The distant, rhythmic thunder of Zoya’s battle was the only proof he was not already in his own grave. It was a sound that bought him seconds, each gunshot an expenditure of her life for his. He moved down the final corridor, the high, piercing hum of the Oscillator growing from a vibration in his teeth to a physical pressure against his skull. The air tasted of ozone and cold, sterile dust. He rounded the last corner and stopped.
The control chamber was a vast cavern of concrete and steel, built to house a god. The Oscillator dominated the space, a monstrous assembly of brass coils, thick glass conduits, and black iron scaffolding that rose fifty meters to the vaulted ceiling. At its heart, a sphere of contained, pale blue light pulsed with a slow, sickening rhythm, the source of the mind-numbing hum. Walkways and control stations ringed the machine at different levels, manned by technicians in grey uniforms who moved with the quiet efficiency of priests serving a terrible idol.
And at the center of the main platform, before a bank of consoles, General Ivan Volkov was waiting for him. He was not surprised. He was not alarmed. He held a cup of tea, his posture one of perfect, paternal calm.
— You see? — Volkov said, his voice cutting through the machine’s drone. He gestured with his cup to the chaos on a distant monitor, a schematic of the fortress where red lights flashed in a distant sector. Zoya’s sector. — Even in betrayal, you serve the state. Your little partisan creates the perfect diversion. Your instincts, as always, are impeccable. You were the only one who could lead me to the Detector. You were the only one who could get it here.
Sineus’s gaze swept past him. Past the guards standing impassively at the edges of the platform. His eyes found Sokolov.
The physicist was not in chains. It was worse. He was strapped into a large, throne-like command chair directly facing the Oscillator’s core. A metal helmet covered his head, thick cables running from it into the main console. His eyes were open but vacant, his body limp. He was a component. A living, breathing psychic lens to focus the machine’s unholy power. The full, monstrous truth of the weapon was laid bare. It did not just require a target; it required a soul to aim it.
— He was always the weak point, — Volkov continued, following Sineus’s gaze. — A man of conscience. But his mind… his mind is a beautiful instrument. Perfect for the delicate work of historical sanitation.
Volkov’s guards shifted, their hands near their sidearms. They expected a fight. A desperate, final charge. A soldier’s answer to a soldier’s problem.
Sineus ignored them. He ignored Volkov. He took a step, not toward the general, not toward Sokolov, but toward the humming, incandescent core of the Oscillator itself.
The guards tensed. Volkov raised a hand, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes.
— Let him, — the general ordered. — Let the moth see the flame.
Sineus walked across the polished steel platform. Each step was a choice. Each meter closed was an act of will against the crushing psychic pressure emanating from the machine. The air grew colder. The hum became a physical blow against his chest. He reached the safety railing that separated the platform from the core. In the polished obsidian of a nearby console, he saw his own face. A fractured reflection, split into a dozen pieces by the angles of the machine, a ghost haunted by the blue light of the core.
He vaulted the railing.
He landed on the narrow service catwalk that encircled the primary energy conduit. The heat was a dry, electric bake. The hum was a solid wall of sound. He placed his hands on the humming, vibrating surface of the machine. It was not hot. It was cold. A deep, absolute cold that felt like the space between stars.
He closed his eyes. He let go of the shield Sokolov had taught him to build. He opened his mind.
He did not push. He did not fight. He connected. He unleashed the full, raw, uncontrolled power of his sensitivity, not as a weapon, but as a key. He poured himself into the machine, his consciousness flowing like water into its crystalline matrix. For a moment, he was the Oscillator. He felt its immense, terrible power. He felt Sokolov’s terrified, trapped mind being used as its rudder.
And he felt the void. The vast, empty spaces in its memory banks. The archives of erased history. The holes where Volkov had carved out the inconvenient truths of the state. The famines. The purges. The mass graves of men and women who had been deemed obstacles to the perfect future.
Volkov’s philosophy was simple: history was clay to be molded. You could not build a new world without first clearing the old ground.
Sineus made his choice. He would not break the machine. He would make it whole.
He reached into his own memory, into the very fabric of his being. He found the stories his grandfather had told him, the whispers of the purges that had taken half his family. He found the hollow-eyed hunger of the peasants he had seen as a young man during the Holodomor. He found the memories of every erased life, every cut-out sin, every lie the Directorate had ever told itself. He gathered them up.
And he gave them back to the machine.
He did not destroy. He remembered. He weaponized the truth.
The change was instantaneous. The Oscillator’s steady, rhythmic hum faltered. The pale blue light in its core flickered, turning a bruised, sickly violet. A new sound emerged, a high, discordant shriek of a system trying to process a paradox. It was a machine built to erase, and he was forcing it to remember.
On the platform, Volkov’s smile finally vanished. He took a step forward, his face a mask of confusion.
— What are you doing?
Then the first memory hit him.
It was not a vision. It was a full sensory implantation, a sliver of a forgotten past injected directly into his mind. The smell of damp earth and lime. The rough texture of a burlap sack being pulled over his head. The cold, metallic click of a pistol’s hammer being cocked behind his ear.
Volkov staggered back, a hand flying to his head.
— What is this?
Another memory. The gnawing, acid pain of a stomach that had been empty for weeks. The taste of boiled leather. The sight of his own child, her face thin and pale, her eyes too big, begging for a crust of bread that did not exist.
— No, — Volkov gasped, his face draining of color.
Sineus pushed more. The terror of a midnight knock on the door. The helpless rage of watching your family being herded onto a cattle car. The final, desperate cold of a ditch in a snow-covered forest. He poured all the erased sins of the state, all the lives Volkov had deemed ‘acceptable costs,’ directly from the machine and into the general’s mind.
Volkov screamed. It was not a sound of pain, but of utter, soul-shattering overload. He was a man drowning in the ocean of truth he had tried to boil away. He clawed at his own face, his eyes wide with the horror of a thousand stolen lives all demanding to be witnessed at once.
He saw the faces of the men he had purged. He felt the agony of the peasants he had starved. He experienced the final, terrified moments of every life his new world had been built upon. The architect was being forced to live in every room of the hell he had designed.
The general collapsed to his knees, his body convulsing. The teacup fell from his hand and shattered on the steel deck. His screams dissolved into wet, choked sobs. The man who saw people as fuel for his engine was finally burning.
The technicians stared, frozen in disbelief. The guards took a hesitant step forward, then stopped, unsure how to fight an enemy that was not there.
Volkov fell forward onto the deck, his body limp. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, tears streaming down his face. He was a broken thing, a mind shattered by the weight of his own philosophy. The man who wanted to erase the past had been erased by it.
The high, shrieking whine of the Oscillator intensified, the note climbing into a register that was no longer sound, but pure, physical pain. The violet light in its core began to pulse erratically, a dying heartbeat.
Sineus felt the feedback loop begin, a catastrophic surge of energy flowing from the machine back into him, and from him back into the machine.
The mountain began to groan.
The air in the chamber grew thin and cold. The polished steel floor vibrated with a deep, resonant tremor.
The feedback loop between his mind and the Oscillator was becoming a maelstrom, threatening to tear the very fabric of the world apart.
