“He bound a tainted core to my life force,” Jaskier murmured, the words tasting like copper. He traced the schematic of the pulsing blue currents over the human silhouette. “And if I stop… it all blows.”
Orina’s face, usually a mask of professional disinterest, was tight with a mixture of horror and grim comprehension. Her gaze lingered on the schematic, then darted to Jaskier, the brass detector still humming softly at her hip. “The old man… he was trying to cage it. Initiative Chimera wasn’t about forging an arm, it was about preventing one.” Her teeth ground together. “And ‘Kacper’ took part. The constant ledger drafts… likely for research, to keep this seal holding.”
Jaskier shifted his weight from boot to boot. Jan Drozd, the patriarch he thought he understood, had run a desperate, terrifying gamble. The cheerful ignorance, the easy steps along wet flagstones, had been the fuse of a living charge. He *was* the munition.
A scrape of loose mortar echoed from the tunnel entrance. Both Jaskier and Orina spun, her brass sensor swinging up. Standing silhouetted against the faint luminescence of the tunnel beyond, a familiar, unsettling figure emerged. Dawid Sroka, his dark cloak blending with the shadows, stepped into the lab, his eyes, like chipped obsidian, immediately fixing on Jaskier.
“So, the truth finds its way out, even in this grimy pit,” Dawid said, his voice a low thrum that seemed to vibrate the very air. He ignored Orina, his focus absolute on Jaskier. “You understand now, don’t you? The marching was never about power. It was about delaying the inevitable.”
“How did you find us?” Orina demanded, her stance shifting, thumbs hovering over the ignition studs of her service sidearm.
Dawid didn’t even glance at her. “I know where the answers lie. I’ve known for longer than you can comprehend.” His gaze bore into Jaskier. “The visions I showed you… they were not merely projections of a possible future. They were memories.”
Jaskier tapped his heel against the stone. “Memories? What are you talking about?”
Dawid’s lips thinned. “I have seen Brzezina burn. I have felt the very foundations of this city vaporize into a superheated dust cloud. I have watched the sky crack open, bleeding poisoned fuel across a world screaming its final moments.”
His voice dropped, the edge of an ancient grief sharpening his tone. “My future began with the stench of ozone and scorched flesh. It began with the screams of my neighbors turning abruptly silent. I was in the Krayka District, buying rations. The sky turned a sickly green. Then, the ground beneath me erupted. It wasn’t a bomb; it was a release. A gargantuan surge of unrefined fuel expanded from the city center, an all-consuming inferno.”
His eyes, distant and haunted, looked past them, seeing something only he could perceive. “I saw it. The epicenter. The Drozd estate. Not the halls above, but the vault beneath, cracked into a gaping furnace. And standing over the crater… a monstrous distortion of you, Jaskier. A titan wrapped in azure fire, radiating death. I saw my wife, Lenka, shield our boy, Olek, in their small apartment on the sixth floor, just as the wave hit. No sound. No light. Just… gone. Dust. Everything I knew, everything I loved, reduced to less than nothing.”
He paused, drawing a ragged breath. “For years, I wandered the irradiated wastes, a ghost among ghosts, until I found a fragment of an old Weaver’s ritual. A desperate, impossible gamble to return. To prevent it. To stop *you*.” Dawid’s voice was a raw rasp now. “I used every last shred of my being to rewind the thread. To claw my way back. To kill you, if necessary, to save them.”
Orina lowered her tracker, brow furrowed as she scanned his face. “You… you’re from the future?” The concept was alien, terrifying, yet the conviction in his voice, the raw agony in his eyes, was undeniable.
Jaskier stared, piecing together the impossible puzzle. The prescient moves, the knowledge of his power’s true nature. It all clicked into place, a horrifying, inescapable truth.
Dawid met Jaskier’s gaze, his own unwavering. “Jan Drozd was trying to save us all. He developed the ‘March,’ a desperate countermeasure. He tied the reactor to you because your bloodline bore the resonance. He hoped steady pacing would bleed off the excess charge. But he took money from the Syndicate under the guise of municipal research.”
“The Syndicate…” Orina murmured, piecing together the names. “The magnate’s primary syndicate.”
“Precisely,” Dawid confirmed, voice flat. “The inner cabal—Councilor Zayets, Baroness Vranov, their ringleader—they schemed to weaponize the engine. They broke your sire’s final binding ritual to seize the payload. The disaster in the cellar was their doing. They wanted a controlled burst to dictate terms to the ministries, but they botched the dampeners.”
Anger prickled beneath Jaskier’s collar. The patron of his ruin. The debt notes, the crushed throat in the workshop, the blood on the tiles.
“They intend to trigger the rupture before dawn,” Dawid said. “They believe the core is ripe, and that a focused discharge will breach the shell cleanly. They have siphoned power from the perimeter grid, routing it through the northern distillers.”
Jaskier took two rapid paces. Tonight? So soon?
Dawid extended a hand, palm up, towards Jaskier. “You have the power, Jaskier. A terrifying, world-ending power, but power nonetheless. I have the knowledge of their plot, their timelines, their weak points. We are two sides of the same coin, destined to clash, yet now, our survival, and the survival of this city, hinges on a temporary, uneasy alliance. Let’s give them the ruin they deserve. Together.”
[Echoed Steps: 4,122,298]