Valera dreamed of a different life, when she was awake and when she was asleep. Almost every night since Ledjo had been born she’d dreamed about the two of them in a small rowing boat, floating in the middle of a calm lake. The details of the dream changed over time – sometimes it was winter and they were bundled up, surrounded by distant, snowy peaks, other times it was summer and she could hear the far rustling of reeds and grassy fields – but the feeling was always the same: freedom.
With the promise of a new life in Povenets B, it felt like her dream might come true at last. She imagined lazy summer days on Lake Onega, fishing for their supper, or long nights curled up in front of a fire, reading stories together like she’d done with her father. None of that had happened. Life in the naukograd was the same, day after grinding day. But last night her dream was the most intense it had ever been. The scenery constantly changed, mountains rising and falling as the sky moved through hues of blue, yellow, and pink, and the sound of Ledjo’s laughter echoed across the water.
When she reached her lab, Valera checked that her equipment hadn’t been tampered with overnight. It wasn’t beyond Zukolev to go snooping when she wasn’t there and try to uncover some piece of information she hadn’t included in her latest official report. Unfortunately for him, he wouldn’t find anything useful if he did. Valera wasn’t stupid. She didn’t keep notes. Everything she did, every experiment she tried, and every discovery she made was locked up in her head. And only a fraction of it made it into her official reports.
The travelling wave amplifier and rake receiver were both exactly as she’d left them. So she fired them up, encoded a test signal, and sent it. There was some slight degradation of individual signals, but the rake receiver easily reconstructed the full message. She encoded another signal, and threw in a couple of random problems of her own. This one came through perfectly. Then, just to be sure, she spent an hour taking the amplifier and the receiver apart and putting them back together again, and sent one more message. When this one was captured without any issues, she leaned back and burst out laughing. Then she stood in front of the portrait of Stalin, looked it square in the eyes, and shouted, ‘The truth is all that’s left!’
She’d really done it. She’d solved the impossible problem, and given herself and Ledjo a way to escape Povenets B.
She ran down the corridor to her research block’s one communal telephone to call Zukolev’s office and deliver the news that would finally free her of him. But before she reached the phone it flew past her, blasted off the wall by a massive shockwave. A split second later she was hurled off her feet, slammed into the floor, and knocked out as the ceiling collapsed on top of her.
CHAPTER 10
Valera didn’t know how long she was unconscious for, but she came to with her ears ringing and her chest pinned under a huge chunk of plaster. The wall where the phone had hung was in pieces, the wooden beams that had been holding it up exposed and buckled.
She knew only one thing in Povenets B could have caused this much damage. The power plant.
She pulled herself up, causing a loud creak to echo through the wrecked building, and crept backwards, away from the collapsed wall towards the staircase at the opposite end of the corridor. She didn’t look into her lab as she passed it. She knew she’d only see her equipment destroyed and her library in ruins.
The staircase was made of thick wooden boards bolted to the bare concrete wall. Valera tested the first step. It held. So she ran down the rest, and burst out into the madness that was consuming the naukograd. She passed other scientists, stumbling out of their labs and offices into the street, and started to sprint towards the school. She outpaced the guards rushing from their posts and parents abandoning their jobs, all running in the same direction, all sharing the same terrifying thought.
The closer she got to the plant, the more damaged the buildings she sped past were. Some had holes blown out of their roofs, some had lost entire walls, exposing all the secret bits of life and work that had been locked up inside them.
She told herself over and over that if the explosion had happened on this side of the plant then the rest of the complex itself might have protected the school from the worst of the blast. That Ledjo and all the other children would be fine – shaken and scared but safe. That any second she’d hear their cries and sobs rise above the shouting of the grown-ups around her. But then she turned a corner and saw in the distance a sight that even her worst nightmares over the last three years had never dared to conjure up.
The cooling tower had collapsed and the plant had been ripped in two, a deep gouge cut through it. And beyond, where the school should have been, was only rubble.
She slowed to a walk, then stopped, frozen, in the middle of the road. She didn’t register the people knocking into her as they ran past. She didn’t notice the hot embers in the air stinging her eyes and burning her nostrils. She only felt a sudden and total emptiness.
Her head told her there was no use rushing towards the gaping void where the school should have been, no point screaming out Ledjo’s name. No one could have survived such a violent explosion. But her heart refused to listen.
After a long, agonising moment she was running again. She clambered through the chasm that had opened up in the middle of the plant. She crushed wood and glass under her feet, climbed over lumps of twisted metal and chunks of brick. It was a gauntlet, and every few metres the carnage was punctured by the raggedy edge of an overall or the blank stare of dead eyes poking up through the rubble.
Then the fabric changed from the dark green of workers’ uniforms to the grey, white and red of children’s. Valera cried out Ledjo’s name, just like all the other parents who were scouring the chaos searching for their babies.
She rushed from body to body, feeling sick and ashamed of herself for leaving them as soon as she realised they weren’t her son. She couldn’t stop until she’d found Ledjo. She couldn’t even help the people who had heard faint, whispering voices and were racing to move the broken pieces of walls and desks on top of them. Any one of them could have been her son, but something inside her told her they weren’t.
Valera reached a large slab of wall that had tipped over, jutting up into the air at a perilous angle. Half-torn posters of colourful Cyrillic letters were still pinned to it, fluttering in the gentle wind that had been stirred up by the city wrenching itself apart. She was in the ruins of a classroom. Jagged metal and glass blocked any other path than the way she’d come.
‘Ledjo! Ledjo!’ she finally screamed. ‘Where are you, Pikku?’
She had to keep going, keep searching. The only route she could take was over the wall. She didn’t know how she was going to scale it, but she knew she had to. She told herself it might even have saved Ledjo from the brunt of the blast, and he was trapped just on the other side of it, waiting for her to rescue him.
She looked for a foothold, something that would help her up onto the wall so she could test her weight. But another flash of red caught her eye almost directly beneath her. It was tiny, barely visible through a gap between two chunks of wall that hadn’t survived the blast, and almost smothered in dust. But as she focused on it she saw the intricate, abstract pattern of triangles and squares that covered the fabric.
‘No. No, no, no,’ she whispered as she pulled away shards of glass and broken plaster. She dug, and dug, and dug. The wall began to creak and shudder as Valera shifted its new foundations, but she didn’t stop until she uncovered the bruised, soot-covered face of her son.