Leshy. Echo of Worlds

Chapter 9. The Hut

The corridor between the anomalies turned out to be narrow — a meter and a half, no wider. Borland went first, without looking back. Lika's detector was silent: to the right and to the left the anomalies stood tight against the path, the air along the edges dense, pressing, alive — she could already tell this pressure apart, she had learned in two days. Here it came from both sides at once, and she walked exactly down the middle, counting steps, trying not to think about what would happen if she strayed from the line.

* * *

Lis landed about thirty meters off.

The sound was such that for a second Lika's breath caught — a heavy blow against the ground, a rustle, then silence. Then — a quiet, very restrained expression, which Lis, by all appearances, uttered purely for himself.

They came out of the corridor, and Lika ran first.

He lay on his back, looking at the darkening sky. When she ran up and bent over him — he turned his head.

"How are you?"

"In one piece."

One word, and that was all. He sat up — slower than usual, touched his shoulder, winced. Got up on his own. Brushed off his knee, straightened his jacket. Then he raised his eyes to the hut, to Borland at the entrance, to the corridor between the anomalies — and said nothing.

Lika looked at him and waited. Lis was silent. That was the strangest part — Lis, who chattered in the Zone at every step, who gave advice, commented, joked and didn't fall silent even when asked to, was now simply walking to the house. In silence. Whatever had happened between him and Borland in the forest — the Trampoline was the least of it.

* * *

Inside, the hut turned out bigger than it looked from outside. Not by much, but six of them went in without feeling like sardines in a can. One room: a plank bunk by the wall, a table, two chairs, a shelf with things on it. On the shelf lay a knife in a sheath — the handle worn, a working one — and several objects set apart from each other, with gaps between them. Artifacts, judging by the arrangement. In the corner a small stove with no chimney. A steady dry heat came off it.

Lis went in last. Stopped at the threshold. Quickly looked the room over — professionally, as he always did — then his eyes fell on the stove, lingered for three seconds, and Lis asked Dub for a cigarette, got it, and went back outside. The door closed quietly behind him.

Dub looked at the closed door. Then at Kit.

Kit shrugged, barely noticeably.

* * *

"The ambush was clearly meant for you," said Borland. He stood at the window with his back to the room, looking outside. "This new group — Apex, they imagine themselves the local mafia. I cleaned them out carefully before you got there."

Gaika nodded.

"We figured as much. It was empty when we passed through."

Kit sat by the wall, Dub settled at the table — elbows on the tabletop, eyes on Borland. Appraising. Calmly, without pressure, the way people look who know how to wait.

"And Lis?" Lika asked. "Did you find him in the forest?"

Borland shifted his gaze to her.

"He spotted me when I'd already finished and was about to leave. Followed me. Thought I hadn't noticed." Something moved in his face — barely, almost indistinguishably, in the direction opposite to a smile. "But I noticed."

"You outplayed him at cat and mouse?"

"He's a sniper. His vantage point on Apex was good, but he didn't find one more. That one would have put a bullet in his forehead when you got close to the ambush." Leshy fell silent, looking out the window. "Consider that I saved him. And when he decided to track me, I stepped into a Trampoline and ended up behind him. The kid got himself quite a scare. Probably still doesn't understand how I got there."

"Harsh."

"The Zone is harsher." He turned back to the window. "It'll be a lesson to him."

Lika thought that this was, probably, true.

Dub coughed.

"How long can we stay here?"

"Until morning." Borland took a mug from the shelf, set it on the stove. "In an hour it'll be fully dark."

* * *

She was the one who talked about her father.

Borland hadn't asked. He set the tea down, sat at the table — and looked at her in a way that made it clear: you can. She didn't speak the way she had told it to Ekaterina, where everything was by the facts and in order. Here it was different. About the smell of tobacco and machine oil, even though they had never had a car, the smell had simply clung to him and stayed. About how once, when she was eight, he took her into the forest and told her to walk slowly and listen with her feet — not with her ears, not with her eyes, but with her soles. Back then she hadn't understood what her father wanted from her. Now, after two days in the Zone, she was beginning to realize. When she had finished her memories of childhood, she went on to what she knew about his later trips into the Zone.

"Svetlov Igor Dmitriyevich," she said at the end. "Bely. Four years ago he went out on an assignment from the institute and didn't come back. The assignment was called 'Resonance.' I don't know anything more specific."

Borland was silent.

She looked at him and tried to read something from his face. Nothing. He sat evenly, without impatience, without the sideways glance people use to signal they're waiting for it to end. He listened.

"Resonance," he repeated. Aloud, not as a question. Testing the word. "Apex has been in the Zone for half a year. If they've been here much longer, then one thing is linked to the other — the trail can still be found. Not hot, but not entirely cold either."

