The sound was small, but it cut through the silence like a razor. A single stone, skittering down a pile of debris on the far side of the nave. It wasn't the random crumble of a ruin settling. It was deliberate. I raised my pistol, the metal cold against my knuckles, and scanned the jagged shadows. The dust from the collapsed ceiling was still hanging in the air, a gray fog in the pale moonlight. My hunt for a ghost had led me into a kennel of rabid dogs. Now, it seemed, the zookeeper had arrived.
She moved out from behind a shattered pillar, not with the jerky stutter of Kestrel's puppets, but with a fluid, deadly grace. A ghost of a different sort. She was a compact woman in a dark, functional coat, her steps silent on the carpet of crushed stone. She held no pistol. In her hand was a small object of brass and Bakelite, something that looked like it belonged in a radio operator's toolkit, not a battlefield.
The last of Kestrel's assets, the one that had crumpled to the ground, began to stir. It pushed itself up on one arm, its head lolling. The woman raised the device in her hand. There was no sound, no flash of light, but I felt a pressure wave ripple through the air, a silent thud that vibrated in my teeth. The asset convulsed once, a violent, full-body spasm, and then collapsed. It didn't move again. The twitching stopped. The machine was off.
She turned, and the device in her hand was now pointed at my chest. Her eyes were a pale, cold blue, the color of a winter sky. They held no fear, only a weary, calculating intelligence.
— You are CIA, — she said. Her voice was low, accented, the words clipped and precise. — You are here to steal our work.
It wasn't a question. It was a diagnosis. In her world, I was a symptom of a disease.
— Your work is a plague, — I said, my own voice flat. I didn't lower my pistol. We stood thirty meters apart, two predators who had stumbled into the same kill zone. — I'm here to kill the source.
The price of that truth was my cover, my mission parameters, everything a good agent was supposed to hold close. But I wasn't a good agent anymore. I was a man with a debt to pay. Her expression didn't change, but something in the rigid set of her shoulders eased by a fraction. The air, thick with the smell of ozone and cold dust, seemed to thin, the pressure in my skull lessening. She was considering my words.
— The source is not a man you can kill with a gun, — she stated, her gaze unwavering. — I am Dr. Anja Petrova. I was a physicist for the State Security Committee. The Echo Protocol… it was my design.
The name meant nothing. The title meant everything. She was KGB. The enemy. And she had just confessed to building the weapon that had hollowed out Misha's mind. My finger tightened on the trigger.
— I fled when I saw what they intended to do with it, — she continued, her voice dropping lower, as if the stones themselves were listening. — They don't want to control it. They want to let it loose. They believe a world of shared trauma will be a world without conflict.
Her words echoed Kestrel's own twisted philosophy. She wasn't just the architect of the weapon; she was its first heretic. The board had changed again. She wasn't the zookeeper. She was another animal that had escaped the cage.
I lowered my pistol, just a few centimeters, a gesture that was both a risk and an invitation.
— Then we have the same goal.
Petrova watched me for a long moment, her blue eyes scanning my face, looking for the lie. She found none, or at least none that mattered. She gave a short, sharp nod and lowered the sonic device. The provisional truce was as fragile as the shattered stained glass around us.
— This, — she said, holding up the brass and Bakelite tool, — it disrupts the composite signal. It creates a feedback loop. But it has a weakness.
She took a step closer, her trust a currency she was spending with extreme caution.
— The frequency has to be tuned precisely. Use it too long, and it can be traced. It leaves a signature.
As she spoke, I saw it. Not the dead, fractured light of the Echoed, but a faint flicker deep in her eyes. It was the barest shimmer, a resonance of the thing she had created. It was the look of a person who had stared too long into a machine that eats souls and had seen it stare back. The static was in her, too, not as a void, but as a scar.
— Kestrel knows this, — I said. It wasn't a question.
— Kestrel knows everything, — she replied, her voice grim. — He is not just using the protocol. He has become part of it. But he is still bound by its physics. The main device, the one that creates the Echoes, it leaves a trail. A psychic resonance. It makes a noise only certain people can hear.
She looked at me, her expression unreadable.
— You are one of them, I think. But you hear the music. You don't know how to find the instrument.
I holstered my pistol. The cold of the metal was a familiar comfort.
— Who does?
She took another step, closing the distance between us to ten meters. The ruins of the church were silent now, a tomb for puppets whose strings had been cut.
— There's a man in Vienna. A dealer. He doesn't trade in artifacts, not really. He trades in the noise. He hears the damage these things do to the world. He can find it.
