The path was clear. A 500-meter corridor of perfect, electronic silence carved through the guts of Moscow. Zora had done her work. Each of the eight Static Veil jammers hummed its dissonant song of erasure, a chorus of beautiful, weaponized noise that made the city’s nervous system blind. Sineus stood at the threshold of the final approach, the air in the maintenance tunnel cold and dead. Ksenia was a statue of coiled tension beside him, her eyes fixed on the chronometer on her wrist. Zora was a shadow at his other side, her breathing shallow, her hand resting on the hilt of a blade that was useless here. It was 02:59. One minute until the blind spot Ksenia had blackmailed into existence would open over the Chorus Spire. One minute until they began the final, impossible push. Hope was a dangerous, unfamiliar taste in his mouth.
He was about to give the signal to move.
The world did not explode. It cracked. A single, sharp report from directly above, like a giant snapping a bone. It was not the messy, blooming roar of a demolition charge. It was a sound of surgical precision. A circular section of the reinforced concrete ceiling, ten meters in diameter, simply vanished. Dust, fine as powdered bone, rained down, smelling of superheated rock and ozone. It did not fall in a cloud. It fell in a perfect, disciplined cylinder of debris.
Before the dust even hit the floor, they dropped. Eight of them. They descended on silent grav-chutes, their matte-black armor drinking the weak light. MemTech Special Forces. They landed without a sound, their movements not human. They were algorithms written in flesh and armor, their motions flowing with a liquid, predictive grace. They did not scan or react. They moved to where the team would be a half-second from now. Voss’s playbook. The trap at Site Anubis had not been a failure. It had been a final exam, and Voss had graded their every move.
— Contact! — Zora’s voice was a raw hiss as she drew her blade, a useless sliver of steel against the coming storm.
Ksenia already had her pulse rifle up, but she did not fire. The soldiers were not advancing on them. They flowed around them, their movements a seamless, choreographed ballet of violence. They ignored Sineus, the man whose face was plastered on every news feed as a global terrorist. They ignored Ksenia, the strategist with a rifle. They ignored Zora, the wounded fighter coiled to strike.
Their sole target was Ansel.
The old man had his pattern-sniffer half-raised, his face a mask of confusion. He was the guardian, the tech priest, the one who kept them breathing. He was not a soldier. The soldiers knew this. They flowed past the threats and converged on the engineer. One of them raised a hand, not with a weapon, but with a device that bloomed into a crackling web of blue light. An energy net.
Ansel had no time to cry out. The net enveloped him, and he convulsed once, a silent, electric shudder, before collapsing. He was a marionette with its strings cut. The entire ambush, from the first crack of the ceiling to Ansel’s capture, had taken less than five seconds.
They were a statue garden of shock. Sineus, Ksenia, Zora—all frozen as the MemTech team attached a line to the net. They were extracted as cleanly as they had arrived, drawn up through the hole in the ceiling into the darkness above. The operation was flawless, efficient, and utterly contemptuous. They had not come to fight a battle. They had come to collect an asset.
The hole in the ceiling remained, a perfect circle of blackness. The dust began to settle. The hum of Zora’s jammers seemed mocking now, a shield raised against an enemy who had never intended to attack them at all. The plan was dead. The assault on the Chorus Spire was a ghost, a memory of a future that would never happen.
Then the psychic echo hit Sineus.
It was not a thought. It was not a vision. It was a physical violation that began as a sharp, metallic taste at the back of his throat. A spike of ice-cold pain drove through his right eye. The sound of the tunnel vanished, replaced by a high, thin scream that was inside his own skull. He was seeing through two sets of eyes. He was feeling two bodies. His own, and Ansel’s.
Voss was not wasting any time. He was flensing him.
Sineus felt the raw, tearing sensation of his friend’s mind being peeled open, layer by layer. It was not a gentle probe. It was a butcher’s work, a psychic vivisection. He felt Ansel’s terror, a pure, animal fear that was a universe away from the man’s usual gruff paranoia. He felt the confusion, the pain, the indignity. It was a torrent of raw, unfiltered agony pouring directly into his own consciousness. This was not an interrogation. It was a harvest.
Through the storm of pain, Sineus felt the specific targets of Voss’s psychic scalpel. He was not looking for battle plans or passwords. He was looking for deeper things. He felt the memory of Ksenia’s face as she decoded the Codex, the feel of the old paper, the shimmer of the ink. Voss was ripping through Ansel’s mind, searching for the location of their most precious secret.
The echo intensified. Sineus staggered, a grunt of pain escaping his lips. He could feel Ansel’s mental defenses, the stubborn, jury-rigged walls he had built over a lifetime of paranoia, being torn down like rotten wood. And then Voss found it. The memory of the alcove in Das Gewirr. The loose floorboard. The oilcloth-wrapped package. The location of the Volkov Codex.
The secret was gone. All was lost.
The psychic feedback crested. Sineus saw one last, fleeting image through the storm. It was not a strategic location or a secret. It was a small, intensely personal detail. He saw Ansel’s hand, clenched into a fist, being forced open by an unseen pressure. The small, brass-cased compass, the one that never pointed north, fell from his grasp. It hit the cold, metal floor of a holding cell with a tiny, tinny clatter. Its needle spun uselessly, a frantic, silent dance in the sterile light. The guardian’s token, a symbol of a world with fixed points, was lost and forgotten.
The connection snapped.
Sineus collapsed to his knees, the sound of the tunnel rushing back in. He choked, the taste of blood thick in his mouth. A thin line of red trickled from his nose, tracing a path through the dust on his cheek.
— Sineus! — Ksenia was at his side, her hand on his shoulder. Zora stood over them, her blade held low, her eyes scanning the darkness, a wounded wolf guarding the pack.
He looked up, his vision swimming. He saw his own reflection in a grimy puddle on the floor. It was not the confident leader from minutes ago. It was the face of a man who had just been forced to watch his friend’s soul being stripped for parts. The flickering image showed only him, pale and broken. The team was gone. Only the pieces remained.
The dust continued to settle in the weak light. A single damaged conduit sparked, a tiny, rhythmic pop in the sudden, immense silence.
