He moved through the guts of Monolit, a place forgotten by the men who walked the clean, wide corridors above. These were the service tunnels, a web of narrow concrete passages that smelled of damp decay and the faint, electric tang of ozone from the city’s deep power conduits. The only light came from caged work lamps set every hundred meters, casting long, distorted shadows that danced with the vibration of the Citadel’s life support. The hum of the city was a constant pressure against his ears, a sound that had meant safety his entire life. Now it felt like the drone of a failing machine.
The rucksack Morozov had given him was a solid, comforting weight on his back. Twenty-five kilograms of survival. Rations, a medkit, power cells, and the new military-grade water filters. It was the weight of a purpose given form, a physical manifestation of the old man’s trust. He moved with a silence that was almost perfect, his boots making no sound on the grimy floor. He knew these tunnels. He had mapped them as a recruit, a pointless exercise in discipline that had suddenly become the key to his escape.
He followed the memory of the map in his head, taking a left at a junction marked with a faded red stripe, then a right down a passage where the air grew colder. He was descending, moving deeper into the Citadel’s foundation, further from the world of rank and council meetings. He was a ranger, a scout. His job was to move on the edges, to see what others did not. The council saw a freak anomaly and a strategic advantage. He saw a surgeon’s precise cuts, excising the arteries of the world one by one. To stay was to let the patient die while the doctors argued about the diagnosis.
After ten minutes of steady, silent movement, he reached his destination. It was a simple service grate, a meter-square plate of rusted steel set into the concrete wall at the end of a dead-end tunnel. It was meant for ventilation, not passage. It was unsecured, forgotten. Beyond it, he could hear the low, mournful hiss of the wind moving across the Eurasian Wastes. He laid a hand on the cold metal, feeling the vibration of the wind through the steel.
For half a minute, he did not move. He just listened. The sound was a harsh reminder of the world he was choosing. Out there was the dust, the radiation, the Unraveling, and the new, thinking horror that wielded it as a weapon. Here, behind him, was order. Three meals a day, clean water, the illusion of safety. He was trading the certainty of a slow death for the possibility of a quick one. The price of his choice was his safety, his name, his entire life within the structure of the Federation. He had to pay it.
His hand went to the left shoulder of his uniform. His fingers found the embroidered patch of the Eurasian Federation Successors. The tri-spoke symbol. Order. Duty. Memory. The council had forgotten the meaning of the words. Their order was brittle, their duty was to themselves, and their memory was a selective fiction.
With a deliberate, steady pull, he tore the patch from his uniform. The sound of the threads ripping was loud in the narrow tunnel, a small, violent act of separation. He held the patch in his palm. The tri-spoke symbol, stitched in grey and black thread, seemed inert now, a meaningless shape. It was a memory he had to sever.
He knelt and placed the insignia on the grimy concrete floor, just inside the tunnel. He was no longer Ranger Sineus of the Eurasian Federation. He was just Sineus. A man with a rucksack and a purpose that belonged only to him. He had shed his old identity like a dead skin. The act left him feeling lighter, but also terribly exposed.
He put his shoulder to the heavy grate and pushed. It groaned, the rusted hinges fighting him for a moment before giving way. The wind hit him full in the face, sharp and cold, carrying the taste of rust and distance. He squeezed through the opening and dropped the meter to the ground outside, landing softly in a drift of fine, grey dust. He was out. He was a deserter. The quest had begun.
He turned and looked back at the monolithic wall of the Citadel rising into the toxic, overcast sky. From here, he could not see the breach at the Western Gate. The city looked whole, eternal. A fortress of denial. He felt a faint, cold certainty pulling him east, a familiar sensation he had known since childhood. It was the dream-path, the intuitive vector that hummed in his bones, pointing toward the legend of the Memory Archive. It was a pull that was more certainty than doubt, a compass needle in his soul.
He turned his back on Monolit, on the life he had abandoned, on the small, stitched symbol of a broken promise lying in the dark of the tunnel. He adjusted the weight of the rucksack on his shoulders and began walking east, his boots sinking into the rust-colored dust. The hunt was on.
The wind howled around him, a sound of pure emptiness. The ground crunched under his feet, a mixture of dirt and the powdered remains of the world that was.
The cold path pulled him east, toward the lands of Union 9 and a stalled engine of iron and disbelief.
