Kamo's whisper barely carried across the cold room, but to Jake it sounded impossibly far away—like a voice echoing through time. His breath caught in his throat. His mind buckled under the collision of two timelines, two worlds folding into each other in the dim light of Tbilisi.
Genrikh Yagoda.
The name detonated in his skull. Not a hero. Not a martyr. A bureaucrat of death. The man who would one day oversee the Gulags, who would turn Stalin's paranoia into machinery, who would orchestrate purges so vast that even his loyalty couldn't save him from their jaws. And here he was, young and unsuspecting, walking through history before it curdled.
"Soso!" Kamo hissed, shaking his arm. The touch snapped Jake back. The tremor in his hands, the white in his knuckles—he couldn't let Kamo see that.
Jake forced air into his lungs. "I… I think I know him," he said, his voice unsteady but functional. He squinted as if digging through memory. "From Batumi. A few years ago. He was loud back then. Wanted power, wanted recognition. Too ambitious for his own good."
Kamo's eyes sharpened. A target now had a story. "Good. Then we take him. Same as Fikus. We grab him, drag him back to the ice house, and make him talk. Maybe he'll lead us to the others."
Jake's mind flared in alarm. The idea was suicide.
"No," he snapped.
Kamo froze, incredulous. "No? He's an informant! You saw him—"
"Think, Kamo!" Jake's voice cracked through the air. He stepped closer, his tone knife-sharp. "Think beyond the next punch for once."
Kamo's jaw clenched, but he held his tongue.
Jake lowered his voice, forcing it steady. "What is our story? The one we've sold to the party? That the Okhrana is spreading false rumors to destroy Orlov. One grand conspiracy. One clean thread." He jabbed a finger at the floor. "If we take this man—if we make him talk—and what he says doesn't match Fikus's confession, what then? He gives us new names, new handlers, new objectives. None of them fit. The story collapses. Fikus becomes a liar. We become fools—or worse, traitors chasing ghosts."
The silence stretched. The logic sank in. Kamo's fists slowly loosened.
"We can't touch him," Jake said firmly. "Not yet."
Kamo spat on the floor. "So we just watch him walk? We do nothing while he feeds the Okhrana?"
"We don't do nothing," Jake replied. "We watch. We study. Fikus was a pawn. This man's something else—disciplined, careful, dangerous. You don't rip out a cancer with a kitchen knife. You trace every root first."
He was talking to Kamo, but the words were also for himself. His thoughts spun like gears locking into place. Orlov was still a political enemy to be strangled quietly. Yagoda was something far worse—a ghost from a future built on blood. Two fronts. Two wars.
Kamo finally nodded, slow and reluctant. "Alright, Soso. We watch. We wait."
It was grudging obedience, but obedience all the same.
They gathered their coats. The air between them had turned heavy, their earlier excitement drowned in the weight of what they'd just seen. At the door, Kamo hesitated.
"This man from Batumi," he said, frowning. "What's his name? We can't just call him 'that man.'"
Jake paused. His mind searched for something safe, a mask to hide the truth. From the dark corners of memory—of history—another name surfaced. Another monster.
He looked at Kamo. "Beria," he said quietly. "Giorgi Beria."
The name left a bitter taste, thick with irony. In this time, it meant nothing. But Jake knew what it would mean one day. Another shadow. Another ghost of the future.
"Alright," Kamo said. "We'll watch Beria."
They slipped back into the freezing streets, their silhouettes swallowed by the night. Jake kept his face turned from the light, thoughts already spiraling ahead.
He wasn't just rewriting history anymore.
History was starting to look back.
The next week blurred into smoke and silence. Jake felt stretched to breaking, pulled between two fronts of a war only he could see. Every hour was a balancing act between politics and paranoia, between the revolution's stage lights and the city's shadows. One wrong move in either could end him.
By day, he played the loyal soldier in the party's inner meetings—the "protector" of Comrade Orlov. He listened, nodded, spoke in the right tone at the right time. His mask was perfect: steady eyes, calm voice, a man weighed down by duty rather than ambition.
