The safe house in Königsberg felt like another world. The bridge, the gunfire, the ice — all of it seemed distant now, replaced by the quiet hum of a bourgeois apartment. Polished floors. Velvet curtains. The soft ticking of a clock. After the chaos, it should have felt safe. To Kato, it felt like a coffin.
There was stew on the table, rich and hot. She couldn't eat. The clean sheets felt strange against her skin. Even the wool dress laid out for her seemed foreign. Everything about the place was warm, but the warmth only made her feel colder. She was free, yet somehow still trapped.
Koba moved through the room like a shadow that refused to settle. His arm was bandaged neatly, his sling clean, the work of an efficient German doctor who had already left. The pain didn't seem to reach him. His eyes were always on her — sharp, hungry, desperate. He tried to speak, to reassure her, to talk of plans and futures. But his words felt like noise leaking from a stranger wearing the voice of someone she once loved.
When they were finally alone — just Koba, Kato, and Pavel standing silent by the door — the quiet thickened until she had to cut through it.
"Who were those men, Soso?" she asked, her voice calm but razor-edged. "The Germans. The ones who looked at you like you were their trophy. And that other man — the one on the bridge. He called you 'Koba.' He said he was acting for the Central Committee. He was one of ours, wasn't he?"
Koba's jaw locked. "It was complicated. A matter of Party discipline."
"Was it?" she stepped closer. "Stolypin told me things. About Malinovsky. About an exchange." The pieces that had tormented her since the bridge slid into place. "You didn't just rescue me. You traded him. You sold one of our own to the Germans."
Even Pavel shifted, as if the words themselves had weight.
Koba understood then that comfort meant nothing; she wanted truth. So he gave it to her.
"Yes," he said. "I sold him."
He didn't defend himself. He didn't soften it. He spoke slowly, coldly, as if teaching a principle he had long internalized.
"The world we dreamed of — it's gone, Kato. It never existed. The real world is a machine. It grinds everything, everyone. You can't survive it as a poet. You have to become a mechanic. You break the parts that don't work. You use the parts that do. Malinovsky was broken. I replaced him with something useful."
He gestured to the walls, the warmth, the quiet. "The Germans are another machine. They don't care who I am — only what I can do. The Party is no different. They would have left you to die for a theory. So I made a deal. I used one machine against another. And I won."
He took a step toward her, eyes fierce with conviction. "You were the only real thing left. The cause, the Party, the Revolution — all ideas. You are not. I chose reality over dreams."
The words dropped into silence like stones.
Kato stared at him. The anger drained. Understanding rose. Not acceptance — recognition. The boy she had loved was gone, burned away somewhere between Vologda and the ice on that bridge. What remained was this hollow creature who spoke of betrayal like arithmetic. He had torn the world apart, and this was all that remained.
Her stomach twisted. He hadn't saved her. He had bought her. And the price was everything he once was.
"You didn't save me, Soso," she whispered. "You just built me a bigger cage."
He flinched. Something in him flickered, then died.
"The man I loved," she said softly, turning away, "died in a forest in Vologda long before I was ever arrested."
Koba stood frozen, bandaged and mute, in a room meant to be a refuge. The stew cooled. The clock ticked on, merciless. All he heard now was the echo of what he had destroyed.
Across the continent, in a cramped Zurich apartment, the air was stretched tight enough to snap. Lenin prowled the rooms like a caged animal; the man who wrote manifestos now moved like a commander tracking a battlefield. Trotsky sat at the map, drifting between silence and scribbled notes. The "Koba problem" was no longer theory. It was a wound.
Yagoda entered without knocking, pale, shaking, carrying a thick stack of decoded telegraphs.
"From Stern," he said. "The full report from Tilsit."
Lenin's voice was a blade: "Read it."
Yagoda read Stern's account of the exchange: German agents positioned like actors; a sniper hiding in the ironwork; the Okhrana colonel struck down mid-ceremony; Koba's cold precision in the firefight. Then the line that made Lenin and Trotsky lean forward as if struck:
"...subject Koba then identified my position. He discharged his weapon in my direction, forcing me to take cover. He facilitated the escape of the German agents with the asset Malinovsky, and retreated under their protection…"
Yagoda lifted his eyes, voice hollow.
"CONCLUDED: HE IS NOT THEIR PRISONER. HE IS THEIR PARTNER. HIS TREASON IS COMPLETE AND WILLING."
Silence fell, thick as earth on a coffin.
Lenin walked to the map. He didn't look toward Berlin. He looked toward Russia — toward the future Koba had once written about with prophetic terror.
"He is gone," Lenin said. "He is now an asset of the German state. A weapon that will one day be pointed at us."
The annoyance that Koba had once been was now an existential threat. If a man like him could defect to an imperial power, how many others might follow when famine, war, and chaos descended?
"We move immediately. Draft protocols for a Special Commission. First mandate: root out spies and traitors from our ranks. We will make our knife inside."
Trotsky stood. Not to craft a legend, but to bury one.
"We denounce him publicly. Absolutely. Every cell gets the directive. We brand him: provocateur, agent of German imperialism. We salt the earth before the enemy can plant his myth."
Their resolve hardened. Koba's betrayal had given them the foundation — and the excuse — for a ruthless internal purge.
Yagoda hesitated. He had one more dispatch.
"From the Balkans," he said. "From Sarajevo."
Lenin and Trotsky barely turned.
"Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have been assassinated. The assassin believed to be a Serbian nationalist."
Trotsky's old prediction — that a single shot could ignite a continental war — vibrated in the room's silence. Lenin's hand drifted to Koba's thesis on the table, to the cold calculus inside it. What once looked like prophecy now read like overdue warning.
War had begun.
And the man who understood its machinery better than anyone — the man they had just excommunicated — was now in the arms of an empire ready to use him.
The only question left was the one none of them wished to voice:
What would their monster do now that the world he foresaw had finally arrived?