The quiet of the Burrow was a weapon. It was a silence bought with kilometers of dead fiber-optic cable and the ghosts of a forgotten internet. In the main chamber of the Prague safehouse, the air was warm, scrubbed clean by Ansel’s jury-rigged purifiers. It smelled of hot electronics and, somewhere deeper in the warren of hidden rooms, the promise of real food. For now, Sineus and Ksenia Morozova worked at a clean table under the harsh, honest light of a single portable lamp.
Between them lay the disassembled guts of a Static Veil jammer. It was a newer model, scavenged from a MemTech defector’s cache in Berlin. More powerful, more stable, and, according to Ansel, more likely to melt into a puddle of slag if they calibrated it wrong. Zora was sleeping off a hole in her shoulder, a souvenir from the Ministry of Public Harmony’s aggressive customer service program. Ansel was somewhere in the Ossuary’s deeper tunnels, his paranoia a better perimeter alarm than any sensor. So the work fell to them.
Ksenia’s hands moved with the unnerving precision of a bomb disposal expert. Her fingers, long and pale, adjusted a micro-potentiometer with a pair of ceramic tweezers. She was all logic, her focus absolute. She saw the device as a system of variables, a machine to be understood and optimized. Her world was one of probabilities and standard deviations.
Sineus did not see the machine. He felt the field it was meant to generate. His own work was done without tools. He held his hand over the jammer’s exposed memetic core, a cloudy quartz crystal that pulsed with a faint, internal light. He wasn't measuring its output; he was listening to its potential, feeling for the dissonant hum that meant the chaotic Memorum it would project was unstable. His talent was not in the hardware. It was in the ghost.
He guided her adjustments with quiet words. A little more gain on the primary coil. Attenuate the feedback loop. His intuition and her logic. They were building a weapon together.
— You think like your ancestor, — Ksenia said, her voice a low murmur that did not break her concentration. She did not look up from the circuit board. The statement was not an accusation. It was a diagnosis. She gestured with the tweezers toward the Volkov Codex, which sat closed at the edge of the table, a block of forbidden history. — All grand strategy. World-breaking ideas.
She paused, her eyes narrowing as she seated a tiny capacitor. — I just see the variables.
Sineus watched her work. He thought of the plan they now carried, the plan to hijack the Chorus Spire. A plan born from his ancestor’s mad, brilliant philosophy. A truth so loud it shatters the walls. It was a fanatic’s dream. He saw the reflection of their two faces on the polished black casing of the jammer, distorted and drawn by the curve of the metal. The light from the lamp flickered for a moment, and their faces seemed to merge and pull apart.
— I need someone who sees the variables, — he replied, his voice quiet but firm. He met her eyes as she finally looked up. The moment was a choice, a price paid in the currency of honesty. He was giving her a piece of himself to hold.
He looked back at the device, at the faint, shimmering reflection. — Or I’ll just be another fanatic.
The admission hung in the air between them. It was not a confession of weakness. It was a statement of fact, a recognition of the poison that came with his power. It was the reason he needed them. The reason he needed her. Ksenia held his gaze for a long second, her expression unreadable. Then she gave a single, sharp nod. The analysis was complete. The trust was calibrated. She went back to her work, the silence between them now heavier, more solid. It was the silence of a pact made without promises.
They worked for another twenty minutes, the only sounds the soft click of tools and the hum of the purifiers. The jammer was reassembled, its casing now cool and inert. It was ready.
The sound of footsteps broke the quiet. Zora and Ansel entered the chamber, moving out of the shadows of a connecting tunnel. Zora’s arm was still in a sling, but the color had returned to her face. The defiance in her eyes was bright as ever. Ansel looked as he always did: like a man who had just seen a ghost and was expecting another one to arrive at any moment. The breather was over. The machine was ready to move again.
Ksenia looked up from the table, her work finished. She closed the diagnostic program on her datapad. Her face was grim, all business. The moment of connection with Sineus was filed away. The variables had changed again.
— It’s done, — she announced, her voice cutting through the quiet hum of the room. She looked at each of them in turn, her gaze finally resting on Sineus. — The plan to raid the Neptune Platform is greenlit.
The quiet was over. The hunt was on.
