The cafe was an exercise in disorder. Sineus endured it for Lilya. He sat straight-backed on a flimsy chair, his hands resting on the table, careful not to touch the sticky film on its surface. The air was a thick soup of wet wool, cheap tobacco, and the cloying sweetness of pastries he would not eat. It was the smell of the city he kept outside his walls. The noise was worse. A constant clatter of ceramic on saucer, the murmur of a hundred conversations bleeding into one another, the frantic, irregular ticking of a large, ugly clock on the wall. A chaotic rattle that set his teeth on edge.
Lilya smiled at him over the rim of her teacup. The light in her eyes was a rebellion against the room’s grey gloom.
— You look as if you’re about to sterilize the silverware with your gaze, — she said, her voice a low counterpoint to the room’s din.
— The tea is brewed incorrectly, — he stated. It was a fact. The water was not hot enough, the leaves steeped for too long. The result was a bitter, lukewarm stew.
— It’s just tea, Sineus. Try to enjoy the moment. Look at all the life.
He looked. He saw a system spiraling into entropy. Thirty people, packed into a space designed for twenty. He saw a waiter spill a drop of coffee. He saw a woman’s laugh, too loud, too sharp. He saw chaos. And he felt Lilya’s hope, a fragile thing he held in his hands like a piece of uncalibrated equipment. He was here for her. That was the only variable that mattered. He picked up his own cup. The price for this moment of her happiness was his own discomfort. A small price.
Then the noise stopped.
It did not fade. It was cut. One moment, the cafe was a symphony of chaos. The next, a vacuum of absolute silence. The woman’s laugh was frozen on her face. The waiter’s spilled coffee hung in the air, a constellation of brown droplets. The large clock on the wall was still, its frantic ticking gone. The silence was not peaceful. It was a pressure, a physical weight that pushed in on him. It was the sound of a world with its power severed.
A wave of cold followed the silence. Not the damp chill of a Petrograd autumn, but a deep, piercing frost that had nothing to do with temperature. It was a psychic cold, a cold that leeched the warmth from thought itself. Around them, the patrons of the cafe were statues. A man, mid-sentence, his mouth open. A child reaching for a cake, her hand hovering an inch from the icing. Thirty people, their bodies present, their minds erased. They were hollow shells, their internal mechanisms stilled by an unseen hand. The blast radius was fifty meters, a perfect circle of oblivion with their table near its center.
Sineus felt it as a force, saw it with the sight he cursed and hid from the world. It was not an explosion of energy. It was an explosion of absence. A weaponized memory of absolute loss, a shard of pure void hurled into the heart of the city. It was a clean, surgical strike. No blood. No rubble. Just the quiet horror of stolen life.
He moved before the thought was complete. An instinct he had honed himself to suppress. He threw himself across the small table, his body covering Lilya’s, shielding her from the wave of nothingness. He felt the psychic frost wash over his back, a cold that tried to scrape his own memories away. He held fast, anchoring himself to a single, solid thought: Lilya.
The pressure vanished as quickly as it had arrived. The silence broke, replaced by a new sound: a high, thin hum that vibrated at the edge of hearing. It was a clean, metallic sound, like the rapid ticking of a watch made of ice. A Ticker’s Rattle. The suspended coffee droplets fell, splashing onto the floor. The world was moving again, but it was broken.
Sineus pushed himself off Lilya.
— Lilya?
She was sitting upright, her eyes open. She was not a statue. She was not a hollow shell. For a half-second, relief washed through him, a feeling so foreign it was almost painful. Then he saw her eyes. The fire was gone. The vibrant, rebellious light had been replaced by a dull, vacant stare. She looked at him, but she did not see him.
— Lilya, — he said again, his voice sharp. He grabbed her hand. It was cold. A deep, unnatural cold that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. He saw it then, with his other sight. A creeping, crystalline frost spreading across the surface of her memory. A network of black ice, extinguishing the warm glow of her thoughts, her history. The Whispering Plague. She was infected.
