The black iron door gave way with a groan of tortured metal, and they spilled into the laboratory. The seven of them. All that was left. The air inside was cold, sterile, and utterly silent, a shocking contrast to the screaming chaos of the corridor. It smelled of ozone and the deep, chilling absence left behind when reality is unmade. The room was circular, its walls lined with racks of humming glass cylinders and copper coils. At its center, a man stood waiting as if he had been expecting them for tea.
He was tall and gaunt, a scarecrow in the perfectly tailored blue uniform of a French officer. Lucien Lacroix. His sunken eyes absorbed the sourceless light of the laboratory, giving nothing back. He offered a thin, bloodless smile that did not reach those eyes. There was no surprise on his face, only a kind of academic curiosity. He was a man observing a predictable chemical reaction.
— You preserve a flawed past, — Lacroix said, his voice a quiet, even monotone that cut through the sterile silence. It was the voice of a man who had excised all passion from himself. — I create a perfect future. A blank page on which humanity can finally write a history free of its own mistakes.
Sineus took a step forward, Alessandro a half-step behind him, a broken piece of pipe clutched in his hand like a club. The other five fanned out, weapons raised, but they all felt the futility of it. This was not a fight for pistols and knives. Sineus could see the man’s defenses. They were not physical. Around Lacroix shimmered a wall of pure memory, a shield woven from a thousand stolen lives. He saw the memory of a young boy’s first kiss, the memory of a mother’s lullaby, the memory of a soldier’s dying oath. Each one was a severed thread, stolen and repurposed into a barrier of shimmering, agonizing light.
The Lodge had taught him how to deal with such things. A shield of memory was still just a knot of threads. He could cut them. He could perform a thousand excisions, a hundred thousand, slicing through the stolen lives one by one until he reached the man at the center. It would be a slaughter. It would be a storm of psychic shrapnel that would feed the Echoing Blight for a generation. It would be easy. It was the work he had been trained for his entire life.
He felt the presence of the six survivors behind him. He heard Alessandro’s ragged breath. He saw Elina’s face in his mind, calm and resolved in the instant before she became nothing. He saw Pyotr’s empty smile. He saw the baker, Stefan, with his rolling pin. A chain of choices. A debt of blood.
To cut through that shield would be to become Lacroix. It was a choice to use annihilation to fight annihilation. The price of that victory was his own soul. He would not pay it.
— No, — Sineus said, the word quiet but absolute. He lowered his hands.
Lacroix’s eyebrow twitched, the first sign of any emotion. It was not anger. It was disappointment.
— A pity. I had hoped for a more enlightened response.
Sineus ignored him. He closed his eyes, turning his perception away from the man and his shield of stolen lives. He reached out with his mind, past the sterile walls of the laboratory, past the collapsing paradoxes of the corridors, past the city of Paris itself. He reached for the great, screaming wound in the world. He reached for the Echoing Blight. It was a sea of pain, a formless, chaotic ocean of every broken promise, every forgotten name, every unmade thing. It was the sum of all their sins, his included.
He had spent his life cutting threads, creating tiny pockets of this poison. Lacroix had turned it into a flood. Now, Sineus would not cut. He would not sever. He would build.
He opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Lucien Lacroix. He focused his will, not into a blade, but into a hook. He plunged it deep into the roiling chaos of the Blight. He felt the agony of it, the grief of a million murdered memories, and he pulled. He dragged a piece of that raw, screaming darkness back with him, a conduit of pure consequence. Then, with all the strength he possessed, he slammed it into Lacroix.
He did not attack the shield. He bypassed it entirely. He forged a bridge. A bridge from the architect to his creation. A bridge from the murderer to all his victims at once.
For a moment, nothing happened. Lacroix simply stood there, his thin smile unwavering. Then his eyes widened. The academic curiosity vanished, replaced by a sudden, dawning horror. A tremor started in his hands. A low sound escaped his lips, a choked gasp, the sound of a man who has just had the air punched from his lungs.
The stolen memories in his shield, the thousand severed threads of life, did not protect him. They became a lens. They focused the agony. He was not just feeling the pain of the Blight; he was feeling it through the senses of every person he had unwritten. He felt the terror of the villagers at Smolensk as their world dissolved. He felt the confusion of the soldier whose loyalty was annihilated. He felt the love for a child that was scoured from a mother’s mind. He felt the loss of a thousand homes, a million moments, all at once.
— What… what is this? — Lacroix stammered, his composure shattering like glass.
— This is the bill, — Sineus said, his voice cold.
Lacroix screamed. It was not a human sound. It was the shriek of a mind being torn apart from the inside by a tsunami of pure, undiluted consequence. The shimmering shield around him flickered and died, the stolen memories returning to the great, wounded dark. He clawed at his temples, his body convulsing. The neat, sterile laboratory was filled with the sound of his agony. His consciousness, the vast, chilling intellect that saw the world as a set of principles, was being drowned in the pain it had created.
His mind did not just break. It shattered. It was obliterated by the sheer, crushing weight of the suffering he had inflicted. His physical body remained for a second, a hollow statue with a face locked in a mask of silent, unending horror. Then, his memory-script, his very Istopis, tore loose from his form. It was not cut. It was ejected, a screaming comet of light and pain hurled out of the physical world and into the endless, hungry dark of the Echoing Blight he had so eagerly fed. He was not dead. He was banished, a ghost condemned to haunt his own wasteland for eternity.
The body of Lucien Lacroix, now just an empty shell, a husk, collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
The laboratory fell silent. The hum of the machines faltered. Sineus swayed on his feet, a wave of nausea and vertigo washing over him. The backlash from the connection hit him like a physical blow. A searing, white-hot pain shot up his right arm. He looked down. The crystalline lattice that had started in his hand, the price he paid for Pyotr’s life, was no longer just in his hand. It had spread, crawling in a shimmering, geometric pattern up his forearm, almost to the elbow. The flesh beneath it was numb, cold, and dead. His arm was no longer his own. It was a monument to his choices.
The air in the laboratory was still and heavy. The fight was over.
The floor beneath his feet trembled, a low, grinding groan that vibrated up through the soles of his boots.