He dropped careful lines into conversation—phrases about the Okhrana's latest plots, about vigilance, about solidarity with their "embattled" hero. He whispered to Stepan Shaumian that Orlov seemed distracted, shaken by the rumors. "He needs support," Jake would murmur. "The enemy thrives on our doubt."
Each word tightened his image. Not an agitator, not a brute—a strategist. A man who thought in systems, who understood the unseen. Men who once mocked him now sought his counsel. He could feel the slow, steady accumulation of power—thin and poisonous as arsenic.
By night, the mask changed.
He and Kamo shadowed "Giorgi Beria."
They lived out of filthy rooms, eating stale bread, drinking bitter tea, sleeping in shifts. Yagoda—Beria—whatever name Jake gave him in his head, was nothing like the careless informants of Tbilisi's taverns. He was sharp. He varied his routes, doubled back without warning, studied reflections in shop windows to spot tails.
Twice, Jake and Kamo barely escaped notice—once by ducking behind a garbage cart, another time by plunging into a cellar doorway and holding their breath while boots scraped past. Yagoda never saw them, but Jake could feel the man's awareness like static in the air.
They logged everything: the bakery, the laundry, the meetings with comrades who seemed genuine. Yagoda played both sides with precision—part revolutionary, part betrayer. Not a snitch. A technician.
The tension hollowed Jake out. Bread turned to dust in his mouth. Sleep came in shallow bursts, haunted by faces—Orlov's smirk, Kato's eyes, Yagoda's silhouette crossing lamplight. "Soso" wasn't a disguise anymore; it was becoming his skin. The soft voice of Jake Vance, history teacher, was fading. What remained was watchfulness, calculation, a constant weighing of threats.
Kamo was the only person who shared his hours, but even that bond was built on lies. Kamo trusted a man who didn't exist.
One night, the weight became too much. Jake found himself outside Kato's building, clutching a small parcel—real bread, a wedge of cheese, a few rubles from one of Kamo's "expropriations."
She was mending a shirt when he knocked. Candlelight softened her, made her look both older and more fragile. She accepted the parcel with quiet gratitude.
"You should eat," he said. The words sounded dry and foreign in his own ears.
She looked him over, her expression softening for just a moment. "You should," she said. "You look half-dead. What are you doing all night, Soso?"
He wanted to tell her everything. To dump the truth at her feet until there was nothing left of the lies. But in this world, truth was a contagion. To protect her, he had to keep her blind.
"Party business," he said. "It's… complicated."
Her gaze didn't waver. She didn't press. She just looked at him with quiet sorrow, as if she were already mourning him. "Be safe," she whispered, and turned back to her sewing.
He left feeling colder than when he'd arrived. The silence between them was worse than anger. It was the silence of two worlds drifting apart. Work, at least, demanded no honesty.
The breakthrough came a week later, on a night so dark the city felt swallowed whole. They followed Yagoda through twisting alleys until he reached the old cemetery. The air was brittle with frost. Between leaning stones and cracked angels, Yagoda stopped before a marble crypt.
He wasn't alone for long.
A man appeared out of the dark—tall, elegant, unmistakably upper class. His coat was rich wool, his fur hat immaculate. A government official. Far above the rank of any Okhrana thug.
Jake and Kamo crouched behind a mausoleum, barely breathing. The two men spoke in low tones. After a moment, the official handed Yagoda a thick envelope, clapped him on the shoulder, and left the way he'd come.
Jake felt the chill crawl deeper into his bones. This wasn't just espionage. It was coordination.
Then, another shadow moved.
From the opposite end of the cemetery, a second man approached the crypt. His stride was confident. Familiar.
Orlov.
Jake's heart stopped. Kamo swore under his breath.
They watched as Orlov greeted Yagoda—not as adversaries, but as colleagues. The two men exchanged words, quiet and easy. Yagoda laughed.
The truth hit Jake like a blow.
Orlov and Yagoda weren't on opposite sides. They were partners.
The plot Jake had spent weeks weaving, the delicate machine he thought he controlled, was a fiction. The real game had been running beneath it the entire time, vast and invisible.
He wasn't the hunter standing above the board.
He was a piece.
And the hands moving him belonged to men who, in another timeline, would build the exact nightmare he'd come here to stop.