Lika waited.

"The northern sector changed after the surge. Where you pointed, I was a year ago. What's there now — I don't know. We'll have to go and look."

"Will you go?"

A short pause.

"First I have to teach you to walk. Then I'll decide."

It wasn't yet agreement. But it was no longer refusal either. Lika felt this not with her head — with the same instinct with which she had begun to feel the pressure of the anomalies in the corridor. Maybe her father had been right about the soles.

Borland stood up, took away the mug.

"Sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

He lay down on the bunk and turned to the wall. Dub settled by the stove, putting his jacket under his head. Kit — on the floor, without any extra movement. Lika found the place that was left.

Outside the door, Lis's cigarette smoldered quietly. Lika didn't go out to him.

She lay there. Listened to the hut going quiet. Rustles at first — then breathing, then a silence so complete that she could hear the Zone breathing outside.

Chapter 10. Farewell

Gaika was sitting on the porch with a mug in her hands when Borland came out.

Dawn was only gathering — the sky over the forest gray, the air damp and cold, with that density that in the Zone comes only in the early morning. The anomalies in the labyrinth were almost invisible in this light, only the air above them trembled slightly — and if you knew what you were looking for, you could make it out.

Borland sat down beside her on a step. Was silent a while.

"How's Vint?"

"Living. Working." Gaika took a sip from the mug. "Gone a bit soft."

"Good."

One word, a nod — short, single. The forest stood quiet. Somewhere beyond the perimeter something crackled at even intervals, and neither of them paid it any attention — one of those sounds you stop hearing after a week in the Zone.

"Leshy. I need to tell you something about the Zone."

He waited.

"After the last surge the data doesn't add up. Several anomalies seem to have mutated, changed structure, as if they don't belong to this Zone. One Flare in the third sector started behaving like a Trampoline, our people didn't even understand it at first. The institute still can't explain it. They called it a geyser, the flame bursts out and is carried off in an arc."

Borland looked at the labyrinth.

"I noticed it three weeks ago." His voice was level, with no intonation of news. "I can't say anything more precise yet. It's stronger in the deep, closer to the perimeter maybe you can't even notice. Something is taking shape in the Zone."

"Understood. We'll be careful."

"More careful than usual."

Gaika finished her mug, set it down beside her on the porch plank.

"You've changed."

Borland didn't answer right away. He looked at the labyrinth.

"Everyone changes."

"Not everyone in this direction."

That went unanswered. He didn't get up, didn't close himself off — just sat beside her. For Gaika that was enough.

"Wake yours up," he said. "We'll eat before the road."

They ate breakfast in silence. Tinned food, bread, herbal tea. There wasn't much food.

Lis, from the moment he sat down at the table, had been looking at the stove. Silently, not looking away.

Dub noticed first. Poured himself more tea.

"There's no chimney," Lis said at last. "But there's heat. And no smoke at all."

Borland ate.

"That's physically..." Lis broke off mid-word. Turned slowly. "There's a Flare in there. You stuck a Flare in the stove."

"Lis," said Gaika.

"No, wait. An anomaly. In a stove. He just took it and stuck it in."

Dub sighed. Poured more.

Borland put down his spoon.

"Where I grew up, the Zone was everywhere. The tribe lived inside it — not next to it, inside. They learned to move anomalies, lure them, use them. A Flare holds heat, doesn't smoke, consumption zero." He stood, took the mugs. "The anomalies here are different, but the principle is the same. Finish up."

Lis stared at his back.

"Dub. He moves anomalies."

"Heard."

"With his hands."

"Not with his hands, he said so himself."

"You're drinking tea calmly."

"That's my superpower," said Dub, and set down his mug.

Kit smiled. Said nothing.

* * *

They left in the middle of the morning.

Borland went out beyond the perimeter first, picked up a cobblestone from the ground — rounded, heavy — and with a short swing threw it at an anomaly at the edge of the corridor. A flash, the smell of ozone, the corridor widened by some two meters. Lis watched this in silence.

A struggle was clearly going on inside him.

"Don't ask," said Dub, passing by.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking."

Gaika stopped at the passage. Turned around.

"Leshy."

He looked at her.

"Thank you. You know what for. And look after her, maybe..." She didn't finish, nodded toward Soika.

He nodded — once, briefly. They both knew it was enough.

Kit waved a hand at the exit — broadly, in his own way. Dub left without looking back. At the edge of the corridor Lis did turn around after all, held his gaze on Borland, on the hut behind his back. Was silent for a second. Then left.

