Interlude I – Episode 1 Where: Chazov Mountains, Russia When: The day after E-Day, 2:57 pm Vlad stared up the mountainside. There was something up there – a bright orange object half-buried under the snow. Even from this distance, Vlad knew it was a corpse. Yet another over-zealous, under-prepared tourist who’d hiked far from the tourist trails of The Brink to find a view of Gorod Drevnih no person had ever seen before. Vlad scoffed at the thought. There was no part of the wall he hadn’t seen dozens of times over. The Ministry paid him nearly nine thousand rubles a month to patrol the snow-capped hills of Gorod Drevnih’s infamous perimeter. His tasks were simple: stop the tourists from doing anything stupid, and locate the corpses of those who’d already tried. Corpses like that of Mister Orange Jacket up there on the slope ahead of him. It was a job Vlad would have done for free. He had complete freedom in his duties, with almost no interference from the pen-pushers in charge, and he spent every day with his lungs full of clean, fresh mountain air. The first couple of weeks had been torture – the frigid temperatures made his knees ache, and the constant roar of the Veil had frayed his nerves – but that was all just background noise by now. He had learned to love the wide open spaces, and the days spent alone with nothing but his own thoughts, uninterrupted by telephone calls, politics, traffic jams or shrill women. He had never felt such serenity. Such peace. And he was the fittest he’d ever been in his life. Plus, every time he checked-in at one of the Ministry’s remote hill-side cabins, there was always a fresh supply of food and vodka waiting for him. Ah! Vodka! He took a small flask from his hip and had a sip. He chased it up with a long gulp of water from the canteen in his backpack. At this altitude, and so far from civilisation, this was not the place to let yourself get dehydrated. He looked up at the orange jacket. Well, Mister Orange, let’s find out who you are and how you died. He began to make the climb.