He had to get them inside the fortress. The thought was not a plan. It was a law of physics. An object in motion stays in motion. Kulagin’s death had set him in motion. He would not stop until he hit a wall he could not break.
He found Zoya in a shallow overhang of rock, a place that was not a cave but simply a lesser part of the storm. She was a dark shape against the white, slumped against the stone. Her face was pale, the color of old snow. Her leg was wrapped in a crude, blood-soaked bandage. She was alive. Her eyes, sharp and feral even in her exhaustion, found his. She held her knife in her good hand, the blade a sliver of darkness. She was not beaten. She was waiting.
— They’re gone, — Sineus said. His voice was raw, torn by the wind.
Zoya did not ask who. She did not ask about Kulagin or Sokolov. Her eyes already held the answer. She was a creature of the front lines. She knew how to read the geometry of a fight, even one she had lost. She simply nodded, a small, sharp movement of her head. The team was now two.
He helped her back to the relative shelter of his own cave. The journey was a hundred meters that felt like a kilometer. She leaned on him, her weight a solid, living thing. She did not complain. She did not speak. She saved her breath for the work of staying alive.
Inside, the wind was a muffled roar. The screaming hum of the Oscillator was a constant pressure against their skulls. Sineus gave Zoya the last of his water. She drank it slowly, her eyes never leaving his.
He laid out the situation. The words were hard and bare, like stones.
— Sokolov is captured. Volkov has him. The Oscillator is active. That sound is the machine powering up. They will use Sokolov to aim it.
He did not need to explain what would happen then. They had both seen Sokolov’s projections. A clean slate. An entire region, its people, its history, erased from the world. A wound in reality that would never heal, feeding the cancerous growth of the Whispering Plague.
Zoya finished the water. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her gaze was steady. There was no fear in it. Only a cold, hard clarity. She looked at her wounded leg, then back at him.
— So we go in, — she said. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact.
The words hung in the air, simple and absolute. In that moment, the last vestiges of rank and protocol dissolved. They were not a commander and a partisan. They were two survivors at the end of the world, bound by a shared, impossible purpose. A glimmer of something that was not quite hope, but a refusal to accept defeat, sparked in the cold darkness.
Sineus nodded. He looked at the meager pile of their remaining equipment. Two rifles. His Tokarev with its three remaining bullets. Zoya’s knives. A few spare clips of ammunition. And the Chronos Anomaly Detector. The heavy brass and steel device sat on a rock, an inert, useless weight.
Useless.
Sokolov’s words from the cistern echoed in his mind. The frantic, desperate lesson as Sineus’s mind had been tearing itself apart. It’s not just a measuring device, Commander. The Ahnenerbe built it to map the Plague, but its core function… it can manipulate the script. It can create a small, targeted fracture. A temporary flaw in the world.
A flaw. A blind spot.
Sineus looked from the Detector to the screaming fortress in the valley below. A plan began to form, a desperate piece of arithmetic. It was an insane idea, born of hopelessness and necessity.
— Sokolov told me about the Detector, — Sineus said, his voice low. — Its secondary function. It can cut a hole in reality. A small one. Temporary.
Zoya’s eyes followed his gaze to the brass device. She understood immediately.
— A door, — she whispered.
— A blind spot, — Sineus corrected. — We use it to cut a seam in the fortress wall. We get inside while their defenses don’t exist. While we don’t exist.
He did not need to elaborate on the risks. Using an artifact to deliberately tear reality, even for a moment, was like using a lit match to search for a gas leak. It would attract the Whispering Plague. It would be loud, in a way that only sensitives and the things that hunted them could hear. And if the fracture collapsed while they were inside it, they would simply cease to be.
It was a suicide mission. The price was their lives, paid up front for a chance to get to the target.
— The odds are not good, — he said. It was the commander’s duty to state the facts.
— The success chance is maybe five percent.
Zoya looked at him, a faint, grim smile touching her lips. It was the first time he had seen her smile. It was a frightening thing.
— Five percent is not zero, — she said.
She did not ask for more details. She did not debate the strategy. She accepted the logic of the insane. Her acceptance was an action. She began checking the action on her rifle, her movements economical and precise despite the pain from her leg. The conversation was over. The decision was made.
Sineus picked up the Chronos Anomaly Detector. The metal was cold, heavy. He ran a hand over its polished brass casing. For a moment, he saw a reflection in the curved surface. It was not just his face. It was his and Zoya’s, side by side. Two fractured images, broken by the curve of the metal, but aligned. Two broken pieces aimed at the same target. The image was sharper now, the lines defined. It was the face of a shared, final purpose.
The screaming of the Oscillator no longer sounded like a threat. It sounded like a target.
He found the last of their assets, the package Kurtoglu’s network had delivered before the ambush. Demolition charges. Four compact blocks of high explosive. Enough to break a machine. Not enough to bring down a mountain. It would have to do.
He laid them out on a flat rock, a makeshift map of their final battle.
— You know how to use these? — he asked Zoya.
— My whole village knew how to use them, — she replied, her voice flat. — Now it is just me.
He divided the charges. Two for her. Two for him.
— I go for the Oscillator, — he said. — For Volkov. You create a diversion. Something loud. Something that will pull the garrison away from the core.
— I am good at loud, — she said.
They worked in silence for the next twenty minutes, a grim, efficient ritual. He showed her how to arm the charges. She showed him the best way to strap them to his body for quick access. He cleaned his Tokarev, the scent of gun oil a familiar, grounding smell. He ejected the magazine, counted the three bullets again, then slid it back into place. Each bullet was a question. One for Volkov. One for himself. The last was for whatever came next.
Zoya sharpened her knives on a whetstone, the rhythmic scrape of steel on stone a counterpoint to the howl of the wind. She re-dressed the bandage on her leg, her movements tight with pain, but she made no sound.
When they were done, they stood in the mouth of the cave, two ghosts ready to step back into the storm. The world outside was a wall of white noise and fury. The fortress of Kavkaz-4 was invisible, but its presence was a weight, a pressure, a high, unholy scream that promised oblivion.
Sineus looked at Zoya. Her face was set, her eyes burning with a cold fire. She was ready. He was ready. This was the hard right. The one that cost everything.
He gave her a final, sharp nod.
They stepped out into the storm, and the assault began.
