The cold air hit like a fist. It was clean, sharp, and smelled of wet iron and the coming winter. After hours in the sewer’s thick, sweet rot, it was a welcome violence. Sineus pulled himself the last meter out of the rooftop access hatch, his boots finding purchase on gritty tar paper. Anja was already there, a compact shadow against the faint glow of the city’s industrial haze. She did not offer a hand. He did not expect one.
They were on the roof of a seven-story tenement, the highest point for half a kilometer. Below them, the Iron Palimpsest sprawled out, a grid of darkness punctuated by the sullen orange of foundry fires and the lonely electric lamps of watchmen. It was a city quarter built on a grave, and from up here, it looked like one. The streets were black wounds. The factories were tombstones.
At its heart sat their destination. The power station. It was a hulking black shape, a mass of brick and steel girders that absorbed the faint light, giving nothing back. It was a void in the city’s fabric. Sineus’s goal was simple. Get in, find the containment vessel, and take the Heart of the Artisan. It felt impossibly distant.
He moved to the edge of the roof, the gravel crunching under his boots. He lay flat on the cold, damp surface, the rough texture pressing into his coat. He raised a pair of heavy German field glasses to his eyes. The lenses were cold against his skin.
The power station resolved into sharp, geometric lines. A high brick wall, topped with rusted iron spikes. A wide yard of cracked concrete, littered with the corpses of dead machinery. And there, on the north face of the main turbine hall, was the entrance. A single, reinforced steel door. Just as the artisan’s schematic had shown.
There were no guards. No patrols in the yard. The searchlight towers were dark, their skeletal frames stark against the night sky. It was silent. Empty.
— It looks quiet, — Sineus said, his voice low.
Anja was beside him, her own smaller binoculars pressed to her face. She made a soft, skeptical sound. — Too quiet. Wolff’s men are crawling all over this district. The Unremembered are out for blood. But here? Nothing. It’s a trap.
— It’s our only way in, — Sineus stated. He felt a flicker of something he had not allowed himself to feel in days. Hope. It was a dangerous, corrosive emotion, an impurity in the clean logic of the mission. He pushed it down. The path was clear. That was a fact. All other considerations were noise.
He scanned the perimeter again. Nothing. Not a single man. He could almost hear a faint, dry clicking in the back of his skull, a psychic tic that had been with him since the workshop. The Ticker’s Rattle. It was barely a whisper, the sound of a watch with a cracked crystal, ticking in an empty room. He dismissed it. Fatigue. The strain of the last forty-eight hours.
He focused on the steel door. They had the map. They had the entrance. For the first time, the objective felt achievable. A false victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Then the hum started.
It was not a sound. It was a feeling. A low, resonant vibration that came up through the tar paper, through his bones. It started in his teeth and spread through his skull. It was the clean, powerful thrum of memory-tech, but on a scale he had never imagined.
Anja felt it too. She lowered her binoculars. — What is that? Engines?
— No, — Sineus said. His voice was tight. He knew that sound. It was the sound of his own humming tool, magnified a thousand times. The sound of erasure.
The hum grew, climbing from a bass note to a solid, unwavering tone that vibrated the air itself. The faint, dry clicking in his head was no longer a whisper. It was a frantic, metallic clatter, the sound of a thousand tiny, ice-cold mechanisms coming apart at once.
A wave of pressure washed over the rooftop. It was not wind. It was a physical presence, a force that made the air feel thick as water. The distant orange glow of the foundries seemed to dim, the colors bleeding out into a uniform grey.
Anja swore, stumbling back a step. She put a hand to her temple, her face pale in the gloom. — My head. What is this?
Sineus fought to stay on his feet. The world was tilting. He looked through the field glasses, his hands shaking. The power station was no longer a solid black mass. Its edges were blurring, shimmering. The great steel gantries that supported the roof seemed to twist, to remember being molten ore in a furnace. The brickwork of the walls rippled, as if the structure was taking a slow, deep breath.
The wave of distortion rolled outwards from the station in a perfect, silent circle. He watched it pass over a row of tenements a kilometer away. For a second, the buildings became translucent, and he could see the faint, ghostly outlines of the wooden hovels that had stood there a century ago. The effect passed, and the brick was solid again. But the psychic echo of it was nauseating. A deep, profound wrongness.
He could feel the stability of reality itself plummeting. It was a quantifiable decay. A drop of at least 30%. The district was not just shaking. It was coming undone.
The wave subsided. The intense pressure vanished, leaving a ringing silence and the smell of ozone. The frantic clatter in Sineus’s head slowed to a sick, mournful tick. Anja was leaning against the brick chimney stack, her breathing ragged.
— What in God’s name was that? — she asked, her voice rough.
Sineus lowered the binoculars. His mind was a storm of connections, each one a shard of ice in his gut. The schematic. The design of the vault. It was not a vault. It was a containment vessel. The heavy reinforcements, the massive power relays, the failsafes. They were not meant to keep people out. They were meant to keep the Heart in.
Stahl. The granite-faced sergeant. He had taken the arming cipher. Not a key to a lock. A trigger.
Wolff. The captain was not here. He did not need to be.
He understood. The realization was a cold, physical weight in his chest. Wolff was not trying to steal the Heart of the Artisan. He never was.
Sineus turned to Anja, his face a mask of horror. The false victory had burned away, leaving only the terrible, simple truth. The mission had been inverted.
— He’s not trying to get it, — Sineus said, his voice flat and dead. — He’s turned it into a bomb.
He gestured out at the sprawling darkness of the district, at the thousands of souls sleeping in their soot-stained tenements.
— The whole district will be erased.
The low hum from the power station was a steady, patient pulse. A countdown.
A piece of loose mortar, shaken free by the wave, trickled down the brickwork beside them, a sound like sand in an hourglass.
