Assassin of Reality

DedicationTo my husband, Sergey Dyachenko, and to our beloved daughter, Anastasia Contents CoverTitle PageDedicationPrologueChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorsAbout the TranslatorAlso by Marina and Sergey DyachenkoCopyrightAbout the Publisher PrologueSomeday, my dear, you will be approached by a stranger. This stranger will bear no ill will toward you. He will assign you a task, ridiculous and rather unpleasant, and you will complete this task every single day. You will do that with no exceptions or excuses. Because if you miss even one day, something terrible will happen to your loved ones. Your adviser really does not wish you ill. He will bring you to the Institute of Special Technologies, a place where only the dead get expelled. And you will become a model student, one who does not miss classes, who studies as diligently as she can—and sometimes even more diligently than that. Eventually, the day of the final exam will arrive. You will enter a spacious hall to cease being human and become a Word of the Great Speech. You will long for this—this is your destiny. You wanted desperately to become a Word. You studied hard, the top of your class. And yet . . . Chapter OneAlexandra woke up a split second after her dark blue Škoda crossed the center line and drifted into the oncoming traffic. A local bus rushed straight at her, its lights blinding Alexandra. The bus howled, and the driver must have howled as well, but the mechanical roar drowned his stream of obscenities. Seeing nothing, obeying her instincts, Alexandra twisted the steering wheel to the right, then all the way to the left. Its brakes screaming, the car slid to the curb, then rolled down to the river, stopping dead a couple of feet from the concrete bridge support. Alexandra somehow found the presence of mind to turn off the engine. She sat still for a while, listening to the creaks and groans of the car. All kinds of sirens yelled above in different voices; never before had Alexandra Koneva née Samokhina fallen asleep at the wheel. She glanced at her watch: it was five in the morning. That meant she’d been with her husband for almost forty-eight hours, and these forty-eight hours were not spent in the throes of passion. They began like two responsible adults well aware of the value of a fair agreement. However, the longer they’d conversed, the quicker the diplomatic veneer had disappeared, melting like a layer of gold leaf—and fake gold leaf at that. First, they lost their poise, then their ostentatious benevolence. At some point they went to different rooms to cool off and compose themselves. At the start of the second round, however, they almost immediately slipped back into a low-class, shrill, revolting squabble. Their marriage had been doomed for quite some time. Alexandra had hoped for a civilized divorce, but even that was no longer possible. She’d given fifteen years of her life to a worthless, empty, vicious, and vindictive man, and now it was ending, abrupt and dirty. Not bothering to wait for sunrise, she’d started the car and drove toward the city. The road calmed her down, pacified her, and gave her a strange sense of hope. After all, she wasn’t even thirty-five yet, and her life was far from over. Finally relaxed after the terrible couple of days, she’d fallen asleep instantly, gripping the steering wheel and staring at the road markings as if at a hypnotist’s pendulum. Until a local bus had rushed straight at her. “Sasha, honey, what happened? Why did you come in a cab?”Mom stood in the doorway, a robe over her nightgown, the habitual anxious expression on her face. She worried about every little thing, and so Alexandra never told her the truth. “I stalled on the highway and had to call emergency services. They towed my car to the mechanic. Don’t worry, it’s some minor issue. Go back to bed.” “How’s Ivan?” Mom asked, a bit calmer now.“Ivan says hello. He’s fine. He’ll take care of the cottage’s new boiler.”Alexandra went into her room. By a previous agreement, her thirteen-year-old daughter, Anya, was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Anya loved sleepovers; she felt cramped in their old two-room apartment, under the watchful eye of her grumpy grandmother and permanently aloof mother. Alexandra didn’t blame her.She sat down at her desk, hung her head, and tried to compose her thoughts. Death had flown by, granting her a short panic attack that meant she hadn’t had to think about much of anything, followed by forty minutes of euphoria, and now a wave of depression. She glanced at the digital photo frame on her desk, the kind that was fashionable many years ago. The frame shuffled through a handful of sentimental old photos: a young Sasha with her mom at the seaside. Sasha’s high school graduation. Sasha’s first assembly at the university. Sasha’s wedding to Ivan Konev. Sasha holding a swaddled newborn on the hospital steps. Mom with baby Anya in her arms. And again: a young Sasha with her mom at the seaside. The slideshow stopped. The last photo froze in the frame. Sasha and her mom, tanned and joyful, posed at the edge of the surf. The sun lit up the sea, and the red metal buoy glowed in the distance, warning the swimmers not to go beyond it . . . Alexandra sensed someone’s presence behind her back. She realized she couldn’t move.“Mom, is that you?”There was no answer, but she knew it wasn’t her mother, and it wasn’t Anya. It certainly wasn’t Ivan, changing his mind and coming back from the dacha. It was something different, something simple and unimaginable, like a bad dream that makes one want to hide under the blanket. “Who is it?” she asked.“It’s me,” a soft voice said behind her.Alexandra looked back. A few steps away, in the middle of her room, stood a girl of about twenty, dressed in jeans and a light jacket,