The staff car moved east. The road was a grey scar on a white landscape. Dead trees clawed at a sky the color of dirty steel. Sineus sat in the passenger seat, the dispatch from General Volkov a cold weight in his greatcoat pocket. His goal was to reach the Red Directorate’s regional headquarters. Forty kilometers to go. The driver, a young private named Mishin with nervous eyes, kept his focus on the road. He chewed on a crust of black bread, a habit that grated on Sineus’s nerves.
The journey was silent. There was nothing to say. The war had burned the words out of the world, leaving only the wind and the drone of the engine. Sineus watched the terrain, his commander’s mind automatically mapping the dead ground. A good place for an ambush here. A poor line of sight there. The habits of the front were hard to unlearn, even when you were being pulled away from it. He was a tool being sent back to the forge, and he did not like the feeling.
He thought of Kulagin’s words in the hospital tent. The hard right. It was a simple philosophy for a complicated world. A world where political officers with clean hands and dirty notebooks decided who was pure. He had made his choice, standing by his sergeant. The price was a black mark in a file he would never see. He could live with that.
Fifteen minutes passed. The car crested a low rise. The landscape ahead was the same. Snow, dead trees, silence. But the air was wrong.
It began to shimmer.
It was not the heat haze of a summer road. This was a cold, crystalline distortion. It looked as if they were driving toward a wall of flawed, moving glass. The world seen through it warped and bent. The trees on the other side seemed to stretch and compress. The driver saw it too.
— What is that? Sweet mother of— — Mishin shouted, his voice cracking. His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. The car’s speed dropped from sixty kilometers an hour to thirty. He was fighting the instinct to slam on the brakes. His fear cost them momentum.
— Drive, — Sineus said. The word was a chip of ice.
They plunged into the shimmering field. The car shuddered, not from the road, but from something else. The light inside the cabin grew dim and strange, the color of a deep bruise. The air grew cold, a sudden, unnatural drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the weather. Sineus had heard rumors from reconnaissance patrols. Whispers of zones where the world went mad. They called them Frontline Fractures. He had dismissed them as battlefield fatigue. He had been wrong.
Then the sky filled with ghosts.
To their left, a spectral T-34 tank, shimmering and translucent, charged across the snow. It made no sound. Its treads threw up phantom clouds of powder. It was met by a Panzer IV, equally silent, equally unreal. More than a dozen of the phantom machines appeared, locked in a silent, ghostly battle that had been fought here days or weeks ago. Memory, burned into the very fabric of the place.
The pressure behind Sineus’s eyes returned. The same vise-like grip from the rail junction, but a hundred times stronger. It was a physical intrusion, a force trying to crack his skull open. The sounds of the car faded. The world outside his window dissolved.
He was no longer in the staff car. He was inside the spectral T-34. He felt the gut-twisting lurch as it crested a ridge. He smelled the hot oil and cordite. He felt the terror of the young gunner, a boy named Sasha, as the German shell came for them. It was not a thought. It was a feeling, raw and absolute, pouring into him. A memory-echo bleeding across time.
He was losing himself. The boundary between his own mind and the phantom battle was dissolving. His sanity was the cost. He fought back. He was a commander of the Red Army, not a vessel for dead men’s fears.
He clenched his jaw. He refused to be a passenger. He ripped his gaze away from the ghostly war and fixed it on the dashboard of the car. He focused on a single, solid object: the small, brass dial of the speedometer. He stared at the needle, the painted numbers, the grime in the corners of the glass. He anchored himself to it. He exerted his will, building a wall in his mind, brick by painful brick. He pushed the fear of the dead gunner out.
It was an act of brutal mental force. The suppression effort took everything he had.
The phantom sensations receded. The smell of cordite vanished. The terror subsided, leaving him with a hollow, shaking emptiness. His headache eased from a spike of agony to a dull, persistent throb. He was back in his own body. He was back in the car. He had won.
He glanced at the side mirror. His own face looked back, gaunt and tired. But for a second, the reflection was split. Overlaid on his own features was the face of the driver, Mishin, twisted in a silent mask of panic. A fractured reflection, showing the fear he refused to feel himself. He blinked, and the image was gone. There was only his own face, a stranger he was beginning to know too well.
The driver, Mishin, was muttering a prayer under his breath. He stared straight ahead, his face slick with sweat despite the cold. He accelerated, his foot heavy on the pedal. The car surged forward, its speed climbing back to seventy kilometers an hour.
They burst out of the shimmering field as if breaking the surface of water. The world snapped back into focus. The light was normal again. The sky was empty. The dead trees were just dead trees. The two-kilometer-wide fracture was behind them. Reality felt solid again.
Mishin let out a long, shuddering breath. He did not look at Sineus. He did not ask what had just happened. Some things were better left unspoken. Some things, if you gave them a name, might follow you.
Sineus leaned his head back against the seat, closing his eyes for a moment. The effort of will had left him exhausted. A dull ache pulsed behind his eyes. His uniform felt too tight, the wool scratching at his neck. He had walled off the experience, just as he had walled off the vision at the rail junction. But the walls were getting harder to build. And he was beginning to wonder what would happen when he no longer had the strength.
The rhythmic thump of the tires on the frozen road was the only sound. Dust motes danced in the thin afternoon light slanting through the window.
