The freight car was a box of cold, resonant steel, and it smelled of rust and old grain. It rumbled north through a world that had been bled of all color, leaving only the endless white of the snow and the black skeletons of birch trees. Sineus sat with his back against the shuddering wall, his pistol resting heavy in his lap. The cold was a physical presence, a thing that seeped through his coat and into his bones, a deep, patient ache that felt permanent. He was on watch. He was always on watch.
Across from him, Anja Petrova was asleep. She was curled into a tight ball for warmth, her face pale and drawn in the sliver of gray light that cut through a gap in the heavy door. Her arms were wrapped around the case that held the Aegis Conduit, the dense, black artifact that was their only insurance against the end of the world. She held it like a mother holds a child, a gesture of fierce, unconscious protection. Seeing her there, a KGB physicist who had built a weapon of mass psychic destruction, now trusting him enough to sleep, was another layer of absurdity in a mission built on impossible choices.
The rhythmic clack of the wheels on the track was a hypnotic, grinding mantra. Vienna. Berlin. Hamburg. Zurich. Finland. Each name was a station on a line that led deeper into madness. He was a rogue agent of the CIA, disavowed and hunted, now traveling on papers provided by that same agency, carrying a doomsday weapon into the heart of the Soviet Union. The price for defying Thorne had been his identity, his network, his place in the world. All he had left was the mission.
He shifted, the movement stiff and loud in the quiet car. He ejected the magazine from his pistol, the metallic click unnaturally sharp. He counted the rounds by feel. Fourteen. Not enough for a war, but perhaps enough for the end of one. He reached into their shared pack and felt the meager contents: two days of hard rations, a medical kit, and a map of the northern Urals. The narrowness of their margin for error was a physical weight.
The train’s rhythm was a taunt. It hammered Kestrel’s words into his skull, a phrase that had been echoing in the quiet moments since Hamburg. I’m just finishing the job you started. The memory of the lab fire, the one he had so carefully cut and cauterized in his own mind, tried to surface. He pushed it down, but the edges were frayed. The psychic scar was itching.
He looked at his own reflection in the grimy pane of glass set high in the door. For a bare second, the endless blur of white snow behind him was replaced by the roaring orange of a fire, the image of a screaming face he refused to remember. A flicker of visual static crawled like frost across the edges of the glass, a faint, greasy shimmer. The world outside was stable, but the world inside his head was Kestrel’s playground. The subjugation was not of a city, but of his own past.
Petrova stirred, her eyes opening. They were dark and clear, holding no trace of sleep. She watched him for a moment, her gaze analytical, as if measuring the strain she saw on his face. She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t offer words. She simply reached into the pack, broke a thick, dry biscuit in half, and held a piece out to him.
He took it. The silence between them was not empty. It was a shared space, built from the rubble of a Berlin church, the sewers of Hamburg, and the cold pragmatism of a Finnish rail yard. They ate the stale biscuit, the act of sharing food a communion more real than any spoken promise. It was the grim solidarity of the last two soldiers in a forgotten war.
She finally spoke, her voice a low rasp.
— How long until the border?
— Six hours. Maybe seven, — he replied. His own voice sounded foreign.
— And then?
— Then we find a truck. And we drive east to Kholodny-12.
She nodded, her gaze turning to the case beside her. The Aegis Conduit. A piece of the void given form, a shield that would consume the one who wielded it. Her expression was unreadable, a scientist looking at a problem whose solution was her own death.
Sineus pulled the manifest from his coat pocket. The one Thorne had given them. Crisp, official, stamped with the seal of a Soviet agricultural collective. A lie printed on paper to move them across a line on a map. The whole world was a lie, and he was running out of truths to hold onto. Kholodny-12. The "Cold-12," a ghost on the map, a place erased from official records to become the stage for Kestrel’s symphony of madness.
The long, steady clatter of the wheels began to change. The rhythm faltered, the hypnotic beat giving way to a slower, grinding protest of steel on steel. The train was slowing.
He looked at Petrova. She was already moving, her actions economical and precise. She checked the straps on the Conduit’s case, pulling them tight. She looked at him, a question in her eyes. He gave a single, sharp nod.
He moved to the heavy sliding door, his gloved hand finding the cold iron of the latch. He pulled it back just enough to let a knife of frigid air slice into the car.
The snow fell in thick, silent flakes, muffling the world. The air grew still, heavy with the promise of a deeper cold ahead.
They had to jump before the border checks began.
