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need to pause and concentrate, to assess the situation and decide on the best course of action. But I didn’t need much time to reflect. Since Galenka was still at her station, still guiding the Progress, it was obvious what the problem was. Yakov was trying to escape from the Tereshkova.
    As if we were still in Star City.
    There was no automatic safety mechanism to prevent that door from being opened. It was assumed that if anyone did try and open it, they must have a good reason for doing so-venting air into space, for instance, to quench a fire. The notion that one of us would do something stupid, like trying to leave the ship because we thought it was a simulation, must never have occurred to the engineers.
    I pushed myself through the module, through the connecting throat, through the next module. The alarm was drilling into my head. If Yakov really did think that the ship was still in Russia, he wouldn’t be concerned about decompression. He wouldn’t be concerned about whether or not he was wearing a suit.
    He just wanted to get out.
    I reached a red locker marked with a lightning flash and threw back the heavy duty latches. I expected to see three tasers, bound with security foils.
    There were no tasers—just the remains of the foil and the recessed foam shapes where the stunners had fitted.
    “Fuck,” I said, realizing that Yakov was ahead of me; that he had opened the locker—against all rules; it was only supposed to be touched in an emergency—and taken the weapons.
    I pushed through another connecting throat, scraping my hand against sharp metal until it bled, then corkscrewed through 90 degrees to reach the secondary throat that led to the number three hatch.
    I could already see Yakov at the end of it. Braced against the wall, he was turning the big yellow wheel that undid the door’s massive locking mechanism. When he was done, it would only take a twist of the handle to free the hatch. The air pressure behind it would slam it open in an instant, and both of us would be sucked into space long before emergency bulkhead seals protected the rest of the ship. I tried to work out which way we were facing now. Would it be a long fall back to the Sun, or an inglorious short-cut to the Matryoshka?
    “Yakov, please,” I called. “Don’t open the door.”
    He kept working the wheel, but looked back at me over his shoulder. “No good, Dimitri. I’ve figured this out even if you haven’t. None of this is real. We’re not really out here, parked next to the Matryoshka. We’re just rehearsing for it, running through another simulation.”
    I tried to ride with his logic. “Then let’s see the simulation through to the end.”
    “Don’t you get it? This is all a test. They want to see how alert we are. They want to see that we’re still capable of picking up on the details that don’t fit.”
    The blood was spooling out of my hand, forming a scarlet chain of floating droplets. I pushed the wound to my mouth and sucked at it. “Like weightlessness? How would they ever fake that, Dimitri?”
    He let go of the wheel with one hand and touched the back of his neck. “The implants. They fool with your inner ear, make you think you’re floating.”
    “That’s your GLONASS transponder. There’s one on the back of my neck as well. It’s so they can track and recover our bodies if the re-entry goes wrong.”
    “That’s what they told us.” He kept on turning the wheel.
    “You open that door, you’re a dead man. You’ll kill me and put Galenka in danger.”
    “Listen to me,” he said with fierce insistence. “This is not real. We’re in Star City, my friend. The whole point of this exercise is to measure our alertness, our ability to see through delusional constructs. Escaping from the ship is the objective, the end-state.”
    I knew then that reasoned argument wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I gave myself a hard shove in his direction, hoping to overwhelm him with sheer momentum. But Yakov