What can be found in the halls of the human soul. In it coexist cold-blooded cruelty and love up to self-sacrifice, cynical calculation and boundless kindness, dry greed and unheard-of generosity, icy indifference and hot participation… Sometimes a person doesn’t even know what they’re capable of until fate’s millstones press down on them. The Zone is one of the levers that turns this mechanism of human behavior. Gryf and Alexey are two completely different people. What could possibly unite them? In a nightmare, a hardened, battle-scarred stalker like Gryf couldn’t imagine such a partner: weak, kind, pathetic, gaping, having collected within himself all the traits that make it impossible not just to go into the Zone but even to appear beside it. And yet it was exactly this guy who became Gryf’s little spark in the surrounding darkness—warming him, reviving something that wasn’t quite dead in a stalker’s soul, reminding him that he too has a heart.