Something inside of him was telling him to go. Certainly Marco wouldn’t regain consciousness until he removed her from this place. Whatever was going on here was not able to sway him, and so he had to get moving while he still could. Shifting her around again, he had her nearly standing up and then carried her over both shoulders like a casualty of war. He reminded himself again that the mutants here had been shot, so it was an unrelated cause that had struck Marco unconscious. Still, this passageway felt unlucky.
With her modest weight balanced evenly on his shoulders, he scavenged her pistol from the floor and stuck it under his belt. Double checking that he had both flashlights, he quickly made his way down the corridor. The bodies of the red lurkers were more spaced out now, and he supposed that once they had been shot at, not as many of them dared to keep up their advance. Sergio took this as a positive sign and kept walking; he could just barely see a light glowing about twenty meters ahead.
At the end of the hallway a door opened up into a sizeable room of concrete walls and steel beam supports in the center. This room was set up like an outpost, but it was completely deserted. An old radio spouted static and two lanterns were still burning. It struck Sergio as strange that the place was abandoned, but there was a makeshift couch and he decided it would be okay to lay Marco there while he secured the area.
The first thing he did was go to close the heavy metal door to the cursed passageway they had just come from, but he caught sight of something in the moment just before it was sealed and paused to observe it; a light silvery blue ball as bright as a full moon on the blackest night. It hovered and flickered like lightning, and he knew exactly what it was – an anomaly – the same as those that haunted some of the tunnels most gruesomely affected by death. Khan had explained all about them when they encountered one in the tunnel near Turgenevskaya. He made sure to shut the door quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the being. That must have been what Marco had spoken of hearing before its energy overpowered her. Thankfully they hadn’t come face to face with it, as he had seen firsthand what destruction the being was capable of in the tunnels; burning away whole hoards of nosalises and spider bugs, as it was attracted to movement.
He could breathe a bit more easily now, after understanding what was affecting Marco. Although the mystery of the battle against the mutants and the reason this outpost was abandoned still lingered. As he crossed the room to check the other doors, Marco began to stir. He quickly examined one exit and found that it only led to a small room with some kind of generators in it, and so he closed the door. Hoping that the last exit led onwards, he was relieved to find that it opened to another stairway.
“Wh-what… happened?” Marco moaned, holding a hand to her head as if the lights were too bright.
“There was an anomaly, but it’s gone now.” Sergio replied coldly, realizing he was still a small bitter about their discussion of trust just ten minutes ago.
“It sounded like… music, then people talking to me all at once.” She winced as she sat upright. “Did you hear it?”
“No.” He said flatly, not wanting to elaborate. Hearing music didn’t exactly coincide with encountering an anomaly, and this caused him to rethink the entire corridor. Was it also haunted?
“Strange.” Marco wiped the blood from her nose with her sleeve and propped both elbows on her knees, using the triangulation to support her head in both hands. She took several breaths and remained quiet. “I thought I saw… no, it’s not possible.”
Sergio still stood by the door leading to the stairs, suppressing the urge to go and assist her with her injuries and ask her more about her hallucinations. He was again consumed by her retraction of trust, as he thought they had been getting along well together up until they had run into Nikolai and Dmitri again – everything had felt awkwardly misaligned since then. Suddenly, she spoke, and it was as if she had been reading his mind as she began to clear the air on the very subject.
“Listen, it’s not that I don’t trust you. I do. But then, I don’t know much about you. You don’t know very much about me… and this true mission, it isn’t defined yet.” Sergio had already turned his head around curiously to look at her. With her head still in her hands, she spoke softly and sincerely. “It’s more like an idea, a hope. Wishful thinking. So, I can’t go around telling everyone about it before I’ve figured out what to do. Okay?”
Not knowing what to say, he could only prove he had heard the confession by going over and standing across from her. She seemed to understand that he was listening.
“Anyway, right now the priority is to get to Colonel Vera and then I can worry about everything else once I return to Avtozavodskaya.” Marco looked up at him and blinked a few times, seeming to shake the last of her affliction away and stared at him with renewed clarity.
“We’re almost to Polis, now. This looks like one of our outposts.” He said softly, offering her his hand. She forced a smile through a somber expression and placed her hand in his, he helped her to her feet. “These stairs should go onto the grey line, I think.”
“You first this time.” Her face went dead serious, with a hint of apprehension in her eyes.
Sergio did as requested and took the lead, although at a much slower pace than they had coming up from Prospekt Marx. He took the steps partly sideways, holding out an arm for her to hold onto, in case she became dizzy again. She was rubbing at her ear with her other hand, complaining that it was ringing.
This stairway was much shorter, only a few flights down led to another metal door that spat them out into a pitch black tunnel. He had correctly assumed that it was the northern border of Farkasovsky Sad, but wasn’t sure which way it was to the actual station. Switching on his flashlight, he scanned the ribs of the tunnel for markings or signs. Just ten meters down to their left was a barricade made of sandbags and metal barrels, on one of which was painted the letter symbol of Polis. It must have been an outer position in the tunnels that lead to the Realm territory in the other direction, and things with the Nationalists had been calm lately, so they might not see a patrol of Kshatriya for another hundred meters or more depending on how far the station was from here.
“It’s this way.” Sergio made a motion with the flashlight, feeling suddenly very confident and comfortable in this tunnel. It was dry and warm and quiet here, with no trace of any of the horrors they had seen in the transfer passage.
Marco didn’t reply, but stayed very close to his side as he navigated around the barricade; he could barely feel the pressure of her arm around his, though she was definitely leaning on him for support. Remembering that he still had her pistol in his belt, he thought of turning to give it back to her, but then thought it might be better to wait until they reached the border checkpoint just in case they decided to search her.
He couldn’t believe that they were so close now. The journey he had been on since losing his way at the church outpost was almost as difficult as the first one he’d undertaken to reach Polis the first time he set out for it, although the companionship was infinitely more interesting and he hadn’t been captured or thrown in jail at any point. He was happy and proud to have helped Marco however he could along the way, though not suspecting that she would have had the same difficulties if she had to traverse through the Subway on her own as he did. She had a good sense of not only herself, but her surroundings, and also the direct training and influence that Sacco had given her – and that man could slip through the most dangerous stations and tunnels without even being seen or heard.