“You were right about the jumper—Melnyk. He was still alive,” she began. “They managed to get him back onto the support before he asphyxiated. Quadraplegic though, for now at least. The VV took him away. I’d have gone with them but, you know… tonight we have bigger fish to fry, right?”
Osterberg didn’t respond, just plodded along beside her in silence. He was starting to annoy her now. He wasn’t a man that she expected to wallow in pity.
“The helicopter is back. I sent the men to unload the cables you wanted, rather than sending them back up to work on the cranes.”
She got a noncommittal grunt by way of response.
“I met someone tonight who thinks that all our problems are caused by old legends coming true,” she told him, while he fished in his coat pocket for cigarettes. “It made me wonder.”
She left the sentence hanging, until eventually, his cigarette lit, he took the bait. “Made you wonder what?”
“It made me wonder if maybe Yosyp’s actually right.” She tried to sound offhand, and carefully looked straight ahead while she spoke. “You read about all these armies and intelligence agencies using psychological warfare against people. Then, here you have all these stories circulating: mysterious figures in black, strange messages on the computers, the dogs that chased me tonight, and the VV all over the place as well. Maybe someone really doesn’t want the Carapace completed.”
Osterberg shrugged. “It seems rather pointless,” he offered.
“I suppose.” Victoria kicked at a loose pebble, sending it skidding down the concrete runway towards the reactor. “Unless it was one of Octra’s competitors.”
“I don’t think a conspiracy can make a snowstorm,” added Osterberg.
“There is that.”
They stopped walking and stood in the pool of light at the Carapace mouth, gazing out at the darkness beyond. Victoria forced herself to wonder where Malcolm was, and what he was doing. Drinking beer and watching television, probably, or playing online poker. She could imagine it easily enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
She knew that her brain was still working feverishly to accommodate her experience in the woods. Behind the scenes, while she walked and talked and tried to worry about other things, her subconscious mind was churning—trying to parse the red eyes and snapping jaws in a way that would leave her sane. She got the unpleasant feeling that she would see them again in her dreams.
A single snowflake drifted through the light, wandering uncertainly but steadily down until it kissed the concrete at their feet. They watched it in silence, and waited for the rest.
Osterberg’s radio crackled into life a few minutes later, with a steady fall of snow in progress, bringing the news that Octra head office were on the phone and demanding to speak to Victoria.
She took his car and drove back to camp through the gathering blizzard. Visibility was almost zero, and moving through the hypnotic storm of flakes felt like travelling through a computer’s screensaver. She had never seen it fall so thickly or so fast, but at least concentrating on following the road kept her from dwelling on what might, or might not, be lurking in the trees. By the time she reached the communications shelter, the stark geometry of Prypiat was already softened by a cold, white fleece.
The conference call lasted an hour and a half, and mainly consisted of people expressing their disappointment that it would be impossible to have television crews filming the Carapace as it moved into position. Listening to them was exhausting, and Victoria found her eyes slumping shut. None of them seemed ready to admit the possibility that the Carapace might not move, that the roof might cave, and that a smog of fallout could rise again, like the ghost of 1986.
While they discussed media strategies and news cycles, Victoria stroked her rumbling belly and tried to stay awake. She was starving. When had she last eaten anything? Before she drove to Slavutych to meet the Ukrainians, as best she could remember. It was nearly two in the morning now. No wonder she was hungry. Still, in a few hours the morning sickness would probably kick in again, which would put a stop to that.
When the conference finally wound down and she stepped out of the comms shelter, she was shocked by the volume of snow that had fallen while she’d been inside. A pristine carpet, four inches deep, crumped beneath her boots as she trudged towards the dining shelter, and still it fell. The ferris wheel’s rusting frame was limned with white, making it look like the biggest snowflake of all.
Rummaging through cupboards in the deserted kitchen, she found a box of Ukrainian wheat flakes and a bowl. There was only UHT milk, but she was too hungry to care. At least the folate in the cereal would be good for the foetus. The foetus. She tried to remind herself that she didn’t care about the foetus, but whether it was hormones, or tiredness, or Osterberg’s insistent nagging, it was getting harder to treat it with indifference. She kept catching herself unnecessarily checking her dosimeter, thinking too much about the connotations of peoples’ names, rehearsing how she’d tell her father he would be a grandfather. Just in case she decided that she wanted to have a baby.
Maybe she should just toss a coin for it. That way at least she could consider the matter settled. Her appetite suddenly gone, she pushed the bowl away and put her coat and hat back on. She could ask Malcolm for his opinion, but there didn’t seem much point. It wasn’t as if she particularly cared what he thought, and asking one child to decide the fate of another seemed pretty perverse.
Outside again, the only sound was the faint, almost imperceptible whisper of settling snow. She hoped that someone was clearing the rails down which the Carapace would have to move. As it was, it would be quicker to walk back to the reactor site than to try and drive there, even in a 4x4.
She wrapped her scarf tight around her throat and started scuffing through the snow towards the road. Osterberg and his men should have the heavy-duty cables unloaded by now. Hopefully they were already connecting the winches to the power supply, because the way the snow was piling up she had no confidence that the reactor roof would even survive until morning.
If it did, she decided—if they managed to get the Carapace into position, if catastrophe was averted—she would keep the baby.
A ridiculous, wanton decision, and one that took her by surprise, but the hell with it. It felt right. She would work from home more, or give it all up and do some consulting, whatever. The point was that the die had been cast, and it felt right. And, if the Carapace failed, if a criticality excursion irradiated the Zone with high-energy neutrons, and a cloud of poisonous dust rolled South south across the wheat fields of Ukraine—well, if that happened, everything else would probably be academic anyway.
It was a relief to have arrived at a decision, and to have asserted control over something amidst the anarchy and confusion of the moment. She wouldn’t tell Osterberg her decision, it wouldn’t be fair. Perhaps Wolfgang would be a good name, if they came through this and it was a boy. Or maybe Czernobog.
She froze, physically, in mid-stride. Where had that come from? She tried to bury the idea instantly, mentally reciting a litany of ordinary, pedestrian, unexceptional names, and pushing it to the back of her mind, but the thought could not be unthought.
The sight of a shadowy figure darting across the road ahead made her breath catch in her throat—but it was okay, it was the figure of a man. Not nine feet tall, not cowled: just a man. Others followed, bent double and looking furtively around. She counted nine of them, vanishing one by one into the woods on the other side of the road. Beyond those woods was open ground, and if they carried on in the direction they had been running, they would arrive at the Carapace, and the reactor.