The chamber was a tomb for a god that was still being born. It was vast and circular, the walls made of a polished black stone that drank the light. At its center, the Echo Protocol turned. It was a monstrous orrery of interlocking brass spheres, rotating in a complex, silent ballet. It cast its own sick, yellow light, a glow that didn't illuminate so much as stain the air. The hum from the tunnels was a physical presence here, a bass note that vibrated up from the floor and into the marrow of his bones. The air was cold, sterile, and thick with the taste of ozone and hot copper.
Sineus raised his pistol, the checkered grip a familiar, solid anchor in a world that had come loose from its moorings. He had seven rounds. It felt like seven fewer than he needed.
A shimmer in the air near the machine coalesced, gathering the jaundiced light into a form. It was Kestrel. Not flesh and blood, but a construct of light and memory, more solid than any Judas Pane reflection. He wore the face Sineus remembered from the academy, the one from before the fire, but his eyes were wrong. They were not eyes. They were windows into a storm of television static.
— I knew you'd come, — Kestrel’s voice said. It didn't come from the shimmering mouth, but from the walls themselves, a calm, resonant echo. It wasn't a greeting. It was a statement of ownership.
The attack was not a sound or a blow. It was a memory, shoved into Sineus’s skull like a railroad spike. The lab explosion, four years ago. Not his memory of it, the one he had carefully trimmed and cauterized, but Kestrel’s. The shriek of overloading machinery, the flash of white fire, the feeling of being unmade, atom by atom, his very identity torn into screaming fragments. The pain was absolute, a pure, distilled agony. The air in the chamber crackled, and faint, greasy static danced at the edges of Sineus's vision.
Before he could build a wall against it, another memory hit him. Istanbul, 1959. A botched extraction on a rain-slicked rooftop. The face of a young Turkish asset, a girl named Elif, her eyes wide with terror as she fell, her hand slipping from his grasp. It was a failure he had buried, a scar he had chosen not to cut. Kestrel had found it in the wreckage of his mind, polished it, and now used it as a whip.
— She trusted you, — Kestrel’s voice whispered, a serpent in his own thoughts. — Feel it again.
Sineus gritted his teeth, the coppery taste in his mouth intensifying as warm blood trickled from his nose. He could build psychic walls, try to weather the storm of his own failures. It was the textbook defense. It was also a guaranteed loss. The price of defense was focus, and Kestrel had an arsenal of his sins to throw at him. He made a different choice. He wouldn't defend. He would attack.
He ignored the pain, the guilt. He extended his senses past Kestrel’s projection, past the taunts, and felt the architecture beneath. The thing holding Kestrel together wasn't his own memory; his own was just ash. It was a chaotic lattice of stolen trauma. The last, violent moments of the fifty souls from Kholodny-12. The terror of Morozov's victims. A thousand screaming ghosts crammed into one psychic space, their agony the fuel for Kestrel's resurrection.
Don't cut the man, he thought, his focus narrowing to a single, sharp point. Cut the legion.
With a focused exertion of will, he performed the Cut. Not on Kestrel, but on one of the stolen memories propping him up—the memory of a Soviet soldier, no older than twenty, dying in the snows of Stalingrad, his mother's name on his lips. Kestrel’s form convulsed violently. A face that was not his own, bearded and gaunt, screamed silently from within the shimmering projection. The deep hum of the chamber stuttered, becoming a discordant, painful screech.
Sineus didn't stop. He found another thread—a pilot burning in his cockpit over Korea, the smell of gasoline and cooked meat—and cut it. Kestrel staggered, his form flickering like a faulty neon sign. The static composing his body grew coarser, less defined, the signal breaking up. Sineus felt a sharp, grinding pain behind his eyes, a spike being driven into his skull. He was bleeding energy, but Kestrel was bleeding ghosts.
He severed a dozen more in rapid succession. A woman in a Parisian cellar, a traitor's garrote tightening around her throat. A child in a bombed-out Dresden apartment. Each cut was a silent scream that only he could hear. Each one made Kestrel’s form more transparent, the stolen faces within his projection more visible. The confident smirk was gone, replaced by a rictus of effort. He was coming apart.
Kestrel let out a laugh, a dry, rasping sound like grinding glass. His form stabilized, though it was now barely more than a silhouette of shimmering, agitated static.
— You think this is a victory? — he hissed, the voice thin and stretched. — You think you can just turn it off?
He was beaten in the duel, and he knew it. But he had one last card to play.
— This machine isn't just a weapon, brother. It's tied into the station's reactor. A failsafe. My design, — Kestrel’s voice was weak, but laced with a final, absolute triumph. — You destroy it, the reactor vents. A blast of pure Oblivion. It will scour this valley from the map and leave an Ashen Tract a hundred kilometers wide. A hole in the world where nothing will ever exist again.
Kestrel’s shimmering form gestured to the humming brass spheres.
— So that's the choice. Kill the machine and murder this entire territory in a flash of nothingness. Or walk away, let it live, and I give the world one mind, one pain. Your move.
The pistol in Sineus’s hand felt impossibly heavy, a useless lump of steel. Seven rounds against a man who was already a ghost. Seven rounds against a machine that would kill the world if he touched it. The choice was a gun to his own head, with two triggers. The brass spheres of the Echo Protocol continued their slow, indifferent rotation, humming the end of the world.
