The hum was gone.
That was the first thing he noticed. For days, it had been a constant pressure in his teeth, a bass note played on the strings of his bones. Now, there was only a profound, ringing silence. The air, once thick with the taste of ozone and hot copper, was just cold. It smelled of chilled stone and dust. The sick yellow light of the Echo Protocol was extinguished, leaving the vast chamber in a darkness broken only by the stark white light from the ruined corridor behind him.
A deep groan echoed through the black marble floor, a sound of stressed metal and cracking concrete. Dust rained down from the ceiling. The facility was dying. His training, the cold calculus of survival that had kept him alive in a dozen cities, screamed one word: run.
He forced himself to move, his legs heavy, his mind a raw, scraped-out hollow after the duel with Kestrel. Every psychic muscle ached. He stumbled over a piece of shattered brass, a fragment of the machine he had just unmade. The corridor beckoned, a promise of escape. But he couldn't take it. Not yet.
He turned back, his gaze sweeping the spot where Anja Petrova had stood. The floor was a chaos of black stone shards and gray dust. He walked the ground, his boots crunching on the debris. He was looking for a body. A scorch mark. Something to prove she had been there, to give a shape to the price she had paid.
There was nothing.
He spent two minutes that felt like an hour, a methodical grid search in the heart of the collapsing structure. No sign of her. No trace of the Aegis Conduit she had wielded. It was as if they had never existed. The physics of it was a blank page. The Oblivion blast hadn't been blocked; it had been consumed. The Conduit, a piece of the void itself, had drunk the tide of nothingness, and then it had drunk her, and then it had drunk itself. A hole in the world plugged by another hole.
A slab of concrete the size of a coffin lid crashed down from the ceiling ten meters away, shattering on the floor with a deafening crack. The impact sent a tremor through the deck. He had to go. The choice was made for him. Her sacrifice was a mystery he couldn't solve by dying here. The price of his survival was leaving her ghost behind.
He was turning for the corridor when a glint of silver caught his eye. It was small, half-buried in the fine black dust near where she had made her stand. He knelt, his knees protesting, and brushed the grit away with his glove.
It was a locket. Simple, silver, oval-shaped, its surface smooth and unadorned. He picked it up. The metal was still warm, a small, impossible pocket of heat in the freezing air of the tomb. It felt like living skin.
His thumb, clumsy in its leather glove, found the tiny clasp. It clicked open. He expected a photograph, a miniature portrait of a loved one, the kind of thing people carried into the dark. Her face, maybe. A child's.
The locket was empty. Both sides were just polished, vacant silver. A disappointment, sharp and cold, cut through his exhaustion. It was just a thing. A piece of jewelry.
He started to close it, but his thumb brushed the inner surface. A ghost of a sensation touched his mind. It wasn't a memory, not a full one. It was a fragment, a psychic residue so faint it was barely there. The warmth of a sun he'd never felt. The scent of salt and unfamiliar flowers. And a snatch of a song, a simple melody played on a stringed instrument, from a place that was not Russia, not America, not anywhere he had ever been.
This wasn't a memento. It was a clue.
A violent tremor shook the entire chamber. The main support beams shrieked, the sound of tearing steel echoing in the vast, dark space. The floor tilted, sending him stumbling. Time was gone. He closed his fist around the locket, its warmth a tiny, solid anchor, and ran.
The corridor he and Petrova had used was impassable, a tangle of fallen ductwork and fractured concrete slabs. Another way. He remembered the schematics she had drawn in the Hamburg tunnel. There were service shafts, ventilation systems. He followed the airflow, a basic survival trick, the cold draft a guide in the choking dust.
He moved through the dying facility, a ghost in a concrete graveyard. He climbed over buckled floor plates and squeezed through gaps in collapsed walls. The building groaned around him, settling into its own ruin. In one corridor, a bank of shattered monitoring screens lined the wall. On one of them, a piece of broken glass flickered with a final, weak pulse of television static, a faint, gray hiss that danced for a moment before dying into blackness. The machine's last, fading breath. The world was being scrubbed clean.
He found a ventilation shaft, its grate blown off by the pressure wave. It was a vertical climb up a narrow steel ladder, his muscles burning, his body screaming from the strain of the duel and the escape. The air grew colder, cleaner, tasting of snow and pine instead of dust and ruin. With a final, desperate effort, he pushed open a heavy grate at the top of the shaft and spilled out onto the snow.
He was on the mountainside, kilometers from the sanatorium's main entrance. Below him, the concrete complex was a groaning, dying beast, its floodlights flickering out one by one, surrendering the valley back to the night.
He lay in the snow, the profound cold seeping into his coat, his breath pluming in the frigid air. The only sound was the low moan of the wind through the skeletal birch trees. The sky above was a clean, star-dusted black, sharp and clear in a way he hadn't seen in weeks.
He opened his fist and looked at the silver locket in his palm. The war was over. Kestrel was gone. The Echo Protocol was a memory. But this small, warm piece of silver was a question that had no answer. It was a debt.
I knew this war wasn't over. It had just become my own.
