No Way Out at the Entrance

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Max neighed so abominably that Athanasius again gave him a fist. The train approached. They hopped into a car.

“Well, how do you like her?” Athanasius asked in the tunnel.

Max looked suspiciously at him. He, like that lady on the phone, did not like to admit being happy. Dissatisfaction, if you examine it, is universal currency, with which everything can be purchased, if we bargain long enough. “Who?”

“You know who.”

“N-not bad. Okay,” answered Max.

“For some reason it seems to me that this is for a long time,” said Athanasius. “Well, with Gulia. Not that intuition… Simply the more confused a situation, the more real it is, perhaps.” Max understood nothing and chuckled. The train slowed down, stopped, and again set off. “Now I’ll not calm down until I nail her ele. I know myself…” said Athanasius.

“Watch you don’t n-nail her together with it!” Max advised quietly. They were silent again. Max swayed peacefully, holding onto the handrail. Athanasius was bouncing like a sparrow.

“Did you understand everything?” he yelled into Max’s ear.

“Yes,” Max winced. “What did I un-understand?”

“Think!”

Max thought till the next station. “Ah! That my Nina, most likely, is from Beldo’s fort but not from D-Dolbushin’s? She’s a pr-practical student,” he stuttered.

“Oho!” thought Athanasius. “My Nina! He labelled her quickly! And several hours ago called her a dog.”

“I’m not on about that,” he said. “The warlocks are having a new recruitment! Would be nice to see how all this progress with them? Eh?”

* * *

Athanasius met Ul in HDive. Ul was standing with his schnepper similar to a double-barrel and aiming at a food can from fifteen steps away. He shot. The can remained standing. “Here I’m thinking about female whims. When it seems to someone that more time is spent with a horse and all that…” he said.

“Is it true?” asked Athanasius.

“It’s not about that. What forces them to behave like that at all? Maybe, a woman is capricious because it’s important for her to check if a man will stand the whims of a possible child? Some kind of test?”

“There are girls who aren’t capricious,” Athanasius said carelessly.

Ul again took a shot. “Who? Your telegrapher from Honduras? Holy! Dang! I suppose they learn to sleep on nails, eat with the head down, and open tanks with a finger.”

“They learned,” said Athanasius.

“What learned?”

“She perished,” Athanasius lowered his eyes. “Didn’t make contact. In the mountains, where there was the hidden transmitter, they found the safety pin from a grenade trampled into the ground.”

Ul grabbed his hand. “And you kept quiet?”

“I was joking. She’s alive. Sits at home. Bought a cookbook,” said Athanasius half-heartedly.

Ul pushed him away. “Some jokes!!! You’re simply a blockhead!”

“Aha,” admitted Athanasius. “I know.”

The can, which Ul aimed at, fell by itself.

Athanasius found Kaleria Valerevna in the teachers’ room, long and narrow. There was an argument: whether Kuzepych blocked up part of the corridor or it was stretched as a result of an unsuccessful dance of the shamans, who wanted to crush the teaching staff of HDive with the walls but did not manage and only stretched out the room.

Kavaleria was standing by the board with the timetable and considering how to make four instructors out of one free one in order to fill all the “windows.”

“Nothing pans out! People will again hang around with nothing to do! Looks like you have to be busy with the novices,” she complained.

“With the novices? Really the bees…?”

Kavaleria’s plait bobbed like a fishing float. “The last departed today. The bees calmed down, it means fall recruitment is finished. This fall we will recruit nine. Plus ‘beeless’ Rina.”

“You hand them over to Kuzepych. He knows how to keep everyone busy,” advised Athanasius.

Kavaleria smiled. “Well, what can I do for you?”

Athanasius told her, supplying the details. In his version, they met with the girls exclusively in the interests of HDive. “Certainly, can blast an attack marker, but there won’t just be some warlocks. Pity the ‘incubators’,” he finished.

For a long time Kavaleria twirled the pencil in her fingers. “Risk must be justified. Unjustified risk is folly. For the time being, I see no justification for the risk. We can lose a man, but what will we get in exchange?”

“Well… we’ll see how it’s there and what.”

“And see what? Walls?”

“Not… Well, warlocks at least…” Athanasius was lost.

“And you haven’t seen them before? Or do you think that the heads of the forts will share their plans with a crowd of people assembled from all over Moscow?” Kavaleria asked mockingly.

Yielding, Athanasius let air out through lips elongated like a small tube. “So, you’re against it?”

“I need to think.”

Chapter 6

Boys to the Left, Girls to the Right!

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    Hunting letter of an elbe

Vlad Ganich stopped by the porch, quickly looked around at Rina gone off in front and outlined with his eyes a semicircle through the lilac bushes. “Why are we following her? If we slip away? Through the fence and…” he, proposed. Cyril wanted to say something maliciously on the theme of cleanliness of the suit, but Vlad had already gotten a move on through the lawn and tore quickly like a young moose through the thick lilac.

“He shouldn’t have! If we’re to get the hell out of here, then all together! He’ll climb over, and the girls will slow down! Have to let them go first!” Sashka condemned him, after noticing how a slightly opened window on the second floor wobbled.

Vlad reached the iron fence. No thorns, no sharp peaks, a very convenient fence. Stepping on the embellishments, he scrambled up in a second and jumped. Sashka heard a crack, and yet a second later Vlad came out of the lilac from this side. The lilac indignantly shook its leaves. Vlad shook his head like a stunned heifer and again persistently climbed the fence. Sashka decided that Vlad had gotten away. Anything can happen when a man is under heavy strain.

Vlad again scrambled along the fence, for some reason stood up on his feet, and only then jumped. This time Sashka definitely saw that Vlad jumped off onto THAT side, but again turned out to be on THIS side. Only this time he did not fall down into the lilac but flew through it. Vlad did not dare to jump a third time and, limping, returned to the others. Sashka raised his head. The window on the second floor was closed.

Rina was standing next to Sashka and sympathetically watched Vlad. “Keep in mind, I got really badly scratched by this lilac. It seems, I think, the leaves…” she said and began to climb the stairs.

Makar overtook her, ran up to the plaque and the white cockroach letters finally formed into the inscription “Guildhall of Divers.” “And whatsa here? They teach diving?” he asked, trying to beak off the plaque.

“Drowning!” Cyril joked.

“H-h-hands! Both!” someone ordered in a resounding voice. Makar and Cyril fidgeted in a startled way. “P-ut in the po-o-ockets! Don’t touch the inventory!” the voice finished cheerfully. The door was open. A thickset fellow in a jacket of rough skin examined them with interest. He looked to be twenty-twenty-five years old. The worldly Makar began to worry. He had gotten it in the neck most often precisely from this age range.

“I’m Ul! Can be Oleg. All questions afterwards! For the present, if anyone gets anything into his head, digest three things. First: this isn’t a school of witchcraft and other magic. Whoever maintains the opposite, I’ll cast a spell on him! This is neither school nor institute nor college at all, but simply the modest and only one of its kind HDive. Second: from this moment on you’re divided into teams of fives. For convenience in tasks, duty, and patrol. One team: Makar, Sashka, Alice, Danny, Rina! The other: Cyril, Lena, Vlad, Lara, Freda… And third: no one keeps you here by force.”

Burning with indignation, Freda jerked up her hand.

“Well?” Ul generously allowed her.

“And the fence??? If no one keeps us by force, why couldn’t Vlad climb over?”