The cold steel of the Nagant revolver felt less like an object and more like a disease in Jake's hand. Kamo's question hung in the air, thick and heavy with the fate of sleeping revolutionaries all across Tbilisi. Do we run, or is there another way?
Jake's 21st-century mind, the mind of a teacher who preached critical thinking and non-violent solutions, desperately scrabbled for an answer that didn't involve condemning a man to death.
"We… we create a diversion," Jake said, the words feeling clumsy and inadequate. "A fire. We can start a fire in the old cooperage on the next street over. It's a tinderbox. It would draw them away, create chaos. In the confusion, Mikho might get a chance to run."
It was a plan born from a hundred movies, a desperate gambit that sounded plausible in the abstract.
Kamo stared at him. For a long, silent moment, the only sound was the whistling wind outside the open window. Then, a low, harsh sound rumbled in Kamo's chest. It was a laugh, but it held no humor. It was the sound of grinding stones.
"A fire?" Kamo repeated, his voice dripping with a contempt so profound it felt like a physical blow. "A diversion? Soso, has the shock frozen your brain?" He stepped closer, his bulk seeming to suck all the air from the tiny room. "And who puts out this fire? The fire brigade, an hour from now? By then, the Tsar's dogs will have pulled out Mikho's fingernails just to warm up. They aren't fools who chase smoke, they are wolves who have tasted blood. They have him. That is the only fact that matters now."
He gestured wildly at the room around them. "This isn't a game we are playing. This isn't one of your poems. That is a fool's plan. A boy's plan! It would get us and anyone we contact killed."
The whistles from the street below grew louder, closer. A dog began to bark frantically. Time was gone.
Kamo's suspicion hardened into a dangerous glare. "What has gotten into you tonight? The Soso I know is a calculator. He understands sacrifice. He knows when a piece must be taken off the board."
Jake felt the trap closing. Every instinct from his old life screamed at him to find another way, to uphold the sanctity of a single life. But in this world, those instincts were a death sentence. He looked at Kamo's hard, fanatical face, then at the gun in his own hand. He was being tested. To show weakness now, to hesitate, was to reveal himself as an imposter. They would kill him for it. And then they would all be caught anyway.
He had to say the words. It felt like swallowing broken glass. He forced his jaw to work, shaping the alien Russian words with Stalin's tongue. He looked Kamo dead in the eye, channeling the ice-cold cruelty he'd seen in the mirror.
"We run," he said, his voice a low, rough command. "He is lost."
The words hung in the air, a death sentence delivered. A wave of nausea washed over him. He had just done it. His first sin. He had condemned a man whose face he'd never even seen.
The tension in Kamo's body vanished instantly, replaced by a grim, approving nod. "Good," he grunted. "The Soso I know is back. Now, move!"
What followed was a chaotic blur. Kamo was already at the door, pulling it open a crack to peer into the hall before motioning him forward. Jake shoved the heavy revolver into his coat pocket, where it banged against his hip like a guilty conscience.
They didn't take the main stairs. Kamo led him to a narrow, rickety servants' staircase at the back of the building, the wood groaning and splintering under their weight. They descended into a freezing, garbage-strewn alley. Jake's 21st-century body was clumsy, his feet slipping on patches of ice and filth. But Stalin's body seemed to know the way. It moved with a grim, predatory grace, hugging the shadows, his senses alive to every distant shout and echoing footstep. Jake was merely a passenger, a terrified ghost in the machine, his mind recoiling even as his legs carried him deeper into the labyrinthine darkness of the city.
They ran. Down alleys that smelled of rot and despair, past shuttered windows where families huddled in fear, the sounds of the Okhrana fading behind them. After what felt like an eternity, Kamo pulled him to a halt in front of a plain, unassuming door in a slightly less dilapidated tenement building. He knocked a quick, rhythmic pattern.
The door opened, and they slipped inside.
The apartment was warmer, cleaner. It smelled of boiled laundry and weak tea. And standing there, her hands twisting nervously in a small shawl, was a young woman.
Her face was gentle, with large, dark eyes that were etched with worry. Jake knew her instantly, not from a textbook, but from the famous, heartbreakingly beautiful photos. Ekaterina Svanidze. Kato. Stalin's first wife. The one true love of his life, according to the history books. The pious, kind woman whose death from typhus in 1907 was said to have frozen the last vestiges of humanity in her husband's heart.
She rushed past Kamo, her eyes only for him. She didn't see the hard-eyed revolutionary or the man who had just left another to be tortured. She saw her husband. Her Soso.
"Soso," she breathed, her voice a soft melody that cut through the harshness of the night. She reached out, not hesitating, and took his hand. "You are shaking. You are as pale as a ghost. Did the Okhrana…?"
Her touch was electrifying. It was warm, real, and utterly human. It was the hand of a good person, holding his. The same hand that, just moments before, had held the cold steel of a revolver. The hand belonging to the mind that had just sacrificed a man to the Tsar's butchers.
The contrast was so profound, so devastating, that it buckled his knees. He looked from her loving, terrified face down to their joined hands. The warmth of her skin felt like a brand, a reminder of a humanity he was already beginning to lose.
His mission, which thirty minutes ago had been a simple, grand plan to save millions by dying, had just become infinitely more complicated and painfully personal. He knew, with the chilling certainty of a historian, that this kind, gentle woman was already living on borrowed time. History had already written her death warrant.
And as he looked into her innocent eyes, a single, terrifying thought crystallized in his mind, sharp and clear as a shard of ice.
How can I save her from the monster everyone needs me to be?
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