The cafe erupted into panic. People outside the blast radius were screaming, running. The frozen patrons began to slump in their chairs, their bodies finally registering that their minds were gone. Sineus saw none of it. He saw only the spreading frost, the death of his sister’s soul happening in slow, silent motion. His fortress of order had not just been breached. It had been vaporized. And the enemy was inside, consuming the only thing he had ever allowed himself to value.
The city’s authorities were useless. Two policemen pushed their way through the panicked crowd, their faces a mixture of confusion and fear. They saw thirty people in a state of inexplicable catatonia. They saw a public disturbance. They did not see the weapon. They did not see the wound.
Sineus pulled Lilya to her feet. She moved stiffly, a beautiful, intricate doll. He had to get her away. He had to get her back to his workshop. His tools. His machines. He could fix this. He had to fix this. Logic could be imposed. The disease could be excised. He held to that thought like a man clinging to a ledge over a bottomless drop.
A man pushed through the crowd, moving against the tide. He was not a policeman. He wore a heavy wool coat, stained and worn. His face was grey with fatigue, his eyes accustomed to horror. He moved with a grim purpose that cut through the chaos. He stopped at their table, his gaze sweeping over the slumped figures, then landing on Lilya. He reached out and gently touched her cheek.
— Cold, — the man said. His voice was a low rumble, rough but steady. — And the eyes. I’ve seen this before. On the Galician front.
Sineus pulled Lilya closer, away from the man’s touch. — Who are you?
— Dr. Ivan Morozov, — the man said, his eyes meeting Sineus’s. They were the eyes of a man who had spent three years putting men back together, and burying the pieces he could not save. — I was a surgeon at the Third Army field hospital. Now I am a man who drinks too much. And you are the brother. I can see it in your face. The same panic. The same denial.
— It’s shock, — Sineus said, the words tasting like a lie. — A neurological event. I can stabilize her.
Morozov gave a short, bitter laugh. — With what? A warm blanket? This is not a wound of the body, my friend. Look at them. — He gestured to the empty-eyed patrons. — This is not shell-shock. This is hollowing. Something has scooped them out from the inside.
— There is a physical cause for everything, — Sineus insisted, his voice tight. He was a scientist. An inventor. He believed in cause and effect, in the elegant, brutal logic of the physical world.
— Is there? — Morozov said, his gaze returning to Lilya. He gently lifted her hand, feeling the faint, thready pulse at her wrist. — I have seen a man with no wound die screaming his mother’s name. I have seen a trench that remembers a battle from a year ago, and kills any man who enters it. The world is not a machine, no matter how much you wish it were.
Morozov let go of Lilya’s hand. He looked at Sineus, his expression softening into something like pity.
— This is not a sickness science can cure. The frost will spread. She will forget to breathe. She will forget to be. In a day, maybe two, she will be as empty as the rest of them.
The words hit Sineus like stones. Each one a precise, calculated blow against the foundations of his world. He felt the ledge he was clinging to begin to crumble.
— No, — he said, the word a raw whisper. — There is always a solution.
— Not always, — Morozov said quietly. — But sometimes… sometimes there is a legend. A desperate chance. The soldiers whisper about it when the doctors can do no more. An antithetical infusion. A memory so powerful, so full of life, that it can burn away the plague.
Sineus stared at him. The man was talking about occult nonsense. The very disease of sentiment and superstition he had dedicated his life to eradicating.
— A memory? — Sineus asked, his voice laced with contempt.
— A specific one, — Morozov said, his eyes holding Sineus’s. — A legend. The Heart of the Artisan.
The air was still cold, thick with the smell of ozone and fear. Sineus could feel his own breath fogging in front of his face.
He looked down at Lilya’s face, at the beautiful, empty mask it had become, and then back at the doctor. The hunt for the Heart of the Artisan began.
