The silence in the Berlin cistern was a physical weight. It was the silence left behind by Valentin Orlov, the man from the Archive State who had offered them a gilded cage and promised a steel one when they refused. It was the silence of knowing Maximilian Voss, their true enemy, now had their playbook. They were ghosts in a machine that could predict their every move, hiding in a concrete lung deep beneath a city that wasn't theirs. The air tasted of damp concrete and the faint, metallic tang of ozone from Ansel’s jury-rigged recycler. It was the smell of defeat.
Ansel Stern sat on an overturned crate, his hands still, his gaze lost somewhere in the grimy floor. Zora Kos paced, a caged animal, her steps short and sharp, her wounded shoulder tight under its clean bandage. Ksenia Morozova stood before a faded transit map on the curved wall, her stillness a different kind of tension, the cold processing of a strategist with no moves left. They were waiting. For what, Sineus did not know. An idea. An attack. An ending.
A soft chime cut through the quiet. It came from a battered comms unit on a makeshift table, their last encrypted link to a world they had been forced to abandon. The screen, a scavenged panel no bigger than a dinner plate, flickered to life. A face resolved out of a storm of digital noise. It was Mila, the pragmatic leader of Sector K, the sprawling black market in the Moscow under-levels. Her face was grim, the lines around her eyes etched deeper than Sineus remembered. The signal was already degrading.
— They’re here, — Mila’s voice was tight, strained through layers of encryption and distance. — All of them.
— A raid? — Ksenia asked, turning from the map, her voice sharp and clinical.
Mila gave a short, bitter laugh that dissolved into static. — No. Not a raid. This is a reconquest. Ministry forces, but not like before. They move like… like they have a schematic. They’re not clearing sectors. They’re erasing them.
The team gathered around the small screen. The audio feed was a chaotic mess of shouting, the crack of scavenged pulse rifles, and the deeper, more rhythmic thud of military-grade weapons. It was the sound of a community fighting for its life.
— We built barricades, — Mila said, her eyes darting off-screen. — Food stalls, junked servers, anything we could find. They’re just… walking through them.
The video feed was a nightmare of flickering pixels, a reality fraying at the edges. Through the noise, Sineus could see it. The vibrant, chaotic heart of the under-levels, the one place where real food grew and unsanctioned music played, was being systematically dismantled. He saw the stall where he and Ksenia had met the terrified Dr. Brandt, now a pile of splintered wood. He saw the graffiti-covered walls he had admired, now pockmarked with energy weapon scars.
The people of Sector K were fighting with the desperate courage of the cornered. They were traders and artists, mechanics and cooks, armed with little more than salvaged tools and righteous anger. They were hopelessly, beautifully outmatched.
Then, the sound on the feed changed. The chaotic symphony of the firefight began to fade, replaced by a high, uniform hum. The video feed stabilized for a moment, captured by a security camera looking down a main thoroughfare. A squad of Shepherd Drones, the Ministry’s spider-like machines, hovered in perfect formation. They were not firing.
White gas poured from their vents.
It was thick and heavy, rolling down the corridor like a silent, suffocating wave. Pacifying gas. It was an area-denial tactic, designed for clean, efficient crowd control. Here, in the enclosed tunnels of the under-levels, it was a death sentence.
— They’re flooding the vents, — Mila’s voice was a choked whisper.
The shouting on the audio feed turned to coughing. A wave of desperate, hacking sounds that spread and then, one by one, fell silent. The hum of the drones was the only sound left. The resistance was collapsing. Not in a blaze of glory, but in a quiet, chemical sleep. Sineus watched, his hands clenched into fists, a thousand kilometers away, a spectator to the murder of his last hope. He was watching them pay the price for his war.
The drone’s camera panned down, its red optic sweeping over the now-still corridor. It focused on the central market square. Two figures in Ministry uniforms rappelled down from a gantry above. They unfurled a banner.
It was not the stark, geometric symbol of the Ministry of Public Harmony.
It was the clean, circular logo of MemTech. A smiling, abstract dove promising a better future. It hung there, pristine and white, over the silenced heart of the rebellion. Voss wasn’t just using the state’s military. He was claiming their victories. This was a corporate takeover, executed with public assets.
The screen flickered, the image of the banner wavering like a reflection in disturbed water. For a second, Sineus thought he saw the ghost of a different banner behind it, one of the protest signs from the Datenspuk in the library. Then the signal died.
Static. Then blackness.
The comms unit went silent. The only light in the cistern was the single, bare bulb overhead. Mila was gone. Sector K was gone. Their entire support network in Moscow, the web of contacts and favors and safe houses Mila had commanded, had been wiped from the map in under ten minutes.
Sineus stared at the dark screen. His own face looked back at him, a pale, hollow-eyed ghost superimposed over the memory of that final, insulting image. The flickering reflection was gone, replaced by a flat, dead surface.
— They’re all gone, — Zora whispered. The fury had drained from her face, leaving something empty and brittle. Her good hand was clenched so tight her knuckles were white.
Ansel did not move. He just stared at the floor, at a puddle of murky water that reflected nothing. He had built the air purifiers for Das Gewirr. He had helped wire parts of Sector K. He was a man who built things, and he had just watched his world be un-built.
Ksenia remained by the wall, a statue carved from ice. Her face was a mask of cold, analytical calm, but her eyes were fixed on the dark screen, processing the strategic reality. Their chances of survival had been low before. Now, the numbers didn't bear thinking about. They were an island. No, they were less than that. They were four people in a concrete bottle, floating in an ocean of enemies.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. The low hum of the air recycler was the only sound. It was the sound of borrowed time. They had chosen to hunt, to be proactive, to take the fight to the enemy. And the price was this. The price was watching your allies be dismantled with chilling efficiency while you were too far away to do anything but bear witness. The price was the silence that now filled this room.
The damp air was cold, carrying the smell of wet earth and rust. A single drop of water fell from a crack in the ceiling, hitting the puddle at Ansel’s feet with a soft, final sound.
