More banging.
Was that Nina? It was Nina. Why didn’t she come in?
“Vanja? Vanja! It’s Nina. We’re evacuating to the commune office. I’ll come get you soon. I love you, Vanja. I don’t care what you did. I’m not leaving you here.” The voice broke and paused. “I don’t have the keys, but I’ll come back when it’s your turn, it’ll be your turn soon. I promise.”
Vanja woke up. She looked out the window, and for the first time, properly outside. The commune office towered in the middle of the plaza, angular and solid. Faces looked out from the windows. People were running over the plaza toward the tower. Patients in white robes were walking, hobbling, and rolling out through the hospital doors below. Above them all, pipes towered. Darkness seeped out of their curved mouths, bleeding into the sky. The gray vault was ripped through with dark streaks. Pinpricks of light glowed in the tears.
She sank back into the bed. She was still so tired.
She stood in front of the machine. It was running at full speed, its wheel turning so fast that the spokes were a blur. She could see the pipes now, running away from the machine and into the walls of the cave. The machine glowed with its own light. It made a noise like thunder.
She woke up in front of the window. She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there. The sky was dark; a glowing sphere hung in the black, striped in orange and brown. The plaza was deserted. Gaps had appeared in the innermost ring, which had been marked and re-marked with block letters; the pharmacy and the general store were gone. Through the gaps, parts of the residential ring were visible. The lights above the front doors had extended over the street, waving on thin stalks. The doors all stood open.
Vanja’s room was high enough that she could see the plant houses at the colony’s edge, if that was what they still were. One of them had stretched into a pyramid shape that reflected the light from the thing that sat in the sky. The plant house next to it was moving restlessly. As Vanja watched, it shook itself free and rose up in a rain of soil and roots. The windowpane vibrated against Vanja’s fingers as the plant house struck out across the tundra on six unsynchronized, rickety legs.
A man came into view, walking from a side street below Vanja’s window toward the commune office. He glanced up at the clinic but didn’t see her. It was the man who had held Vanja’s hand that night in the leisure center, the man who had slapped his daughter. He turned his eyes back toward the plaza, leaning forward as if against a strong wind.
At first it wasn’t there, and then it was: a small, half-shaped thing the size of a child, walking next to him. It climbed up the man’s trouser leg and onto his back, where it wrapped its arms around his neck. Vanja could hear his screams through the window. He fell to his knees and then onto his side before rolling onto his back. The child-shadow straddled his chest. The man’s screams had disintegrated into convulsive howls. He banged his head against the ground. After a while he stopped and lay still. The faces watched from the commune office’s windows.
Vanja slid off the bed and walked over to the door. She ran her left hand over the surface. She had opened a door without a key once. Thinking was such slow work, but there was a memory: making a key from something else, telling a thing what it should be. The room was empty except for the pitcher, and that was full. She fetched the pillow from the bed. It would have to do. “Aflar,” she told the pillow.
She frowned at the word that came out and tried again. Key. “Muleg,” her mouth said.
Vanja tried again and again. Each time her mouth spurted gibberish. She dropped the pillow and gingerly touched her temple, the shaved spot, the wound. They had taken her words.
The man was still lying prone in the plaza. The child-shape sat on his chest. The man’s mouth was moving. It moved quickly at first; he was speaking to the child. Then he shuddered and gasped. Then he spoke again, slowly, and his words sent shockwaves through the air. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He lay very still for a moment, like Ivar had, as though he had departed his body.
Eventually as the plant house to the left of the pyramid split down the middle and released a stream of furiously flapping greenery, the man opened his eyes again. He put his arms around the child. It curled up against his chest and sank into his body. Then it was gone. The man stood up on legs that seemed to bend in more than one place. He turned around and staggered off toward the residential ring and its swaying lanterns; he walked into a house and didn’t come out again.
Someone jumped from the top floor of the commune office. The ground split open where the body landed. Cracks rushed across the ground and a wedge-shaped section of the plaza fell away without a sound, exposing part of an underground tunnel. Its walls were covered in a pale network of heavy root threads that trembled and shrunk back as daylight rushed in. Round fruiting bodies in shades of faded pink and brown bulged from the mycelium. The fruits swiveled slowly on their short necks, and what might once have been the citizens of the first quadrant raised their white eyes toward the sudden sky.
Vanja remained by the window, watching people jump from the commune office’s windows or leave through the front doors and run for the beckoning lanterns of the residential ring. The walls of the commune office had begun to warp, as if buckling under great pressure. The remaining buildings around the plaza were falling in on themselves, one by one. Raw gloop from the dissolved buildings trickled into the exposed mushroom tunnel. The air in the residential and factory rings was turning blue and hazy. Seen through the haze, the low factories and workshops looked wobbly and deformed.
“I’m back,” Nina’s voice said behind her. “I’ve come for you.”
Nina stood in the doorway of what remained of Vanja’s room. The walls beyond the bed and the window had softened, sagging limply from where they were still attached to the ceiling. The door lay crumpled up next to the bed. Vanja hadn’t heard it happen.
It was Nina and yet not: she had expanded, as if her body had become too small to contain her. Heat pulsed from her in waves. She carefully enunciated the words one by one, as if speaking was an effort.
“I said I’ll come back for you. I’ve come back for you.”
Nina bent down, cradled Vanja’s neck in her hand, and pressed her lips against hers. They burned. Blisters formed where their tongues met. She drew back a little.
“Give up or give in,” Nina whispered. “I gave in. I gave myself to the world.”
Vanja tried to say her name, over and over again. Nina tilted her head, expressions flitting rapidly across her face. Her eyes leaked fluid.
“Don’t worry,” she said eventually.
Nina took Vanja’s hand and led her down the corridor. The floor yielded to their weight; the walls had assumed an oily, slithery shine. Flabby doorways to the left led to rooms where the furniture had dissolved into slime. All empty, except for the last one. Below the window in the last room sat a man with a red beard. Vanja strained to look. The room stank of old excrement, concentrated around Evgen where he huddled, knees drawn up to his chest. He was leaning against the wall, gazing with pale eyes at the sliver of sky that showed through the window. The wound on his temple looked infected. His beard was stiff with dried saliva.
Vanja poked Evgen’s shoulder. He didn’t react. Nina pulled her back up and led her onward, down to the ground floor. They stepped out of the clinic and into the open space in the middle of what had been Amatka.
To the east, between the undulating ruins of factories and beckoning residences, the view toward the lake was clear. The sky above was robed in black, adorned with brilliantly striped and mottled spheres. On the path from the lake came a crowd; ahead of them strode the being that was Berols’ Anna. No one else shone and shimmered like she did. At her side walked Ulla, back straight, eyes gleaming.