The last way out was a hole in the ground. A cellar beneath a forgotten bakery, its entrance hidden behind a collapsed brick oven. Anja had known about it for years. A final bolt-hole, a place to disappear when the city tried to swallow you whole. She moved toward it now, not with hope, but with the grim finality of a gambler playing their last coin. The air grew cold as she descended the stone steps, then damp. It smelled of mildew and sour earth.
A single electric lamp cast a sterile white circle in the center of the room. A man stood just at its edge. He was not a Palimpsest man. His suit was dark wool, perfectly pressed. His shoes were polished. His hands were clean. He was Makarov, a factor for the Black Sea Combine. A clerk of the underworld. He did not belong here. That was the point. He was the world outside.
He gave a slight, formal nod as she stepped into the light. He did not offer a greeting. The Combine did not waste words on sentiment.
— The situation has deteriorated, — Makarov said. His voice was as neat and tidy as his suit. It was the voice of a man who deals in ledgers and final sums. — The asset is compromised.
— The job isn’t finished, — Anja said. Her hand was a steady weight on the butt of her pistol. It was a habit she could not break.
— The job is a loss, — Makarov corrected her. He spoke as if stating a fact from a balance sheet. — The district is a loss. The nobleman is a liability. You are an asset. The Combine preserves its assets.
He held out his hand. In his palm lay a small, elegant device. It was a cylinder of glass and polished steel, no bigger than her thumb. Inside the glass, a tiny, intricate clockwork mechanism was suspended in clear fluid. The Syndicate's Failsafe. A piece of forbidden, life-saving technology that could restart a dying heart or knit together shattered bone. It was the machine that had saved her life two years ago, after a deal on the Odessa docks went bad. It was the source of her unnatural resistance to the Plague. It was the leash around her neck.
— We are calling in the debt, — Makarov stated. He did not threaten. He explained. — Your contract is terminated. You will be extracted. The Failsafe requires a system flush and recharge. It is a matter of maintenance.
The choice was simple. A clean extraction. A new life, somewhere the snow did not smell of coal and the rain was just water. All it would cost was Sineus. She would walk out of this cellar, and he would die in the power station. The district would be unwritten. A neat, tidy conclusion. A debt written off the books.
She looked at the Failsafe. The tiny gears within it turned with a slow, perfect rhythm. A clean, mechanical sound. A quiet, precise ticking that was the opposite of the chaotic, frantic rattle of the dying district. It was the sound of a life she could still have. A life without memory, without loyalty, without this crushing weight.
The price was her soul. She would live, but she would be nothing more than a tool in the Combine’s workshop, a piece of equipment to be maintained and deployed. An asset.
She thought of Sineus. His pale, intense face when he realized the Heart was a bomb. The foolish, stubborn integrity that made him refuse Orlov’s deal, the choice that had cost Anja her own network. He was a nobleman, an arrogant fool out of his depth. He was also the only person in a decade who had looked at her and seen more than a smuggler. He had seen a partner.
— And the nobleman? — she asked. The question was a test.
— A liability, — Makarov repeated, his voice devoid of emotion. — Liabilities are erased.
Erasure. The word hung in the cold air. It was what Wolff wanted for the district. It was what the Unremembered wanted for the world. It was what the Combine offered her now. A clean slate. An escape from the past. Her family had been erased in one of Wolff’s field tests. A memory-weapon test that had left a hole in a city block and a bigger one in her life. The Combine had found her in the wreckage. They had saved her. They had owned her ever since.
To accept this offer was to become them. To agree that people, that places, that history, could be written off like a bad debt.
The distant, bone-deep hum of the overloading Heart vibrated through the stone floor. Beneath it, she could hear the frantic, metallic ticking of the Palimpsest itself, the sound of a world coming apart. The Ticker’s Rattle. It was the sound of her home dying.
She looked from the Failsafe in Makarov’s hand to the cellar’s damp stone ceiling. Above that ceiling was Sineus. Waiting. Trusting her.
She made her choice.
— The asset declines the offer, — she said. The words were hers. Not the Combine’s.
Makarov’s expression did not change, but a flicker of something cold passed through his eyes. It was not anger. It was the dispassionate assessment of an accountant closing a ledger. He withdrew his hand, and the Failsafe disappeared into his coat.
— The debt remains, — he said. — But the asset is now reclassified. A liability.
He turned and walked toward the stone steps, his polished shoes making no sound on the dusty floor. He did not look back. He was a functionary. The transaction was complete. He had followed his orders.
Anja was alone in the cellar. The circle of electric light seemed smaller now, colder. She was no longer an asset of the Black Sea Combine. She was no longer a smuggler with a network. She was a woman in a dying district, allied with a ruined nobleman on a suicide mission. She was free. The price of that freedom was her life.
The only sound was the low hum of the bomb. And the frantic, steady ticking in her own head.
The damp air felt clean on her face. The smell of cold earth was the smell of a grave.
