The distant thunder of the battle was a dull, rhythmic concussion. A heartbeat felt through the soles of his boots. Sineus walked across the turbine hall, his steps echoing in the vast, cavernous space. He moved past the hulks of dead generators, their steel casings cold and silent. The air tasted of ozone and cordite. At the far end of the hall, on a raised platform, was the nexus.
He ascended the short flight of iron steps. The conduit nexus was a dais of dark, polished stone, ringed with heavy ceramic insulators and thick copper busbars that disappeared into the floor. It hummed with a latent power that had not been drawn upon in decades. A low, resonant thrum that vibrated in his teeth. He knelt, placing the Heart of the Artisan in the exact center of the platform. The sphere of obsidian and captured light settled into a shallow depression, its own steady, one-second pulse seeming to sync with the station’s dormant energy. The final component was in place.
He closed his eyes. He did not pray. He did not hope. He performed a function. He reached into his own mind, to the place where his strange sight originated. It was a valve. For his entire life, he had only ever used it to vent, to purge, to keep the world out. Now, he would open it. All the way. He took a breath, the air sharp with the smell of hot metal from the distant river of fire, and pulled the lever in his soul.
The torrent hit him like a physical blow. It was not a memory. It was a life. The entire, unedited existence of a man he had never met. The rough texture of a wood-handled hammer. The scent of sawdust and linseed oil. The quiet pride of a perfectly joined corner. Decades of calluses and splinters, of waking before dawn and working past dusk. The face of a wife, laughing in the thin sunlight of a Petrograd spring. The weight of a sleeping child in his arms. It was a flood, a tidal wave of another man’s existence, and it threatened to drown him.
His skull screamed with the pressure. The slow, heavy chime of the Ticker’s Rattle in his head shattered into a million frantic, metallic shards. It was the sound of his own consciousness cracking under the strain. He fought to remain a vessel, a simple conduit. He could not be the man. He had to be the ground. He had to absorb, not become. The price was the pain. He accepted it.
The chamber itself groaned. The very air grew thick, heavy as water. The high steel walls around him began to shimmer, the grey paint and rust bleeding away to reveal what lay beneath. Latent memories, stirred by the raw power of the ritual, flickered into life. He saw the faces of forgotten workers, their expressions grim with concentration as they riveted the great steel plates into place. He smelled the sharp, clean scent of ozone from the day the station first went online, a ghost of industrial triumph. The room was no longer empty. It was full of echoes.
A concussive blast blew the heavy steel door off its hinges. It cartwheeled through the air, a slab of screaming metal, and crashed against a defunct turbine casing thirty meters away. Smoke and pulverized concrete dust billowed into the chamber. A figure stood in the ruined doorway, a silhouette against the hellish orange glow of the burning shipyard.
Captain Valerius Wolff stepped into the room. His immaculate uniform was scorched and torn. His face was a mask of soot, but his eyes were untouched. They were chips of cold, blue ice, burning with a focused, absolute purpose. He was alone. Anja’s plan had worked. It had stripped him of his army and forced him to come himself.
Wolff’s gaze swept the chamber. He saw Sineus kneeling, helpless. He saw the Heart pulsing on its dais, a captive star. He saw the shimmering, memory-soaked walls. He understood instantly what Sineus was doing. A flicker of something—not surprise, but a kind of clinical contempt—crossed his face. He began to advance, his boots crunching on the debris-strewn floor. Each step was deliberate. The sound of a clock ticking down the final seconds.
— You are a sentimental fool, Sineus, — Wolff’s voice was calm, conversational. It cut through the psychic roar in Sineus’s head. — That power belongs to the future, not the past.
He kept walking, his pace steady. He was a predator approaching a trapped animal. Sineus could not move. Every ounce of his will was focused on containing the artisan’s life, on not letting his own identity be washed away by the flood of another man’s joy and sorrow. He was locked in place, a statue of flesh and bone, the living heart of the ritual.
— You would drown in history to save a slum, — Wolff continued, his voice laced with a genuine, academic curiosity. He stopped ten meters away. — You see this power as a thing to be buried. To be mourned. I see it as a tool. The final tool. A scalpel to cut the cancer of sedition from the body of the world.
Sineus gritted his teeth, the pressure in his skull building to an unbearable peak. He could feel the artisan’s final moments approaching. The quiet satisfaction. The sudden, sharp pain of a blade. The surprise. The darkness. He had to hold on.
— And you would burn the library, — Sineus forced the words out, his voice a raw whisper. — To read one page.
Wolff almost smiled. It was a cold, thin thing.
— The right page is worth all the rest.
He raised his hand. A sleek cylinder of dark metal, the Ordo Umbrarum’s Memory Blade, slid into his grip. A low, hungry hum filled the air, a clean, metallic sound that harmonized with the frantic ticking in Sineus’s head. A point of cold, violet light ignited at its tip. Wolff was not going to shoot him. He was not going to fight him. He was going to perform surgery. He would sever the connection, cut the memory from Sineus’s mind, and claim the now-defenseless Heart.
He took another step. Then another. He was five meters away. The violet light of the Memory Blade was a malevolent star, ready to extinguish a soul. Sineus could do nothing but kneel and hold the floodgates open, a willing sacrifice on an altar of his own making. He had bought the district time. He had not bought enough for himself.
Wolff raised the blade, preparing to strike.
