Day Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненко

  But I smiled, remembering how smartly the kid had fooled me.

  He ought to be our future brother-in-arms.

  A future Dark One.

  But even if he wasn't an Other and he was fated to live a boring human life, people like him were still our foundation and support.

  It wasn't even a matter of the trick he'd played, of course. The Light Ones like to joke too. It was what drove the kid to play pranks like that-to lead a stranger into the middle of a park at night and abandon her, to thrust out his skinny chest proudly and pretend to be a kid with no problems from a great family… All of that was ours.

  Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you-these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones. People or Others who are marked out by a sense of their own dignity, endowed with pride and a longing for freedom.

  What kind of person would result from a child of well-off parents, one who really did spend every summer by the sea and studied in a good school, who made serious plans for the future and had been taught the rules of etiquette? Despite the widespread opinion to the contrary, he wasn't very likely to turn out close to us. And he wouldn't necessarily go over to the Light Ones either. He'd just bob backward and forward his whole life like a lump of shit in a drain-petty wrongdoings, minor good deeds, a wife he loves and a mistress he loves, waiting to take his boss's place and promote one of his friends… Grayness. Nothing. Not our enemy, but not our ally either. I have to admit that a genuine Light One inspires respect. He may oppose us, his goals may be unattainable and his methods may be absurd, but he is a worthy opponent. Like Semyon or Anton from the Night Watch…

  So-called good people are equally distant from us and from the Light Ones.

  But solitary wolf cubs like Makar are our foundation and support.

  He would grow up knowing for certain that he would have to struggle. That he was on his own against everyone else, that it was pointless to expect any sympathy or help, and equally pointless to waste his own energy on pity and compassion. He wouldn't get any ideas about being a benefactor to the entire world, but he wouldn't play mean, petty tricks on other people either. He would train his own willpower and character. He wouldn't go under. If the kid possessed the natural abilities of an Other, the incredibly rare and unpredictable ability to enter the Twilight, which is all that distinguishes us from ordinary people, then he would come to us. But if he remained a human being, he would unwittingly assist the Day Watch. Like many others.

  "This way, Alisa…"

  We walked up to a small building. A veranda and open windows-with a faint light in one of them…

  "This is a summer house," Pyotr told me. "The Azure section has four main dachas and eight summer houses. You know, I think in summer it's a lot more fun living here."

  He seemed to be apologizing for the fact that I and my young charges would be living in the summer accommodation. I couldn't resist asking: "And what about in winter?"

  "Nobody lives here in the winter," Pyotr said sternly. "Even though our winters are so warm, the conditions would be inadequate for children to stay here."

  He made the transition to official bureaucratic language very easily too. It was as if he were giving a lecture intended to reassure someone's mom-"the temperature is pleasant, the living conditions are comfortable, the catering provides a balanced diet."

  We stepped onto the terrace, and I felt a slight stirring of excitement.

  I thought… I thought I could already feel it…

  Nastya turned out to be small and swarthy-skinned, with features that had something of the Tatar about them. A pretty girl, except that now her face was too sad and tense.

  "Hello, Alya…" She nodded to me as if I were an old friend. And in a certain sense, I was-they had obviously given her a false memory. "Look what's happened now…"

  I stopped looking around at the room-there was nothing special about it anyway. A little, ordinary camp leader's room: a bed, a cupboard, a table, and a chair. The little Morozko refrigerator and the cheap black-and-white television looked like luxury items here.

  But then, I'm not choosy…

  "Nastya, everything will be all right," I promised her with false sympathy. The girl nodded wearily, the way she must have been doing all day long.

  "It's good you were able to fly down so quickly." She picked up the bag that was already packed, but Pyotr immediately took hold of it. "Have you worked in Artek before?"

  "No."

  Nastya frowned. Maybe whoever implanted the false memory had got something confused, but she had no time to worry about that now.

  "I'll be in time for the morning flight, Petya," she said. "Is the bus going to Simferopol?"

  "In an hour," Pyotr said with a nod.

  The former camp leader turned her attention to me again: "I've already said goodbye to the girls. So… no one will be surprised. Tell them I love them all very much and I'll definitely… I'll try to come back."

  For an instant the tears glinted in her eyes-evidently at the thought of one of the possible reasons for a rapid return.

  "Nastya," I said, putting my arm around her shoulders. "Everything's going to be all right, your mom will get better…"

  Nastya's little face crumpled into a grimace of pain. "She's never been ill!" The words seemed to burst out of her. "Never."

  Pyotr delicately cleared his throat. Nastya lowered her eyes and stopped talking.

  Of course, there had been various different ways I could have been sent to work at the Artek camp. But Zabulon always prefers the simplest possible methods. Nastya's mother had suddenly suffered a massive heart attack, so now Nastya was flying back to Moscow, and another student had been sent from the university to replace her. It was elementary.

  Most likely Nastya's mother would have suffered a heart attack anyway: maybe a year later, maybe five. Zabulon always calculates the balance of Power very thoroughly. To provoke a heart attack in someone who was perfectly healthy was a fourth-level intervention that automatically gave the Light Ones the right to reply with magic of the same Power.

