The safe house was on the third floor of a building that smelled of boiled cabbage and damp regret. I took the stairs, my hand resting on the butt of the pistol tucked under my coat. Misha’s voice on the phone had been a frayed wire, spitting sparks of a terror I had never heard in him before. Fear was a tool in our trade, something to be measured and applied. For Misha Orlov, my handler and the closest thing I had to a friend, to be drowning in it meant the tide had come all the way in.
The door to his apartment was unlocked. It was ajar by a centimeter, a dark slice in the dim hallway. Misha was a man who triple-checked locks, who saw the world in terms of angles and exit strategies. An open door was not an invitation. It was a tombstone.
I pushed it open with two fingers. The air that rolled out was thick and wrong, heavy with a pressure that pushed against my eardrums. It smelled of ozone, the sharp scent of a high-voltage discharge, and something else underneath. Something coppery and old, like a room full of bad memories. The psychic contamination was a physical weight, a contamination level so high it felt like wading through engine grease. The world was already wrong in here.
The main room was neat. Too neat. A chair was tucked perfectly under a small writing desk. A book lay closed on the end table, its spine unbroken. Nothing was out of place, except for the man on the floor.
Misha was lying on his back in the center of the worn Persian rug. His coat was still on, his eyes wide open. He was alive; I could see the shallow, rapid flutter of his chest. But he wasn't there. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, but he wasn't seeing it. His eyes were strobing, flickering with a frantic, internal light show, as if he were watching a dozen films at once. The courier’s warning hit me like a slug of cheap gin: echoes.
Faint, shimmering afterimages, like heat haze, flickered in the air around his head. For a split second, I saw the outline of a soldier’s helmet, then the glint of a bayonet, then the cracked glass of a cockpit canopy. They were ghosts of moments, bleeding into the room. His fingers twitched against the floorboards, tapping out a frantic rhythm that wasn't his.
I knelt beside him, the floorboards cold through the knee of my trousers. His skin was clammy, his breathing a fast, shallow pant. There was no response in his eyes, just the relentless, silent scream of the light show behind them. I had to know what they had done to him. I had to see the shape of the weapon.
I closed my eyes and reached out with my mind. It was a familiar process, like tuning a shortwave radio, searching for a specific frequency in the noise of the world. I pushed past the thick, greasy residue in the room and touched the edge of his consciousness.
It was not a mind. It was a maelstrom.
The moment I made contact, the storm hit me. A hurricane of screaming static and stolen agony. I was ripped from the quiet Vienna apartment and thrown into a collage of other men’s wars. The shriek of a dive bomber over a steel-gray ocean. The wet, choking smell of a jungle trench under monsoon rains. The roar of a tank engine and the taste of diesel fumes. It was a hundred different battlefields, a thousand different deaths, all happening at once.
I saw through a dying pilot’s eyes as his plane spiraled toward the earth, the cockpit filled with fire. I felt the cold shock of a knife in the ribs in a muddy field in a war that had ended before I was born. I heard the desperate prayers of a radioman in a foxhole as artillery shells walked toward him. It was a psychic plague, a chaotic overwrite of a man’s soul with the shredded trauma of forgotten soldiers. This was Echoing. The courier hadn't been afraid. He had been sane.
The sheer force of it, the chaos of identity, almost broke my hold. This wasn't the clean subjugation of a single memory. This was the annihilation of a man, his entire history paved over with the screaming ghosts of others. I pulled back, gasping, the floor of the apartment solidifying around me again. My heart hammered against my ribs. The price of this weapon wasn't just a memory. It was everything. Misha was gone.
My own training, the discipline that let me perform my own cold surgeries, was the only thing that kept me anchored. I pushed past the grief, walled it off. That could come later. Now, I needed a name. An attack this powerful, this precise, left a signature. A psychic fingerprint.
I let my senses expand again, carefully this time, sifting through the psychic shrapnel in the room. I ignored the fading echoes of the dead soldiers and searched for the hand that had thrown them. I looked for the unique resonance of the operator, the specific frequency of the mind that had wielded this nightmare.
I found it. A thin, sharp signal underneath the roar of the storm. It was faint, but it was clean. And it was familiar.
A cold dread, colder than any alley anomaly, washed through me. I knew that signature. I had worked alongside it, fought back-to-back with it. I had trusted my life to it. It was a frequency I had felt go silent four years ago in a blast of fire and white light.
The signature was Kestrel’s.
The world tilted. The neat little room seemed to warp at the edges. Kestrel, my partner. The man I saw die. The man whose memory I had surgically altered in my own mind to dull the pain. He was alive. And he had done this. The shock was a physical blow, an 80% impact that left me breathless. The mission was no longer about some abstract new weapon. It was a vendetta.
As I reeled from the revelation, my psychic senses, still extended, brushed against something else within the chaos of Misha’s mind. Deep inside the hurricane of echoes, behind a wall of psychic noise, was a small, quiet space. A lead-lined box in the middle of a nuclear blast.
It was a block of data, encrypted and shielded. It was deliberate, structured. It felt like Misha’s own meticulous mind, a final act of will before he was overwhelmed. He had saved something. Hidden it. A sleeper’s cipher, waiting for a key. Kestrel had either missed it, or he couldn't break it.
A new objective crystallized through the shock and the rage. This wasn't just about revenge anymore. Misha had died, or whatever this living death was, to protect something. A piece of information so important he had built a fortress for it in the ruins of his own mind.
I stood up, my legs unsteady. The room was the same, but the world had been remade. Misha was a casualty. Kestrel was a ghost walking the earth. And I had a new purpose. Find Kestrel. Avenge Misha. And get that data.
The hunt for the ghost named Kestrel began now.