* * *

Lika stood by the porch and watched them go until their silhouettes dissolved among the trees. Then she turned around.

Borland stood two steps away, looking in the same direction.

"So. You stay. Three days. I'll see what you can do and what you can't. Then I'll decide."

"Decide what, exactly?"

"Whether it's even worth going there with you."

He turned to the hut and went in. The door closed without a slam.

Lika looked at the door.

Three days.

Chapter 11. Three Days

He took out the map in the morning, without preamble.

Large, frayed at the edges. Over the printed base — layers of pencil marks: arrows, numbers, symbols whose meaning Lika didn't understand. Borland spread it on the table, weighed the corners down with mugs. In places the paper had worn clean through at the folds — the map had been folded and unfolded many times.

"Show me."

"What exactly?"

"Everything you know. Bely's last run. Where Apex is, according to the institute's data. In general — whatever there is. And I'll see whether you can read, while I'm at it."

Lika bent over the map.

She could read a map — her father had taught her before school, with the same seriousness with which children are taught to count. "A map is a conversation with a place," he used to say. "The place tells you what's there. You tell the map where you are." She ran her finger over the sheet, named sectors, marked what she remembered from the archive data — fragmentary, incomplete, but data all the same.

Borland listened. Sometimes he looked not at the map but at her — she noticed it from the corner of her eye.

"The last point where he was seen — here." She marked it with a fingernail. "The far north of the sector. After that there's no data."

"Apex?"

"This corridor, according to our data. But that's half a year ago. They show up in different places."

Borland was silent over the map for a long time. His finger passed over the northern edge, not touching the paper. Stopped at an empty spot where there was no data.

"After the surge everything there became different. The old routes don't work." He rolled up the map, put it away. "First I'll see how you walk. We go out in ten minutes."

* * *

The labyrinth around the house she already knew fairly well by eye. Borland led her through it differently.

He walked and stopped. Stood and waited. Said nothing.

The first time she stopped next to him and didn't understand what he was waiting for. Looked around, shrugged.

"What?"

He moved on again.

The second time she felt pressure on the left — the air there was slightly different in density, barely perceptible. She took to the right. Something in his step changed for a fraction of a second.

She caught it.

By noon she began to understand what he was doing. He was teaching her to listen — not to the detector and not to her eyes, but to the thing inside. Borland didn't explain in words. He walked, stopped, waited — whether she felt it or not. More often she felt it. Not always accurately, not always quickly.

Once she felt nothing — just stood and didn't understand. He waited, then picked up a stone and threw it a little ahead and to the left. The air flared quietly: a Flare, almost invisible in daylight, marked itself with a strip of hot air above the ground.

"You can't always hear them." The first words in an hour and a half. "Sometimes look at the insects. They don't fly where an anomaly is."

"Did you come up with that here, or did you know it before?"

"Here. Everywhere I ended up, the anomalies were different — every time I had to learn anew."

Nothing more. He walked on again.

He drove her through the labyrinth for four hours. Without breaks, without assessments, without words. By the end her legs were humming, sweat stung her eyes, her concentration was swimming — but she didn't ask to stop. When he finally turned toward the house, she didn't grasp it at once — she just noticed they had already come out of the ring of anomalies.

"That's all?"

"For today."

When she passed him in the doorway, he didn't step aside. Stood there. She took it as an assessment — silent, but clear.

* * *

Inside it was warm. The Flare in the stove was working evenly.

Lika dropped onto the bunk. Somewhere in her shoulder there was a pull — it seemed that at one of the passages she had veered right a little earlier than needed and grazed something with her edge. Borland sat at the table, making notes on the map. Quietly, without extra movement.

She closed her eyes.

Her thoughts came slowly. She fell into sleep before she could finish thinking.

The creak of a door.

Steps.

Lika opened her eyes. The ceiling. She lay for a second, then got up.

* * *

The summer shower stood around the corner of the hut — a tank on a post, boards underfoot, three walls of slab wood.

Lika went out for water and turned the corner without thinking.

She stopped.

Borland stood with his back to her. Above, only trousers. Water was pouring from the tank.

She should have left. She stayed.

His back was narrow and wiry, though with broad shoulders for all that. On his forearms — scars. Even spirals, from the wrists upward, applied with intent and precision — that doesn't come out by accident, it is done for a long time and most likely painfully. Higher, going up to the shoulders, ran a tattoo: angular signs, each separate and at the same time part of something. In the institute's materials she had seen nothing like it; they also didn't resemble any language she had ever seen.

The water stopped pouring.

Lika stepped back. Not quietly enough.

Borland didn't turn around. His shoulders changed their angle slightly.

She went around the corner, pressed herself to the wall.

Her heart beat fast. She stood.

