Part 1. The threshold of the Zone

  This would be the last one for today, he decided, or they might notice his absence at the orphanage. But he absolutely had to pick this last artifact. With the kind of guys whom he owed, he was not sure if coming back with not enough loot was any better than plunging himself straight into the nearest anomaly.

  For a moment, Adrian froze, his senses amplified. He did not move a single muscle, but kept surveiling the surroundings with his eyes, catching every sound with his ears, distinguishing smells, feeling the tingling touch of cold air with bare skin at his fingertips. The air was moving here unusually, but the movement had a steady pattern to it.

  The Forest remained silent. At first, he could only hear the gentle rustle of leaves high in the crowns, touched by the wind. Birds abandoned this place a long time ago. Gloam was creeping in the thicket beyond the black pine trunks, but in the clearing it was diluted with faint morning light just enough to distinguish the trail. A perfect hour for a hunt.

  He slowly stretched his arms, spread his fingers, and moved them around, scanning. In one particular direction, the tingling intensified. Aha, Adrian thought. Squinting his eyes, he could finally see it: there, a few meters away, between two dead pines, familiar tiny sparks were dancing above the ground, drawing an intricate shape. Well, the sparks were familiar. The shape—not so much.

  Adrian sensed big game.

  He stretched out his left arm, continuously sensing the air with his fingertips, feeling its subtle movement. With his right hand, he reached for the satchel hanging on his side and fished out a small steel nut. He hesitated for a moment, calming his breath, steadying his pulse. Then, with a practiced movement, he tossed the nut, watching tensely as it pierced the air and landed softly in the grass.

  There was something he did not like about the flight of the nut. Something was not quite right about the arc it traced, a subtle deviation from a perfect parabola that would be purely determined by the initial impulse he’d given it. Adrian frowned, hesitated for a few seconds, weighing his chances. Then he tossed another one, a half meter to the right. This one went smoothly. He tossed a few more, carefully marking out a safe corridor, stumbled for another second, listening, feeling the air, and slowly made a step forward. Then another one. Turning his head slightly, he could catch with his peripheral vision a tiny change in the refraction of the air to his left, as he passed right next to the anomaly. Adrian swallowed hard, recognizing the “carousel”. He knew too well what could happen if he crossed into its domain, even with one toe of his boot. So he made extra sure to stay clear.

  It took him ten steps to get to the pines. Only when the dancing sparks were right in front of him did he allow himself to breathe out and relax a bit. Now, crouching, he could see his catch: a small mineral with pronounced smooth crystal planes arranged in a hexagon, faintly flickering with blue, levitating a few centimeters above the ground. This was an interesting one; Adrian had never seen it before. Most of the artifacts flickered green or yellow and looked more like a shapeless blob. And to think what he had to go through to find it, three different anomalies on the trail! That must have been rare loot.

  And rare often meant expensive, if you knew how to bargain.

  Adrian took off his backpack, put it on the ground, unzipped it, and unlatched the small white container within, popping it open. The insides glowed at him. He fetched a pair of tongs, turned to the blue crystal, and carefully reached out to pick it up. Slowly, he brought it out of the anomaly, and held it up before his eyes, watching it with admiration.

  It was one heartbeat too late when he realized that the soundscape around him had changed.

  He glanced up and froze. A quiet snarl reached his ears, and the next thing he saw was the big grey-haired muzzle with flaring nostrils, huge maw with bared sharp teeth, and glaring red eyes.

  Their eyes met, and the mutant dog charged.

  The only thing that Adrian managed to do while falling on his back was stretch his hand with tongs forward, so the dog crashed right into the artifact with its muzzle. Sparks burst out, the creature recoiled and howled in pain, and this second delay was enough for Adrian to drop the tongs and reach for his knife instead. The dog leapt again, gaping its mouth open and growling furiously, and landed on him, trampling him into the ground, making him lose his breath. He shielded with his left hand, and the sharp fangs that could have torn his respirator and his face apart bit deeply into his forearm instead.

  Adrian’s bones and muscles exploded with pain. The beast pressed his left arm forward, trying to reach his throat, and he slashed with the knife from the right. At first, he missed, barely scratching the mutant’s neck. The dog released its vice before another charge, and Adrian saw its red eyes right in front of him, felt the stench of its breath, its saliva falling onto his chest. He groaned and hit with the knife again. This time, the blade pierced deep into the flesh.

  The dog roared deafeningly, then tried to bite him again, but he already pushed it aside with all remaining force, and its teeth barely scratched his sleeve. Adrian pulled the knife free and immediately thrusted, jostling the beast away from the trail. It ducked, recoiled, trying to stay away from the blade, and as Adrian managed to rise on his side and charge toward it, the dog stepped beyond the line marked by nuts.

