The first thing he noticed was the cold.
Not the tame chill of an apartment AC in 2025. This cold bit through a thin blanket and sat on his bones. It smelled of coal smoke, cheap tobacco, and sweat.
Jake Vance blinked into gray light. A single gas flame guttered on a table. Shadows pooled in the corners.
He tried to sit. Pain answered him—sharp in the left shoulder, unfamiliar. His hands, when they found the floor, were coarse and callused. They belonged to someone else.
Panic prickled, tight and bright. This wasn't a dream.
The room was small and shabby. Wallpaper peeled in brown maps. A heavy wool coat hung on a nail. On the table: a hunk of black bread, a glass of dark, cold tea, and a stack of pamphlets.
He picked one up. The paper tasted of dust. The script curved in a language he almost remembered from old electives. Georgian. Under it, Cyrillic: Russian. Words floated up—workers, struggle, revolution.
His teacher-brain tried to catalog it. Georgia. Early twentieth century. Bolshevik leaflets. It could be immersive tech. But the ache in his shoulder and the grit under his nails argued otherwise.
He needed a mirror.
A cracked rectangle hung on the wall. He leaned close. His breath fogged the glass and then cleared.
The face that looked back was not Jake's.
It was younger. Gaunt. A dark mustache. Untidy black hair. Pockmarks dotted the skin. The eyes were the wrong thing—deep, hard, and small as coals. They looked like a man who had learned to endure and then to dominate.
He knew that face. He'd just shown it to a class.
Ioseb Jughashvili.
Stalin.
The word hit him like a physical shove. The room tipped. He stumbled back, hand to his mouth.
It couldn't be. He wasn't only in the past. He was in this man.
Memory came in flash-bullets. The Great Purge. Show trials. NKVD raids. The Holodomor. Gulags stretching into white emptiness. Numbers from dusty textbooks—twenty million, thirty million—suddenly had weight and teeth.
What had been abstract was now a ledger pressing against his chest. Every death, every broken life, felt like a bill with his name on it.
He thought of himself—Jake Vance—an anxious teacher who flinched at parent-teacher meetings and couldn't stomp on spiders. Now he occupied a body destined to make history bleed.
For a sliver of a second, fear swelled and then snapped into something else. Panic faded. A cold, precise clarity took its place.
There was only one answer, the teacher part of him said in the only voice that made sense. One life could change millions.
He scanned the room for something—anything—that would end a life cleanly.
A bread knife. Small, dull. Not enough.
Poison? No. He needed certainty.
He walked to the narrow window. Outside, an alley ran down into darker night. Wind pushed in, carrying the smell of wet cobbles.
He set his palm on the sill. His knuckles creaked white with grip. There were no tears. No pleading for mercy. Only the steady, terrible determination of someone who had decided what had to be done.
He swung one leg over the sill. The stone bit through thin trousers. For a beat he hung between inside and outside, between the cramped room and the cobbles below.
He could feel the life in this body—tight muscles, quick heart, the hunger for action. It made him steadier, not braver. The thought of killing the man whose name would scar history steadied him more.
He looked once at the flame on the table, at the pamphlets, at the crumpled coat. Then down.
Below, the alley swallowed the light. It would be quick. It would be certain.
He didn't imagine glory. He imagined prevention—one terrified gasp that never rippled into the machinery of terror.
He pushed.
Cold wind gusted full on his face. The window frame strained. For a second he hung, the world a slim ribbon of night beneath his boots.
Then he dropped.