The world was not a machine to be fixed. It was a wound to be shared. The thought was not his own. It felt like hers. Like something she had hammered into the void inside him with the quiet, brutal force of her return. Anja stood a few meters away, a silhouette against the faint, foul light from the sewer access. A ghost in a city of ghosts. She had come back. The fact was a crack in the smooth, cold surface of his despair.
He saw her then. Not as a smuggler. Not as a tool. He saw the same stubborn fire he had seen in Lilya, burning in the heart of a blizzard. The refusal to be erased. Lilya had argued it across a polished dining table, her words a desperate plea against his cold logic. Anja had just lived it, in the filth and the dark, turning her back on the clean, safe world the Combine had offered. She had chosen to remember. The price of that choice was her life. She had made it anyway.
The slow, heavy tick in his head, the funereal beat that had started the moment he knew Lilya was gone, faltered. It stuttered, like a gear slipping a tooth. For a single, silent moment, there was nothing. Then the rhythm returned, but it was different. It was not the frantic, metallic clatter of the dying district. It was not the mournful toll of his own failure. It was quiet. Steady. The sound of a machine finding its purpose.
The constant, low hum of the overloading Heart of the Artisan vibrated up through the stone floor, a bass note of impending doom. The air in the catacombs was thick and cold. It smelled of damp earth, of centuries of decay, of cold stone that had never seen the sun. He sat with his back against a rough-hewn support pillar, the rock a solid anchor in the chaos.
He had been wrong about everything. His science had been a hammer against a ghost. His isolation had been a cage, not a fortress. He had seen the world as a problem of engineering, a system to be perfected through erasure. Anja’s return was a fact that did not fit his equation. It was an act of faith. An act of loyalty. An impurity he suddenly found essential.
His hand moved. It felt slow. Unrehearsed. An alien limb acting on a foreign impulse. He reached across the small space between them. He did not reach for her gloved hand, the hand of a smuggler and a killer. He reached for her other one. The bare one.
He took her hand.
The price was the perfect, sterile wall he had built around himself. He felt it crumble into dust. Her skin was cool and calloused. The hand of a woman who worked. A woman who fought. A woman who survived. It was real. A solid fact in a world of shimmering ghosts and fading memories.
She did not pull away. Her fingers were stiff for a moment, a bundle of tense wires. Then, slowly, the tension bled out of them. Her hand was not soft. It was not comforting. It was simply there. A silent acceptance. A pact sealed not with words or money, but with the simple, profound weight of human contact. The steady ticking in his head settled into a firm, resolute rhythm.
He held her hand for a long time. Ten seconds. A minute. He could not measure it. Time had become fluid. The only constants were the hum of the bomb from above and the warmth spreading from her hand into his. He looked at their joined hands in the near-darkness. His, pale and long-fingered, the hand of an inventor, a man who dealt in schematics and delicate instruments. Hers, scarred and capable, the hand of a woman who dealt in knives and desperate bargains. They did not belong together. And yet, here they were.
He finally let go, the loss of contact leaving a strange coldness on his skin. He retreated to the familiar ground of logic. The problem remained.
— We can’t get into the station alone, — he said. His voice was a rough sound in the oppressive quiet. — Wolff will have his men everywhere. The entrance will be a fortress.
Anja was silent for a moment, her silhouette a study in stillness. She was processing the new tactical reality. Her world was one of angles, of exits, of calculating odds. He had seen her do it a dozen times. But now, she was calculating for two. For the district.
— The Unremembered, — she said. The words were flat. Practical.
He stared at her, the name a splash of cold water. Katarina Volkova. The red scarves. The ambush in the alley. Her zealous eyes and her promise of a world made clean by fire. They were chaos. They were destruction. They were everything he despised.
— They tried to kill us, — he stated. It was a simple fact.
— They hate Wolff more than they hate you, — Anja countered. She took a step closer, her voice dropping. — Maybe. The Ordo are outsiders. Germans. They came here to use our home as a bomb. The Red Scarves are rats born in these tunnels. They’ll burn the house down themselves, but they won’t let a stranger do it for them.
It was a desperate, insane idea. To ask for help from people whose entire philosophy was the annihilation of his world, of his class, of history itself. It was like asking a fire to help you put out a flood.
— They want to destroy the past, — Sineus said. — All of it.
— And Wolff wants to destroy the present, — Anja shot back. — The Unremembered are zealots, but they’re our zealots. They live here. They die here. This is their home turf. They know every tunnel, every weak wall, every forgotten passage. We need bodies. We need a diversion. They are the only bodies left.
He thought of Katarina’s face, twisted with a righteous fury that was a dark mirror of his own past self. The desire for a perfect, final erasure. His had been a cold, sterile dream. Hers was a hot, bloody one. But Anja was right. Their motives did not matter. Their shared enemy did.
The plan was a paradox. A contradiction. It was illogical. It was messy. It was human. It was the only thing they had.
He gave a single, sharp nod. The decision was made. The steady ticking in his head was the only answer he needed. It was the sound of the clockwork of the world, and he was finally a part of it.
