The vault door closed with the sound of a tomb sealing, locking the hunter in with his prey.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, the head of the Cheka's most feared investigative unit, stood in the sudden silence. He adjusted his spectacles, his expression betraying nothing. He had walked into the Imperial Merchants Bank expecting a routine inspection of a disorganized archive. He had expected to find boxes of paper and a flustered, incompetent woman.
Instead, he found himself in a steel box buried thirty feet underground. And he was not alone.
The room was not an archive. It was a laboratory, a chaotic jungle of wires, glass tubes, and humming generators that filled the massive vault. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal.
Standing by a workbench was a wild-haired man in a stained lab coat, scribbling furiously on a chalkboard. Next to him stood Pavel, the silent giant who had disarmed Menzhinsky's guards at the top of the stairs with a speed that blurred the eye.
And leaning against a stack of crates marked with radiation hazard symbols was the Deputy Commissar herself. The woman he knew as "Sister Anna." The woman he had been hunting.
She was no longer playing the role of the harried bureaucrat. Her posture was relaxed, predatory. Her eyes were cold and bright.
"This is not an archive," Menzhinsky stated, his voice calm, though his mind was racing, analyzing the trap, calculating the odds. "What is this game, German?"
"It is not a game, Vyacheslav," Kato said, pushing herself off the crates. She walked toward him, her heels clicking on the steel floor. "It is the future. And you are going to help me build it."
Menzhinsky looked around the room, his gaze landing on the scientist. Recognition dawned. "Professor Ipatieff. You were reported missing. Kidnapped by bandits."
"Rescued," Ipatieff corrected, not looking up from his equations. "Liberated from small minds."
Kato nodded to the professor. "Show him."
Ipatieff turned. He picked up a long pair of tongs and reached into a lead-lined box. He withdrew a small, unassuming grey rock. It looked like nothing. A piece of gravel from a driveway.
He placed it into the center of a strange apparatus: a hollow cube of graphite bricks surrounded by sensors.
He flipped a switch.
A machine on the table—a Geiger counter—began to click. Slowly at first. Click. Click. Click. Then faster. Click-click-click-click.
Ipatieff adjusted a dial, moving the graphite bricks closer together.
The clicking dissolved into a solid, high-pitched scream. The needle on the gauge buried itself in the red.
The sound was unnerving, primal. It wasn't mechanical; it sounded like the angry hiss of a thousand venomous snakes. Menzhinsky took an involuntary step back. He didn't understand the science, but he understood the threat. The air in the room felt heavy, charged with a sickly, invisible energy.
"Do you know what you are hearing, Comrade Menzhinsky?" Ipatieff asked, his voice filled with a terrifying reverence. "You are hearing the song of the atom."
He turned off the machine. The scream died, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.
"Chemical explosives are primitive," Ipatieff explained, his eyes wide and manic. "They burn fuel. This... this destroys matter itself. It releases the energy that binds the universe together. A single bomb, the size of a grapefruit, could turn Petrograd into a shadow on a wall."
Menzhinsky stared at the small grey rock. He was a man of logic, of files and secrets. He dealt in the currency of information. But what he was seeing rendered his files obsolete. It made his pistols look like toys.
He looked at Kato. He saw the cold ambition in her eyes, and for the first time in his life, he felt a flicker of genuine, existential terror.
"Why show me this?" he asked. "Why not simply kill me?"
"Because I don't need another corpse," Kato said. "I need a partner who understands the scale of the game."
She stepped closer to him, invading his personal space. She smelled of expensive soap and cold steel.
"Lenin plays with soldiers," she said, her voice a low, hypnotic murmur. "Trotsky plays with speeches. They are fighting for a country. I am playing with the fundamental forces of creation. I am building a weapon that will make armies irrelevant."
She gestured around the vault. "This is the real revolution, Vyacheslav. Not in the streets, but here. In the dark."
She locked eyes with him. "You are a hunter. You pride yourself on seeing what others miss. So look. Really look. Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a policeman chasing rumors and reading mail? Or do you want to hold the leash of the sun?"
The offer hung in the air. It was not a choice between life and death. It was a choice between the past and the future. Between being a servant of the state, and being a master of the world.
Menzhinsky looked from the silent Geiger counter to Kato. His mind, a machine for processing data, re-evaluated everything. His loyalty to Lenin, to Dzerzhinsky, to the Party... it all seemed suddenly small. Petty.
He realized that the woman standing before him was the most dangerous person in Russia. And he realized that he wanted to be standing next to her when the fire started.
He did not kneel. He did not offer a handshake. He simply adjusted his spectacles, his face returning to its mask of impassive calm.
"The Lubyanka has resources you lack," he said quietly. "Safe houses. Forgers. Scientists who are currently wasting their time on cryptanalysis."
Kato smiled. It was a sharp, victorious expression.
"I will require access to the Cheka's foreign intelligence files," she said. "Specifically regarding German industrial contacts."
Menzhinsky nodded once. "It can be arranged."
"And your report to Lenin?"
"I will tell him the archive is disorganized but secure," Menzhinsky said, his voice smooth and practiced. "I will tell him you are an overwhelmed administrator with delusions of grandeur, harmless and isolated."
He turned to leave, the vault door already swinging open for him. He paused at the threshold and looked back at the grey rock sitting on the table.
"Do not fail, Comrade," he said. "Or we will all burn."
He walked out of the vault a changed man. He was still the head of the Cheka's counter-intelligence, still a loyal servant of the state on paper. But his true allegiance had shifted. He had seen the face of the new god, and he had decided to become its high priest.
He was now Kato's creature.