Sveta held out the small slot card. Zoya wasn’t sure what she felt about seeing the cursed thing, but she took it and put it in her pocket. She laughed ruefully. “I don’t even know what it is.”
Sveta led her down a small wooden stair built into the train tunnel. From the level of the tracks, Zoya could see the bundles of cabling spread out across the gravel and running up to the slots of each addict.
“This way,” Sveta said, tugging on Zoya’s arm and leading her toward the pitch blackness of the exit tunnel.
Zoya paused and peered into the darkness. “Aren’t you afraid of the dark?”
“I’ve lived my entire life in the dark,” Sveta said, flicking on a flashlight. “You?”
“I don’t enjoy it, but I’ve spent years working in a chilly, dark room surrounded by dead people. I’ve come to think I can handle almost anything…or at least I did until today.”
The darkness quickly became complete but for the lone beam of light playing across the ancient tracks. Zoya wasn’t sure how long they walked before Sveta flashed the beam at a metal door in the wall.
“A maintenance tunnel,” she said, and led Zoya into a cramped, concrete corridor. An old-fashioned light-switch was on the wall, but the bulbs lining the ceiling were all either missing or burnt out. Zoya had never been very scared of darkness, but she’d never felt anything this creepy.
“How many tunnels are under here?”
“You’d be amazed,” Sveta said. “It’s like another city.”
“I thought there’d be rats all over down here.”
“There are plenty. They come and go as they please.”
They came to a large round cross-tunnel with a trickle of water running down the middle that smelled like sewage.
“North or south?” Sveta asked, indicating direction with her hand.
Zoya held a hand over her mouth and nose to block some of the stench. “Anywhere, please! I can’t take this smell for long.”
“This way then,” Sveta said, turning north.
The whole world narrowed to the quivering beam of light and the echoes of their footsteps in the round tunnel. Every so often they passed a rusty iron ladder set against the wall and leading up to a manhole cover.
“How much longer?” Zoya murmured.
“Right here,” Sveta said, stopping at one of the ladders and flashing the light up at the cover. “You’ll be safe here.”
Zoya touched the iron ladder, expecting it to feel slimy, but it was cold and dry. She turned and hugged Sveta, kissed her cheeks. “Thank you for everything.”
“Sorry about your mother.”
Zoya nodded, then clambered up the ladder. She put a hand on the manhole cover and pushed, but it didn’t budge.
“You need more leverage. They’re heavy.”
Zoya climbed another rung, bent her head, and put her shoulder to the cold iron. Slowly she was able to shove the cover to one side, welcome daylight flooding through the hole. She stuck her head up and saw that she was just outside the refugee camp in Kolomenskoe. The smell of the camp was nearly as bad as that of the sewer pipe. A few trees and a black iron fence separated her from the people in the camp. Relieved, she scrambled out of the hole and turned to peer down at Sveta. Their eyes met and held for a few moments. Sveta smiled and gave a small wave. Zoya nodded in return, then struggled to push the manhole cover back into place.
Poplar seeds floated everywhere under the overcast but still bright sky. It was hard to believe it was the same day. Her brother’s murder felt like it had happened a week ago. She considered where to go. The morgue? But her colleagues would be at home on Sunday, and anyhow Tavik knew she worked there. Her friends? Her uncle? The short mobster had threatened them all. It mattered little what she thought; she knew she must check on her mother. Stupid. You’re going to walk right into their hands. Then she thought, Do I care? And what about the lost card? It’s one of my only bargaining tools, and I lost it somewhere.
Sveta had brought her to a perfect place. She could cross the street and approach her apartment block from the rear. There was a wall behind her complex that she had climbed many times as a kid. She hoped she could see signs of the mobsters without them seeing her.
As she walked, constantly scanning her surroundings, her mind kept turning to the data card in her pocket. It still made her nervous, but curiosity itched inside her. What could be so important that good people had to die?
She stepped off the sidewalk and approached two trees that looked like they would make a decent screen. Leaning against one of them, she pulled the card from her pocket and reread the labeclass="underline" ‘K3 — v2.6’. What could it mean? Since finishing school, she’d mostly used cards for music or reading. Sometimes she would pore over collections of art.
She brought the card up to her slot, hesitated, then pushed it in, wincing as the card clicked into place. Nothing happened that she could detect. She probed the interface for data access and saw an enormous index. It was overwhelming, but she noticed many of the features fell into categories: a multitude of martial arts sims; military history; combat strategy and tactics; weapons of all types. The list went on, but she lost interest. Georgy risked his life for a stupid military chip? It looks like something they’d give to draftees for training. Why would the mob care about this?
It made the deaths of her family members feel even worse that they had happened over something so trivial. She glanced about quickly to see if anyone was around, then returned to the sidewalk. To the left was the camp, and she suddenly noticed something strange about the refugees — each of them had a yellow aura. She halted and stared openmouthed at all of the faintly glowing people. She reached up and ejected the card, and the glow vanished.
That’s really odd. What is that for? She reinserted the card and the glow returned. She sent a query to the interface, and it provided a short report from the combat category. Yellow aura is for unknowns. Red is for enemies. Green is for friendlies.
She was about to eject the card again when it occurred to her that perhaps the card’s features might prove useful for eluding her pursuers. A quick scan all around showed no red auras. Even with the oddly-colored people, the view wasn’t too disconcerting, so she left the card in place and continued on.
It took half an hour to circle around to the rear of her complex, but at last she climbed the short wall and peered over into the parking lot. No one was in sight, but an expensive-looking air car hovered a few meters above the ground not far from her entrance door. That can’t be good, she thought. Someone from the military, perhaps?
There was no sign of Tavik’s green car, the police, or the sky cycles. The muscles of her arms strained to hold her chin up above the wall, forcing her to make a choice. She pulled herself up and dropped to the dirt on the other side of the wall. The expensive car showed no movement or any other sign that someone had noticed her, so she cautiously made her way toward the entrance door. Her eyes never paused, flicking between the car, the door, Pig’s broken window, scanning the surrounding area.
Shouts from her right startled her, but it was just the three boys running back into the parking lot, one carrying a football. The card took a moment before deciding on a green aura for them. She didn’t know the boys well, but she’d seen them around enough to know they were harmless.
She picked up her pace as she drew near the door, and breathed a sigh of relief when she reached it safely, punched in her code, and pulled the door open. There was no sign of anyone in the entry hall, so she cautiously made her way to the stairs and started up.
As she climbed flight after flight, she kept imagining various traps that Tavik had set for her. Mobsters would trap her in the stairwell, or perhaps they would be waiting in the apartment. She ran into no one, though, and heard nothing until she approached the tenth floor landing. Here she heard voices, muffled by distance; one sounded menacing and the other scared…and speaking with a strange accent.