The cold air was a knife against his face, a final, sharp sensation before the end. His muscles were tensed to push off, to finally trade the horror of this reality for the simple peace of oblivion. He was a breath away from saving the world.
Then the world kicked the door in.
The sound was a deafening crack of splintering wood, an explosion of violence that ripped through the room's quiet despair. Jake flinched so hard he almost lost his grip, his body reacting with a jolt of pure animal terror.
A mountain of a man, bearded and wild-eyed, filled the doorway. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving under a thick woolen coat dusted with snow. He reeked of the freezing outdoors and sheer panic. His eyes, wide and frantic, landed on Jake perched in the window.
"Soso!" the man roared, his voice a gravelly torrent of Russian. "By the devil, what are you doing? Dreaming by the window? Get down from there!"
Jake froze, his mind struggling to shift gears from existential sacrifice to immediate threat. He knew this man. From grainy, black-and-white photographs in his textbooks. Simon Ter-Petrosian. The Bolsheviks called him Kamo. A fanatic. A master of disguise. The party's most infamous bank robber. A man who handled dynamite like it was bread dough.
Kamo didn't see a man contemplating suicide. He saw his comrade, his leader in this small cell, wasting precious seconds. He stormed into the room, his heavy boots thudding on the floorboards, and grabbed the back of Jake's thin shirt, hauling him from the windowsill with shocking strength.
Jake stumbled back into the room, his plan, his one clear moral purpose, shattered into a million pieces.
"The Okhrana!" Kamo snarled, his face inches from Jake's. His breath was hot and smelled of garlic. "They're on the street! They swarmed the bakery. They took Mikho!"
The name "Okhrana"—the Tsar's secret police—sent a jolt of historical fear through him, far more potent than any movie villain. These were the experts of the dungeon and the Siberian exile.
Jake's mind was a chaotic mess. He tried to form a sentence, to ask a question, but his tongue felt thick and clumsy. The Russian he knew was academic, sterile, learned from audio files. Kamo's speech was a rapid-fire, guttural slang he could barely keep up with.
"M-Mikho?" Jake stammered, the name tasting alien in his mouth.
"Yes, Mikho! Are you deaf?" Kamo shook him again, his panic turning to frustrated anger. "They dragged him out into the street not ten minutes ago! We have to run. Now!"
As Kamo's hands tightened on him, something terrifying happened. Beneath Jake's conscious horror, a different feeling surged up from the depths of the body he wore. It was a flash of ice-cold fury. A deep, predatory instinct recoiled at being manhandled, at being challenged. The muscles in his neck and shoulders coiled like snakes, and for a split second, his arm tensed to strike, to smash his fist into Kamo's face.
Jake gasped, fighting himself. He had to mentally wrestle his own arm into submission, forcing the clenched fist to relax. It was a horrifying realization: he wasn't just piloting a body. He was trapped in a cage with a beast, and the beast was waking up.
He forced down the alien rage, his voice coming out as a strained rasp. "What… what was he carrying?" The history teacher in him was taking over, trying to assess the damage, to gather information.
Kamo's wild eyes narrowed. For the first time, a flicker of suspicion cut through his panic. He stared at Jake, at "Soso," as if seeing him for the first time tonight. "What was he carrying?" he repeated slowly, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl. "He was carrying everything, Soso. Everything."
He let go of Jake, pushing him back a step. "The new membership lists. Your name. My name. The names of the dockworkers who have been feeding us information. And worse."
"Worse?" Jake breathed, the cold in the room now a reflection of the ice forming in his stomach.
"The location of the new printing press," Kamo said, his words landing like stones. "The one we spent three months setting up. If they get that… our entire operation in Tbilisi is finished. They'll round everyone up. He won't last the night in the citadel, Soso. You know what they do. They'll peel him like an onion until he gives them every last scrap."
The abstract horror of Stalin's future victims was suddenly gone, replaced by the immediate, certain doom of dozens of real people whose lives now hung by the thread of a single man's ability to withstand torture.
The sounds of whistles and distant shouting echoed up from the street, sharp and clear through the open window. They were out of time. The net was closing.
Kamo's eyes darted towards the door, then back to Jake. The desperation was back, but now it was laced with a demand. He reached into his coat and his hand emerged with something heavy, dark, and brutally real.
He shoved it into Jake's hand.
A Nagant M1895 revolver.
The weight of it was absolute, a dense, cold promise of violence that seemed to suck all the warmth from his palm. Jake stared at it, his mind blank with terror. An hour ago, he was grading essays on the causes of World War I. Now he was holding a gun, the same model that would be used to execute millions in the century to come.
Kamo's gaze was locked on his, his eyes blazing with a desperate, fiery intensity, waiting for a command.
"They will have him at the citadel within the hour. He is a brave man, but no man can hold out forever. You are the senior man here, Soso," Kamo said, his voice low and urgent. "You give the order. Do we run, save ourselves and warn the others we can? Or is there another way?"
Jake stood there, frozen, the impossible weight of the gun in his hand, the lives of dozens of strangers suddenly his responsibility. His clean, simple plan for suicide, his one noble act, now felt like a cowardly, selfish luxury he could no longer afford.
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