“Use?” whispered Aleksandra.
“Listen. Have you seen the Replica? Been in it?”
“Yes.”
“It was built based upon my exploration of what they call the Original. But I didn’t tell them everything. You can—”
“I can do nothing but what I am instructed,” said Aleksandra. “Shargei warned me. Again. If I do not comply, it is my parents they will punish, and Konstantin and Marie—”
She stopped. Vladimir was making a noise that was partway between an excruciating cough and a sob.
“What? What is it? Is there medicine I can—”
“No, no,” husked Vladimir. “I am sorry, so sorry, Sashenka. Your parents and the children… they are already dead.”
“But the photographs,” said Aleksandra slowly. “Shargei showed me… they are older, but…”
Her voice trailed away. They both knew what could be done to make photographs show what was wanted, not what was true. They sat in silence for a minute, before Aleksandra spoke again, her whispered voice like a knife slowly run along a sharpening steel.
“You are sure of this?”
“Yes,” groaned Vladimir. “It was only the day after… after you were taken. Boris Ivanovich Russov saw it done… from his attic window, he could look into the courtyard… he told me… I wrote to you, but…”
“Yes. I will kill them. All of them. All of them. Shargei first. And Stalin too.”
“Sashenka, Sashenka… you cannot kill them all… and to kill… like them… is to be… like them.”
He took a rasping breath to gather strength.
“There is a… better… better way. Listen.”
Aleksandra bent close enough that she could feel the faint waft of his breath as he whispered, the awful stench of his burned flesh so strong in her nose and throat. He spoke with both difficulty and urgency, as if he had waited almost too long to impart the information he wanted to share. He made her repeat what he had told her, to be sure it was fixed in her mind. Then he sighed. Aleksandra was afraid he had died in that moment, till he took in another raspingly slow, painful breath.
“Aleksandra. There is something more… I ask you… you must help me to… to make my escape.”
“Yes.”
“You have the… extra inch of height… and my knowledge. You will make it. I should not… have turned back. It would have been… been better to… die inside than here.”
“Sssh,” soothed Aleksandra. “Where is… ah!”
She spotted the drug cabinet, walked to it, and picked the lock in less than a minute.
The first vial of morphine seemed to hardly affect Vladimir at all. She injected another, into his neck. His breathing grew more ragged, and he made a rhythmic, slow sound in his throat like a drain unblocking.
The third vial did the job. Aleksandra waited by his side until she was absolutely sure he was dead, and then took the empty vials and the metal syringe and put them on the desk by the nurse’s hand. Waking from his alcoholic stupor the man might think he had somehow administered the overdose, and would be frightened enough to hide the evidence. Or he would be found like this, and blamed. Either way worked for Aleksandra.
Back in her hut, she slowly burned the towels in the iron stove, then went to bed. But she did not sleep. She lay there, thinking, going over what Vladimir had told her. Remembering the directions, the technical suggestions, the timing.
And she thought of her family, dead for so long. The day after she had been arrested. All that time… Aleksandra had always feared they had been executed or sent to the camps, but she had forced the suspicion aside. Their continued existence in the everyday world had been something to live for.
A treasured delusion.
No more.
There was no commotion in the camp the next morning. No obvious signs that Vladimir had been found dead, or that he had been there at all. Guards came for Aleksandra, escorted her to breakfast, escorted her to the Replica where Termin was waiting by himself, without Shargei. She was given a skin-tight suit to keep her warm–Termin said it was the kind that divers wore–made from a rubber-like fabric that was not rubber. Someone had removed the main label, but there was printing inside the leg that said it was made in America.
Aleksandra was sent into the strange cork-lined steel tunnel again, encouraged to go as far as she could, to go as fast as she could, to remember the intersections and turns and risers and down-shafts.
Shargei was there when she came back out. Neither he nor Termin explained anything, nor would they answer any of her questions about the Replica, or the Original it modeled, or anything else.
Not that Aleksandra needed them answered. Vladimir had given her the key points, at least as he understood them. Which was likely more than either Shargei or Termin knew. After all, they had never been inside the Original.
Then there was the sauna again, but only a half-bottle of vodka, and dinner served in her hut. Aleksandra left the floorboards in place, and did not creep out for nocturnal roaming.
This was the pattern of her days, for a week. Practice in the Replica. Recover from practice. That was all.
On the morning of the seventh day, the guards escorted her a different way through the camp, to the northern side she had not seen. There was another, internal compound there, a small area surrounded by concertina wire three coils deep and stacked six coils high on special pickets. It had a double gate, manned by four guards. There was an odd, wooden tower in the middle of this compound, a rectangular edifice like a tall, very narrow church, with a high-peaked roof. Or perhaps a bizarre, over-sized grandfather clock case.
Shargei and Termin were waiting outside the door to this thin building, which on closer inspection reminded Aleksandra very much of a four-storey outhouse. It wasn’t big enough to fit more than a couple of people inside, standing up. The door had an enormous bolt on it, and a very large padlock, an American Lockwood which Aleksandra knew she could not easily pick. Not that she needed to, since Shargei had already put the key in the padlock, though he had yet to turn it.
“We are sending you into the Original today,” said Shargei. “The entrance lies behind this door. I remind you that the existence of this… anomaly… is most secret and is not to be discussed, even with others at this camp.”
“Anomaly?” asked Aleksandra. She kept her face still, revealing nothing of what she knew, or suspected, or feared.
“It is a tunnel, of sorts,” said Termin enthusiastically. “An inter-dimensional tunnel.”
“Show me,” said Aleksandra.
Shargei looked at his watch.
“In two minutes,” he said. “We must wait for the orange light phase.”
“We don’t understand the nature of the tunnel, or its composition,” Termin rushed along, waving his hands. “Its walls are coherent energy that behaves as mass or imitates it, yet it has additional characteristics, visible states, indicated by light. It cycles through these states from red to violet, the spectrum visible to the human eye, which is doubtless no coincidence. But the red state at the beginning is very dangerous, a lethal form of… of radiation, as is the violet at the end—”
“The sixteen-minute deadline in the Replica,” said Aleksandra. “That relates to this cycle? And the junctions are safe?”
Shargei smiled coldly.
“No,” he said. “The junctions are not safe. But the rate of progress necessary to get from the entrance to what we believe is an exit to another world requires you to reach Junction A in sixteen minutes from the end of the Red phase, during the Orange period. The phases inside the Original are each of twenty minutes’ duration, or to be exact, nineteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds. You must get to the known exit at the end of the tunnel within thirty-five minutes, make an investigation of no longer than ten minutes and return within thirty-five minutes, before the Violet phase begins. From the times you have managed in the Replica, this should be achievable for you.”