Klava Sinitsyna was led out of the Room at dawn.
She was alive. Her pulse was steady, her blood pressure high, her hands cold. Maya called an ambulance, then cancelled it, then called again because she had no idea how to explain to a doctor that someone had lost her voice at a Young Pioneer assembly. Varya brought a blanket. Ilya made tea in an electric kettle that heated the water so slowly it seemed afraid to make a sound too.
Klava sat in the ticket booth and wrote.
Her handwriting was adult, angular, stubborn. But she formed the first words like a schoolgirl:
I am not Olya.
Then crossed them out.
Wrote again:
I was there.
The story was not the kind the town liked. It was not about children who had run off for a swim. Not about a group that had 'left the approved route of its own accord'. In the late eighties, the factory camp used to take children to the park for the end of the season. The bus was supposed to return before the rain. It did not. What came back afterwards was not the bus but a list. The list said that every child had attended morning assembly, handed in their neckerchief and gone home.
For some reason, their parents went on searching for them for another three days.
Klava was the oldest in the group. Not a counsellor, just a girl the adults trusted to hold the younger children's hands. After the accident by the old dam, she was taken into an office and told to answer at roll call for those who were 'temporarily absent'.
She did not understand what she was doing.
Then she understood and stopped speaking about it altogether.
"Why Olya?" asked Maya when Klava could whisper in her own voice again.
Klava wrote:
Because she was the smallest. I was holding her hand.
Maya stared at the line for a long time. Then she picked up the register the Room had left on the booth counter and found the stamp on the final page.
Her face changed.
"What is it?" asked Ilya.
"I've seen this stamp before."
"Where?"
Maya closed the register too quickly.
Varya said:
"If you say 'it doesn't matter' now, I'm taking your tea away."
Maya gave her a weary look.
"On some old papers of my uncle's. He served on the commission investigating the accident. According to the family version, it was nothing serious. Just an inspection of the camp. He was given a flat afterwards."
"And according to the version outside the family?" asked Ilya.
Maya did not answer.
It was the first time her scepticism had not vanished, but become personal.
By day, Roman Zuev had made use of the story about the children before they had even understood it themselves.
By lunchtime, a post had appeared in the town chat: "Elderly woman narrowly escapes harm in unsafe park. Owner continues night-time experiments against backdrop of old local tragedies." No outright libel. No unnecessary emotion. Only facts arranged so that the truth looked like a crime.
People argued beneath the post. Some wrote that the park should be closed. Others said their relatives had disappeared from lists too. A third group demanded that journalists be let in. A fourth asked how much a ticket cost.
Maya read the comments and grew steadily more sombre.
"He isn't lying," she said.
Ilya knew whom she meant.
"Zuev?"
"He takes hold of the truth by one edge and turns it until it cuts us."
Varya gave a mirthless smirk.
"Welcome to public safety."
By evening, the Room of Fear had produced the day's result.
A new sign appeared beyond the door marked "THE SHOP FLOOR WITH NO SHIFT". It was neither bright nor promotional. Just a wooden board with words burnt into it:
THE ASSEMBLY WITH NO GROUP.
Ilya did not open it to visitors. Even if he could have, he would not. The debt had not been settled.
The ticket booth accepted this in silence.
But the attendance register opened by itself. A whistle lay between its pages. Old, aluminium, on a braided cord. When Ilya picked it up, someone in the next room answered softly:
"Here."
Maya sprang to her feet.
"Who's there?"
No one.
The stamp of the nonexistent commission appeared inside the register's cover. Beside it was another stamp. Fresh and even, the sort used on Land Registry copies.
The same stamp appeared on the land plan for the Quiet Quarter.
Varya looked at Ilya.
"This isn't about the children any more."
"No," said Maya.
For the first time, it was not the Room that frightened her, but the archive.
"It's about the land."
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