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  ‘Katya, it’s our only choice! If they know we’re here, we have to get off this train and . . . and trek back to N’Djamena. At least then we’d be able to try and find some other way north!’

  I pointed out of the window at the scrubby terrain whipping by. ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘Look how fast the train is going! Not to mention it’s the middle of nowhere and over forty degrees out there. We can’t just—’

  ‘There’s no time,’ he said, pushing past me and sliding the compartment door back open. He peered cautiously left and right along the corridor. ‘I don’t see them. They must have gone into one of the other compartments.’ He reached back in and grabbed my hand. ‘Now come on.’

  He led me out into the corridor. We were in the last carriage, and we hurried to the end, Tomas slamming open the door. Raw heat baked through my clothes in an instant, drenching my skin in sweat. I looked down, seeing the rails and patchy clumps of grass whip by in a blur. The rattle and thunder of the wheels was deafening.

  ‘Are you insane?’ I shouted over the noise. ‘We’ll be killed!’

  He pulled me close and kissed me. ‘We have no choice,’ he shouted back.

  Before I could raise any further objections, he had swept one arm around my waist and lifted us both up and over the safety rail. I screamed as we fell, rolling and tumbling down an embankment, the force of the impact driving the air from my lungs.

  Once I had come to a stop, I pulled myself into a crouch with my face pressed against the hard black soil, tasting sand and grit in my mouth. My ribs ached more than I would have believed possible. It was a miracle I hadn’t broken my neck.

  I looked up, and saw that the train had already receded far into the distance.

  I dragged myself upright and looked around until I saw Tomas lying sprawled on his side in the dust several metres away. When I stumbled over to him, I saw he had both hands wrapped around one thigh, his teeth bared in a snarl.

  But at least he was alive.

  I dropped onto my knees beside him. ‘I might have broken something,’ he gasped.

  ‘Can you stand?’

  He shook his head tightly. ‘I don’t know.’

  I hooked an arm around his shoulder and managed to ease him upright. He leaned on me heavily. I kept expecting the train to grind to a slow halt, and the two agents to jump down and come running back for us with their guns drawn. Instead it continued into the far distance and out of sight.

  The heat already made it hard to think clearly. I thought longingly of the water merchant, his steel insulated trolley loaded with ice-cold jugs of water. Just another few hours on the train, and we would have reached the rebel-held territories . . .

  It wasn’t worth thinking about. With a little bit of effort, Tomas was able to take first one step, then another, and then another.

  After a while, Tomas found the going a little easier, though he still had to lean on me most of the way. It took several hours more than it should have to walk back to N’Djamena, but by the time the sun began to drop towards the horizon we had reached the city’s outskirts. I was soon able to locate a store, where I bought water and other supplies.

  ‘N’Djamena isn’t Free Africa,’ said Tomas, once he’d had something to eat, ‘but it’s close. If we can find the right people, someone might be able to help us get the rest of the way.’

  ‘And if they’re the wrong people?’

  Tomas didn’t reply at first, and I immediately regretted my words. If not for him, we might never have got even this far.

  ‘They won’t be,’ he said at last. ‘And even if they are, we still have this.’ He patted the bulge in his jacket where a pistol was concealed.

  I resisted the urge to say that since he had never shot anyone in his life, I doubted whether he had it in him to do so now.

  The streets were still busy even at this late hour. N’Djamena, on this alternate at least, was a frontier town. Mosques and churches stood side by side with bars, tobacco shops and trading posts. From time to time a few people approached us from out of the gloom, looking for easy pickings, but Tomas warded them off by showing them his pistol. Instead of jeering at us and snatching his weapon from his grasp, as I half-expected them to do, they vanished back into the shadows.

  ‘Wait,’ Tomas croaked, still leaning on me heavily. With a nod of his head, he indicated a blocky whitewashed building with smoky dark windows and a twisted neon sign above the door. ‘We can try in there. It’s as good as anywhere else we’ve seen.’