  All happened in a fraction of a second. The air wobbled, distorting the image of black trunks and intertwined branches beyond it. An invisible force pulled the dog by its paw easily, like a straw puppet, and dragged it into the whirlwind. The dog only let out a heart-wrenching shriek, and the next moment its body stretched along a spiral in the air. The vortex darkened and then exploded, spitting out a drizzle of blood, hair, and shards of bone. Adrian fell back on the ground, crawling away, shivering. For a moment, he went limp, dumbfounded by the view.

  He only got one second to catch his breath before two other dogs jumped from behind the pines in front of him, snarling. They saw what happened to the first one, and now they charged slowly. They knew he also had only one way to escape, and that was along the trail. One of them stepped over his open backpack and the tongs still clenched around the artifact.

  You bitch, Adrian thought, slowly receding, staring into their hateful eyes and stealing glimpses to the sides, instinctively spotting the nuts. The pain in his wounded arm was almost unbearable; it darkened his vision and blurred his thoughts. He felt like he could no longer use the arm to keep himself upright. Blood was dripping down his sleeve, leaving black stains on the ground. The dogs advanced, stepping carefully, and his backpack was out of reach behind their backs. Crawling backwards and clenching his teeth, Adrian weighed his chances and decided: the loot was dear to him, but his life even more so. Where there were three mutant dogs, a whole pack could appear any moment now.

  Gathering all his strength, he jostled away from the ground with a groan, and rose to his feet. For another second, he looked sullenly at the dogs, panting, and then sharply turned and bolted headlong.

  The mutants growled and followed.

  Adrian ran like hell, the only thought thudding in his skull—keep an eye on the markers, don’t lose the trail. In this part of the forest, he knew every tree, but he also knew how densely it was filled with anomalies. An old cedar split by lightning, a “trampoline” on the left side: go around on the right. The ravine, a “frying pan” in the middle: cross next to an elder bush. The dogs pursued. A couple of times, he felt them right behind his back, stopped, turned around sharply, and slashed with the knife across, leaving bleeding scratches on their muzzles. They shrieked and hissed, but backed away for a few seconds, giving him a bit of a head start. And he kept running.

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  The pain and tension exhausted him, and he realized that he was losing his focus: he almost wandered off the trail. Suddenly, the trees parted, and he burst out into the big clearing crossed by a ravine. Adrian tripped over a tree root, rolled forward, and landed heavily at the bottom. Turning on his back, his heart pounding wildly, he saw the dogs baring their teeth above him on the edge.

  They did not move further.

  Through the veil of sweat and tears, he watched them stamp uncertainly and then cool down and retreat into the forest. The pain did not let him think clearly, and it took him a while before he realised: this was the edge. The part of the Forest touched by the Zone ended here. The mutants never crossed the border into the human realm.

  Adrian breathed a sigh of relief and dropped his head on the ground.

  It was cold, the ground radiating frost, yet beads of sweat rolled down his forehead. He ground his teeth, cradling his left arm, which lay limp on his chest. He rested for a few minutes, eyes closed, relaxing and soaking in the first timid rays of dawn. Then, hurriedly, he rolled up the tattered sleeve of his suit to the shoulder. Having pulled a spare first-aid kit box from his inner pocket, he searched frantically until he found the syringe and made himself an injection. The arm went numb, and the pain receded a little. He gasped with relief, bit off a strip of clean bandage, and tightly wrapped his entire arm from wrist to forearm, somehow managing to tie the dressing in a simple knot using only one hand.

  Now he could afford a little time to rest and think.

  What the hell had happened today? They’d appeared out of nowhere, catching Adrian completely off guard. He had grown used to feeling like the true master of this place, right next to one of the most dangerous anomaly fields, because in all the years he had been coming to the Forest, not once had mutants shown up here. But this night, something had changed.

  Adrian swallowed, managed to get on all fours, crawled to a nearby aspen, and, holding onto its branches, pulled himself to his feet.

  He rolled his sleeve back down to hide the bandages, and walked on, staggering, heading for the forest’s edge. The trees were thinning. The dawn was blazing brighter and brighter.

  Idiot, Adrian thought, walking forward slowly. Shouldn’t have dropped the backpack… Going back for it in the daytime is twice as dangerous.

  What am I gonna do now?

  He stepped out onto the forest edge, stood there for a moment, then went forward, glancing back several times at the semi-darkness of the night forest, reluctant to let him go. Ahead lay a small clearing shrouded in mist. Beyond it were hills, a stream, and a fence entwined with barbed wire and signal cables.

  Adrian reached the stream, washed his face in it, rinsing away the blood, then waded across. He rested, gazing at the brightening sky. In the main building, they’d probably already sounded the wake-up call, but if he managed to slip unnoticed past the tin barracks, cross the wheat field, and get to the main gates, no one would suspect he had been in the Forest. In the morning, many people went out to the field to smoke.

