The folded scrap in Kamo's hand was no bigger than a thumbnail, yet Jake felt its weight like a live grenade. It was a fragment of chaos, a wild variable tossed into the gears of a machine he had built with surgical precision. His perfect lie had just sprouted a terrible truth.
"Let me see it," Jake said, voice taut.
Kamo passed it over. The paper was cheap, damp from fog. Jake unfolded it carefully. Inside was a single mark—a circle crossed through by a line. An Okhrana signal. The same kind of symbol he'd invented out of nowhere, meant only to add realism to Fikus's confession. And here it was. Real.
His stomach turned. The odds were impossible.
"This is good, Soso," Kamo whispered, his excitement crackling through the cold air. "It proves the confession was real! You broke that tavern rat so hard he told us a truth he didn't even know he knew!"
Jake didn't respond. His mind was spinning too fast for words.
Kamo pressed on. "Think about it. We can watch this place. Catch whoever's using it. Expose a real Okhrana cell! You'll be a hero across the whole Caucasus. Even Lenin will hear about this!"
It made sense—at least to Kamo. He was a man of direct action. He saw opportunity, not risk. But Jake saw the cracks forming already.
If they acted on this, everything could collapse. His plan to control Orlov was built on a single, fragile illusion: a lie balanced so neatly it had begun to feel like truth. This real drop-box shattered that symmetry. If they investigated and found nothing, it would weaken the story. If they found something, but it didn't connect to Orlov, the confession would unravel completely. A single wrong discovery could undo weeks of work.
The safe move was to destroy it—to pretend it didn't exist. He could tell Kamo that Levan was mistaken, that it was some child's chalk mark or a piece of garbage. He could protect the plan.
But another, colder thought slid in. The part of him that had once pulled triggers. The part learning to think like Stalin.
A second snake in the room was more dangerous than the first. You didn't ignore it—you studied it. You found out how deep its den went. Real control wasn't about sticking to a plan. It was about owning every variable.
He had to know.
"No," Jake said at last, the word hard and final.
Kamo blinked. "No? Soso, this is a gift from the gods of revolution!"
"A gift horse," Jake said quietly, "whose mouth is full of sharp teeth." He met Kamo's eyes. "If Levan found it, others can too. What if the Okhrana wanted it found? What if it's bait?"
Kamo hesitated. His grin faltered. Jake leaned in. "We can't send anyone else. Too many already know the confession. If one of ours is seen near that wall, everything we built burns. Orlov, the Committee, all of it."
The logic sank in slowly. Kamo's shoulders dropped.
"This is too delicate," Jake said. "If we watch it, it's just us. You and me. No one else."
The decision settled between them, heavy and cold. Jake knew he was doubling their danger—opening a second front while still fighting the first. It wasn't one game of chess anymore. It was two, played blindfolded, with death waiting at both boards.
They began the next night.
They took turns watching from the window of an abandoned tenement overlooking the narrow alley. The hours crawled. The room stank of mildew and stale air. Outside, the loose brick sat untouched, mocking them.
The first night passed. Nothing.
The second. Still nothing.
By the third night, Jake was questioning everything. Maybe he'd made the wrong call. Maybe Kamo had been right—it was trash, not a thread of fate.
Then, close to midnight, movement.
A lone figure emerged from the far end of the street, keeping to the shadows. The steps were hurried but careful, the gait untrained—nervous, not professional. A worker, not a spy.
Jake and Kamo ducked low. The man reached the wall, checked both sides, and slid a folded paper behind the brick. Then he vanished as quickly as he'd come.
"Did you see his face?" Kamo whispered.
"No," Jake said. "Too dark."
Five long minutes passed before they dared move. Then they slipped down, silent as ghosts. The air outside cut like knives. Jake pried the brick loose. Another folded note waited in the hollow.
This one carried a new mark—different symbol, same hand. A signal acknowledging the first.
Back in their hideout, they watched again.
An hour later, another man appeared. Not sneaking this time. Walking like he belonged to the street. He stopped by the wall, pretended to light a cigarette, and in the same motion, retrieved the message.
Under the weak glow of a gas lamp, he lifted his head for half a second. That was all it took.
Kamo squinted. "Don't know him. Some stranger."
But Jake's breath caught in his throat. His pulse roared in his ears.
He knew that face. He had seen it a hundred times—on the glossy pages of history books, in the grainy photographs of men who smiled while signing death warrants. Genrikh Yagoda.
In the future Jake came from, Yagoda would rise to become head of Stalin's secret police—the NKVD. He would oversee purges, torture, and executions before being devoured by the very system he built.
But here, in 1906, he was young. A comrade. A shadow already moving through history.
Kamo looked at him, puzzled. "Soso? Who is he?"
Jake couldn't answer. He just stared at the spot where Yagoda had vanished, his heart sinking under the weight of what he understood.
The web wasn't just wide—it was endless.
He wasn't fighting the Okhrana anymore.
He was staring at the first flicker of his own future terror.
"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.