Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick

undocumented storage vaults carved from the bedrock when the city was young. Military installations from bygone eras and bunkers built to protect ancient tyrants from their enemies both abroad and at home were embedded deep within a three-dimensional tangle of transit and utility tunnels, some still functional and others containing the ruins of the electrical infrastructure that had been hastily ripped asunder after the revolt of mankind’s electronic slaves. Long corridors connected buildings that no longer existed.
    “Vodka, miss?”
    “Why the hell else would I be in this shit-hole?”
    No man knew all of the underground city’s ways. But Anya Pepsicolova knew as many of them as anybody. To its denizens she was the single best guide to its mysteries that money could hire, a young woman of aristocratic birth who had taken to slumming in the criminal underworld and who, because she had no known protector, they could routinely cheat and shortchange. To the secret police, she was a ruthless and useful undercover agent, though one they felt absolutely no loyalty to. To Sergei Chortenko, she was a naïve and ingenious girl who had snooped into matters that did not concern her and who had subsequently been broken to his will. To the monsters who fancied themselves the real rulers of the City Below, she was a convenient means of keeping an eye on the City Above while their plans ripened and fermented and the glorious day grew nearer and nearer when everyone in Moscow—herself most emphatically included—died.
    It was hard sometimes for her to keep all of her ostensible masters straight—much less decide which of them she hated the most. The only real pleasure she got out of life anymore was when she was hired by somebody powerless enough that she dared to feed him, alive and screaming, to one of her oppressors.
    Pepsicolova sat hunched over a plate of bread she’d chopped into small pieces, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking slowly but steadily, maintaining a small, warm buzz in the back of her skull. After each shot, she splayed a hand over the bread. Then she closed her eyes, flicked Saint Cyrila out of her wrist sheath, and stabbed between her fingers for a bit of bread to clear her palate. It was her way of judging whether she was still sober. She wanted to have a clear head when the foreign adventurer named Aubrey Darger finally put in an appearance.
    For the past two days she had observed him. Today they would speak.
    At last there came a clatter of feet down the stairs from the street and her prey threw open the door. For the merest instant cool autumn air blew into the Bucket of Nails. Then the door slammed shut, once again restoring the stench of cigarettes and stale beer.
    “English!” cried one of the negligible young men—of no interest even to Chortenko’s people—who came here regularly to argue political theory and leave behind small piles of pamphlets. “It’s the Englishman!” shouted another. A young woman who was still half a student but already more than half a whore twisted in her stool and blew him a kiss.
    The foreigner could be charming when he wanted to be—that had been the first thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.
    “Vodka!” Darger cried, seizing a chair and throwing his cap onto a table. “If you can call it that.” A bottle, a glass, and a plate of bread were provided. He downed a shot and pinched up some bread. Then he leaned over to fill the glasses at the nearest table. “What subversive nonsense are we discussing today, eh?”
    The dilettantes laughed and raised their glasses in salute.
    Darger gave the impression of great generosity, but if one kept careful track of what he actually spent, it came to very little, perhaps half a bottle of vodka over the course of a long evening. That was the second thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.
    Pepsicolova studied Darger through narrowed eyes. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. He was a well-made fellow, if one