  Despite my trepidation, I helped him inside the bar and into a booth. There were perhaps three or four customers at most, but I felt the eyes of every one of them following us as we entered. A broken screen above the bar ghosted fuzzy holographic images: a news report about General Yakov leading the Tsar’s imperial forces against the rebels on this alternate.

  The bartender was a gangly Sudanese with tribal scars on his cheeks. I bought something to drink and asked him how I might go about buying a vehicle, without specifying exactly how far I intended to go and in what direction. As I did so, I drew out the small metal token I had been given by a contact at the Khartoum inter-parallel transfer facility: an imperial coin, with the symbol of the revolution stamped over the Tsar’s face.

  The bartender gave me a knowing look, and I listened to the thudding of my heart, unsure how he might react. But then he directed me in halting Russian to speak to a man sitting in a shadowed corner, and twenty minutes later, at the cost of all our remaining money, I had somehow managed to negotiate the purchase of an all-terrain vehicle that had once, apparently, belonged to a goat-herder.

  I excused myself briefly and went back over to Tomas. ‘He’ll know we’re on the run,’ he said. ‘You didn’t tell him where we were going, did you?’

  ‘We’re two white people speaking Russian on the edge of Free North Africa, who just wandered out of the desert and bought transport in cash from a random stranger in a bar,’ I said. ‘Where the hell else would we be going but north? The only reason anyone comes here any more at all is because they’re headed that way.’

  ‘You know, he could probably make a lot more money by selling us to Yakov. We’re obviously on the run.’

  ‘You said yourself we had no choice,’ I snapped in irritation. I glanced around the bar, in time to see multiple pairs of eyes suddenly look the other way. ‘He has no idea who we are, anyway.’

  The man I had spoken to walked past us and headed for the door. He glanced back at me, then pushed the door open and stepped outside.

  ‘I think he wants us to go with him,’ I said, helping Tomas stand.

  ‘Here,’ he said, turning away from the rest of the bar and pressing his pistol into my hands. ‘I can barely stand, let alone shoot. Just in case he tries anything funny. There’s no law here, Katya, unless you count General Yakov.’

  Outside, the wind blew grit in my eyes. The man led us several blocks before presenting us with a battered, open-top all-terrain that was clearly worth a tiny fraction of what we were paying for it. Even so, I gave him the last of our money and we soon left N’Djamena behind, racing along beneath a wind-battered moon. I drove while Tomas slumped beside me.

  We had been underway for a couple of hours when Tomas glanced up at the night sky. ‘Do you hear something?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I could hear hardly anything over the rattle and thump of the engine.

  He frowned. ‘I can hear something.’

  Then, at last, my ear picked it out of the noise of the engine and the wind: a thin, high-pitched whine that seemed to come from somewhere directly above us. I looked up, but could see nothing in the darkness.

  I glanced at him uneasily. ‘It’s probably just some surveillance drone that wandered off-course. We can’t be that far from the fighting.’

  Tomas kept his attention fixed overhead. ‘I swear, I think it’s coming closer.’

  I listened again. It did sound louder than it had a moment before . . .

  Tomas rea
ched out, grabbing hold of the wheel and twisting it so that we slewed off the road.

  ‘Tomas!’ I shouted, ‘what are you—?’

  ‘Just keep your feet on the pedals!’

  The whine faded – then grew stronger once more, finding its way back above us.

  ‘Is it tracking us?’ I asked, when he let me have the wheel back again.

  ‘Of course it’s tracking us,’ he said. ‘I think we’re going to have to—’

  Suddenly, the desert all around lit up as bright as day. I glanced up, seeing the outline of an unmanned drone against moonlit clouds.

  Something slammed into the desert floor directly in front of us, kicking up a great fountain of dust and dirt. The transport crashed to a sudden halt as its front wheels fell into a hole that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  I swallowed and coughed on the choking dust billowing through the shattered windscreen. My vision was blurred, but I could hear a rumble of car engines, coming closer.

  ‘Tomas?’ I felt for him next to me. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s too late, Katya,’ he mumbled, his speech slurred. ‘They’ve found us.’

