FOURTEEN

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When I wake, the sun is barely peeking up from the horizon, and the trees are alive with the skittering and chirps of morning birds. I groan, because my back is stiff from the heavy rucksacks and the second night without a mattress, but when I stretch it helps the ache a little and I’m able to sit up and soak in the dewy morning air.

Lex is already up, sitting on the edge of the roof and stretching his back out himself. 

“What time is it?” I ask once I get my voice.

“A little after five.”

“Have you been awake long?” I’m suddenly self-conscious knowing he was up first, remembering his teasing about the other boys’ snoring and wondering if I was a snorer myself.

He shakes his head. “Just a few minutes.”

I end up sighing with relief before I can stop myself, and like he was in my head, I see him glance over his shoulder with a smirk in his eyes. He rises and moves over to me, offering a hand to help me to my feet as well, before delivering the mischievous thought playing in his gaze. “You’re soft when you sleep. That line between your eyebrows goes away.”

Disarmed by his helpful gesture and still groggy headed, it takes a moment for me to realize he’s teasing. I glare when I clue in.

He definitely grins under his mask, then raises a hand and pokes his finger between my brows. “Yup, there it is.”

I bat his hand away, and he laughs. I have to fight hard not to reveal the secret I know about him, wanting badly just to wipe that hidden expression off his face. But I wasn’t ready to scare him off like that, either.

Our first mission of the day is to get water, because we don’t even have enough to make breakfast. We pack our empty water bottles, a burner and some packets of food into a smaller backpack that Nico carries, and the four of us eat protein bars as we set out to retrieve water as soon as possible, the sun still barely over the horizon. The bars are not very flavorful, dry, and difficult to swallow without a drink, but I know my body needs something so I make sure to get the whole thing down.

I’m thankful to be traveling without our rucksacks today. We hid them away under a pile of rubble near our camp, and Mikey takes down the exact coordinates so we can come back for them later. Without the extra weight, I feel like a bird with hollow bones. Even with only a protein bar for energy, I’m buzzing with excitement for the day. 

Amongst that excitement is nerves though, because I know at some point I will be climbing with Lex, and I don’t know what it will be or how high up he’ll force me to go to prove myself. I hope that once we get water and make a proper breakfast I won’t be shaking, but I have a hunch the trembling has nothing to do with low blood sugar.

Our first stop for the day, simply due to proximity to our camp, is the Azure Swimming Hall. The tour had taken us here as well, but it was different, as everything was, approaching from the wilderness into a truly empty, abandoned place. A husk of the humanity that once lived here. A time capsule. And it was truly different when I could touch the concrete with my bare hands, which I had not been allowed to even attempt during the tour. These buildings, which had seen many lifely caresses in its prime, now untouched by human flesh for decades. 

I’d already swam in the water and slept on the ground, so what was stroking my fingertips over the disintegrating walls going to do, really?

The pool itself sits in a beautiful, open hall lined with wide windows. Now, it is little more than a skeleton, all the windows broken in and the pool dry to the bone, but I can still imagine what it looked like fresh, on a hot summer day, with the sun shining in through the wall of glass stretching all the way up to the high, peaked ceilings. In the haunting silence, I can picture the playful laughter of children splashing, echoing off the beams above. The lovely moments of life that happened within these, now deteriorating walls. On the left of our entrance to the hall, is a huge clock, perfect for the swimmers to manage their lap paces, frozen in time at 4:30 on the dot. I take a picture of it, because I can’t articulate how it makes me feel. 

Mikey has already crossed the huge room to the deep end of the pool, scaling the tallest of the two diving boards. At the top, he gives one of his hyena laughs, then walks to the end of the board and picks up a rusty, disintegrating pole, attached to it a dusty, but well preserved flag. Blood red, though slightly muted, likely from sun bleaching, with the gold hammer and sickle adoring it. 

I snap a shot as he plants the pole at the end of the diving board and waves it back and forth a little to make the flag flap through the air gracefully. He looks like a conqueror, planting a flag in uncolonized land, but the dilapidation is an undeniable contrast visible in the wider frame of the shot. As I’m admiring it on the screen of my camera, Lex grabs me by the arm and hauls me along with him, away from my distant admiration and back into the present.

Mikey comes down from the diving board, because it probably wasn’t smart for all of us to be on the potentially brittle fiberglass at the same time. Then Lex directs me to climb. I pause, but am reminded of my promise the night before by little more than a look from him. Fine, if this was all the climbing he expected from me, then I’d oblige. After all, I’d jumped from a diving board before. 

It is, of course, a little different over a pool void of water, and that becomes painfully apparent at the top when my legs get a little shaky from just the sight of how high we are. My feet are grounded though, and I’d watched Mikey walk right to the tip of the board without issue. So I dare as well, stepping over the flag, to reach the end of it. 

I don’t hang my toes like I might have if really planning to jump. But I line my boots up to the edge, and snap a photograph directly down, including my feet, before the nerves get the better of me and I have to take a step back while laughing through my fear.

With my retreat, my feet end up on the fabric of the flag, and I panic while trying to remove my soles from it. I’ve been conditioned to understand that stepping on a flag, or any other kind of degradation at that, was inherently disrespectful, regardless of what that flag represented. Lex is laughing though as he reaches out to steady me from my moment of alarm at my actions. 

“Don’t worry, there’s no Soviet’s here to offend.” Like sealing that sentiment, he steps closer so that his boots are on the fabric as well, twisting his feet to rub in the dirt onto it. “They might have built this place, but they also destroyed it.”

I watch him briefly, but when his eyes tell me nothing about his thoughts, I just look at our feet, sharing space on the symbol that probably means much more to him than I can possibly comprehend. A symbol that once represented power and triumph, a great world authority, a nation that brought so many people into a new age of civilization, but now was just a stain on their history. Our feet, stark black on the faded red, felt like a moment of rebellion, against the nature of society itself. Against the abuses that power leads to. 

Maybe that’s what the Stalkers were at heart as well. Rebels, against the norm. Against the expected. Making home in a place that the Soviet regime had stolen from them. Bringing life back to somewhere left behind. 

I take a picture of our boots on the flag, then of the hall, the wide-open wall that had once been all beautifully tended glass, now just an opportunity for the foliage to overtake the view. I aim down and snap candids of Nico and Mikey, hanging their legs over the edge of the pool like a couple of boys preparing for a swim. And as I photograph from above everything, I realize I want to go higher.