  Breaking his nails and dirtying his fingerless gloves, he climbed the muddy hill and reached the fence at the spot where a dense bush hid a hole with neatly cut cable and wire, big enough for seventeen-year-old skinny guys with backpacks to crawl through and move freely between the forest and the inner territory. He slipped to the other side, lay down in the bushes, glancing around nervously—but the fields were quiet. Then he got up and hurried toward the barracks. The sun rose above the forest, the light shifting from a cold purple to a pale white.

  When he approached the square brown huts clustered at the edge of the field, Adrian saw a silhouette leaning against the rusty tin sheets. At first, he paid it no mind, too absorbed in thoughts of how to get back for the backpack during the day. Only when the person slowly pushed away from the wall and beckoned him with a finger did Adrian feel his throat go dry with fear.

  “Come here,” said a familiar voice. “Come on, come on. Don’t be afraid. I’m in a good mood today. But you, it seems, are not. What’s wrong? Have you really lost your edge?”

  Adrian obeyed. Walked closer, lowering his head. Croaked barely audible, “Not the left arm… I got it wounded.”

  They did not touch the left arm. Instead, with a sharp movement, the second man, who’d just appeared from the barrack, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, while the first one brashly and precisely punched his belly with brass knuckles. Adrian lost his breath and would collapse onto his knees, if the very same moment he had not been dragged into the darkness of the barrack. His head blurred with anguish, colourful sparks jumping in his eyes.

  He was forced to stand up and lean against the wall. Adrian popped his eyes out, barely keeping from a groan. His legs went limp, and he would surely fall, but the two bruisers held him tight. He did not see anything surprising about that, just as about the knife he soon found next to his throat.

  “Where?” the first one to greet him outside asked. “Where is it?”

  “I’ve got it…” he exhaled. “I swear! I’ve got it all, to the last stone!”

  “I've no doubts about it, Adrian. You didn't get my point. I’m just asking: where are they, these stones of yours?”

  “The dogs… Mutant dogs, Southpaw! You see?” Adrian shook his cripled arm, puckered from ache. “I had to fend off, so I left it in the Forest…”

  “Left it?” Southpaw asked amusingly. “You know, Adrian, what’s lost in the Forest…”

  “I hid it! It’s safe! I have a stash!” Adrian cried. “I was just scared that I won’t make it out of the Forest with it! You wanted me to die in there, so that you’re left without any loot at all?”

  “Wrong. I just wanted you to show some diligence! The time was due today at dawn. It’s your fault you delayed it until the last moment. And you’re coming without loot. You’re risking your reputation, Adrian. Do you want me to consider you an unreliable partner? You know what I do with partners who prove unreliable?”

  “I’ll get them for you, Southpaw,” Adrian forced out, swallowing. “Today, I swear. I’ll just go back and collect the bag. It’s an hour’s work. There and back.”

  “Till sunset,” Southpaw drawled. “You have time till sunset. If you don’t show up, you’re as good as dead. You got it?”

  Adrian gasped. Circles swam before his eyes.

  “At least until dawn,” he muttered. “If I can’t get out during the day… I’ll find you myself. I swear, you’ll have them, even if I have to go through all the circles of hell! You’ll have them!”

  Southpaw was silent for a long time. In the darkness, where only a thin, pinkish ray of light from the slightly open barracks door penetrated, Adrian couldn’t make out the expression on his face. But the knife was lowered.

  “I’ll wait,” he said at last. “It’s more important for me to keep a good partner than to get that loot as quickly as possible. But if you don’t show up at dawn... Someone might die instead of you. Got it? You know that I don’t waste words.”

  “I know. I understand everything.”

  “Get lost.”

  He was shoved outside, and the barrack door slammed shut immediately. Adrian rushed down the hill through the tall grass, crouching some distance away to catch his breath. He cursed. Things were taking a very bad turn. His heart was still pounding furiously. To calm down, Adrian took a scrap of newspaper and a tobacco pouch from the hidden pocket, rolled a cigarette with trembling hands, and lit up, trying to make sense of what was happening and to decide what to do next.

  He squatted down and took a deep drag. The tobacco was good, nothing like the garbage they smoked in the sixth block. The best of what could be stolen from the plantations, he sold to the factories. The very best he kept for himself.

  Now he had to get to the dorm immediately, before someone from the personnel spotted him. And he had to be extremely careful. The last thing he needed was to be locked up for the code of conduct violation.

  Adrian finished the cigarette, snapped the butt away, and climbed back to the road leading toward the dorms. The road was empty, and he walked automatically, his thoughts wandering. Not having met a soul, he reached the white four-storey scabby buildings, turned around the corner, and almost bumped into three people walking down the alley.

  “Aha,” Mr. Burakovsky, the director of the orphanage, said. Two officers in the military stood behind him. “Thorne! Here you are.”

  Now, things have really taken a bad turn.