  I blinked and looked out through the windscreen. A troop-carrier rolled to a halt before us, disgorging half a dozen troops with imperial insignia on their uniforms. Moments later, a black limousine pulled up next to it.

  The troops came forward and hauled us out of the transport. One pushed a gun against my head. I watched as Herr Frank, wearing a long dark overcoat despite the dusty heat, emerged from the limousine, followed by the two imperial agents and the man who had sold us the transport. The man looked dazed, his face covered in cuts and bruises.

  ‘Very good work,’ said Herr Frank. He nodded at the man from the bar. ‘We don’t need him any more.’

  ‘Sir,’ said one of the agents, drawing a gun and shooting the man in the head.

  I watched in horror as he crumpled, lifeless, to the ground.

  I barely had the strength to protest when one of the soldiers pulled a black hood over my head.

  TWO

  Department of Okhrana Special Operations, St Petersburg,

  First Republic of the Novo-Rossiyskaya Imperiya

  Two Days Later

  ‘Gospodin Borodin?’

  The man whom Herr Frank had addressed turned from the window at which he stood. He had deep-set eyes and thinning dark hair, and hollow cheeks that gave him a consumptive appearance. His gaze briefly passed over Tomas and me, taking in our bruised faces and plastic cuffs, then moved on to Herr Frank, standing beside us at the door, along with two guards.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Frank,’ said Borodin. ‘You can remove their cuffs. It won’t be necessary for you to be present.’

  Herr Frank blinked. ‘These two are my responsibility. I should be there throughout their interrog—’

  ‘You can wait downstairs until I’m finished,’ said Borodin. ‘That is final.’

  I risked a glance at Herr Frank and saw a muscle twitch in his bony cheek. ‘Gospodin Borodin, I must insist that—’

  ‘Do as I ask,’ Borodin interrupted him, ‘or you can explain to the Tsar in person how you let these two escape in the first place.’

  Herr Frank grew pale, but spun on his heel and spat orders at the two guards. They removed our cuffs and then departed with Herr Frank, pulling the heavy double doors shut behind them.

  ‘Well,’ said Borodin, turning to us and gesturing towards two chairs placed side by side at the centre of the room. ‘Sit. We have a lot to talk about.’

  I glanced at Tomas, his face as full of indecision and fear as my own, then sat carefully, massaging my sore wrists. After a moment, Tomas did the same.

  Apart from an antique-looking desk standing in one corner, the room was bare of furnishings or personal effects of any kind. A pistol lay on the desk, next to several dark green folders and a heavy lighter set in a block of onyx. Borodin pulled a drawer open and removed a slim steel case, from which he tapped out a single cigarette. He touched it with the lighter, then breathed blue smoke into the air. Bare-branched trees swayed in a late autumn breeze through the tall windows behind him.

  ‘My name is Mikhail Borodin,’ said the man, ‘and yours are Katya Orlova and Tomas Szandor. I gather you’re a native of the Twelfth Republic, Mr Szandor – I suppose that helped you get as far as you did.’

  Tomas nodded warily.

  Borodin sat on the edge of the desk and touched a finger to one of the green folders by him. ‘I’ve been studying your records. Both of you were separately found guilty of seditious activities some years ago. You, Miss Orlova, were sentenced at the same time as your father and a number of his colleagues.’ He took another drag on his cigarette, and smoke jetted from his nostrils. ‘Instead of execution, the Tsar decreed that you should all be permitted to continue your work in exile at Herr Frank’s research facility at the Crag. Can you tell me why that is?’

  ‘It was felt that we could best repay our disloyalty by furthering the greater glory of the Novo-Rossiyskaya Imperiya,’ I said, repeating words that had been drilled into me almost from the moment I had arrived at the Crag.

  ‘And what,’ asked Borodin, ‘has been the primary focus of your work over the last ten years?’

  I hesitated. ‘Don’t those folders tell you?’

