The wound in his mind was cold and clean. A perfect excision. He knew, as a matter of fact, that he had taught his sister to ride a bicycle. He did not remember her laughter. The absence of it was a quiet, sterile space he could not fill. He hated it. He walked away from the Obvodny Canal, the pre-erasure map a brittle weight in his coat pocket. The Archivist of Ruin had taken his payment. Now he had to see if the purchase was worth the price.
He moved north. Towards the Vyborg Side. Towards the smoke that stained the grey sky a darker, bruised shade of grey. The streets here were still orderly. The grand, crumbling facades of Petrograd stood in their designated places. The laws of physics held. He passed a bakery, the smell of bread a memory he was still allowed to keep. He passed a patrol of city police, their grey wool uniforms soaked dark at the shoulders from the earlier rain. They did not look at him. He was just another man in a good coat, walking with a purpose.
The border was not a line on a map. It was a change in pressure. A drop in temperature. He stood at an intersection. On one side, the street was paved with worn but regular stones. On the other, it was cracked concrete patched with black tar. On one side, the buildings had the tired dignity of age. On the other, they were brutalist blocks of soot-stained brick and exposed iron, built for function and nothing more. This was the edge of the Iron Palimpsest.
He had to choose. Turn back to the world of predictable decay, or step into the world of active chaos. Lilya’s shallow breathing was a clock ticking in his head. There was no choice. The price was his safety, the comfort of a world that obeyed its own rules. He paid it. He crossed the street.
The air changed. It grew thick, heavy. It was something to be pushed through. The familiar city smells of wet stone and horse manure were gone, replaced by the sharp tang of coal smoke and the metallic scent of cold, wet rust. And something else beneath it. The faint, cloying sweetness of rot. The smell of forgotten things.
The sounds of the city fell away behind him. The rumble of trams, the calls of vendors, the distant clang of a church bell—all of it was muffled, then silenced. The soundscape here was different. A low, industrial drone was the foundation of everything, the hum of a thousand machines in factories both running and ruined. Above it, the rhythmic crash of a steam hammer somewhere to the east. And beneath it, the whispers.
They were at the very edge of hearing. Faint, overlapping, like a radio tuned between stations. Fragments of words in languages he did not know. Snatches of lullabies. The sharp crack of a single, angry curse. It was the background radiation of discarded history. And mixed within it, a sound he recognized from his own workshop, but distorted, made foul. A dry, mechanical ticking, like a watch made of ice. The Ticker’s Rattle. It was the sound of reality being unstitched.
He walked for a kilometer, following the crude line on the Archivist’s map. The district was a testament to brutal efficiency. Tenements for the workers, packed tight against the walls of the factories where they labored. Wide, straight avenues for moving material. No parks. No squares. No space for anything that did not serve the engine of production. The people he passed had the same look. Their faces were blank, smeared with soot, their eyes fixed on the ground in front of them. They moved with the trudging, relentless pace of men who had forgotten what it felt like to rest.
He turned into a vast factory yard. A sea of cracked concrete, stained with oil and rust. In the center of the yard, it happened. For four seconds, the world had two sets of rules. A narrow cobblestone alley shimmered into existence. It cut diagonally across the yard, a phantom limb of the city that had been amputated. He saw the texture of the stones, worn smooth by a century of cartwheels and boots. He saw the dark, wet gleam of them, the moss growing in the cracks. He could almost smell the memory of rain on old rock.
A worker pushing a cart of iron filings walked straight through the apparition without flinching. The man’s face did not change. He did not notice the ghost of a street that had appeared and disappeared in the space of a few heartbeats. Sineus stopped. The air where the alley had been was still, unnaturally cold. The silence that followed the vision had a faint, ticking quality. He was the only one who saw it. A curse he had once tried to cure, now his only tool for navigation.
He pressed on, his senses on high alert. He passed a tenement block, a monstrous brick box with a thousand dark windows. As he drew level with its entrance, a wave of emotion washed over him. It was not his own. It was a cold, specific, and overwhelming sorrow. The grief of a mother for a child lost to a fever in the winter of 1888. The memory was sharp, detailed. The smell of boiled cabbage and sickness. The feel of a small, cold hand in hers. The precise pattern of the cracks in the ceiling above the bed.
The sorrow was an infection. A piece of old, discarded pain that had found a new host. Sineus stumbled, his breath catching in his chest. He leaned against the rough brick of the factory wall opposite, fighting it. He was a man in a clean room, and a bucket of filth had been thrown over him. He focused on his own breathing. On the solid feel of the brick under his palm. On the cold weight of the useless, broken watch in his pocket. After a dozen heartbeats, the feeling receded, leaving him hollow and shaking. This was the Whispering Plague. Not just shifting streets, but ambushes of the soul.
He needed to get off the main thoroughfare. He found a recess between two hulking warehouses, a narrow space out of the main flow of workers, and pulled out his maps. The contemporary city map was a grid of straight lines and right angles. The pre-erasure map from the Archivist was a tangle of curved alleys and forgotten squares. He laid them one over the other.
They did not align. They fought each other. A street on his modern map, the Proletarsky Prospect, ran directly through a block of what the old map called the Weaver’s Rookery. The power station he needed to find was not on the new map at all. The old map showed a marsh in its place. His maps were useless. One showed the bones. The other showed the skin. He was in the flesh, and it was tearing itself apart.
His tools were failing him. His logic, his science, his belief in a measurable world—they were all useless here. He was a mathematician in a world without numbers. He needed a different kind of knowledge. He needed a guide. Not a mapmaker, but a ghost who knew the habits of other ghosts.
The Archivist had given him a name. Not a person. A place. A tavern called the Rusty Mug. A known hub for the city’s memory markets, where smugglers and criminals traded in the district’s toxic bounty. It was his only lead. He folded the maps and put them away. He would have to navigate by feel, by the currents of this sick, whispering tide.
He stepped back out onto the street. He needed a direction. He saw a man in the greasy overalls of a railway worker, leaning against a wall, smoking a cheap cigarette. The man’s face was a roadmap of exhaustion. Sineus approached him.
— The Rusty Mug?
The worker took a long drag from his cigarette. He looked Sineus up and down. The good coat. The clean hands. The man did not belong here. The worker exhaled a cloud of foul-smelling smoke, then pointed with a grimy thumb down a side street. He said nothing. He did not need to. The gesture was clear enough. Go that way. Get out of my sight.
Sineus gave a curt nod and turned down the alley. The drone of the factories grew louder here. The air was thicker, the whispers more insistent. He passed doorways that led into absolute darkness. He saw figures huddled in the shadows, their faces indistinct, their forms seeming to shift and blur at the edges of his vision. This was the heart of the district. The place where the decay was deepest.
He felt the pull of the tavern before he saw it. A concentration of memory. A nexus of traded histories and desperate bargains. Then it came into view. A squat, two-story building of dark, sweating brick, wedged between a foundry and a collapsed tenement. Its windows were boarded over, save for one on the ground floor, so thick with grime it admitted no light. A crude sign, a simple iron mug nailed to a plank of wood, hung above the door. The iron was bleeding a trail of rust down the wood.
The sound of rough laughter spilled out from inside, along with the smell of cheap alcohol, unwashed bodies, and something else. A low, rhythmic hum, shot through with a familiar, rapid ticking. The sound of active, weaponized memory.
He had traded a piece of his soul for a map that led him here. To the doorstep of the criminal underworld. He put his hand on the rough, splintered wood of the door.
