, except for a few tramps clustered on the platform, not far from the transfer passage, there was not a single living soul to be seen on the platform. It had become noticeably darker; the torches were extinguished on the side where he had come into the station, and only a few were burning at the centre of the hall; but in the distance, at the opposite end, a dying fire was still burning. The clock showed it to be a little after eight in the evening. What had happened? Artyom hurried on as quickly as the pain in his body would allow him. The crossing was closed on both sides, not just with the usual metal doors, but with sturdy iron gates. It was exactly the same on the second stairway, but one of the gates was still half-open, and behind it could be seen solid latticework, welded, like the casements at Tverskaya station, with heavy reinforcement. Behind that had been placed a table, feebly lit with a small lamp, at which sat the guard, a washed-out grey-blue figure.

‘No admission after eight,’ he snapped, when asked permission to enter. ‘The gate opens at six in the morning,’ and turning away, he let it be understood that the conversation was over.

Artyom was taken aback. Why did the life of the station come to an end after eight in the evening? And what was he to do now? The tramps, having crawled into their cardboard boxes, looked positively repulsive, and he didn’t want to go near them; so he decided to try his luck at the fire, which glimmered at the opposite end of the hall.

It was clear even from afar that standing at the fire was no group of tramps, but rather border guards or something of the kind: silhouetted against the fire, they seemed to be strong male figures, with the sharp contours of automatic weapons visible. But what was there to guard, sitting there on the platform itself? Guard posts should be set up in the tunnels, the entrances to the station, the farther away the better, but here… If some sort of creature crawled out or bandits attacked, the men on duty would not be able to do anything about it.

But drawing closer, Artyom noticed something else: from behind the fire, a clear, white light flashed, seemingly going upwards, but too briefly, as if cut short at the very beginning, not striking the ceiling, but disappearing, contrary to all the laws of physics, after a couple of metres. The searchlight was illuminated infrequently, in distinct intervals, which is probably why Artyom had not noticed it earlier. What in the world could it be?

He walked up to the fire, politely said hello, explained that he was travelling through, didn’t know about the closing of the gate, and so missed it; he asked whether he might take a rest here, with the patrol men.

‘Take a rest?’ sneered the man nearest him. He was a dishevelled, dark-haired man with a large, fleshy nose; he was not tall, but was seemingly very strong. ‘This is not a place for resting, kid. If you last till morning, you’ll be doing fine.’

To the question of what was so dangerous about sitting by the fire in the middle of the platform, the man said nothing, but only gestured behind him with a nod of the head, to where the searchlight was switched on. The others were busy with their conversation and did not pay Artyom the slightest attention. Then he decided he would finally find out what was going on around here, and went over to the searchlight. What he saw there surprised him, but explained a lot.

At the very end of the hall there was a little booth, such as you sometimes see near escalators, for obtaining transfers to other lines. Bags were piled up around it, reinforced here and there with massive iron plates; one of the patrol men was taking the cover off an extremely formidable-looking type of weapon, and the other was sitting in the booth. On it was mounted the very searchlight that was shining upwards. Upwards! With no damper, no barrier here and not even a trace of one, the steps of the escalator began right behind the booth, leading up to the surface. And that was where the beam of the searchlight struck, anxiously probing from wall to wall, as if trying to find someone in the pitch darkness, but only picking up some kind of some kind of brownish lamp-frame and the damp ceiling from which enormous chunks of plaster were peeling off, and beyond… Beyond that, one could see nothing.

Suddenly everything fell into place.

For some reason, here the metal damper that usually separated a station from the surface was missing: it was missing both from the platform and from above. Paveletskaya was in direct contact with the outside world, and its residents found themselves under constant threat of attack. They breathed contaminated air, drank contaminated water, which is probably why it tasted so strange… That was why there were so many more mutations here among young people than, for example, at the VDNKh. That was why the adults looked so sickly: their skulls exposed and polished to a shine, their bodies worn out and subject to decay. They were gradually being devoured by radiation sickness.

But still that was not all, apparently. How could one explain the fact that the whole station ‘died’ after eight o’clock in the evening, and that the dark-haired duty officer by the fire had said that surviving until morning was a big deal?