The barn smelled of wet rot and cold earth. They had found it an hour before midnight, a sagging skeleton of a building in a field of mud, and had collapsed into the damp straw without a word. They moved as if their bodies held only a fifth of their former strength, each step a negotiation with exhaustion. Their supplies were down to a single day’s ration of hard bread, a lump in Alessandro’s satchel that felt more like a stone than sustenance.
Sineus sat with his back against the rough timber wall, listening to the steady, miserable drum of rain on the broken roof. He closed his eyes and tried to reach out with his senses, to read the memory-script of the surrounding land, to feel for the psychic spoor of their pursuers. It was a duty he performed by reflex, but the act brought only pain.
Instead of the clean, luminous lines of the Istopis, his mind was met with a roar of static. The dying terror from the severed signet ring, the phantom heat of Lacroix’s fire, the hollow ache where Pyotr’s presence used to be—it all crashed together into a chaotic, indecipherable knot. The threads of reality were tangled and frayed, and his focus, once a surgeon’s blade, was now too dull to find a single, clean line. The pressure of the last weeks had finally ground his gift down to a nub.
In the gloom, Alessandro worked with a grim, silent focus. He had the compact signaling mirror disassembled on a square of oilcloth, its delicate brass and glass innards looking like the bones of a small, intricate bird. He probed the clockwork mechanism with a fine pair of tweezers, his breath fogging in the cold air. He was trying to repair the device, but they both knew it was hopeless without the proper parts. They were cut off, technologically isolated in a world that was actively hunting them.
— Anything? — Alessandro’s voice was a low rasp, not looking up from his work.
Sineus opened his eyes. The question was not about the device.
— Noise, — Sineus said. The admission was a price he had to pay, a confession of weakness that shifted the weight of their partnership. — Just noise. I can’t get a clear reading.
Alessandro’s hands stilled for a second. He looked over at Sineus, his sharp eyes assessing him in the darkness. He gave a short, sharp nod, then returned to the broken mirror. He did not offer false comfort. He accepted the new, terrible fact: their seer was blind.
Sineus looked down at his own hands. He remembered the ballroom in the Winter Palace, the weightless feeling of his will moving through the world, the clean snap of an excised memory. A perfect instrument performing a perfect function. He had been a creature of sterile precision. Now he was this: a hunted fugitive, cowering in a collapsing barn, his greatest strength a source of blinding pain. He saw a length of old rope hanging from a rafter, its end a frayed, severed thread of hemp. It was not a clean cut. It was a messy, ugly break, just like his own. The cost of his choice was not a single, noble sacrifice, but this slow, grinding attrition that stripped away everything—allies, tools, hope, and finally, the sense of self. The barn seemed to grow colder, the sound of the rain more distant, as if the world itself was pulling away from them.
He could feel the logic of the trap they were in, a cold mathematical certainty that needed no psychic sense to perceive. Kurov’s relentless herding from the east, pushing them north. Lacroix’s intellectual sadism, laying psychic landmines ahead of them to the west. They were being funneled into a shrinking corridor of blighted land. He could feel the statistical weight of it, the net closing with what felt like a 75% probability of capture. It was no longer a matter of if, but when.
Hours passed in near silence, marked only by the shifting of their positions as the cold seeped deeper into their bones. Finally, Alessandro carefully wrapped the pieces of the signaling mirror in the oilcloth and put them away. The device was useless.
He pulled the last of the bread from his satchel. It was stale and hard as wood. He broke it in two, the sound loud in the quiet barn. He handed one half to Sineus. They ate in silence, the rough bread scraping their throats. It was a communion of the damned, a shared moment of quiet desperation. When it was gone, their food supplies were at zero. There was nothing left.
Sineus took the next watch. He stood by a gap in the barn wall, his rifle a cold weight in his hands, and watched the rain turn from a downpour to a drizzle, and finally, stop. The world outside was a wash of grey on grey. He felt hollowed out, a vessel filled only with cold and a dull, persistent ache.
As the first hint of dawn bled into the sky, he saw it.
The air grew still, smelling of wet earth and the clean scent of the coming morning. The first light painted the underside of the clouds a bruised, delicate purple.
A figure stood on the ridge, and Sineus knew him.
