The truck was a stolen box of misery, a ZIS-151 military transport that smelled of diesel and wet wool. It groaned and shuddered along a road that was little more than a rumor on a map, a dead mining track swallowed by the Soviet backcountry. Sineus held the wheel, his knuckles white, his gaze fixed on the endless expanse of white. The world had been bled of all color, leaving only the snow, the black skeletons of birch trees, and a sky the color of a dirty bandage. They were a ghost moving through a ghost of a country, heading for a place that officially did not exist. Kholodny-12.
Beside him, Anja Petrova was a study in stillness. She held the heavy case containing the Aegis Conduit on her lap, her posture rigid, her eyes scanning the oppressive emptiness. They had not spoken for nearly an hour. There was nothing to say. The silence in the cab was as vast and cold as the landscape outside. Hope was a luxury they had burned for fuel kilometers ago. Now, all that remained was the grim calculus of the mission: find the Echo Protocol, use the Aegis, and pray they didn't unmake a piece of the world in the process.
He drove at a steady sixty kilometers per hour, the engine’s drone the only sound in the universe. The silence outside the truck was wrong. It wasn't peace; it was a vacuum. No birds. No wind in the skeletal trees. Nothing. It was the kind of absolute quiet that precedes a killing frost, a silence that felt heavier than sound. He felt it first as a pressure behind his eyes, a familiar thrum of psychic contamination that was growing steadily stronger. The air in the cab grew thick, charged with an energy that had no source.
— Anything? — Petrova’s voice was a low rasp, cutting through the engine’s drone.
— Just the cold, — he lied. But she knew. He could see it in the way her gaze sharpened, the way her hand tightened on the handle of the case. She couldn’t feel it the way he could, but she could read the signs in him. The contamination was at eighty-five percent and climbing, a tide of wrongness flooding the valley.
Then he saw it. A dark patch on the frozen road ahead. A puddle. It was impossible. The temperature was well below freezing, the snow packed hard and dry. Yet there it was, a small, circular mirror of black water, steaming faintly in the frigid air. A localized rupture. A place where the rules had been bent until they broke. He slowed the truck, his hands tight on the wheel, his senses screaming a silent alarm.
As they drew alongside it, he glanced down. The puddle did not reflect their stolen truck. For three seconds, the water showed a different time. It held a perfect, clear image of a column of old military transports, their canvas tops dark with snow, soldiers in heavy winter coats huddled in the back. A ghost of a memory, burned into the road itself. A Judas Pane. The image flickered, shot through with a greasy shimmer of visual static, and then it was gone. The puddle once again reflected the gray, indifferent sky.
The pressure in his head intensified, and with it came a new sensation. A taste. It was the taste of ozone and hot copper, the flavor of a live wire on the tongue. It was the taste of static. The psychic noise was no longer a distant hum or a flicker at the edge of his vision. It was inside his mouth, a physical presence. The world’s memory was not just fraying here; it was being actively, violently overwritten. The subjugation was nearly complete.
He slammed his foot on the brake. The truck skidded, its heavy tires screeching in protest as it slid to a halt in the middle of the dead road. The engine sputtered and died, plunging them into the profound, unnatural silence.
Petrova stared at him, her face a pale mask in the gloom of the cab.
— What is it?
Sineus looked past her, his eyes fixed on the cluster of low, concrete buildings that had just appeared over the rise, the ghost town of Kholodny-12. The windows were all dark. The streets were empty. But the air was screaming.
— We’re too late.
The engine ticked as it cooled, the sound loud in the crushing stillness. Snow began to fall again, each flake landing without a sound on the truck’s cold hood.
Ahead, a single light switched on in a dark window.
