The camp was a fresh wound in the grey flesh of the Ashen Tract. It clung to the side of a low, muddy hill, a collection of ragged tents and lean-tos that seemed to sag under the weight of the colorless sky. The air, which for days had tasted only of cold dust and decay, now carried the smells of human misery: damp wool, sickness, and the thin, greasy smoke of wet wood fires that gave no warmth. This was their destination, the temporary shelter Alessandro’s network had promised.
They moved down the slope, their boots sinking into the clinging mud. The refugees watched them pass, their faces blank and hollowed out. These were not the proud, defiant faces of partisans, nor the disciplined masks of soldiers. They were the faces of people who had lost everything, including the memory of what they had lost. They were the human cost of the Blight, the living refuse of a war fought with weapons that murdered the past. Sineus had seen battlefields littered with the dead, but this was worse. This was a graveyard for souls.
Alessandro led him to a small tent patched with oilcloth, its entrance a dark slash in the gloom. — Shelter, — the Italian grunted, his voice low. — For now.
Sineus nodded, his gaze sweeping over the camp. He saw an old man coughing into a rag, his body wracked with a dry, rattling sound. He saw a woman stirring a large pot over a sputtering fire, the contents a thin, greyish broth. He saw children with old eyes, huddled together under a threadbare blanket, their movements slow and listless. This was the reality of the front. Not the clean lines on a map in the Memory Duma, not the sterile reports of his old life. It was this. The slow, grinding erosion of hope.
His aristocratic detachment, the cold armor he had worn for a lifetime, was thin and useless here. It offered no protection against the raw, quiet despair that saturated the air. He was a nobleman trained to see the world as a grand game. But here, there was no game. There was only the end of things.
Then he saw her.
She was sitting alone, away from the others, beside a smoldering fire that was little more than a pile of glowing embers. A girl of about seven, with a thin, smudged face and dark hair tangled with bits of leaf and twig. In her lap, she held a doll made of bundled rags. The doll’s body was lumpy and misshapen, but it was the head that held Sineus’s gaze. It was a smooth, featureless oval of pale cloth. There was no face. No eyes, no mouth, nothing. It was a perfect, horrifying blank.
The girl, Anya, was trying to fix it. She held a small, rust-pitted needle with a short length of grey, frayed twine—a severed thread, useless and weak. She poked the needle at the doll’s blank face, a slow, repetitive gesture of hopeless industry. She was trying to sew a memory onto a void.
Sineus felt something shift deep inside him, a painful cracking of old ice. He had seen the Lacuna through the Chronos Telescope, a shrieking void in the world’s script. He had felt the land’s grief in the dead forest. But this was different. This was the consequence of annihilation made small and personal, held in the hands of a child. This was not a strategic problem. It was a profanity.
He felt an uncharacteristic pull, a need to do something, anything, that was not about tactics or survival. He started toward her, his boots squelching in the mud.
— Leave it, — Alessandro said quietly from behind him. — There is nothing you can do for her.
Sineus did not stop. He walked to the small fire and sat on a damp log a few meters from the girl. She did not look up, her attention fixed on her impossible task. He watched her for a long moment, the rhythmic, useless poke of the needle. He reached into his greatcoat and pulled out his last ration. A piece of hard, black bread, dense and heavy as a stone. It was the sort of food he had once seen served only to prisoners. Now it was all he had.
He broke the bread in two. The sound was a dry, brittle snap in the damp air.
He held out one half to the girl.
She stopped her work. Slowly, she raised her head. Her eyes were huge and dark in her small face, and they were as empty as her doll’s. She looked at the bread, then at his face. Her gaze was not fearful or curious. It was a flat, vacant stare, the look of someone peering out from a very deep, very dark well.
For three seconds that stretched into an eternity, she simply looked at him. A silent connection, a fragile bridge thrown across an abyss of loss. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, she reached out a small, grimy hand and took the bread.
She did not thank him. She made no sound at all. She simply held the bread in both hands and continued to stare at him.
From across the camp, Alessandro watched the exchange. He had been cleaning his rifle, but his hands were still now. He lowered the weapon, his cynical expression softening for just a moment. He saw not an aristocrat, not a Lodge butcher, but a man sharing the last of his food with a ghost. His assessment of Sineus shifted, a small but significant adjustment in the calculus of their alliance.
Sineus looked away from the girl, back at the camp. The faces of the refugees no longer looked like a mass of anonymous suffering. They were individuals. They were the people he had sworn an oath to protect, an oath he had fulfilled from the sterile distance of palaces and secret archives. He had served the idea of the Empire, a grand and abstract thing. He had never truly served its people.
His mission, the hunt for the Lethe Mortar, was no longer about defying the Duma or proving himself right. It was not about honor or duty as he had once understood them. It was about her. It was about the hundred and fifty other broken souls in this muddy, forgotten camp. It was about fighting for a world where little girls did not have to try and sew faces onto dolls with severed threads.
The grief for Pyotr was still a raw wound in his chest. The fear of Kurov and Lacroix was a cold knot in his gut. But now, something else was there too. A hard, clear purpose. A fire lit in the cold, empty space of his failure.
A man splashed through the mud, his face urgent. He was one of Alessandro’s scouts. He ran to the Italian, speaking in a low, rapid voice.
Alessandro listened, his posture changing, the brief moment of softness gone, replaced by a predator’s focus. He nodded, and the scout hurried away.
Alessandro walked over to Sineus, his eyes bright with a new, fierce energy.
— Our luck has turned, aristocrat, — he said. — A message from the network. A convoy, moving west. Heavily guarded.
Sineus stood up, his gaze still on the small girl, who was now nibbling at the edge of the hard bread.
— What is it carrying? — Sineus asked, though he already knew.
— Components, — Alessandro said, a grim smile touching his lips. — For the Lethe Mortar.
Now they could make the enemy pay.