The spirals — most likely ritual. From that world. And the tattoo is different — applied later.

The sky was darkening beyond the forest.

The hut door creaked.

She waited. Went in after him.

Borland was already lying on the bunk, turned to the wall.

"Tomorrow will be harder. Go to sleep."

She lay down. Closed her eyes.

The spirals stood before her eyes for a long time.

* * *

At this pace a couple of days went by, during the night and day breaks Leshy would leave and come back an hour later. After which the labyrinth became unrecognizable, he moved something and changed its structure and each time it was harder for Lika to get through.

Finally, one evening, he nodded to her approvingly.

"Tomorrow we set out."

Chapter 12. The Departure

They set out at dawn.

Borland went first — habitually, without words. Lika kept behind him, trying to fall into his pattern: not literally into his footprints, that was useless — he moved too unpredictably, too many small course corrections that from outside were almost unreadable. Rather — into the overall rhythm. Where he looks, where he slows, where he shifts the angle of his shoulder a little. In three days in the labyrinth she had learned to read at least that. Badly, so far. But all the same.

The Zone met them differently than the first time, when she had entered it.

Not more aggressively. Denser. The pressure began earlier, even before the detector gave a signal — barely perceptible, at the level of that very inner instinct that Borland had spent three days teaching her not to ignore. She noticed this pressure. Noticed that he noticed it too — he moved a little slower, a little more carefully, with longer pauses on open stretches. Like a man walking on ice who knows the ice is thinner today than yesterday.

Lika kept going and stayed quiet. Here, silence was right.

* * *

By noon they had covered about eight kilometers. By the standards of the deep Zone — decent, Gaika had said that here more than five a day counted as a good pace. They stopped at the ruins of some structure — three walls and a piece of ceiling, enough to give shade. What it had been before was unclear. The Zone had long since ground up everything that could have answered that question.

Borland sat, leaned against the wall. Took out water. Lika lowered herself next to him, stretched out her legs. Her shoulder ached — the very one she had grazed in the labyrinth. She didn't say anything.

They ate in silence. Cold tinned food, bread. Borland ate methodically, without appetite and without disgust — simply a necessary action that had to be carried out.

Lika looked at the ruins opposite. At how something gray and stubborn pushed up through the cracks in the concrete. At how the anomalies around held a perimeter — unseen, but felt.

Then she asked after all.

"Vikki." She didn't look at him. "Can you tell me about her?"

A pause. Long enough for her to regret the question.

"Why."

"I don't know." Honestly. "I just want to understand who exactly I remind you of."

Borland looked aside. For a long time — so long that she had already decided there would be no answer.

"She could listen with her soul." His voice was level, but there was something in it that was not level — like a crack in a wall that you don't see at once, but feel. "Much more human than me. She sensed her surroundings, but she was just as lonely as I am." Borland fell silent for several minutes. "She completed me..."

Silence.

"Is that all?" Lika asked quietly.

"That's enough."

He stood up before she could think of anything to say. Picked up his pack, swung it onto his shoulder.

"Moving out."

He said nothing more. But that was already more than I had expected.

* * *

After noon the Zone began to press more noticeably.

Not dangerously — just more perceptibly. The pressure on her temples became background, almost habitual, but Lika noticed that she was beginning to tire faster than usual. Not her legs — her head. Concentration required effort.

Borland saw it before she understood it herself. He stopped, turned around. Took from the side pocket of his pack a gray-yellow porous piece.

"Open your mouth."

"Why?"

"Just listen to me. The psi-pressure is higher here, closer to the center it will keep growing."

She opened it. He put a piece of something like a sponge in and told her to chew. A metallic, bitter taste. After a few minutes her head became clearer — not completely, but enough to hold the pace.

"Loofah (that's the name — an artifact, not an actual sponge). Nobody found a use for it," he said. "I take it everywhere now, found the effect by accident. Probably nobody else would ever think of chewing a useless artifact in order to stick their head into the very hell of the Zone."

"I'm afraid to find out under what circumstances you started eating artifacts... And before?"

"Before, I just put up with the itch in my head."

They went on. Lika walked and thought that "put up with" in his version probably meant simply kept moving. Didn't complain, didn't slow down, didn't stop. Just went through it, like through everything else.

* * *

They made their night camp in an abandoned pillbox — small, low, with an embrasure instead of a window. There was room for exactly two, if you didn't move unnecessarily. Outside, the walls were knee-deep in moss, inside — bare concrete with rusty traces of brackets. Somebody's old position. Long abandoned.

Borland set the perimeter. A rope with nuts, a few wire loops — simple, no tricks. Then he lay down, closed his eyes.