The air in front of the Forge-Crawler ‘Perun’ did not move. It shimmered, like heat haze off scorched steel, but it was cold. A deep, unnatural cold that seemed to suck the warmth from the engine block and the blood from your veins. Irina Pavlenko stared into the shimmering wall of the Mnemonic Scar, her hands clenched on the forward rail of the command car. The Scar was a dead place, a wound in the world where reality had forgotten its own name, and it blocked their path east. The ground within it was not ground; it was a suggestion of earth that had dissolved into a kilometer-wide fissure of non-existence.
She turned from the impossible view and back to the real, pressing problems on her console. The gauges told a story of slow, grinding failure. The ‘Perun’s’ Mnemonic Anchor, the great engine of purpose that held the train’s two-hundred-meter length together, was fighting a battle it could not win. Its core temperature was climbing, already at 115 percent of its safe limit. The needle on the strain gauge trembled deep in the red. The anchor was trying to impose the memory of ‘solid ground’ onto the Scar, and the Scar was simply not listening. It was like shouting schematics at a vacuum.
The air crackled with static discharge, a dry popping sound that set her teeth on edge. The smell was of ozone and a deep, underlying wrongness, like the scent of metal that had forgotten its own strength.
— We can’t go around, — a voice said from behind her. Pavel Orlov, her outrider, stood with his rifle held loosely, his young face grim. — It’s a thousand kilometers of badlands and fractured territory. We don’t have the water or the fuel.
Irina didn’t answer. He was stating a fact she had already run through her calculations a dozen times. They were trapped. The ‘Perun’ was the heart of Union 9, a rolling forge that laid its own path, a testament to the belief that to work is to live. Now it sat helpless before a wall of nothing, slowly tearing itself apart. Her knuckles were white on the rail. She could feel the vibration of the straining anchor through the deck plates, a discordant hum that felt like a scream trapped in iron.
Then Pavel grunted, lifting his rifle slightly. — Contact. West. One man, on foot.
Irina followed his gaze. A lone figure was approaching, walking with a steady, unhurried pace out of the western dust. He was too clean. His greatcoat, though worn, was free of the grime that clung to everything and everyone in the wastes. He carried no heavy gear, just a rucksack that sat squarely on his shoulders. He moved with an economy that spoke of discipline, not desperation. He was a bunker-dweller. A man from the Eurasian Federation.
— Another one, — Irina muttered, the words tasting like rust in her mouth. — Lost and useless. Come to lecture us on procedure while we die.
She hated their clean hands and their clean doctrines. The Federation hoarded its pre-Blast knowledge in fortress-cities like Monolit, safe behind walls of concrete and dogma, their authority marked by the cold, brass tri-spoke symbol on their collars. They traded for Union 9’s grease and steel parts, but they offered nothing of real value in return. They offered no hope. They let the world rot, as long as the rot was kept outside their gates.
The stranger stopped a hundred meters away, a respectful distance. He made no move, just stood there, watching them. He was a scout, she guessed from his posture. One of the rangers who patrolled the Federation’s decaying frontiers. He raised a hand, not in greeting, but as if testing the air.
After a long moment, his voice carried across the unnatural stillness, calm and clear, devoid of the panic that was beginning to coil in Irina’s own gut.
— Your anchor is resonating against the Scar’s frequency, — he called out. — You are pushing against a wall that isn’t there.
Irina’s jaw tightened. The sheer arrogance. To walk out of the dust and lecture her, Irina Pavlenko, on the function of her own engine. Her engine. She had built this anchor herself from salvaged naval reactor parts and schematics pieced together from fragments of old knowledge. She knew its every bolt and blessing.
— And I suppose you have a mystical solution, ranger? — she shouted back, her voice dripping with scorn. His words were abstract and useless, hollow ideas unfit for a world of steel and steam.
The man didn’t react to her tone. — You have to decouple it, — he said, as if explaining a simple mechanical problem. — Let it remember only itself, not the ground beneath it.
It was madness. The anchor’s entire purpose was to reinforce the reality of their path, to ensure the rails they laid on did not dissolve behind them. To decouple it from the ground was to invite the Unraveling into their own machine. It was suicide. She turned back to her console, her hands flying across the controls, trying to vent the pressure, to cool the core, to do anything that made physical sense. But the temperature gauge continued to climb. 130 percent. 135.
A new sound cut through the air. A high, piercing whine began to emanate from the anchor’s armored housing deep within the ‘Perun’. It was a sound Irina had only ever read about in old engineering manuals, a sound that preceded catastrophic memory overload. The final scream of a machine forgetting its own existence. A city-wide alarm klaxon suddenly blared from the command car’s speakers, a frantic, desperate pulse. The anchor’s core temperature was now critical. The strain had reached 140 percent. The reactor would breach in seconds.
Her pragmatism, her lifetime of belief in tangible things, had led her to this. A dead end. A dying machine. Pavel was shouting something, but she couldn’t hear him over the anchor’s death-scream. She looked from her failing console to the lone, quiet figure in the distance. Her world of logic had failed. His madness was the only option left.
The air smelled of superheated metal and burning ozone. The deck plates beneath her feet vibrated so violently it felt like they would tear apart.