  Borodin regarded me critically. ‘I am not a scientist, Miss Orlova. There are things I would wish you to explain to me in terms I might clearly understand. So far, the primary focus of your collective research has been the Hypersphere. Am I correct?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Explain to me what it is, if you will, Miss Orlova,’ he said. ‘In layman’s terms.’

  ‘A technological artefact recovered from an abandoned Syllogikos base,’ I replied, ‘designed for the purpose of establishing stable traversable links to alternate universes.’

  ‘What makes the Hypersphere different from, say, the transfer stages the Empire already uses to achieve that same end?’

  ‘It can take months – more often, years – to identify even a single viable alternate using our current methods. These methods further necessitate the use of exotic forms of matter, which are enormously difficult to refine and store even in trace amounts.’ I spoke with growing confidence: this was a subject I knew well, after all. ‘By contrast, the Hypersphere – at least according to the historians of the Syllogikos, before they disappeared – can establish a link with any imaginable alternate – instantaneously – merely by holding it in one’s hands.’

  ‘Then why did the people of the Syllogikos bother with transfer stages, if they were capable of creating such wondrous devices?’

  I shook my head. ‘They didn’t create it. All the evidence points to it having been created by some other, presumably older and certainly more advanced, civilization whose ruins they probably encountered in the course of their own explorations.’

  ‘And they just stumbled across it?’

  I nodded. ‘Much the same as an Imperial survey expedition “stumbled” across an abandoned Syllogikos transfer stage on our own First Republic, yes. Or at least,’ I added, ‘that is our primary conjecture.’

  ‘And it can take one to any imaginable destination? What if I were to ask the Hypersphere to take me to Heaven, or even Hell?’

  ‘Nothing, Gospodin Borodin. Those are abstract and supernatural concepts only. But even then, the multiverse allows for a near-infinite range of possibilities—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Borodin, sounding impatient. ‘I take your point. Now – will one of you tell me why it is, after all these years of study, and despite your collective scientific acumen, none of you has managed even once to make the Hypersphere function in the way it was supposedly intended to?’

  I felt a sudden, sharp spike of terror. ‘There are still avenues of research to be explored,’ I replied in a babble. ‘The algorithms that control the Hypersphere’s internal systems have not been mapped out in their entirety. It might be possible that with s
ufficient time—’

  Borodin sighed and put a hand up to stop me. ‘I assume you are afraid to tell me the truth, because you fear punishment for your collective failure.’

  I said nothing.

  He picked up one of the green folders again and held it high. ‘Herr Frank, as part of his administrative duties at the Crag, provides the Tsar’s security services with regular detailed reports about your work – and every one of them, I assure you, is a masterpiece of obfuscation.’ He dropped the folder back down with a slap. ‘His reports are designed not so much to inform, as to prolong the period of time that he remains in charge of the Crag and the Hypersphere research project. The longer you take to achieve any real results, the more comfortable he becomes in his sinecure. However, matters have recently come to something of a head.’

  Borodin reached across the desk and picked up the pistol, then held it loosely in his lap without pointing it directly at either of us.

  I heard Tomas swear quietly under his breath.

  ‘Let me rephrase my question,’ said Borodin. ‘Can the Hypersphere you’ve been picking apart all these years ever be made to do what the Syllogikos said it could?’

  My heart beat so wildly I found it difficult to speak. ‘When . . . when it was found, it turned out to have been severely damaged, Gospodin Borodin. The only reason we know as much as we do about it is because some of the Syllogikos’ records survived the vandalism its own people appear to have inflicted on every one of their bases we’ve found.’

  ‘Would it be reasonable to suggest,’ asked Borodin, ‘that contrary to Herr Frank’s reports, the artefact is in fact so badly damaged that it is unlikely to ever function?’

  ‘Reasonable?’ Tomas sneered at Borodin. ‘Is locking us all up in some remote fucking prison just so we can find a way to make the Tsar young again reasonable? As if conquering entire alternates and enslaving their populations wasn’t bad enough!’

  ‘Ah. You speak at last, Mr Szandor. You came very close to stealing away one of our most brilliant minds and handing her over to our enemies.’