"Kainozoi" by Sergei Lukyanenko, summary Automatic translate

"Kainozoy" is the second and final novel in Sergey Lukyanenko’s dilogy about the "intelligent dead," published in December 2018. The book concludes the story begun in "Kvazi" (2016): in it, the world of humans and quasi-beings finds itself on the brink of a new upheaval — the biological evolution of death, which no one yet suspects.

Death Train

Moscow state security captain Denis Simonov is traveling on the overnight train to St. Petersburg with his teenage son, Alexander, whom everyone calls Naid. In the dining car, a rebel forces his way through the vestibule door — it turns out to be a young naval cadet from the eighth car. Denis, without hesitation, cuts off his head with a machete. A red-haired beauty named "Alexandra Fadeeva," who was sitting in the restaurant, doesn’t run away, but asks Denis to cut off her dress "at the knee" and goes with him to sort things out.

The scene in the eighth car is terrifying: the entire car — about thirty young naval cadets — has died almost simultaneously and is now slowly rebelling. This directly contradicts the biology of rebels: each has their own individual "period of rebellion," and a mass, simultaneous uprising is impossible. Denis isolates the car, warns the conductor and the neighboring passengers, and before St. Petersburg, the car is uncoupled right at the siding.

In the morning, the truth comes out: the cadets were killed with the chemical warfare agent C-Pei, an ampoule planted in the air conditioning system. Preliminary travel information indicated that Denis himself was traveling in the eighth car — the attack was being planned specifically against him, and thirty young lives were accidental casualties.

"Alexandra Fadeeva" also turns out to be a fictitious name: the ticket was purchased under the name "Olga Chekhova," she had no husband or daughter, and she disappeared from the platform during the noise of the train’s uncoupling. Her real name, it later turns out, was Maria Belinskaya.

Peter quasi

Waiting for Denis at the Moscow train station is the old quasi-commander Mikhail Bedrenets, nicknamed the Ragged Fox — a former policeman and now the quasi-commander’s special representative. Six months ago, they nearly killed each other, and now they’re forced to work together. Bedrenets — wearing a hat, a rumpled suit, and a naval ribbon on his lapel in memory of the fallen cadets — leads Denis and Nayd through the bicycle-fueled Petersburg to the apartment on Dzhambul Street.

St. Petersburg is the capital of the quasi-Catholic. After the Holocaust, the living left, and the dead flocked here from across the country. A city of bicycles, vegetarian cafes, and busts of Peter the Great next to Lenin. There is no official police force here: only "ordinary residents in identical uniforms" with rubber truncheons — the local equivalent of law enforcement.

Bedrenets briefs Denis on the situation on the Bank Bridge. Over the past two weeks, four cases of quasi-human attacks on living people have been recorded — biting and eating flesh. This is a disaster: quasi-humans are strict vegetarians, which is precisely what makes their coexistence with humans possible. If it turns out that quasi-humans are capable of devouring humans, war will break out. Arkady, a young quasi-analyst from Bedrenets’s lab, is one such victim: he bit sixteen-year-old courier Nelli Selivanova without any intention, just "something happened."

The Librarian and the Strings

Their investigation leads them to a book looter nicknamed the Librarian, Andrei Mshanin. He illegally smuggles books from abandoned houses, using his teenage son, Petya, as cover. By threatening to strip him of his parental rights, Bedrenets and Denis extract information from him: Mshanin has an urgent book order from a client who, when they met, mentioned that the "predatory quasi" are more to be feared than the rebels — they’re smarter and faster.

Nastya, a quasi and Denis’s former lover, arrives from Moscow to help. The atmosphere is tense: Bedrenets has been removed from office, and the quasi’s political position is in jeopardy. An attempt to contact the Librarian after several hours fails — he doesn’t answer.

Maria

Maria Belinskaya herself finds Denis in a St. Petersburg pub on Fontanka, now with jet-black hair and an orange sweater embroidered with bears. She explains that she’s grieving for Dmitry Bolshakov, the only cadet Denis ever killed. The others had agreed to be elevated to Quasi, but Bolshakov hadn’t.

Maria tells Denis: "Leave, take your son, and ring all the alarm bells — both to the people and to the Circle (a secret society of influential people operating outside the state). The coexistence of humans and quasi-beings is entering a critical crisis, and excesses will escalate." When Denis tries to take her to Bedrents, Maria causes a ruckus in the pub — the quasi-beings attack Denis, and she escapes through the window.

But she doesn’t manage to escape completely. In the final moments, Maria dies: her skull shatters into pieces. The texture of her flesh, however, reveals her to be quasi-human, though she appeared alive until the very last moment.

The next step

Denis tells Bedrents and Nastya what he’s realized: humans, rebels, and quasi — that’s not the whole story. Maria was a being of the next level. Just as quasi control rebels, she controlled quasi — that’s why there were "crazy" quasi who attacked humans, and rebels who rose too quickly. Someone was forcing them to behave this way — either intentionally or through experiments on their own abilities.

Maria also told Denis what he had long dreaded: his wife Olga, who disappeared during the Holocaust, was dead — for good, without a rebellion. Maria had wandered with her for several years after the Holocaust, until connections between the cities were established, and she knew Olga’s identity too well to lie.

Nastya, holding Denis’s hand — too hot to be dead — offers her condolences. Bedrenets quietly admits he’s glad: he wasn’t the cause of Olga’s death. Denis filled out the form — item ninety-three, "refusal to rebel," item ninety-four, "refusal to advance." He’s of sound mind and memory. Markin, his boss in Moscow, is convinced he’ll change his mind. Denis — no.

The city outside the window lives on: bicycles, quasi-people with books, the Neva in the April cold. But the equation that held it all together — the people, the rebels, the quasi-people — has acquired a new, as yet unexplained variable.