The shape was not Wolff. It was bigger. Broader. A mountain of a man in a scorched German uniform who shoved his captain aside. Sergeant Gregor Stahl. The enforcer. The loyal dog. He moved with a brutal economy of motion, his objective clear. Wolff stumbled, his surgical precision ruined by blunt force. The violet point of the Memory Blade wavered, its clean hum lost in the sudden chaos.
Stahl did not carry a blade. His hands were empty. They were weapons enough. His eyes were dead things, chips of granite fixed on Sineus. His purpose was simple. Not to capture. Not to dissect. To kill. To smash the machine before it finished its work.
Sineus could not move. The artisan’s life poured into him, a river of someone else’s joy and sorrow. He was a dam about to break. Every muscle was locked. He could only watch as Stahl closed the final five meters. The frantic, metallic ticking in his skull screamed, a sound of tearing reality. The Ticker’s Rattle was a frantic, discordant clatter, a thousand tiny gears shattering at once.
Then a second shape hit Stahl from the side. A blur of dark clothing and desperate motion. Anja.
She impacted the sergeant with the force of a derailed train car. The big man grunted, a sound of surprise and annoyance. He staggered, his forward momentum broken. They went down together, a rolling, thrashing heap on the grimy floor of the dais. Wolff took a single, precise step back, his expression a mask of cold fury at the interruption. He was a surgeon waiting for the patient to stop struggling. He was waiting for a clean shot.
Anja was a snake fighting a bear. She was all sharp elbows and knees, but Stahl was pure mass and muscle. He absorbed her frantic blows without a flicker of pain. His huge hand, scarred and thick, closed around her throat. He began to lift her from the floor, her boots kicking uselessly against his thick legs. Her face contorted, the air cut off.
But she was not trying to win. Sineus saw it then, through the storm in his own mind. Her free hand was not striking. It was not clawing at Stahl’s face. It was reaching inside her coat. It came out holding a small, elegant cylinder of glass and polished steel. The Syndicate's Failsafe. The thing that had saved her life on the Odessa docks. The thing that owned her.
He understood. It was not just a lifeline. It was a leash. And it was a weapon.
She fought with her last ounce of strength, her body convulsing. Not to break his grip, but to press the small cylinder against the thick muscle of his chest. Her knuckles were white. Her eyes, wide and straining, found Sineus’s across the ten meters of churning air.
Over the psychic roar, he heard her voice. Not with his ears, but with his soul. A single, clear thought projected with all the force of her dying will. A final report. A closed ledger.
A debt is a debt.
Then she activated it.
There was no explosion. There was an implosion. A flash of perfect, hungry blackness that swallowed the light. A wave of absolute cold radiated from the point of contact, a cold that felt like the heat death of a universe. It was the sterile purity Sineus had once craved, now weaponized into an act of total annihilation. The frantic Ticker’s Rattle in his head shattered into dust and went silent.
Stahl’s grip loosened. His face, a mask of granite, registered a flicker of something beyond pain. Not fear. Not surprise. A profound, intellectual confusion. The look of a man watching the math of the world fail. He and Anja, locked together in that final, violent embrace, were thrown backward.
They tumbled off the dais. They did not hit the floor.
They fell into a grated vent set in the stone, a dark opening Sineus had not seen. A maintenance duct that vomited a shimmering, colorless haze. The raw, chaotic energy of the Whispering Plague, drawn to the surface by the ritual.
The Failsafe, the enforcer, and the smuggler met the un-reality. For a single, silent heartbeat, they were a frozen tableau against the shimmering void. Then they were gone. Not vaporized. Not disintegrated. Erased. Unwritten from the book of the world.
The vent hissed, the shimmering haze receding back into the depths as if a pressure valve had been closed.
The space where Anja had been was now just empty air. The psychic pressure in the room plummeted. The roar in Sineus’s head was gone, replaced by a profound, ringing silence. A single, heavy tick echoed in the void. The sound of a great clock striking its final chime.
Wolff stood frozen, his Memory Blade lowered. He stared at the empty space, his perfect plan shattered by an act of illogical, sentimental sacrifice. He had accounted for armies and artifacts. He had not accounted for a debt of honor.
The path to Sineus was clear. The time had been bought. The price was Anja.
The air smelled of ozone and nothing. The world waited for his next move.
