The first thing he noticed was the cold.
Not the tame chill of an apartment AC in 2025. This cold bit straight through a thin blanket and settled deep in 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 like ink in the corners.
He tried to sit. Pain shot through his left shoulder—sharp and unfamiliar. His hands, when they found the floor, were coarse and callused. They weren't his. They belonged to someone who lived harder, harsher.
Panic pricked at the edges of his mind. This wasn't a dream.
The room was small and shabby. Wallpaper peeled in loose brown maps. A heavy wool coat hung on a nail by the door. On the table sat a hunk of black bread, a glass of dark, cold tea, and a stack of pamphlets.
Jake reached for one. The brittle paper tasted of dust and damp age. The script curved elegantly in a language he almost remembered from old electives. Georgian. Underneath it, Cyrillic. Russian. Words floated up—workers, struggle, revolution.
His teacher-brain tried to catalog the scene. Georgia. Early twentieth century. Bolshevik leaflets. Maybe immersive tech. Maybe a hallucination. But the throb in his shoulder, the grit under his nails, and the cold slithering into his ribs argued otherwise.
He needed a mirror.
A cracked rectangle hung on the far wall. Jake stepped toward it, leaning close. His breath fogged the glass, then cleared.
The face staring back wasn't Jake Vance.
It was younger. Gaunt. A dark mustache. Untidy black hair. Pockmarks scattered across the skin. And the eyes… the eyes were wrong. Deep, hard, small as coals. Eyes that had learned to endure. Eyes that would later learn to dominate.
He knew that face. He'd shown it to students. He'd graded quizzes on it.
Ioseb Jughashvili.
Stalin.
The name hit him like a physical blow. The room seemed to tilt. Jake stumbled back, hand clamped over his mouth.
It couldn't be. He wasn't just in the past. He was in this man.
Memory punched through him in flash-bullets. The Great Purge. Show trials. NKVD raids. The Holodomor. Gulags stretching like frozen scars across a continent. Twenty million, thirty million—numbers that had always lived in textbooks—suddenly felt like weight pressing directly on his lungs.
What had once been abstract now felt like debt. A ledger of blood. And every entry carried his new name.
Jake thought of himself—an anxious teacher who hated confrontation and lifted spiders outside instead of killing them. And now he occupied a body destined to grind history into dust.
Fear swelled, sharp and suffocating. But then, as quickly as it rose, it shattered.
A cold, precise clarity took its place.
There was one answer—the only one a desperate teacher could cling to. One life could save millions.
He scanned the room. Anything sharp. Anything final.
A bread knife. Small, dull. Not enough.
Poison? No certainty.
His eyes drifted to the narrow window. The alley below was long, dark, and unforgiving.
He stepped forward. His palm pressed the stone sill. His knuckles whitened with the force of his grip. No tears came. No desperate bargains with fate. Only the quiet resolve of a man who believed he was about to prevent a century of suffering.
He swung one leg over the sill. The stone bit through thin trousers. Wind slapped his face and carried the smell of wet cobbles.
For a heartbeat he hung between the cramped room and the drop below. He could feel the life in this body—tight muscles, quick heart, a hungry readiness. The kind of readiness a revolutionary would have. The kind of readiness Stalin would one day use to crush nations.
The thought of stopping that future steadied him.
Jake looked once more at the guttering flame on the table, the scattered pamphlets, the heavy coat. Then he looked down.
The alley swallowed the light whole. It would be quick. Certain.
He didn't imagine glory. Only prevention. One gasp that never turned into a purge or a famine or a gulag.
He pushed.
Cold wind knifed across his cheeks. The window frame creaked. For a second he hung, suspended between one world and another.
Then he dropped—
And the door exploded.
Wood cracked like a gunshot. Jake flinched, losing his balance on the sill. His boot scraped stone. He twisted back inside.
A man burst into the room—a massive figure with a wild beard and eyes burning with panic. Snow clung to his ragged coat. His breath steamed in the icy air. He smelled of cold, sweat, and smoke.
"Soso!" he roared in Russian, his voice shaking the walls. "By the devil, what are you doing? Dreaming by the window? Get down!"
Jake froze. The nickname slapped him harder than the cold wind had. Soso. Stalin's childhood name.
His mind scrambled through the mental index of revolutions and faces and footnotes.
Simon Ter-Petrosian.
Kamo.
Revolutionary. Bank robber. Lunatic with explosives. Stalin's friend and sometime guardian.
Kamo didn't see suicide. He saw carelessness. He lunged, grabbed Jake by the back of his shirt, and yanked him off the ledge with terrifying strength.
Jake hit the floor hard. His grand, tragic sacrifice plan shattered like cheap glass.
"The Okhrana!" Kamo bellowed. His breath smelled of garlic and raw fear. "They're on the street! They took Mikho!"
Okhrana. The Tsar's secret police. Jake's throat tightened. He knew exactly what they did—interrogation, exile, torture.
Jake tried to respond, but his Russian was too clean, too slow. Kamo's furious burst of slang nearly blurred into noise.
"M-Mikho?" Jake managed.
"Yes, Mikho!" Kamo shook him again, as if trying to rattle sense loose. "They dragged him into the street not ten minutes ago! We have to move!"
Jake trembled—not entirely from fear. Something deeper stirred. Something cold. Something that lived inside this body before he did.
A sharp, violent anger rose like a coiled beast. For a terrifying moment, Jake wanted to hit Kamo. His arm started to move on its own.
He caught his wrist mid-swing.
Sweat broke cold on his spine.
He wasn't alone in here. He was wrestling the instincts of a man who once bent an empire by sheer force of will.
"What… what was he carrying?" Jake forced the words out, clinging to logic like a rope.
Kamo paused. Suspicion flickered in his eyes. He leaned in, voice low and dangerous.
"What was he carrying?" he echoed. "Everything."
Jake's stomach dropped. "Everything?"
"The lists." Kamo's voice was a growl. "Our names. The dockworkers helping us. And worse—the location of the new press. The one we spent months hiding."
He stepped closer. "If they break him, it's over. All of us. You know what they'll do to him in the citadel, Soso. They'll peel him like an onion."
Outside, whistles cut through the night. Boots hammered cobblestones. The net was closing.
Kamo's hand went to his coat. He pulled out a heavy revolver. A Nagant M1895. He pressed it into Jake's palm.
The metal was shockingly cold. The weight seemed to drag his arm down.
Jake stared at it. This was the revolver that would one day symbolize terror. Now it felt like a test.
Kamo's voice dropped even lower. "They'll have him in the citadel within the hour. He's strong, but no man can last forever. You are the senior man here, Soso."
His eyes locked onto Jake's. Burning. Trusting. Expecting the man he thought he knew.
"What do we do? Run and warn the others? Or something else?"
Jake didn't answer. The world shrank until it was just him, Kamo, and the revolver in his shaking hand.
An hour ago, he had considered ending his life to save millions.
Now he couldn't die—not when dozens of people might die tonight if he did nothing.
He wasn't here to run. And he wasn't free to jump.
He was already in the war.