The anchor was stable. The deep, resonant thrum of contained purpose vibrated through the deck plates of the Forge-Crawler ‘Perun’, a healthy heartbeat where before there had been only a scream. Outside, the Mnemonic Scar remained, a silent, shimmering wall of non-reality that drank the light and bled a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was a fissure in the world, a place where the ground had forgotten its own name. The crew of Union 9 stood at the armored viewports, their faces grim. They were saved, but they were still trapped.
Irina Pavlenko stood before them, her wiry frame held straight by a will of pure iron. Her face was smudged with grease, her grey braid tight and orderly.
— The anchor is stable, — she said, her voice cutting through the low thrum of the idling reactor. It was not a celebration, but a statement of fact. — The mystic’s plan is our only way across.
A murmur went through the assembled crew. Twenty engineers and outriders, men and women who understood steel and steam, looked from their lead engineer to Sineus. He was an outsider, a bunker-dweller in clean gear, a man who fought with ghosts. Pavel Orlov, his rifle held loosely but ready, voiced the doubt of every person there.
— A bridge of what?
— A bridge that works, — Irina snapped, her gaze quelling any further dissent. The shift in the crew’s posture was immediate. Her word was law. The brief moment of fragmentation resolved into a grudging, focused quiet. — Get to your posts.
Sineus stepped forward, the weight of their skepticism a physical pressure. He unrolled a schematic on a nearby console, its surface still warm from Irina’s work. He pointed not to a physical structure, but to a diagram of energy flow.
— We will not push against the Scar, — he said, his voice low and even. — Its memory is null. Pushing against it is like shouting at a deaf man. We will give it a new memory to hold, just for a moment. We will build a bridge of purpose for the ‘Perun’ to cross.
He looked at Irina. The understanding that had been forged between them in the engine room, a bond of shared labor, held firm. She nodded once, a sharp, decisive motion, and turned to the anchor’s main console. Her hands, which had felt the ghost in the machine, now moved with a new kind of certainty. She was not just operating her engine; she was tuning an instrument for a song she was only just beginning to understand.
— Re-calibrating the mnemonic field, — she announced, her fingers flying across the controls. — Shifting from broadcast to a focused beam. Power output at 90 percent.
The deep hum of the anchor changed. The broad, area-wide field of reinforcement that protected the train collapsed inward, concentrating into a single, potent point of energy. The air in the command car grew thick with the smell of ozone. The main focusing crystal, a cylinder of amber-colored quartz as thick as a man’s torso, began to glow with a steady, intense light. The machine was ready. Now it needed a soul.
Sineus walked to the heart of the anchor, the glowing crystal pulsing with contained power. He placed his hands on its warm, smooth surface. He had to give it a memory, a blueprint. Not just any memory, but one of strength, of stability, of a singular purpose held against the slow decay of the world. He closed his eyes and reached into his own past, past the pain of his mentor’s erasure, past the battles in the wastes.
He found the memory of the Skeletal Overpass. He felt the toxic wind on his face, thirty-five kilometers from the cold safety of Monolit. He remembered the feel of the crumbling ferro-concrete under his palm, the discordant hum of its failing structural memory. He recalled the worn, familiar weight of the tools in his hand, the sight of the three-spoked gear stamped into the steel of his father’s wrench. He remembered the patient, solitary work of cleaning the joint, of reciting the litany of its purpose, of sealing the cracks against the Unraveling. It was a memory of one man’s duty holding a single piece of the world together. He took that memory of stubborn, lonely unity and pushed it into the heart of the anchor.
— Now, — he said, his voice a strained whisper.
Irina slammed a heavy lever forward. The energy from the reactor surged into the focusing crystal. A beam of pure, concentrated memory, invisible to the eye but immense in its power, shot from the ‘Perun’ and struck the shimmering wall of the Mnemonic Scar.
Where the beam hit, the Scar did not break. It yielded. The chaotic, null-memory field was given a purpose. A shimmering, translucent path began to form, stretching out from the ‘Perun’s’ bow and across the chasm of non-reality. It looked like a road made of heat haze, a fifty-meter span of fragile, temporary existence. It was a bridge built not of steel or concrete, but of the pure idea of a bridge. The air grew cold as the Scar’s energy was ordered into this new form.
The bridge was unstable, its edges fraying back into nothingness. It would not last.
— Full power! Now! — Irina’s voice was a roar, a command that sent a jolt through the entire crew.
The ‘Perun’s’ drive systems engaged with a deafening groan. The massive Forge-Crawler, a half-kilometer of steel and machinery, lurched forward, its immense weight settling onto the path of pure thought. From his position at the anchor, Sineus felt the strain as the memory of the single girder was forced to bear the weight of a rolling fortress. The effort was immense, a screaming exertion of will. He gritted his teeth, sweat beading on his forehead, holding the memory of the overpass firm in his mind.
Through the viewports, the crew watched as the world outside became a blur of shimmering, unreal light. The tracks of the ‘Perun’ bit into the mnemonic bridge, the structure groaning under the impossible load. For a terrifying seventeen seconds, they were driving on a ghost, suspended over a pit of absolute nothing. Then, with a final, jarring shudder, the front of the Forge-Crawler hit solid ground. They were across.
A ragged cheer erupted through the command car. The tension broke like a snapped cable. They had done it. They had crossed the uncrossable.
The moment the ‘Perun’ was clear, the bridge of memory, its purpose fulfilled, dissolved. The shimmering path vanished, and the Scar behind them was once again an unbroken wall of shimmering haze. The strain on Sineus’s mind vanished with it. The sudden release was too much. The strength went out of his legs, and the world dissolved into a tunnel of grey. He collapsed, the hard steel of the deck plates rising up to meet him. His last sensation was the feeling of hands, strong and sure, catching him before he hit the ground.
The air was still and quiet, filled only with the steady, healthy hum of the anchor. The light through the forward viewport was no longer warped by the Scar, just the familiar grey of the Eurasian Wastes.