  Nastya's mother would almost certainly live. Zabulon is not given to senseless cruelty. Why kill the woman when the necessary effect can be produced simply by a serious illness?

  And so I could have reassured my predecessor, except that I would have had to tell her too much.

  "Here's a notebook I wrote a few things in…" Nastya held out a slim school exercise book with a gaily colored cover showing a popular singer grinning moronically on stage. "Just a few details, but it might be useful. A few of the girls need a special approach…"

  I nodded. Then Nastya suddenly waved her hand through the air and said, "I don't need to tell you all this. You'll manage just fine."

  But she still spent another fifteen minutes introducing me to the subtle details of the camp regime and asked me to pay special attention to some girls who were flirting with the boys too precociously. She advised me not to demand silence after lights out: "Fifteen minutes is long enough for them to talk themselves out, half an hour at the most…"

  Nastya only stopped talking when Pyotr pointed to his watch. She kissed me on the cheek, then picked up a small bag and cardboard box-maybe she was taking some fruit to her sick mother?

  "All the best, Alisa…"

  And at last I was left alone.

  There was a pile of clean linen lying on the bed. The electric bulb glowed feebly under its simple glass shade. Pyotr and Nastya's steps and their simple conversation quickly faded away.

  I was alone.

  But not absolutely alone. On the other side of two thin walls, just five steps along the corridor, eighteen little girls aged ten or eleven were sleeping.

  I suddenly started trembling-a rapid, nervous trembling, as if I were an apprentice again, trying for the first time to extract someone else's Power. Nabokov's character Humbert Humbert would probably have trembled the same way in my place.

  But then, com
pared to what I was going to do now, his passion for nymphets was nothing but childish naughtiness…

  I switched off the light and tiptoed out into the corridor. How I missed my Other powers!

  I would just have to make do with the human powers I had left…

  The corridor was long and the floorboards squeaked. The threadbare carpet runner was no help-my steps could easily be heard. I could only hope that at this early hour the girls were still sleeping and dreaming…

  Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated children's dreams.

  I opened the door and went into the dormitory. For some reason I'd been expecting some kind of state institution, halfway between a children's home and a hospital-iron bedsteads, the dull glow of a night lamp, depressing curtains, and children sleeping as if they were standing at attention…

  But in fact it was all very nice. The only light came from the lantern on the pillar outside. The shadows swayed gently, a fresh sea breeze blew in at the open windows and I could smell the scent of wildflowers. The screen of the switched-off television glowed dully in the corner, and the walls were covered with drawings in colored pencil and watercolor paintings that looked bright and cheerful even in the semi-darkness.

  The little girls were sleeping, sprawled out across their beds or tucked underneath the blankets, with all their things neatly arranged on their bedside lockers or scattered untidily on the headboards and the backs of the chairs-swimming costumes that were still wet, skirts, little pairs of jeans and socks. A good psychologist could have walked through that dormitory at night and composed a full character portrait of those girls…

  But I didn't need one.

  I walked slowly between the beds, adjusting blankets that had slid off, lifting up arms and legs that had slipped down to touch the floor. The girls were sleeping soundly. Soundly and with no dreams…

  I only got lucky with the seventh girl. She was about eleven years old, plump with light hair. An ordinary little girl whimpering quietly in her sleep. Because she was having a bad dream…

  I knelt down beside her bed, reached out my hand, and touched her forehead. Gently, with just the tips of my fingers.

  I felt Power.

  As I was now, without any Other powers, I couldn't have read an ordinary dream. But sensing the opportunity to nourish yourself is a different matter. It all takes place at the level of animal reactions, like an infant's sucking reflex.

  And I saw it…

  It was a bad dream. The girl was dreaming that she was going home-their session wasn't over yet, but she was being taken away because her mother had fallen ill and her gloomy, frowning father was dragging her toward the bus. She hadn't even had time to say goodbye to her friends, she hadn't had any time to take a last dip in the sea and take some little stones that were very important… and she was struggling and asking her father to wait, but he was just getting more and more angry… and saying something about disgraceful behavior, about how girls her age shouldn't have to be beaten, but since she was behaving like this, she could forget about his promise not to punish her with his belt anymore…

  It was a really bad dream. Nastya's departure had affected the little girl very badly…

  And anybody would have tried to help the child at that moment.

  A human being would have stroked her hair and said something affectionate in a gentle voice, maybe sung a lullaby… anything to interrupt the dream.

  A Light Other would have used his Power to turn the dream inside out, so that the father would laugh and say the little girl's mother was well again and go running to the sea with her… He would have replaced the cruel but realistic dream with a sweet lie.

  But I'm a Dark Other.

