The workshop was a vault. Not of money, but of silence. Sineus sealed the heavy oak door, the tumblers of the lock sinking into place with a solid, satisfying chunk. Outside, Petrograd dissolved into a grey wash of drizzle and fog, the clatter of steel-rimmed wheels on wet cobblestones a distant, irritating noise. Here, inside, the world held its breath. The air was his own, tasting of clean machine oil and the faint, sharp scent of ozone that clung to his tools. He moved through the ordered space with an economy of motion, his steps silent on the worn floorboards.
He ran a hand over the cool brass housing of the chronometer. It was the heart of his sanctuary, a machine of his own design built for a single purpose: to impose a clean, mechanical order on the messiness of time. For three days, he had been chasing a ghost within its gears, a resonance so faint it was less than a sound and more than a feeling. A flicker of imperfection. He leaned closer, his ear near the escapement mechanism. The rhythmic pulse was almost perfect. Almost. A clean, sharp click and release. The sound was the only one that mattered. The steady, uncorrupted beat of a world without history.
His eyes scanned the workbench. Every tool lay in its designated place, nested in a custom-cut felt liner. Calipers, gauges, drivers, each one polished, each one sterile. He had spent the morning purging them, running the humming tool over every surface until they were nothing but pure function, their histories of forge and factory and previous hands wiped clean. He selected a pair of fine-tipped tweezers and a jeweler's loupe, the cold metal familiar in his grip. He fitted the loupe to his eye, and the world shrank to the universe of a single gear train. The balance wheel spun, a blur of gold. The pallet fork, a tiny anchor of polished steel, rocked back and forth, locking and releasing the escape wheel one tooth at a time. The sound was a precise, metallic rattle. A clean Ticker’s Rattle. But beneath it, he could still feel it. A drag. A weight. A memory.
The problem was the mainspring. He had sourced it from a new supplier, a workshop in the Tula province known for its quality. But quality meant pride, and pride meant a strong memory. He had to make a final adjustment, to tighten the barrel arbor just enough to alter the spring’s tension by a fraction of a degree. It required a specific wrench, one he had commissioned himself. He reached for it, his fingers closing around the dark, heavy steel.
It hit him instantly. Not a thought, but a full-body imposition. A shimmer of light, invisible to any other eye, bloomed across the wrench’s surface. With it came the phantom sensation of calloused hands, not his own. The air filled with the spectral scent of forge coal and hot metal. He felt a dull ache in a lower back that had stood hunched over an anvil for twelve hours. He saw a flash of a grimy, bearded face, sweat-soaked and streaked with soot, grinning with satisfaction at a finished piece of work. The man’s name was Pavel. He had a daughter with a cough that would not go away. He was proud of this wrench. It was the best thing he had made all week.
Sineus flinched, dropping the tool. It clattered on the workbench, the noise an obscenity in the quiet room. He hated this. This unwanted intimacy, this trespass of another’s life into his own. Memories were a disease, a contagion of emotion and experience that clung to the physical world like filth. He had been born with the curse of seeing it, and he had dedicated his life to the cure: a world scrubbed clean, a reality of pure, unburdened matter.
He took a steadying breath, his jaw tight. He would not tolerate it. Not here. He turned and picked up the humming tool from its charging station. It was his own invention, a sleek cylinder of polished obsidian and brass. He thumbed the activator. A low, resonant hum filled the air, and the series of small lenses at the tip glowed with a faint, violet light. The tool felt cool and heavy in his hand, a solid piece of logic against the spectral chaos. He picked up the wrench again, forcing himself to ignore the phantom ache in his back.
He brought the tip of the humming tool to the steel. The hum deepened as it made contact, the violet light brightening. The memory-shimmer on the wrench flared, resisting. Pavel’s pride was strong. It fought back, a stubborn ghost refusing to be exorcised. For a moment, the image of the smith’s daughter, her face pale and thin, flashed in Sineus’s mind. A pang of something—pity, connection—threatened to surface. He crushed it. He increased the tool’s power, twisting a dial at its base.
The hum rose to a sharp, whining pitch. The smell of ozone intensified, cutting through the scent of oil. The shimmer flickered violently, then dissolved like smoke in the wind. The phantom sensations vanished. The wrench in his hand was suddenly just a piece of cold, heavy steel. Nothing more. The erasure took twelve seconds. The tool’s power cell drained by a fraction of a percent. He had won. The workshop was clean again. But the victory left a familiar, hollow space inside him. The silence in the room felt heavier now, emptier.
He placed the sterile wrench back in its felt cradle. He ran a cloth over the spot where it had lain, erasing any lingering trace of the conflict. Order was restored. He stood for a long moment, surveying his domain. The gleaming brass of the chronometer. The ranks of silent, history-less tools. The neat stacks of schematics on his drafting table, their paper smelling of age and ink, not of the men who had drawn them. This was his fortress. This was his peace. A peace bought by a thousand tiny acts of un-making.
He felt a familiar thirst, the dry taste of concentration in his mouth. He moved to a small alcove where a samovar and a set of canisters stood in a perfect row. His tea ritual was as precise as his mechanical work. He measured the dark, coarse leaves into a porcelain pot. He checked the temperature of the water from the samovar with a dip-thermometer. Exactly 95 degrees. He poured the water over the leaves, watching them unfurl. The bitter, smoky aroma of strong chifir filled the small space. It was the only impurity he allowed himself.
While the tea steeped, he walked to the single, large window. It was made of reinforced glass, a full five centimeters thick, and looked out over the rain-slicked roofs of the Vyborg Side. Below, the city was a smear of grey buildings and dark, rushing water in the canals. A world of uncontrolled variables, of messy, unpredictable people. He felt a profound sense of detachment, the quiet satisfaction of a man looking down from a high tower. He was separate. He was safe.
He returned to his workbench, a cup of the scalding, dark tea in his hand. The bitterness was a welcome shock to his senses. His gaze drifted across the desk and settled on a velvet-lined case. He opened it. Inside lay a silver pocket watch. It was an old family piece, his father’s. The silver was polished to a mirror shine, the chain coiled in a perfect spiral beside it. It was a masterpiece of mechanics, its quiet ticking a counterpoint to the louder rattle of his own chronometer. But it was flawed.
He picked it up. The silver was cool against his skin. He ran his thumb over the crystal face. There, almost invisible, was a hairline crack. A tiny, branching fracture, no more than three millimeters long. It was the only object in the workshop he had not sterilized, the only imperfection he had allowed to remain. He had told himself it was because the memory of how it happened was too complex to excise cleanly. A lie. The truth was he was afraid to try. The crack was a flaw in the story he told himself, a constant, quiet reminder that his control was not absolute. It irritated him more than any ghost-memory on a stranger’s tool.
A sharp, insistent knock sounded at the workshop door.
Sineus froze, the watch heavy in his hand. The sound was an intrusion, a violation of the sealed environment. It was not the tentative rap of a servant. It was hard, official. The specific three-beat pattern of a Chancellery courier. A summons.
He did not move. He did not breathe. He willed the sound to go away, to be a phantom of the wind. Let the world handle its own messy affairs. He had his work. He had his order.
The knock came again, harder this time, echoing in the sterile silence of the room. A demand. The world outside did not care for his peace. It was rattling the handle of his cage.
The rain beat against the thick glass of the window. The chronometer ticked, a clean, steady rhythm counting down the seconds of his isolation.
