The corridor was a weapon. It did not just exist; it fought them. The air, cold and sterile, tasted of ozone and nothingness. One step forward, the floor beneath their boots was solid stone. The next, it was wet sand that tried to pull them down, the memory of a forgotten beach bleeding through. Sineus felt the shift before he saw it, a lurch in the world’s script. He threw out an arm, stopping Mikhail before the ex-Lodge loyalist could step into a patch of wall that had suddenly remembered it was water. The stone rippled and flowed for a second, then solidified.
— Stay behind me, — Sineus ordered, his voice low. — Match my steps. Exactly.
From the walls, the whispers grew louder. A thousand forgotten voices, a discordant choir of last words and dying prayers. The Paradox-Constructs bled out of the flat, sourceless light. They were amalgams of pain, shifting things made of psychic residue. One moment a construct was a French grenadier, uniform perfect, raising a musket that wasn't there. The next it dissolved into a whirlwind of screaming faces and grasping hands, a storm of tangled, severed threads of memory given violent form. They were the ghosts of the men whose lives had fueled this place.
They came at the team of eight, silent but for the hissing whispers that were their blood. A Carbonari veteran fired his pistol; the ball passed through a construct’s chest with no effect. The thing reformed, its face now the soldier’s, twisted in a mask of agony. It lunged, and the veteran screamed as its hand passed through his arm, leaving a trail of frost and the phantom memory of a bayonet wound. He stumbled back, clutching an arm that was not bleeding but was suddenly useless.
— They are not solid! — Mikhail cried out, his voice tight with panic. — You cannot shoot a memory!
Sineus ignored the chaos. He was not a soldier now. He was a navigator. His unique perception, once a tool for the sterile work of the Lodge, was now the only thing keeping them alive. He saw the corridor not as a physical space but as a river of competing histories. He could see the stable currents, the solid paths of memory where the floor would remain the floor. He saw the eddies and whirlpools where time looped and identity frayed.
— Left! Three steps! Now right, against the wall! — Sineus’s commands were sharp, precise. He led them in a strange, halting dance through the corridor’s madness. He was their eyes, their anchor in this sea of unreality. The weight of their lives was a pressure he had never known in his isolation, a burden that felt strangely like strength. This was interdependence. This was the price and the reward.
A construct formed directly in their path, a towering shape of a dozen fused soldiers, all screaming.
— Alessandro! — Sineus yelled.
The Italian inventor needed no other command. He pulled a small, brass sphere from his bandolier and twisted its base.
— Fire in the hole! — Alessandro tossed it underhand.
The alchemical grenade did not explode with fire or shrapnel. It detonated with a flash of corrosive green light and a sound like shattering glass. The construct shrieked, the thousand whispers rising to a single, piercing cry. Its form, held together by the logic of stolen memory, dissolved. The fused soldiers broke apart into a cloud of drifting, agitated threads of light that faded into nothing. One grenade gone. They had only a few.
They pressed on, a tight knot of fugitives moving through a nightmare. Sineus guided, Alessandro cleared the path, and the others provided covering fire that did more to distract than to harm. The ache in Sineus’s crystallized hand was a constant, throbbing drumbeat, a reminder of Pyotr, of the cost that had brought them here. He pushed the pain down. It was fuel now.
Then he saw it. Fifty meters ahead, at the end of the shifting, treacherous corridor. A single, round door of black, polished iron. It was solid. It was real. The entrance to the main laboratory. They were close. The sight of it sent a surge of hope through him, a dangerous, fragile thing in this place of despair.
— The door! — one of the Carbonari shouted, his voice raw with relief.
As if the word itself were a trigger, the corridor ahead erupted. The whispers rose to a deafening roar. From the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the constructs poured forth. Not one or two. Not a dozen. An army. A wave of shimmering, screaming history, a tide of stolen death surged toward them, blocking the path to the door completely. They were a solid wall of shifting faces and phantom limbs, a hundred meters of corridor packed with the workshop’s rage.
Alessandro cursed, firing his pistol into the mass with no effect. Mikhail stared, his face a mask of horror. The two remaining Carbonari fell back, their weapons useless. They were pinned down, their advance halted just meters from their goal. The narrow corridor that had been their path was now their tomb. The black iron door was ten meters away. An impossible distance.
The air grew still, the roar of the constructs settling into a low, predatory hum. Dust motes, disturbed by their fight, danced in the flat, dead light.
They were trapped, and the dead were coming for them.