  And I did what I could. I drank her Power. Sucked it into myself-the gloomy father, and the sick mother, and the little friends lost forever, and the sea stones left behind, and the shameful beating…

  The little girl gave a quiet squeak, like a mouse caught under something heavy. And then she began breathing calmly and regularly. There's not a lot of Power in children's dreams. It's not like the ritual killing that we had threatened the Light Ones with and which provides a truly monstrous discharge of energy. These were dreams, just dreams…

  Light nourishing broth for an ailing witch…

  I got up off my knees, feeling slightly dizzy. No, I hadn't recovered my lost powers yet. It would take a dozen dreams like that to fill the yawning gap.

  But those dreams would happen. And I would do my best to encourage them.

  None of the other little girls were dreaming. Well, one was, but her dream was no use to me, a stupid little girl's dream about the freckle-faced boy who had given her yet another of those stupid stones with a hole in them-what they called "chicken gods." I suppose chickens must have their own gods.

  I stood beside this girl's bed-she was probably the most physically advanced of them all. She even had the first beginnings of breasts. I touched her forehead several times, trying to find at least something, but there was nothing. Sea, sun, and sand, water splashing, and that freckle-faced boy. Not a drop of anger, envy, or sadness. A Light magician could have drawn Power from her by drinking in her dream and then gone away satisfied. But I was wasting my time here.

  Never mind. There would be another evening and another night. And my plump donor's dream would come back to her- I had drawn out all of her fear, but not its causes. Her nightmare would return, and I would help her again. The important thing was not to try too hard, not to push the girl into a genuine nervous breakdown-I had no right to do that. That would smack of serious magical intervention, and if the Light Ones had even a single observer in the camp, or even-who knows what tricks the Darkness might play-if there was an Other there from the Inquisition, then I would be in serious trouble.

  And I wasn't about to let Zabulon down again.

  Never!

  It was amazing that he had forgiven me for what had happened the previous summer. But he wouldn't forgive me a second time.

  At ten o'clock in the morning I went to breakfast with my charges.

  Nastya had been right-I was managing just fine.

  When the girls had woken up, they had been a bit cautious at first. How could they not have been, when the leader they had already come to love had gone away in the middle of the night to see her sick mother, and another young woman had come into the dormitory instead of her-a stranger, an unknown quantity, someone quite unlike Nastya? I had immediately felt the unfriendly wary gaze of eighteen pairs of eyes on me-they were all together and I was isolated.

  The situation was saved by the fact that the girls were still little and I am beautiful.

  If boys of the same age had been in their place, my appearance wouldn't have made the slightest difference. Ten-year-old boys are far more interested in the ugliest of puppies than the most beautiful of girls. And if my charges had been two or three years older, my appearance would have only irritated them. But for ten-year-old girls, a beautiful woman is an object of admiration. They are already beginning to develop the desire to flirt and to please, but they still don't understand that not everybody can grow up beautiful. I know, I was the same myself, and I used to gape wide-eyed at my tutor, the witch Irina Alexandrovna…

  So I soon established contact with the girls.

  I sat on Olechka's bed because the notes in the exercise book suggested that she was the most quiet and timid of them. I talked to the girls about Nastya, about how bad it is when your mother is unwell, and told them they mustn't be offended with Nastya… she had really wanted to stay with them, but your mother is the most important person in your life!

  When I finished, Olechka began sniveling and pressed herself against me. And the eyes of all the others were looking moist and weepy too.

  Then I told them about my dad and his heart attack, and I said that nowadays they knew how to cure people's hearts, and Nastya's mother was going to be perfectly all right too. I helped the swarthy-skinned little Kazakh girl Gulnara to weave her braid
s-she had magnificent hair, but as Nastya had noted, she was a bit slow. I argued with Tanya from St. Petersburg about what was the most interesting way to come to Artek, by train or by plane, and, of course, I finally admitted that she was right-it was much more fun on the train. I promised Anya from Rostov that by the evening she would be swimming and not just floundering about in the shallow water. We discussed the solar eclipse that was expected in three days' time and regretted that it would be just a tiny bit less than total in the Crimea.

  We arrived at breakfast as a united and cheerful group. Only Olga, who was "not Olechka, but always Olga," and her friend Ludmila were still sulky. But that was not surprising since they had obviously been Nastya's favorites.

  Never mind… in another three days' time they would come to love me too.

  Our surroundings were genuinely lovely. August in the Crimea is just fantastic. The sea was glittering at the bottom of the slope, the air was saturated with the scent of salt water and flowers. The girls squealed and ran about all over the place, bumping into each other. The marching rhymes in the old Pioneer camps were obviously invented for good reason-you can't do much squealing if your mouth's busy trying to sing.

  But I don't know any marching rhymes, and I don't know how to march in line anyway.

  I'm a Dark One.

  In the dining hall I simply followed my little charges' lead- they knew where we were supposed to sit. We were surrounded by five hundred children creating a huge din who somehow managed to eat at the same time. I sat there quietly with my little band of girls, trying to assess the situation. After all, I had to spend an entire month here.

  There were twenty-five leaders who had come to breakfast with their brigades. My facile pride in how skillfully I was managing my charges rapidly evaporated. These young men and women were more like the boys' and girls' older brothers and sisters. Sometimes they were stern, sometimes they were affectionate; their word was law and they were also loved.