The air was a thick soup of ozone and cordite. Gunfire echoed from the high steel walls of the turbine hall, a frantic, metallic stutter that hammered at the senses. Sineus moved from the cover of one dead generator to the next. He did not think. He calculated. The objective was a raised platform at the far end of the hall, three hundred meters away. The Heart of the Artisan pulsed there, a soft, rhythmic glow that was the eye of this industrial hurricane.
The Unremembered fought with the suicidal zeal of true believers. They charged from the service tunnels, their red scarves flashes of crude defiance in the gloom. They threw themselves at the disciplined firing lines of the Ordo Umbrarum, their bodies buying meters of ground with blood. Anja and Katarina fought near the main entrance, a whirlwind of brutal efficiency and righteous fury, holding the flank against a German counter-assault. They were a wall of violence, keeping the main Ordo force pinned.
Sineus ignored them. They were variables in an equation he had already solved. His path was a straight line through the chaos. He saw an Ordo soldier raise a rifle, aiming for him. He was already moving, dropping behind a rusted control panel before the man’s finger tightened on the trigger. The bullet sparked against the steel where his head had been. The Ticker’s Rattle in his own head was a deafening scream, a sound of reality being torn apart by a thousand impacts a second.
A lull. A sudden, unnatural quiet fell over the hall, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the low, constant hum of the Heart. Sineus risked a look from behind the panel. A figure was walking into the open space between the battle lines. Dr. Ivan Morozov. He wore a simple white armband with a red cross painted on it. He held his hands up, empty.
— Cease fire! — Morozov’s voice was calm, steady. The voice of a man used to giving orders in the face of death. — We have wounded. On both sides. Let us retrieve them.
It was an act of pure, foolish sanity in a world gone mad. A moment of decency. Sineus watched, his breath catching in his throat. He saw an Ordo officer raise a hand, signaling his men to hold their fire. He saw Katarina do the same. For a single, impossible second, the battle stopped. The doctor was a small island of peace in a sea of violence.
Then a crackle of static cut through the quiet. An Ordo officer near the platform held a vox-caster to his mouth. A voice came from the device, distorted and genderless, stripped of all humanity.
— No witnesses.
The Ordo officer lowered the vox. He gave a sharp nod to the man beside him. Sergeant Gregor Stahl. The mountain of scarred granite took one step forward. He raised his pistol. The movement was economical. Unhurried. The movement of a butcher selecting a cut of meat.
Sineus opened his mouth to scream a warning. The sound died in his throat.
The shot was a single, sharp crack. It was not loud. It was simply final. Dr. Morozov did not cry out. He simply folded. His legs gave way and he collapsed to the concrete floor, a discarded puppet whose strings had been cut. A dark stain spread on the back of his coat. An act of moral courage, erased by a single, simple fact of physics.
Sineus felt a sharp, sympathetic vibration in his coat pocket. A sound only he could hear, a high, crystalline snap, like ice cracking under pressure. The silver pocket watch. His father’s watch. The one he had carried for years, its flawed crystal a single tolerated imperfection in his sterile world. He did not need to look. He knew. The crack had spread across the entire face. The delicate hands had stopped.
The Ticker’s Rattle in his head ceased.
In its place, there was a perfect, sterile silence. A void. The absolute absence of sound, of feeling, of hope. It was the state he had spent his entire life trying to achieve in his workshop. A world without the messy contagion of memory. Now it was inside him. And it was a horror beyond imagining.
He knew.
With a certainty that was colder and harder than any scientific principle, he knew. Lilya was gone. The reason for the quest, the anchor of his entire world, had been extinguished. The doctor’s death was a fact. The watch’s failure was a symbol. Her death was the truth that burned the world down to grey ash.
The void inside him was not empty for long. It filled with a white-hot rage that was pure and clean and absolute. It was not thought. It was fuel. He rose from behind the control panel. He did not feel the bullets that tore through the air around him. He did not hear the screams or the explosions. The world had become a series of obstacles between him and the man who had given the order.
He moved.
He ran a straight line. An Ordo soldier stepped into his path. Sineus did not slow. He drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, a solid impact of bone and muscle. The soldier went down. Another raised a rifle. Sineus was already past him, a blur of motion. He vaulted over a barricade of sandbags, his movements precise, economical, and utterly devoid of self-preservation. He was a machine of grief. A weapon forged in the final, silent moment of his sister’s life.
The Ordo soldiers on the platform turned, their faces a mixture of surprise and alarm. They were trained for fanatics like the Unremembered. They were not trained for this. For a man who had nothing left to lose. He hit their line like a cannonball. He grabbed a rifle from one, using it as a club to shatter the jaw of another. He kicked a third off the platform. They were not people. They were just things in his way.
He reached the center of the platform. The Heart of the Artisan pulsed before him, a sphere of contained light, humming with the power to cure, to erase, to unmake. The cure for a disease that had already claimed its victim. The key to a lock that no longer existed. It was the ultimate symbol of his failure.
He reached out and seized it. The energy that coursed into him was immense, a torrent of life and creation. It meant nothing. He held the salvation of the world in his hands.
And all he felt was the cold, empty weight of ash.
