It stops halfway. When you, extracting from yourself the stinger of claustrophobia, leave its metallic embrace and approach the door to the street, it becomes a stone wall, and its metal handle, handcuffs. With serpentine cunning and cold tenderness, they wrap around your wrists. Because this is what I desire. I won’t let you go, not now. You won’t realise for a long time that you won ages ago. The demons, inhabitants of the grey city in my head, dropped dead, poisoned by the chemical weapons of your psyche. And the weaker you are, the greater your power over me. Hear my words. In rage, there is obedience; in a terrible display of strength, tenderness; in a scream, silence. The more pain we are dealt, the more fiercely we love. All of this, however, is no justification for inaction. Fight. Your submissiveness has inflicted a mortal wound on the credibility of our book. You have to fix it.

F.

Myanmar

Chapter 3

Grumpy stared at the sky. He had stopped listening. Blankets of soft clouds extended to the horizon. A warm wind caressed his face. It smelled of hot tarmac, dust, and grass. K. waved a hand in front of his face.

“Grumpy, hello, you there? No snoozing. Tactical medicine isn’t complicated, just follow what I’m telling you. First, close the open wound, then apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. No point worrying about sterilising injuries. The human organism is a pretty hardy machine. You just stop the bleeding, and you can compensate for lost resources, blood and oxygen, later. Fifty percent of badly injured people will die immediately without emergency assistance. Thirty percent will die slowly. Your job is just to push up the survival stats.”

“Right,” he said.

“So, repeat.”

“Apply a tourniquet.”

“After closing the open wound.”

“And administer something for shock.”

“That’s right. And pain reliever if limbs are severed. But nothing for shock if it’s a head injury.”

“But pain reliever?”

“Why don’t I write you a cheat sheet.”

The ambulance was parked in the centre of Snizhne. The town was an evacuation zone. For the previous week, K. and Grumpy had been busy getting fighters wounded in the battle for Saur-Mogila—the hill they had been struggling, but failing, to capture for about three weeks already—out to Donetsk.

“Doc, you know I can do it. I can manage anything. Except for shit. Guts, fine, because when somebody is there dying, you have to do something. But shit . . .?”

His voice was drowned out by a loud engine. K. turned to see a heavy vehicle on tracks turning a corner.

It was like an iron caterpillar crawling slowly past them. An off-road van carrying some serious-looking customers in camouflage followed close behind. Asian features poked out of a hatch in the front of the larger vehicle—he might have been Buryat, maybe Yakut.