The skiff’s engine coughed and died. Anja killed the power, letting them drift into the shadow of a skeletal iron bridge. The fog was a wet shroud, muffling the sounds of the city. It smelled of cold rust and the river’s deep rot. They had escaped Orlov. They had escaped the gunboats. For now.
Sineus smoothed the damp schematic on the skiff’s grimy bench. The pre-erasure map from the Archivist was a ghost. This new one, taken from Orlov’s men, was a bone. It showed a decommissioned workshop near the old power station. A place of recent death.
— There, — Anja’s voice was a low rasp. She pointed with her chin towards a dark opening in the canal wall, a water-gate choked with debris. — The old artisan’s quarter. The map says the workshop is two blocks in.
They secured the skiff in the shadows, the hull scraping against unseen stone. Moving on foot was a risk. Staying still was a death sentence. They climbed a set of slick, iron rungs onto a narrow towpath. The air here was different. The city’s industrial drone was gone, replaced by a heavy silence that felt older. The faint, dry clicking of the Ticker’s Rattle was a whisper in the back of his skull. A sign of a wound in the world.
The workshop was a squat brick building, its windows boarded over, its door swollen shut in its frame. Anja put her shoulder to it. The wood groaned but did not yield. She stepped back, drew her heavy pistol, and fired twice into the lock. The shots were flat, ugly sounds in the quiet street. The lock shattered. She kicked the door open.
They stepped inside. Dust hung in the air, thick as felt, dancing in the thin beams of their chemical lamps. The smell was of cold iron, sawdust, and something else. Something metallic and faintly sweet, like old blood. The space was large, filled with the hulks of dead machines covered in tarps. A fine layer of grime coated everything.
The air grew cold. Not the damp chill of the canal, but a deep, psychic cold that sank into the bones. The Ticker’s Rattle grew louder, a steady, rhythmic click-clack-click, like a loom weaving a shroud.
It started without a sound.
A shimmering in the air. A man appeared behind a heavy workbench, his form translucent. He was broad-shouldered, with a thick beard and hands stained with grease. The artisan. He was humming, his spectral fingers tracing the lines of a complex gear mechanism. The memory was peaceful. A moment of creation.
Then the door burst open.
Three figures in the grey coats of the Ordo Umbrarum filled the frame. They moved with a predatory silence. The artisan looked up, his face a mask of confusion, then terror. He raised his hands. He said something, but the memory was silent. A ghost play.
The lead agent, a man with a face like a clenched fist, raised a Memory Blade. The artisan screamed, a silent, gaping hole in reality. The blade struck. The artisan’s form flickered violently and collapsed, not like a body, but like a projection being switched off. The agents swept the room, their movements efficient and brutal. Then they were gone.
The memory reset. The air shimmered. The artisan reappeared at his bench, humming.
— A loop, — Anja breathed, her hand tight on her pistol. — A bad one.
Sineus felt a wave of nausea. The psychic residue of the violence was a physical force. He wanted to turn away, to raise his own humming tool and wipe this place clean. To erase the pain. That was the old way. The path of erasure. But the schematic was here. The answer was inside the pain.
— I have to watch, — he said. The words tasted like ash.
He made himself look. He forced his eyes to stay open as the memory played again. And again. Each time, he felt a phantom echo of the artisan’s terror. A cold spike of it in his own gut. The price was a piece of his sanity, shaved away with every loop. The Ticker’s Rattle was a frantic, metallic scream in his ears now, the sound of a history that refused to heal.
He focused on the details. The agents. Their movements. They were looking for something. They checked the walls, the floor. They were systematic. He let the artisan’s fear wash over him, using it as a lens. What did the artisan see in his last moments? What did he try to protect?
The loop played. The door burst open. The agents entered. The artisan looked up, his eyes wide. For a single frame, a flicker of an instant before the terror consumed him, the artisan’s gaze darted to a spot on the far wall. A section of plain brickwork, indistinguishable from the rest.
But in that one frame of memory, Sineus saw it. A faint outline. A hairline crack that was not there in the physical wall. A hidden compartment.
The memory reset. The artisan was humming again.
— There, — Sineus said, his voice strained. He pointed. — On the wall. To the left of the furnace stack. There’s a loose brick, three rows down.
Anja looked at him, then at the wall. She saw nothing. Her expression was a mask of doubt, but she had steered a boat through a solid wall on his word. She moved without another question. Her trust was a new and heavy weight.
She ran her fingers over the bricks, her touch sure and practical. The memory loop played on behind them, a silent chorus of death. The artisan screamed his silent scream. Anja found the brick. It shifted under her fingers.
She worked her knife into the mortar, prying. The brick came loose. Behind it was a small, dark cavity.
She reached inside and pulled out a roll of oilcloth, tied with a leather thong. She unrolled it on the dusty workbench. Inside was a single, large sheet of schematics, the ink still dark and precise. It was not a copy. It was the original.
— The vault, — she said, her voice tight with triumph. — The real plans.
They had it. The key.
The air in the workshop grew still. The looped memory faded, the psychic pressure easing. The Ticker’s Rattle slowed, the frantic clicking becoming a faint, almost mournful tick. A story had been witnessed. A secret had been passed on.
The silence was clean. The dust settled.
