Page 91 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘I know someone,’ Valery said at last. ‘An engineer. She runs the village Resovskaya is using for high-contamination human data.’

‘Fantastic.’

‘No. She’s got her head screwed on. As soon as she finds out what we’re doing, she’s going to say that she won’t help unless we get her people out too. That’s – anything between sixty and eighty, I think.’

He thought Anna would wince, but she only looked pensive. ‘I think I can do that. We just need a goods lorry.’

‘They’re going to be radioactive, all of them. Their clothes, their boots – the soldiers at the gate run a dosimeter over everything coming in and out. Even if the villagers come into Resovskaya’s lab through the forest door and up on the Lighthouse side, they’re still stuck behind the perimeter fence. And we can’t drive a truck into the forest to get them.’

‘I’ll think of something. Go and see her.’

Tatiana, who had been quiet all along, climbed factually into his lap then, with Albert. She was wearing a sticker that said she had been brave at the doctor’s.

‘Hey,’ he said, forcing himself to smile. ‘How was Chelyabinsk?’

‘A lot of needles and poking,’ Tatiana said drowsily, swinging her legs. Her knees were bruised. ‘I don’t feel very well now.’

‘The medicine is vicious,’ Anna said. She was watching them with the carefulness that anybody watched a little girl with a strange man.

Valery began to set her down, but then realised she wasn’t getting ready to stand up. She had gone to sleep, switched off like a lamp. Anna scooped her up and said they had better be getting home. He saw them to the lift and stood out in the hallway once it had gone down, gazing at nothing. Even if Anna really did want to help him, she would have to do it around a sick child. If Tatiana’s reaction to her treatment got any worse than this, there was going to come a point when Anna would have to choose between helping Valery, and going with her little girl to hospital.

Albert squeezed his wrist sympathetically.

33

Octopus Toys

Valery’s first instinct, which was childish and formed from reading too many spy novels, had been to find a way to disguise the core or hide it somehow. It only occurred to him when Anna handed over the equipment in a bag that if he had no idea what a criticality test core looked like, then nor would Dr Resovskaya. The beryllium sphere looked impressive and space age, but if someone had just left it on the kitchen table, he would never have guessed what it was. He didn’t know what he’d have thought. More than anything it looked like it could have been a novelty indoor fountain, one of those little ones that made happy gurgling noises and everyone wanted because a Japanese person had once said it was zen.

So that was what he did. He took it out of his bag, which was otherwise filled with student papers, and put it together on the table in the underground lab. It took him about ten minutes. The other researchers glanced his way but seemed to put it down to Valery Strangeness. Resovskaya did ask what he was doing, but not with much hope.

‘Bloody thing broke at home and the octopus is going nuts without it,’ he mumbled.

‘What does an octopus going nuts look like, I wonder?’ Resovskaya said, sounding resigned.

‘You’d think that stealing batteries would electrocute an octopus, wouldn’t you, but oh no.’

‘O … kay,’ she said, starting to laugh. She patted his shoulder and went away.

He felt exhausted. It had taken five hours for Nanya to make a clockwork mechanism, scavenged from old combine-harvester parts, which would open and close the demon core accurately enough. Like he had thought, the price was transport away for anyone in the village who wanted to leave.

‘I’m not doing this for you unless you can get us out too,’ Nanya said over her kitchen table in the candlelight. She looked worse for wear since he had last seen her. He wondered how much radiation she and the other villagers had absorbed, just hunting for Pyotr.

‘No, I know.’ He swallowed, because he wanted to tell the truth and say, we’ve had to organise this in forty seconds because any later and the test subjects will be too far gone to save; I have no idea if any of it will work. But none of it would without the demon-core mechanism. ‘We can do it. We have a truck big enough for everyone.’

Maybe.

‘How do I know you won’t go without us?’ Nanya said.

‘Because we need you.’ He had rehearsed this in his head on the way to the village. ‘If we turn up at an embassy in Moscow claiming to be from some top-secret nuclear installation, no one’s going to believe us, even with a few people radiation-sick; we could just be zeks who ran off from a reactor. People come up with stories all the time to get a few American dollars or asylum in France. But if we bring seventy-five people with clear long-term radiation-related health problems and an identical story, they will have to believe us. All of us.’

Nanya hesitated. ‘Who’s helping you?’

‘One of the physicists. Her husband was just taken as a test subject.’

Nanya nodded slowly. ‘Okay. But if you screw me over—’

‘I know, one of the lads will be by to cut off my hands.’