The choice was a gun with two triggers. Kill the machine and murder the valley. Or let it live and Kestrel would murder the world, one mind at a time. The brass spheres of the Echo Protocol kept turning, indifferent. The hum was the only answer in the room, a sound that promised only static and subjugation. Seven rounds in his pistol. A useless weight.
Kestrel’s form, a silhouette of agitated television snow, pulsed with a weak, triumphant energy. He was a ghost held together by stolen pain, and he had won.
Sineus looked at the ghost of his friend, then at the machine that was its soul. He had tried to cut the legion of stolen memories that gave Kestrel form, and it had broken him. But there was one memory left. The one they both shared. The one Kestrel had used as a whip. The lab. The fire. The scream of overloading machinery. Kestrel had built his new self on that foundation of shared trauma.
He wouldn't defend against it. He wouldn't excise it. He would own it.
Sineus let the memory rise. The smell of burning insulation. The shriek of failing capacitors. The flash of white fire that had remade one of them and birthed the other. He didn't push it away. He pulled it closer, wrapping his own consciousness around the memory not as a victim, but as a witness. He accepted the scar.
Then, with a final, focused act of will, he performed the Cut. He severed the memory of the lab explosion not from himself, but from Kestrel. He cut the foundation stone from the house of ghosts.
Kestrel’s shimmering form did not scream. It simply came apart. The stolen faces within the static—the soldiers, the pilots, the children—flickered and vanished. The static itself, the very substance of the ghost, collapsed inward. It dissolved into a final, silent hiss, leaving nothing behind but the cold, humming air of the chamber. The duel was over.
The heavy vault door to the corridor slid open again with that same, too-quiet hiss. Sineus spun, pistol raised, expecting Morozov and his men to come for the cleanup.
It was Anja Petrova.
She stood in the doorway, a dark silhouette against the stark white light of the tunnel. Her lab coat was torn at the shoulder, and a dark, ugly bruise was blooming on her cheekbone, but she was free. In her hands, she held the Aegis Conduit. The seamless black rectangle seemed to drink the light around it, a piece of the void given form. She had escaped. She had recovered the key.
The two-pronged plan was alive again.
She walked toward him, her steps even and deliberate. She didn't look at the empty space where Kestrel had been. She didn't look at the rotating brass spheres of her monstrous creation. Her eyes, dark and filled with a terrible, crystalline resolve, were locked on his. She stopped a few meters away, holding the Aegis Conduit in a two-handed grip, its unnatural coldness not seeming to affect her.
She gave him a single, sharp nod.
It was not a question. It was a statement. I am ready. Are you? It was the final confirmation of the part of the plan they had never spoken aloud. The part where she paid the price.
Sineus felt the choice settle on him, a weight heavier than the humming machine, heavier than the mountain above them. His every instinct, every piece of training from the CIA, screamed at him to take control. To take the Conduit from her. He was the operative. He was the one trained to make the sacrifice. It was his responsibility to see it through, to guarantee the outcome, to be the one who paid. His way was certain. Her way was a gamble on a woman he’d known for less than a month. A gamble on trust.
He thought of Elif, falling from the rooftop in Istanbul. He had been in control then, too. He thought of Misha, his mind a screaming ruin in a Vienna apartment. He had failed to protect him. His control had failed. Petrova’s way offered a chance at two victories. His way guaranteed one death.
He made the irreversible choice. He would not take the Conduit. He would trust her. The price was her life, a cost he would have to carry. He gave a slow, deliberate nod in return.
— Do it, — he said, his voice a dry rasp.
That was all. He turned his back on her, a final act of faith, and faced the machine. He let go of the pistol, letting it hang from its lanyard at his wrist. He didn't need it. This was not a job for steel. He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, pushing past the ambient hum, past the psychic residue of Kestrel’s demise. He found the core of the Echo Protocol. It wasn't a physical component. It was a memory. The first memory, the one that gave the machine its purpose: a single, perfect, endlessly repeating loop of a man dying in agony. The seed of all the pain it harvested.
He wrapped his will around it. He pulled.
The hum of the chamber pitched upward, from a bass note to a piercing, mind-flaying shriek. The brass spheres spun faster, blurring into a golden smear. He felt the core memory resist, anchored to the machine's very existence. He pulled harder, pouring every ounce of his strength, his focus, his entire being into the single, silent act of unmaking.
The core memory tore loose.
For a single, perfect second, there was absolute silence. The shriek stopped. The hum died. The static in the air vanished.
Then the failsafe triggered.
It was not a sound. It was not an explosion. It was a wave of pure, silent, white Oblivion that erupted from the dead machine. A tide of absolute nothingness, un-creation itself, expanding to scour the valley from existence. It was the color of a world with no memory.
Behind him, Petrova raised the Aegis Conduit.
She didn't brace herself. She met the wave. The black rectangle in her hands did not block the tide of nothingness. It drank it. The white wave of Oblivion poured into the Conduit, vanishing into its impossible depths. The artifact did not glow; it simply became blacker, a hole in the world that was hungrier than the void it was consuming.
Petrova’s form began to dissolve. She didn't burn or break. Her edges simply frayed, turning into a fine, shimmering dust that was pulled into the Conduit along with the last of the Oblivion. Her face, calm and resolute to the very end, was the last thing to go. She vanished. The sacrifice was complete.
The chamber was still. The hum of the machine was gone.
The only sound was the soft patter of dust falling from the ceiling. The air, once thick with ozone and the taste of hot copper, was now just cold, smelling only of chilled stone.
