Anja led the way. She moved through the labyrinth of collapsed service tunnels and forgotten basements like water flowing through cracks in stone. He followed, a step behind, his world a series of calculations. The angle of the tunnel. The structural integrity of the ceiling. The number of paces since their last turn. Logic was the only handrail in the dark. The steady, purposeful tick in his head was the only compass. It was the sound of his new resolve, a clockwork heart beating in the void where his sister’s life used to be.
They were going to ask the destroyers for help. The thought was a piece of grit in a precision machine. It did not compute. It simply was. A necessary, impossible step. The air grew thick, heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies, cheap tobacco, and the sharp, metallic tang of gun oil. They were close. Anja paused, her hand held up in a fist. She pointed to a low, reinforced doorway ahead, a single sliver of yellow light bleeding from its edge. The command post.
She gave him a look. Not of encouragement. Of warning. She drew her heavy pistol. He gave a single, sharp nod. He had no weapon but the schematics in his coat and the terrible clarity in his mind. He was ready. Anja kicked the door. It did not swing open. It shuddered, the sound a dull thud that was swallowed by the oppressive quiet.
— We have a business proposition, — Anja called out, her voice flat and loud. — For Katarina Volkova.
There was a scrape of a heavy bar being lifted. The door opened inward. The light was blinding. The smell hit him like a physical blow. Twenty or more bodies crammed into a fortified cellar. The fighters of the Unremembered. They were young. Too young. Their faces were thin and pale, smudged with soot, their eyes burning with a feverish light. They wore a mix of stolen army coats and roughspun factory clothes. Every one of them wore a strip of red fabric. A scarf. An armband. A rag tied around a rifle stock.
And every one of them was pointing a weapon at him.
The collective click of two dozen hammers being cocked was a dry, intimate sound in the small space. The steady ticking in his head dissolved into a frantic, discordant clatter. The sound of a world coming apart. He stood still. He made his hands into fists at his sides to stop them from shaking. He was a nobleman. An inventor. A man of clean rooms and precise measurements. He was a ghost at the feast of the damned.
Katarina Volkova emerged from the thicket of bodies. The woman from the alley. Her face was sharp, her eyes the color of ice. She held an old, heavy revolver, its pitted metal a perfect match for the righteous rust of her ideology. She stopped five meters from him. Her gaze was not one of simple hatred. It was a look of profound, religious disgust.
— I should kill you where you stand, nobleman, — she said. Her voice was low, a dangerous hum. — A relic. A parasite. Your entire history is a boot on our necks. Why should I let you breathe our air for one more second?
He had no answer for that. Her assessment was not entirely wrong. He had lived a life of privilege, insulated from the filth and desperation that had forged these people. He had built his gilded cage and polished its bars while their world burned.
Anja stepped forward, placing herself halfway between him and Katarina. She did not raise her hands. She did not lower her pistol. She held it loosely at her side, a casual threat.
— Because the Germans are about to burn your house down, — Anja said, her tone bored, almost dismissive. She was not asking. She was telling. — And you with it.
Katarina’s eyes flickered to Anja, a flicker of contempt. — We are not afraid to die for our cause.
— This isn’t dying for a cause, — Anja shot back. She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. — This is being deleted. Wiped. Unwritten. Captain Wolff of the Ordo Umbrarum has turned the Heart of the Artisan into a bomb. In a few hours, the Iron Palimpsest won’t be a memory. It won’t even be a ghost story. It will be nothing. Your revolution, your precious cause, all of it. Gone. A blank page.
A murmur went through the room. The fighters glanced at each other, their certainty wavering. They understood bombs. They did not understand this. Katarina’s face was a mask of stone, but a flicker of doubt entered her eyes. She looked back at Sineus.
— A smuggler’s lies. You would say anything to save your skin.
This was his moment. The frantic ticking in his head sharpened, focusing into a single, precise rhythm. A metronome counting down to zero. He stepped past Anja. He met Katarina’s gaze. He felt the weight of twenty guns trained on his chest.
