The machine was silent. The silence was a judgment. Sineus stood in the center of his workshop, a captain on the deck of a sunken ship. The air, once clean and sharp with the scent of ozone and machine oil, was now stale. It smelled of failure. The Chronal Purifier, his monument to logic, was a tomb of polished brass and dead lenses. Eight hours to build. Two hours to accelerate a death sentence.
Dr. Ivan Morozov, the battlefield surgeon, stood by the far wall. He had not moved for an hour. He was a piece of the messy, uncontrolled world that had invaded this sterile space. A witness. Sineus felt the man’s gaze but did not meet it. To do so would be to admit the truth.
He looked at his hands. They had seated gears with a tolerance of one-hundredth of a millimeter. They had soldered wires into perfect, clean seams. Now they were useless. He looked at the rows of sterilized tools on the wall, each in its designated place. They were relics of a dead faith. He had believed the world was a machine. A complex system of gears and levers that could be measured, understood, and controlled. He had been wrong.
Morozov’s voice cut through the quiet. It was low and rough, like stones grinding together.
— You are trying to cure a ghost with a hammer. The hammer is broken.
Sineus flinched. The words were not an accusation. They were a diagnosis. He heard an echo in his mind, the sound the purifier had made in its final moments. Not the clean, steady hum of its function, but a frantic, discordant clatter. A rapid, mechanical rattle, like a watch made of ice shattering on a stone floor. The sound of his world breaking apart.
He walked to the reinforced window and stared out at the rain. Petrograd was a smear of wet grey and blurred gaslight. The chaos he had fought so hard to keep outside his walls was now inside. It was in the silence of his machine. It was in the coldness of his sister’s skin.
A sound from the cot. A small, hitching breath.
Morozov was there in an instant. He leaned over Lilya, his large, scarred hands surprisingly gentle as he felt the pulse at her neck. He laid the back of his hand against her cheek. He did not need his medical instruments. His expression was enough. He looked at Sineus, his face a mask of grim finality.
— We are losing her. Her breathing is shallow. The time for your science is over.
The ticking clock was no longer a concept. It was the space between each of Lilya’s struggling breaths. Less than twenty-four hours. Maybe less than twelve. The plague was a contagion of the soul, the university professor had said. A thing for which there was no vaccine. A ghost.
Sineus turned from the window. He looked from the cold, still form of his sister on the cot to the cold, still form of his machine. The brass cage that was meant to be a cure. The beautiful, intricate failure that had cost him everything. He saw his own arrogance reflected in its dark, polished surfaces. He had built a monument to his own pride, and the price was Lilya’s life.
He had exhausted the world of reason. Three calls to the most respected minds in the city. Three polite dismissals. Three death sentences wrapped in condolences and professional curiosity. The system he had once, however distantly, been a part of had offered nothing. It was a machine designed only to sustain itself.
There was only one path left. The one he had rejected his entire life. The path of ghosts and legends. The path of the man who had stood in the ruins of the cafe and spoken of a world that was not a machine.
He walked across the concrete floor, his boots loud in the oppressive quiet. He stopped in front of Morozov. The surgeon smelled of cheap tobacco and the antiseptic soap he used to scrub the memory of the front from his hands. He smelled of a reality Sineus had refused to acknowledge.
Sineus met the doctor’s tired eyes. There was no judgment in them. Only a deep, weary understanding of loss. All the pride, all the certainty Sineus had built his life upon, was gone. Burned to ash by the failure of his machine and the coldness of his sister’s hand. He had to surrender. It was the only logical move left. The price was his entire worldview, the core of his identity. A small price to pay for a single, desperate chance.
— Where do I start?
The words were quiet, rough. An admission of total defeat. A plea.
Morozov held his gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, slow nod. He accepted the surrender. He did not offer comfort. He offered a direction.
— There is a man. He keeps the city’s forgotten stories. The things that are erased from official records. He deals in knowledge the Chancellery would execute a man for possessing.
Sineus listened, his mind stripping the information down to its functional core. A source. A contact.
— His name?
— He has none that matters. They call him the Archivist of Ruin, — Morozov said. The name was absurd, something from a penny dreadful. It was the sound of the world he was now forced to enter. — He has a shop in the old book market, near the Obvodny Canal. A place of dust and decay. It will not be marked. Look for a door with no sign, painted the color of a faded bruise.
A name. A location. It was insane. It was occult nonsense. It was the only thing he had.
Sineus looked from the doctor to his sister. The black frost on her memory was spreading, a delicate, fatal lacework. He had tried to fight it with logic, with the clean power of a machine. Now he had to fight it with whispers and legends.
He gave a single, sharp nod. The debate was over.
