The floor beneath his feet trembled, a low, grinding groan that vibrated up through the soles of his boots. The constant, sterile hum of the Vaucanson Atelier, the sound of a thousand stolen memories being processed into weapons, faltered and died. It was replaced by the shriek of tortured metal and the deep, resonant thrum of mnemonic energy tearing itself apart. The stored power of the workshop, the very fuel of its annihilating purpose, was beginning to implode. The facility was collapsing.
A hand clamped down on his good arm, hard and grounding.
— Sineus! Move! — Alessandro’s voice was a raw bark, cutting through the haze of pain and psychic exhaustion. — Now!
Sineus stumbled, his legs clumsy, his mind still caught in the aftershock of the Mnemonic Bridge he had forged. The world was a smear of grey light and roaring sound. Alessandro pulled him, dragging him away from the husk of Lucien Lacroix and back toward the round iron door. The escape had begun. They had only minutes, maybe seconds, before the entire structure folded in on itself.
They plunged back into the disintegrating corridors. The paradoxes were gone, the screaming constructs dissolved into the greater chaos of the building’s death throes. Now it was just raw physics coming undone. Walls of brick and plaster flickered like faulty lanterns, showing glimpses of the Parisian night outside and then sealing over again. The floor beneath them buckled and heaved, and a section of the ceiling collapsed behind them in a shower of dust and splintered timber.
Alessandro led, his movements economical and sure, pulling Sineus through the unraveling maze. Sineus followed, his mind a storm of images: Elina turning to face the tide of ghosts, her face calm and absolute. Pyotr’s empty, beatific smile. The baker, Stefan, falling in a cloud of flour. A chain of severed threads, each one a life given so they could reach this moment. The weight of it was a physical thing, heavier than the collapsing building around them.
They found a service tunnel, a narrow iron-walled tube slick with chemical residue. It was a artery for the workshop’s waste, leading out toward the river.
— In! — Alessandro yelled, shoving him toward the opening.
They scrambled inside, crawling over each other in the cramped, dark space. They were not ten meters into the tunnel when the world behind them ended. There was no explosion, no fireball of conventional destruction. There was a sound of immense, impossible pressure, the sound of a giant fist closing, and then a wave of absolute silence that was so profound it hurt the ears. A flash of cold, violet light pulsed once, swallowing the corridor they had just left. The Vaucanson Atelier, the heart of Napoleon’s occult war machine, collapsed inward, unmaking itself.
They tumbled out of the end of the service tunnel, landing hard on the muddy bank of the Seine. They were alive. They had escaped. Covered in grime and the psychic dust of unmade memories, they got to their feet and looked back. Where the tall, narrow workshop had stood just moments before, there was now only a shimmering wound in the night air. It was a perfect circle of distorted reality, a contained and stable Lacuna. It did not spread. It did not hunger. It was a clean scar, the edge of it as neat as a line drawn by a surgeon. A monument to their victory, and to its cost.
Later, in the pre-dawn chill, they stood in the ruins of what had been their final command post. It was a wine cellar south of the city, now just a temporary camp for the survivors. Of the thirty who had begun the assault, twelve remained. The empty spaces on the benches where the others should have been were louder than any cannon fire. Victory felt like a defeat.
Sineus looked down at his right arm. The crystalline lattice had stopped spreading, solidifying into a permanent, shimmering gauntlet of dead flesh and captured light from his elbow to his fingertips. It did not hurt anymore. It felt like nothing at all, a cold, foreign object grafted to his body. A constant reminder of the price he had paid to connect a man to the consequences of his actions. The price of his new weapon.
He thought of the debts that had been paid. The blank memory-vial he had given the Golden Horde had bought them the manifests. The knowledge of his ancestral home had been the bait for Lacroix’s trap, a trap that had led them here. The enemy’s own research notes, captured in a prior raid, had given Alessandro the key to the Atelier’s wards. It was all a chain of causality, a series of threads tangled and cut, leading to this one, silent moment.
Alessandro stood beside him, a silhouette against the first grey light of dawn. He said nothing, just watched the city. They had won. They had destroyed the factory. They had stopped the mass production of the Lethe Mortar. It was a victory that would change the course of the war. But the war itself was not over.
The air smelled of damp earth and the cold, clean scent of coming rain. A single bell began to toll in a distant church, a sound that was simple and real.
The threat was gone. But the dead still needed counting.