— She is not lying, — he said. His voice was cold. Clinical. The voice he used in his workshop. He reached into his coat and slowly pulled out the oilcloth schematic. He unrolled it on a crate between them. The paper was a stark, clean world of lines and numbers in this place of grime and zeal. — I am an engineer. I do not deal in lies. I deal in facts.
He pointed to a section of the diagram. — This is the containment vessel for the Heart. These are the power conduits. Wolff has used a remote cipher to reverse the flow. The Heart is not drawing power from the station to remain stable. It is feeding its own energy back into the system, creating an exponential overload cascade.
He traced a series of concentric circles he had drawn in charcoal over the original ink. — This is the decay radius. It is expanding at a geometric rate. At the current rate of energy release, total reality failure for a one-kilometer radius will occur in less than three hours. This cellar will be at the epicenter. You will not die. You will cease to have ever existed.
He spoke without passion. He presented the data as he would to a board of investors. He was not asking for their help. He was informing them of their own annihilation. He could see them processing it. Not the words. The tone. The cold, unshakeable certainty of a man who understood the mechanics of the weapon that was about to unmake them.
Katarina stared at the map. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her revolver. He could see the war inside her. The pure, clean fire of her ideology against the cold, hard fact of her own extinction. To accept his help was to betray her entire belief system. To kill him was to sign her own death warrant, and the death warrant of everyone in this room. It was the choice between erasing her enemy and having her entire world erased.
The price of her revolution was her own existence.
The frantic ticking in his head had stopped. It was replaced by a profound silence, an empty space waiting for a sound. He watched her face. He saw the muscles in her jaw work. He saw her gaze shift from the map, to him, to the faces of her followers. They were watching her. Waiting for her.
She finally looked up, her eyes locking onto his. The hatred was still there. It would always be there. But something else was there now. A grim, terrible calculation. She had made her choice.
— We fight for the Palimpsest, — she said, the words tasting like acid in her mouth. — Not for you.
She holstered her revolver. It was not an act of trust. It was a tactical decision. Around the room, the sound of hammers being lowered was a wave of metallic sighs. The alliance was made. A fragile, ugly thing born of shared desperation.
— What’s the plan? — Katarina demanded, her voice sharp.
Anja answered before he could. — We need a diversion. A big one. Something to pull the Ordo forces away from the main entrance to the power station.
Katarina nodded, already moving into her role as a commander. — The shipyard. It’s adjacent to the station. The Germans have a command post on the central pier. If we hit them there, they’ll have to respond.
— It’s a fortress, — one of her fighters said, a boy with a face like a starved wolf.
— Then we’ll break it, — Katarina snapped. She turned to a large, detailed map of the district chalked onto a sheet of rusted metal. — We use the lower service tunnels to get a team to the oil barges. We turn the canal into a river of fire. It will cut off their naval support and force them to fight on our terms. On our ground.
Sineus watched them. The chaos he had so despised was being forged into a weapon. Their knowledge of the district, their willingness to use fire and terror—it was all being turned against a common enemy. Anja stood beside him, her expression unreadable. She had been right. They were rats born in these tunnels, and they would defend their nest.
He felt a strange, unwelcome flicker of something that might have been respect. They were zealots. They were murderers. But they were not cowards.
The plan was settled in minutes. A brutal, simple thing. Anja and Katarina would lead the main assault on the shipyard. He would use the chaos to get inside the power station. He had to get to the Heart. He had to be the one to absorb its memory. It was the only way.
As they prepared to leave, Katarina stopped him. She stood close, her voice a low whisper.
— When this is over, nobleman, our business is not finished. This changes nothing.
He met her gaze. — I know.
He turned and followed Anja back into the darkness of the tunnels. The steady, purposeful tick had returned to his head. It was heavier now. Weighted with the knowledge of the unholy alliance he had just made. They had a plan. They had an army of ghosts and zealots.
