Page 25 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Whatever it is, it’s inside Moscow’s safety parameters.’

Valery was already well beyond the perimeter of safe conversation. He could see the edge of a leather strap against Shenkov’s shoulder; a gun harness.

‘I know,’ he said, and even meant to leave it at that, but then the levee broke, Normal Valery drowned, and the rest decided it was worth risking his life to have just another five minutes of speaking to someone who wanted to listen. ‘I know that’s what they’re saying. But the trees are dying to windward, which means there wasn’t just groundwater contamination; it was airborne, the kind you get from a bomb.’ Valery felt as though he were being wrenched along by an undertow in the sea now. ‘This place is staffed by not one single well-reviewed specialist in the field, but students, convicts, and women who have been elbowed out of better jobs. We’re all disposable.’ He couldn’t stop. Perhaps it was talking, or perhaps it was airing some honest logic rather than the Code, he couldn’t tell now. He closed his hands over the edge of the desk. ‘The only reason I can think of for this kind of blanket secrecy – flying blatantly in the face of very obvious facts – is that the radiation is so bad it’s dangerous for humans to be here.’

It banged into the quiet.

‘Unless people here are eating grass in the forest contaminated with strontium-90 like your mice are, I don’t see why anyone should worry,’ Shenkov said tiredly. He’d closed off. Perhaps that was a good thing. ‘If Moscow says it’s safe here, it’s safe—’

‘Are they healthy, your kids?’ Valery interrupted. He had begun speaking about the whole thing with no intention of pushing it this far, but the more Shenkov argued, the more Valery had to justify himself, the more sure he was. Now, the undertow was so strong he could feel it wrenching him under. ‘You have kids, I’ve seen the pictures in your office. Their DNA is still building itself, which means it is not closed up yet. It’s open, and it can absorb any radiation that happens to pass by in a way that yours or mine wouldn’t. Allergies, prone to sickness, bone weakness, any of this sound familiar—’

Shenkov just tapped one hand on the table. But Valery, who had seen it coming and expected him to bang it hard, jumped so badly he dropped the Petri dish he’d been holding. It smashed so delicately on the floor that it almost held its shape, just in pieces. ‘Calm down,’ Shenkov said, after a pause in which the smash seemed to echo and echo. ‘Review your data and find the error. And if you jitter about this to anyone else, I will have to shoot you. Do you understand?’

Valery had been in lots of fights; fights about food, non-fights with guards where you just curled up and thought of the motherland, fights with his father. Real fights, not a hushed recommendation from a well-mannered man. He should have been used to it, but he wasn’t. He stood at the workbench for a long time after Shenkov had gone, hating how upset he was, and how he’d all but thrown himself into the whole stupid conversation just for the sake of talking when he knew how dangerous that water was. It made him want to shred his own skin off.

He couldn’t go to bed feeling like that, so he meant to work all night. He was finished by three, though, which made him feel cheated, so he went walking outside in the dark. Automatic already, he set the stopwatch going at the door, even though he’d decided he didn’t care if he was out for more than half an hour. He was still fizzing and ashamed. He had sounded like a gulag-addled neurotic making mountains out of electrons.

Smooth, 745, really bloody smooth.

Normal Valery had not drowned after all.

The birch forest shushed strangely, and out on the lake, reeds bowed in the wind. One of those geysers banged, somewhere off over the marsh.

On the far bank, there were lights. He watched as they moved out over the water. Someone must have been in a boat. Very distinctly, he heard a reel buzz, and the plink of a float.

9

The Village

He could still taste the bleach inside the back of the soldiers’ van, and feel the rancid terror he had felt when they escorted him out of the cafe. But splashing about in the Techa was one thing; actually eating irradiated fish was something else altogether. There were some hills you had to die on. He set off across the damp grass.

The way around the lake was dark, but the night was bright. With the halogens of the Lighthouse facility and the town a good way behind him, the marshlands were silver under the stars. In the distance, the forest creaked in the breeze that blew in from the Urals, perhaps a little louder than healthy trees would have. Out into the lake, the weird shallow section looked like a glass spill, the moonlight making ripple shadows on the concrete just under the surface. He had a strong feeling he was walking beside the corpse of a lake, not a living one. There was something fossilised about it. But perhaps that was because, in his mind, the dark water was just a veneer over the smoky pall of radiation on the lake bed, whirling in black plumes where the current pulled it into the Techa and beyond.

On the water, the fisherman in his small boat recast, and the single light on the prow bobbed.

Because Valery was watching that, he almost fell over the bucket of fish propped up in a shallow swim, beside someone’s rucksack.

Something pressed into the back of his neck.

‘You,’ said a hoarse voice, ‘had better piss off and leave our catch alone.’

He put his hands up. ‘I’m a scientist at the Lighthouse,’ he explained. ‘I just came out to warn you not to fish here. The lake is irradiated, it’s full of nuclear waste. So are the fish. You shouldn’t eat them.’

‘Well, we’ve got to,’ the voice said crossly.

Valery frowned. ‘But everything in town is shipped in. It’s all so cheap, you don’t need to fish yourself – there’s fish in the shops, and—’

‘Not for us there’s not. Off you fuck, comrade.’

‘Can I turn around please?’

The rifle tip lifted from the nape of his neck. The man was dressed in rough clothes, overalls and a jumper with holes in the sleeves, and he was ill. Or rather, starved – he had the pinched look Valery still did, though on Valery it was already softening. Whoever the man was, he was not from City 40.

‘Are you living in the exclusion zone?’ Valery asked slowly.

‘So what if we are?’ the man snapped.

‘You’re living off the land here?’