The decision was a physical thing. It settled in the air of Das Gewirr, changing the pressure. The arguments were over. The debate had been settled by the clang of Sineus’s hand on a steam pipe. Now came the quiet, frantic work of erasure. They were leaving. They were going to war.
Ansel Stern moved with the grim efficiency of a man dismantling his own heart. He placed five small, grey discs at key structural points around the library’s main chamber, his movements precise and ritualistic. Mem-charges. They were not bombs. Bombs were loud and stupid. These were elegant, quiet, and far more vicious. They did not destroy things. They just made the world forget things had ever been there.
"A clean break," Ansel muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. He tapped the screen of his datapad, his fingers smudged with grime. A timer appeared, its numbers a stark, clean white against the dark background. Eight minutes. That was the price of their escape, measured in the currency of time they did not have.
Zora Kos worked nearby, her movements sharp and angry. She stuffed gear into a worn satchel, a focused fury in the way she handled the equipment. The Static Veil jammers, crude devices that could wrap them in a small bubble of anonymity, went in first. Then her custom light projector, the tool of her art, her only weapon against the blank-faced conformity of the city above. A dark patch stained the shoulder of her jacket where the energy bolt had torn through. She moved as if the pain was just another inconvenience, another part of the world to be ignored.
Ksenia Morozova, the ex-archivist, was methodical. Her task was the most important. She carefully wrapped the Volkov Codex in a waterproof satchel. The book was their map, their bible, their bomb-making manual. It was the mind of a dead man who had seen this future coming. Ksenia handled it with the reverence of a priestess and the pragmatism of a soldier. Its weight was more than just paper and synth-leather; it was the weight of a truth that could shatter the world.
Sineus watched them, a commander observing his fractured, perfect army. A paranoid guardian, a wounded artist, a cautious strategist. And him. The cause of all this. He had made the choice. He had traded their safety for a chance to matter. Now, he had to make sure the price was worth it. He took one last look around the library, this impossible sanctuary of truth.
He walked past shelves groaning with the weight of real paper books, their spines cracked, their pages smelling of dust and time. He ran a hand over a display case containing a collection of 20th-century film cameras, their lenses like dead, glassy eyes. This place was a memory. A physical, tangible memory of a world before the great, smiling erasure. It was everything they were fighting for, collected in one dusty, indefensible basement. And he was choosing to abandon it. The choice was simple: stay and die with the truth, or leave and try to weaponize it. The price of his decision was this room. This sanctuary.
He saw his reflection in the glass of the camera case. It was thin, tired. Behind him, the library wavered, the shelves of books flickering for a half-second as if they were already a memory, a ghost of a place that used to be. The flickering reflection wasn't a ghost from the past this time. It was a premonition of the void they were creating by their own hand. He accepted it. He turned his back on the books and the ghosts. The proactive reclamation of their world had begun, and its first casualty was their home.
A low thud echoed from the surface, a sound that vibrated through the concrete floor. It was the sound of a breaching charge.
"They’re here," Ksenia said, her voice calm, stating a fact. The Ministry police were at the door.
Ansel checked his timer. Two minutes left. Not enough.
"Move," Sineus ordered. There was no time for another plan. There was only the tunnel.
He led them to a section of the wall that looked like solid concrete but wasn't. Ansel had found it months ago, an undocumented maintenance shaft from a forgotten phase of the city’s construction. Zora pulled a lever hidden behind a loose conduit, and a section of the wall ground open, revealing a maw of absolute darkness. The air that billowed out was cold and smelled of damp earth and rust, a smell older than the city itself.
They slipped through the opening one by one, leaving the warm, dusty light of the library behind. Sineus was the last to go. He looked back at the shelves, at the silent testament to a world worth remembering. Then he stepped through, and the heavy door slid shut behind him, the sound of its closing final and absolute. They were in the deep, the unknown. They were no longer hiding. They were hunting.
Back in the main chamber of Das Gewirr, the timer on Ansel’s datapad hit zero. There was no explosion. No fire. Just a soft, pervasive hum that lasted for less than a second, a sound like a single, plucked string on a massive, invisible instrument. The five mem-charges pulsed, releasing a wave of pure erasure. The recent history of the room, the heat signatures of their bodies, the lingering traces of their arguments and their fear, were wiped clean. The library was still there, but the memory of them was gone.
Thirty seconds later, the main entrance to the library blew inward in a cloud of dust and shattered metal. A squad of eight Pacifier Frames, their white and grey armor pristine, moved into the room. Their movements were silent, efficient, their red optical sensors sweeping the chamber. They found nothing. Just a silent, dusty library, filled with old books that no one had touched in years. The honey pot was empty. The flies were gone.
In the darkness of the tunnel, Sineus paused, listening. The silence was complete.
"They’ll be searching the upper levels for hours," Ksenia whispered, her voice close in the oppressive dark.
"Good," Sineus said. He activated a small hand lamp, its beam cutting a sharp cone through the blackness. The tunnel ahead was narrow, cylindrical, and slick with moisture. It was a path to nowhere, which was exactly where they needed to go. "That gives us time."
He looked at his team, their faces pale and strange in the harsh light of the lamp. They were fugitives, stripped of their home, hunted by the most powerful entities in the world. But for the first time, they were not running away from something. They were moving toward it.
— Our first target is information, — Sineus said, his voice echoing slightly in the confined space. — We need to find out who has the technology to mimic an innate talent. We need a name.
And then they would find him.
And they would cut his fingers off the switch.
He turned and walked deeper into the darkness, and the others followed.
