Aleksandra grimaced and pushed on. She’d gone a metre or so when she realised she could feel the rasp of those needles everywhere, not just on her exposed skin, but also through her American diving suit.
Vladimir had not mentioned this. Aleksandra touched her forehead to the tunnel surface. The strange material looked completely smooth, but she felt the prickles. She pushed her head harder, but the sensation didn’t change and there were no other effects. If they were real needles, they would have gone into her, drawn blood.
“It doesn’t matter,” muttered Aleksandra to herself. “Not important. That’s why Vladimir didn’t speak of it. He had such little time.”
She didn’t notice that the many small scratches she’d sustained from the Replica slowly disappeared, the green light washing them away as if they had never been. The puckered scar from where the rival German sniper’s bullet had grazed her left arm also vanished. She felt the itch as it happened, but ignored it, and of course could not look to see what had caused it.
At Junction B, Aleksandra rested for two minutes, as measured by Shargei’s watch, while she clicked her joints back in and massaged her tendons and muscles. She figured she had time, since she only had to get to the exit and get out.
Not go back. She was never going back.
There was a bad moment when it was time to go forward. Her mental map from the Replica faded out of her mind as she looked at the three tunnels that continued on from the junction, only discernable because the green light was different in those places, less intense, indicating a tunnel opening. For several seconds she couldn’t recall which was the one she should take. Then it came back to her in a rush, and she stretched up and slithered into the correct tunnel, dropping one shoulder back, pushing off with her legs and feet and toes at maximum extension.
The light turned a light, sky-ish blue as she reached Junction G and slid out into the relatively open space, arms outstretched. She saw the bones of her hands through her flesh, like an x-ray, but her skeleton was limned in dark, fuzzy blue as if the bones had been sketched in crayon. Vladimir had told her about this part, to not be bothered, but she still could not help but stare at the second finger of her left hand, able now to see where it had been broken and though set straight, the bone had thickened in a knot, like a gall in a tree.
It was only a few seconds lost, she thought, as she tore her gaze away and looked for the next tunnel entrance. It was easier to find in the blue light, the edges seemed more defined. Aleksandra found the right one, then shut her eyes for a moment, remembering the Replica, to make absolutely sure she had identified it correctly.
When she opened her eyes again, she had the sensation that she had somehow lost time. She shook her head, and raised her ankle to look at Shargei’s Rolex, ignoring the view of the bones in her feet. But the watch didn’t make sense. The numerals had changed to symbols she didn’t know, the shorter hour hand had a bifurcated end like a snake’s tongue, and the smaller inset dial with the second hand had become a wheel of several dashes, all blue in the current light, which was turning slowly to create an illusion of continuous, wavy lines.
Aleksandra blinked again, and looked away. The watch was no use, but the light was still pale blue. Not yet the darker blue that Termin called indigo, so she had at least twenty minutes. She inserted herself into the correct tunnel, this one almost at floor level, and pushed on.
But she had somehow lost time. Slithering up the corkscrew turns that led to the small junction S, the light changed to indigo. Tilting her chin to her chest to look back along her body, Aleksandra could no longer see the bones in her hands where they trailed behind her at the end of her dislocated arms.
She remembered Vladimir’s warning about this last survivable stage of light.
“Indigo is the worst,” he’d whispered, with such difficulty. “It brings memories. You must not dwell on them. You must not stop.”
Even as she recalled those words, she saw him vividly. Not burned and reduced in his hospital bed, but in his prime, at the school, roaring encouragement to a group of children making a human pyramid.
“Higher, higher, come on! A pyramid doesn’t end with three on top, two more up, and then Aleksandra you go on top like the star on the New Year tree in the House of Unions!”
Aleksandra smiled, a smile that relaxed her whole face, till she felt she was that child again, clambering up to stretch high on the human pyramid and they were all so proud, all twenty-eight of them and Vladimir beaming—
“Do not stop!”
She blinked. She had stopped, lost in memory. For how long? She pushed on again, scraping her head against the tunnel, hard, using the pain to banish the memories that were rising up. Happy memories, ones she had long since let go, since it only weakened her to recall them. The past was gone.
The light was still indigo. Aleksandra wriggled hard, using up energy faster than she normally would. She had no idea how much time she had lost.
The tunnel ahead bifurcated into two passages. She slithered into the left one, sure this was correct. But it ended almost immediately and she had to back out and take the right side, and now she was panicking. The light was indigo, but for how long? Soon the searing heat would come and she would be cooked from the inside out…
The tunnel turned left and ended. Aleksandra cried out and began to back again, but stopped. This was what was supposed to be here, it was right, then left… and up.
She slid forward, rotated herself inside the tunnel, ignoring the pain of scraped sides and aching joints.
High above, the light was not the glowing indigo of the tunnel walls–there was a tiny patch of softer blue, four or five metres above.
The distant sky of some far-off world.
Memory pressed at her again. Another sky, the sky above the steppe, the week she was sent back to get a medal, far behind the front line. Riding in the back of a truck, the canopy down, looking up at that endless sky. Happy to still be alive, and the world so big, and herself so small beneath it—
Aleksandra screamed, using the sound to push the memories away. She tilted her head up and began to inch up the shaft, forcing one arm back into place so she could work the shoulder. Slowly, ever so slowly, she rose up, centimeter by centimeter.
Memories assaulted her. Flashes of childhood derring-do; the secret feast during recruit training; the meeting with Stalin that had seemed such an honour at first… vivid memories that were so distracting, so real she almost felt she could step into them, escape into her own mind—
“No, no, no,” growled Aleksandra. That was not escape. She had seen people do that so many times. Give up and retreat inside their own heads, abandoning their bodies, always dying soon.
That was surrender.
She would not surrender.
Groaning, she kept squeezing herself up the shaft. The patch of blue sky grew closer and closer and then her working arm reached up, she got two fingers over the impossible edge of nothingness, made them into a hook, and pulled herself that fraction more to get a full handhold, all four fingers.
Sudden cold bit her hand.
Her fingers were outside.
Outside somewhere.
Using all her strength, she hauled herself up and out–and fell, like a cork popped from a bottle.
The exit she had climbed up opened down.
Instinct and training, all those years of circus school, took over. She rolled on impact, steadied herself, looked up.
For a moment, she saw the indigo tunnel, a strange contrast of different blue to the sky beyond it. Then it disappeared, as if it had never existed.