The carriages, posts, people, everything that was to be seen was covered with snow on one side, and was getting more and more thickly covered. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would swoop down again.
Meanwhile, inside the carriage from whence they had escaped, a troop of 77s charged in, heads spinning rapidly, spitting pincer-tipped cords from their midsections to catch up koschei, sending rapid-fire bursts of bolts around the carriage, pinning the little beasts against chair backs and doorposts. Anna saw several more of the dog-sized cockroach koschei, along with at least one blackly gleaming spider-bot and a small cadre of flying wasp koschei, which buzzed and swooped through the carriage like demonically possessed birds, stinging passengers in their necks and ears.
Android Karenina gently turned her mistress’s eyes from such horrors, and for a long time they stood quietly in the freezing dark of the station. But then it sounded like the tenor of the battle was changing, and Anna risked another glance through the window; what she saw heartened her, for it seemed that koschei were being dispatched rapidly now, one after the other, their hideous clacketing metal feet stilled, their fangs loosened from the necks and arms of the passengers.
Anna realized after a moment that the changing tide of the fight appeared to be the doing of one man-not a 77 at all, but a regimental soldier in a crisp silver uniform, who moved briskly but unpanicked up and down the length of the carriage, slashing and shooting and calling out orders with a loud, authoritative voice. And even before Anna heard the rumbling growl of a mechanical wolf, before she could see the sizzle and crackle of a hot-whip in action, before she could see his face, she knew that it was he.
The battle won, the koschei thrown together into a portable sizzle unit and destroyed, Vronsky emerged from the carriage, put his hand to the peak of his cap, bowed to her, and asked if she had been hurt? Could he be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long while at him without answering, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she saw, or fancied she saw, both the expression of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of reverential ecstasy which had so worked upon her the day before. More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that are met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to bestow a thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why he was here. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
“It is lucky you were on this train, it seems, Count Vronsky,” she said. “But what are you coming for?” she then added, barely masking the irrepressible delight and eagerness that shone in her eyes.
“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said. “I can’t help it.”
At that moment the wind, surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the mechanisms of the Grav’s engine eased back to life. All the awfulness of the storm, all the terror of the koschei, seemed to her almost splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict.
“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no answer. Android Karenina, for all this long silence, looked off with studied disinterest into the distance, while Lupo, less instinctively decorous, sniffed with curiosity at the hem of her skirts.
“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to forget what you’ve said, as I shall forget it,” she said at last.
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…”
“Enough, enough!” she cried, trying assiduously to give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And clutching at the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. Settled again in the carriage, fumigated and revivified already by the Grav’s assiduous crew of IIs, she cued in Android Karenina’s monitor a Memory of what had just occurred. As she watched, she realized instinctively that the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at it. The overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary, there was something blissful, glowing, and exhilarating. Even the painful recollection of the multitudinous cold steel feet of the koschei, tickling their way up toward her breastbone, could not dampen this powerful rush of feeling.
Toward morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she woke it was daylight and the Grav was gliding into the Petersburg station. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, as soon as the Grav stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted Anna’s attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! That face!” she murmured to Android Karenina. Covering the right side of Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as always, nearly entirely hiding it, was a mask of steely silver, descending from brow to chin, with only enough metal cut away to allow his nose and mouth their full functioning. While Alexei’s left eyebrow could and did twitch sardonically, and while his left cheek could and did rise in wry humor, the corresponding parts on the opposite side were hidden behind an unreadable sheen of metallic cold, laced with dark veins of pure groznium-not tempered or alloyed by the Ministry’s metallurgists, but the raw, scarlet-black ore itself. Where his right eye once had sat was a large aperture, a cyborgicist’s reinvention of a human eye socket, from which emerged a telescoping oculus. It was with this rotating orbital that Alexei Alexandrovich was now scanning the crowd, looking for his wife.
Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips sliding into their habitual, sarcastic smile, and his left human eye looking straight at her, while its mechanized companion eye mechanically scanned the station. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. He took his wife’s valise from Android Karenina, offering her Class III no greeting, and naturally receiving none in return.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” Anna asked.