The psychic trail Kestrel left was a smear of filth in the clean cold of the Berlin night. It was a thread of decaying energy, a deliberate taunt leading northeast into the Soviet sector. I followed it on foot, crossing the border with papers that were a work of art and a face that was a mask of bored indifference. The rage was still there, a block of ice in my gut, but it was a tool, not a master. Grief was a bill I would pay later. Vengeance was a dish I would serve now.
The trail ended in a place where God had packed up and left years ago. A bombed-out church stood like a skeleton against a sky the color of lead. Its roof was gone, its walls were jagged teeth. The psychic contamination hit me a block away, a pressure behind the eyes and a low hum that vibrated up through the soles of my shoes. The air tasted of cold stone and something else, something like burnt sugar and ozone. Kestrel had been here. He had prepared the ground.
I moved through the gaping hole where the main doors used to be, my hand resting on the pistol under my coat. The nave was a graveyard of shattered pews and fallen stone, all of it dusted with a fine layer of concrete powder that looked like gray snow. The air was thick with a psychic energy that felt like a sixty percent contamination field, a hum that made the hairs on my arms stand up. It was a trap. I knew it was a trap. But it was the only way forward.
They emerged from the shadows behind the ruined altar. Three of them. They didn't walk. They lurched, their movements jerky and unnatural, like puppets animated by a clumsy hand. Each step was a fraction of a second too fast or too slow, a stutter in the film of reality. Their clothes were the simple coats and trousers of factory workers, but their bodies moved with a purpose that was not their own. Echoed.
My first instinct, my only instinct for years, was to cut. It was the clean solution, the surgical strike that had defined me. I stood my ground as they advanced, their broken gait eating up the distance across the rubble-strewn floor. I closed my eyes for a second, tuning out the physical world, and reached for the minds inside those stumbling bodies.
I sought the threads of memory that animated them, the specific traumas Kestrel had used as puppet strings. I found them, but it wasn't a set of strings. It was a solid wall of screaming noise. A thousand threads tangled into a single, impenetrable knot. It was the memory of a platoon being overrun, a pilot burning in his cockpit, a tank crew drowning in a river, all smashed together into one chaotic signal. There was no single memory to sever. There was no thread to cut.
My psychic push met a solid, unyielding mass. It was like trying to punch through concrete. The feedback slammed into me, a wave of pure psychic agony that made my teeth ache and my vision swim. My ability, the one thing that set me apart, was useless. The effectiveness of my primary weapon was zero. The world had changed its rules without asking.
The choice was simple. Die here, overwhelmed by puppets I couldn't control, or fight like any other man with a gun and two fists. The price of survival was my advantage, my edge. I had to become a brute to fight a ghost.
The three assets didn't slow. My failed psychic attack had meant nothing to them. They were just bodies, machines of meat and bone aimed at a target. The one in the lead swung a length of rusted pipe, the metal whistling through the cold air. I dropped under the swing, the pipe smashing into a block of stone behind me, sending chips flying.
I was no longer a surgeon. I was a brawler.
I drove my shoulder into the man's chest, sending him stumbling back. His balance was wrong, his center of gravity a shifting, unpredictable thing. I grabbed a loose piece of rebar from the floor and swung it hard into his knee. The sound was a wet crack, and he went down without a sound, his leg bending at an angle it was never meant to.
Two left. They came at me from either side, their movements still jerky but brutally effective. They were Kestrel's battering rams. I backed away, putting a mountain of fallen debris between us. My breath was a cloud of white in the frigid air, my lungs starting to burn. The physical cost was already mounting, a debt my body was paying for my mind's failure. My stamina was draining, a fifteen percent drop that felt like a lead weight in my limbs.
One of them clambered over the rubble, his hands reaching. Above him, a section of the vaulted ceiling sagged, held up by a single, crumbling pillar. I saw the geometry of the problem. I drew my pistol, not aiming for the man, but for the keystone in the arch above him.
The shot was deafening in the enclosed space. The bullet chipped a chunk from the stone. For a second, nothing happened. Then, with a groan of tortured rock, a ton of masonry gave way. The asset looked up, his face blank, as the ceiling came down on top of him. He disappeared in a cloud of gray dust.
One left.
He stood twenty meters away, near the shattered remains of the altar. He stopped his advance, his head cocked at an unnatural angle. He was just watching me now, a puppet waiting for new orders. I raised my pistol, the sights steady on his chest.
I walked closer, my steps crunching on shattered glass and stone. I needed to see. I needed to understand the totality of what Kestrel had done. I stopped five meters from him. He didn't move. He just stood there, breathing in the cold, dusty air.
I looked into his eyes.
They were empty. Utterly vacant. There was no fear, no anger, no flicker of a soul trapped inside. They were just optics. And in their flat, dead surfaces, the faint light from the ruined stained-glass windows didn't reflect properly. It fractured, shimmering into a pattern of broken, meaningless light. It was the visual hiss of a television tuned to a dead channel. It was pure, silent static.
The last of his identity had been scrubbed clean, leaving nothing behind. Kestrel hadn't just subjugated these men. He had unmade them.
The last asset crumpled to the ground, its strings finally cut by some remote command. The fight was over.
The dust began to settle in the shafts of pale moonlight. The silence that fell was heavier than the noise of the fight had been.
A loose stone skittered down a pile of debris from the far side of the nave, a sound too deliberate for gravity alone.
I was not the only one hunting in the ruins of Berlin.
