The single light in the window was a yellow stain in the gray twilight. It was an invitation. A dare. A figure stepped out from the shadow of a concrete apartment block, moving with a calm that did not belong in this dead place. He stopped at the edge of the snow-dusted street, not fifty meters away, and waited. It was Kestrel. He wore a heavy wool coat, unbuttoned to the cold, and his hands were empty. He wasn’t here for a fight. He was here to take a bow.
Sineus felt Petrova tense beside him, her breath a small, white cloud in the frigid air. Kestrel’s face was a pale oval in the gloom, and when he spoke, the words were not carried on the wind. They arrived directly inside Sineus’s skull, a clean, sterile intrusion. Behold, true peace. He made a small gesture with one hand, a conductor calling his orchestra to attention. He gestured at the silent, waiting town.
And the town began to scream.
It was a silent scream, a psychic storm that hit Sineus like a physical blow. A man stumbled out onto his porch, his face a mask of terror, his mouth open in a soundless cry as he charged an imaginary machine-gun nest from a war fought two decades ago. Through a grimy window, Sineus saw a woman clawing at her own face, her body convulsing as her mind burned with the memory of a fire that wasn't there. A child in the street, who had been dragging a stick through the snow, suddenly dropped and began to crawl, trying to get under a tank that only he could see. Fifty souls, all of them drowning in other people’s deaths. This was the Echo Protocol’s final performance. This was the subjugation of history itself.
He couldn't just watch. The refusal was a reflex, a law of his own physics. He reached out with his mind, the cold of the valley floor a distant thing compared to the ice that flooded his veins when he used his gift. He pushed past the wall of psychic noise, searching for a single mind, a single thread of original memory to anchor. He found the man on the porch and tried to perform the Cut, to sever the parasitic memory of a forgotten battle. He had to try. The hope that he could fix this was the only weapon he had left.
It was like trying to cut the ocean with a razor. There was no single thread. The man’s mind was a solid wall of screaming trauma, a thousand dying moments fused into an impenetrable mass. The psychic force of it threw Sineus back, not physically, but mentally, a door slammed shut in his consciousness. He tried again, pushing against the woman in the window, then the child in the street. Nothing. His power, the one thing that defined him, was useless. The psychic static was no longer a hum or a taste; it was a deafening roar, an avalanche of pure chaos that buried everything.
The horror of it was absolute. The sheer scale of the violation, the fifty lives turned into a puppet show of agony, crashed over him. This was Kestrel’s victory, born from the fire of their shared past, a monstrous, twisted fulfillment of a mission Sineus no longer understood. The strength went out of his legs. He dropped to his knees in the snow, the cold biting through the fabric of his trousers, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. His control, the iron discipline that had been his shield for years, shattered into dust.
As he knelt there, broken in the silent, screaming town, a small weight shifted in his coat pocket. The silver flask, Misha’s gift, slipped free. It made no sound as it fell, landing softly in the deep snow. It vanished beneath the white, a final, quiet surrender. The last token of a friendship that had started this whole damn thing, gone. Unnoticed.
Kestrel watched him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. He had made his point. He had proven that Sineus’s struggle was meaningless, that his own vision of peace through shared agony was the only truth left. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod, a gesture of finality.
The snow fell, thick and silent, on the dead town. The air was cold and clean.
Kestrel turned his back and left them to the silence.
