“What is it?”
Evgen looked over her shoulder and back at her. “Did you…”
“No, but.” Vanja squinted at the darkness inside the ruin. She thought she could see something move in the doorway.
“Vanja.” Evgen’s voice was taut. “I’ve decided to trust you, because you’re the first person I’ve met in a long time who’s said anything close to what you told me in the library. Maybe you’re just out to report me, but I… I’m willing to take the risk.” He paused for breath. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, or if you’re the least bit uncertain, then I want you to leave and this never happened. And if you report me, I’ll report you.”
The rest of the air escaped him with a sigh. He looked small where he stood against the weak light from the colony. After a moment, Vanja realized that he was as scared as she was, if not more. She took off one of her mittens and held out her hand. After a moment’s hesitation he pulled off his glove and took it. His palm was moist and hot.
“Good.” Evgen withdrew his hand and pulled out a couple of flashlights from his coat. He gave one to Vanja. “Let’s go.”
The doorway was partly buried in the ice, and they had to crouch to get through it. The room on the other side was perhaps thirteen by thirteen feet and completely bare. Vanja let the beam of her flashlight sweep across the walls. Flakes of green paint still clung to the rough surface.
“This was the reception,” Evgen said.
Here and there, scraps of posters were stuck to the walls. There was no text, only images: a head in profile, a clenched fist, yellow rays over a landscape. Vanja aimed the beam at her feet. The ice was perfectly clear; she could see the floor a foot and a half below, bare save for a few scattered pebbles.
Further back there was another doorway, blocked with debris from a collapsed ceiling. Next to it, a set of stairs led up to the next floor. Evgen started to climb them. Vanja followed.
The construction—or deconstruction—had halted at the second floor. From the landing at the top of the stairs, two unfinished corridors led off in either direction. The left one had collapsed in on itself. Below, Vanja could glimpse the nearly buried door to the reception.
Evgen walked into the corridor on their right, stopping after a few feet. “Careful here. There’s no floor.”
Vanja walked up to stand next to him. The floor ended in darkness. She angled her flashlight downward. Below them lay the rest of the ground floor, what would have been the lounge next to the reception, if the building conformed to the standard layout. Evgen sat down on the edge and slid forward and down.
As Vanja peeked over the edge, she saw him climb down the pile of debris from the collapsed floor. She followed. The stack of thick slabs seemed stable. Evgen waited for her on the ice. He waved at her and walked around the pile to the other side. There was another doorway, half-hidden by rubble. Evgen shoved a lump of concrete aside and crawled in on his hands and knees.
He backed out again with a box in his hands. It looked like one of the boxes from the library archive. He put it down on the ice and sat down on the lump of concrete he’d just pushed away. “Have a seat.”
Vanja sat down on the edge of a piece of collapsed floor. “Doesn’t anyone else come here?”
Evgen shook his head. “It’s too close to the water. People are afraid of the lake.” He took the lid off the box and put it to one side. “Only the eccentric and the suicidal go down to the lake.” Inside the box was another lid, which he also opened. He pushed the box toward Vanja. “These should have been given to the committee for destruction, but I couldn’t do it.”
It was full of good paper, most of it covered in handwriting. Vanja took her mittens off and picked up the topmost sheet. The paper was delicate, but the words were clear in the torchlight.
Would you believe it, mother. We’ve begun to see cats in the street. Cats and a couple of dogs. It’s funny. They said they haven’t found any animals in this world, at least nothing bigger than insects. But I thought I heard cat noises in the kitchen the other day. I admit I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. I wrote a little story about her and drew some pictures. It’s so strange that there are no animals here. It feels empty.
Vanja recognized the childish handwriting. It was the rest of the letter from Jenny, the girl who wrote about her longing for disposable pads. The part Evgen had told her had been culled.
“Cats,” Vanja said. “Dogs… what are they?”
“Animals. A type of organism, fairly large.” Evgen gestured at knee height. “In the old world, they were kept as companions. People would eat some of them.”
Vanja shuddered at the thought. “So they brought those? It says she saw them in the street.”
Evgen shook his head. “The pioneers didn’t bring any animals at all, I know that much. I’ve read somewhere that they had plans to bring animals later, but it never happened. Something prevented them.”
“But if they didn’t bring any animals…”
Evgen looked at her in silence. He pointed at the letter.
I had been dreaming about the time we spayed Sascha, and she hid behind the sofa in the living room for two weeks. I woke up because there was a noise from the kitchen: a faint knocking, and then a scraping sound, over and over. Tock rasp, tock rasp.
I got out of bed. Raul was still sleeping. I went out into the kitchen. It was Sascha. I would have recognized her anywhere—her thin, crooked little body, her bow legs, her fur that always looked dusty. She was wearing the cone. She was straining with the cone against a kitchen cabinet, as if she was trying to wriggle free of it. Then the cone slipped across the cabinet door. Rasp. Sascha got up again and drove the cone into the cabinet: tock.
I called for her. Come here Sascha, come here sweetie, I said. And she turned her head and looked at me. Then she meowed.
Do you remembered how Sascha had such a ridiculous voice? She sounded like a squeaky toy when she meowed. She was so tiny and crooked and grumpy. She was really not a very nice cat. But it was just because she was such a little runt that I couldn’t help but love her. We belonged together that way, somehow. Do you remember how she was always at the bottom of the pecking order in the yard? She was allowed on the compost heap and under the dumpster. Everything else was claimed by the other cats. She’d sit there on the compost heap and chase flies. She’d never let you pet her. But sometimes, if you sat very still for a long time and pretended she wasn’t there, she would slink over and curl up in your lap.
I’m stalling. The thing that happened in the kitchen. I suppose nothing actually happened. I called for her, and she turned around, and she made a sound. It didn’t sound like a cat. It was a sort of bleat, like a sheep, no that’s not a good description, but it’s as close as I can get. It wasn’t a cat sound. It wasn’t Sascha, it wasn’t a cat at all.
Vanja turned the paper over, but the other side was blank. If there were more pages, they were missing. “What was it?” she asked.
“The animal?”
“Yes.”
Evgen gave her a long look. “I think you know.”
Vanja folded the paper. Her hands were trembling.
“Read more.” Evgen browsed through the pile and pulled something out. “Here. It’s by an industrial inspector.”
They were pages torn from a book, a log.
Upon arrival, the controller had immediately gone to the factory’s employee quarters. He didn’t look at the employee log, explaining that he usually didn’t read it until bedtime. Apparently the controllers use the log to leave messages for each other. The controller had cooked himself a dinner consisting of preserves from the storage. He then made a preliminary examination of the factory in preparation for the main inspection next morning.