The deck of the Sea Wolf bucked like a wild horse. Sineus held the iron rail, his knuckles white against the cold, rusted metal. The salt spray was a constant lash against his face, tasting of grit and distance. Their goal was Istanbul. Survival. The lighthouse was behind them, a memory of fire and death that had bought them this passage. The storm, however, was now.
A crewman, a boy no older than the conscripts Sineus had left dying in Stalingrad, shouted from the bow. His voice was thin against the wind.
— Boat spotted! Bearing one-eight-zero!
The Turk, the grizzled captain who owned the trawler, did not move from the helm. His crimson fez was a defiant speck of color in a world of grey. He raised a pair of heavy binoculars, bracing himself against the pitch of the deck. Sineus felt the shift in the engine’s rhythm, a deeper thrum as the captain pushed for more speed.
— Directorate, — The Turk grunted, lowering the binoculars. He spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the deck, where it was instantly washed away by a wave. — Fast mover. They saw the lighthouse. They saw our light.
Sineus looked back. A dark shape, low and sleek, was closing the distance. It was a shark cutting through the churning water. He could see the white foam of its bow wave even from here. They were being hunted. The bill for their passage through the mined channel was coming due.
A flash of orange bloomed on the horizon. A second later, the flat crack of a cannon reached them, a sound swallowed by the roar of the wind and sea. A geyser of water erupted 10 meters from the Sea Wolf’s bow, a white pillar against the grey sky. A warning shot. The next one would not be.
— They are not asking us to stop, — Kulagin said, his voice a low rumble beside Sineus. The Sergeant Major, a man made of grit and bad memories, held his submachine gun as if it were part of his arm.
— Push the engines, — Sineus ordered The Turk.
The captain laughed, a harsh, barking sound.
— They are already at their maximum! The strain is 110%! Any more and they will tear themselves apart! — He wrestled with the wheel as a heavy wave slammed into their port side. The trawler groaned, the sound of stressed metal and wood. The boat was old. It was dying.
The storm hit with full force. The sky, already dark, turned to a bruised black. Rain came down in solid, blinding sheets, cutting visibility to less than 20 meters. The world shrank to the confines of the ship, a small, fragile bubble of existence in a universe of violent water. The patrol boat was a ghost, a presence felt but no longer seen.
Then the air grew cold. It was not the cold of the sea, but a dead, cellar-cold that had nothing to do with weather. A low whisper started on the edge of hearing, a sound like a thousand dry leaves skittering across pavement. Sineus knew the sound. He had heard it in the silent safe house. The Whispering Plague.
His head throbbed, the familiar pressure building behind his eyes. He felt the presence of the forgotten dead, the weight of erased memories pooling nearby.
— There, — Sokolov, the scientist, shouted over the wind. He was pointing a trembling finger off the starboard bow, into the wall of fog and rain. — A Fracture. I can see it.
Sineus looked. He saw nothing but the storm. But he felt it. A tear in the world. A place where the rules were broken.
— What is it? — The Turk yelled, his face a mask of confusion and fear.
— A way out, — Sineus said. He turned to the captain. — Steer for it.
The Turk stared at him as if he were mad.
— Into that? Into nothing? I am a smuggler, not a madman! I will not steer my ship into a ghost story to be torn apart by things that are not real!
The patrol boat fired again. This time the shell was closer. Shrapnel screamed over the deck. One of The Turk’s crewmen cried out, clutching a bleeding arm. The choice was gone. There was only survival.
Sineus drew his Tokarev pistol. The click of the safety being disengaged was a small, hard sound in the heart of the storm. He did not raise the weapon. He did not need to.
— You will steer where I tell you, Captain, — Sineus’s voice was flat, cold, and absolute. It was the voice of a commander on the battlefield. The voice of a man who paid debts.
The Turk’s eyes widened. He saw the nobleman. He saw the Red Army officer. He saw the man who had taken the lighthouse. He saw a man more dangerous than any storm. He held Sineus’s gaze for a second longer, a battle of wills fought in the screaming wind. Then he gave a sharp, angry nod. He turned back to the wheel and spun it hard to starboard.
— Madness, — he spat. — All of you are mad.
The Sea Wolf plunged into the anomaly.
The world outside the wheelhouse dissolved. The roar of the storm was replaced by an unnatural, pressing silence. The light turned the color of a day-old bruise, a dim, violet twilight. The unnatural cold intensified, seeping through their coats, through their skin, into their bones.
Silent, spectral galleons with tattered sails and splintered masts drifted past them, ghost ships from another century’s war. Their crews were skeletal figures, frozen in the act of loading phantom cannons. The sea was a flat, black mirror reflecting a sky that was not theirs.
The trawler’s engine sputtered, coughed, and fell silent. They were adrift in a sea of memory.
Sineus felt the whispers of the Plague clawing at his mind, the hunger of forgotten things. He fought it, anchoring his mind to the solid, physical reality of the Tokarev in his hand. The worn wood of the grip. The cold steel of the slide. The memory of its purpose.
He caught his reflection in the fogged brass of the binnacle. A fractured, distorted face, half his own, half a screaming, skeletal visage from one of the ghost ships. The boundary between his own past and the world’s was dissolving. He was a part of the ghost story now.
— The engine, — Sokolov said, his voice tight with fear. — The memory of its function is being suppressed by the Fracture. It is forgetting how to work.
The Turk was frozen at the helm, his face pale, his eyes wide with a terror that went beyond the fear of storms or patrols. He was seeing the world as it truly was, a story that could be unwritten.
They drifted for an eternity that was probably less than a minute. The spectral ships faded. The bruised light began to brighten. With a final, violent lurch, the Sea Wolf burst back into the real world.
The roar of the storm returned, a welcome, familiar violence. The engine coughed back to life, sputtering at first, then catching, its rhythm uneven but present. They were miles from where they had entered the Fracture. The sea around them was empty. The patrol boat was gone.
The Turk leaned heavily against the wheel, his knuckles white. He was breathing in ragged gasps. He looked at Sineus, his eyes holding a new emotion. Not anger. Not defiance. It was fear. And a sliver of something that looked like respect.
— What… what are you? — he whispered.
Sineus did not answer. He holstered his pistol. He had bought their escape not with gold, but with the captain’s certainty. He had broken the man’s world.
The storm began to subside. The rain lessened to a steady drizzle. The sea, while still rough, lost its murderous rage.
The engine coughed again, a sick, grinding noise. The steady rhythm was gone.
Sineus walked to a rain barrel lashed to the deck. The water inside was almost still. He looked down. His reflection looked back. It was still broken into pieces by the ripples, but the pieces fit. A mosaic of the man he was becoming. Whole, but scarred.
The quiet of the ship was broken only by the uneven chugging of the damaged engine. The air smelled clean, washed by the rain.
