A week passed.
A week of whispers and unease. A week in which the ghost of Orlov haunted every backroom and tavern where revolutionaries gathered. His disappearance—his erasure—had become legend overnight. The official story, carefully constructed by Jake and delivered with Shaumian's measured gravity, told of a loyal comrade abducted and executed by the Okhrana. A martyr. A cautionary tale.
But beneath that neat fiction, something new was taking shape. Power in Tbilisi had shifted, drawn toward an invisible center buried beneath a sympathizer's villa.
The wine cellar had changed.
Once a place of fear and interrogation, it now throbbed with purpose. Crates of weapons lined the walls, stacks of documents grew by the day, and men and women came and went in quiet efficiency. It had become the heart of a new organism—Jake's creation, his kingdom. The Special Committee for Party Security.
He had become its architect.
Days blurred into one another. His primary task was Danilov, the broken assassin turned unwilling informant. Gone were the crude methods of beatings and screams. Jake had replaced them with something far more precise.
Danilov was kept fed, clean, and alone. No chains, no threats—just exhaustion and relentless questioning. Jake would sit with him for hours, calm, patient, unblinking. He didn't torture; he dismantled.
Every day, he asked for details—small ones, trivial ones—until Danilov's mind became a threadbare cloth of facts and habits. The man began to talk simply to fill the silence. He mapped Okhrana safe houses, identified couriers, sketched out the smallest rituals of communication: a chalk mark, a folded newspaper, a handkerchief left in a doorway.
To Kamo and the others, it was witchcraft. They were used to extracting truth with fists. But Soso's way was quieter—and far more terrifying. He was a scholar conducting an autopsy on an enemy network, piece by piece, while storing every detail inside the flawless archive of his modern mind.
When Danilov had nothing left to give, Jake began to build.
He needed watchers, not killers. Listeners, not brawlers. The revolution had enough men who could pull a trigger. What it lacked were eyes and ears.
He summoned Luka, the quiet witness from the ice house. "You notice things," Jake said. "You see what others ignore. From now on, you'll watch our people. The taverns. The tea houses. You'll tell me who whispers, who spends too freely, who meets with strangers. You'll be my eyes."
Luka nodded, solemn, proud, frightened.
Next came Anna—Luka's niece, the girl who had once delivered the message that lured Danilov to his doom. She stood before him, nervous but steady.
"Anna," Jake said, handing her a small notebook. "You remember faces. Patterns. Who walks with whom. You'll write it all down. Nothing is too small. Every word comes to me."
She accepted the notebook with both hands, as if it were a holy text.
And so the Special Committee began—not with soldiers, but with watchers and whisperers, bound to Jake by secrecy and devotion. It was the seed of something far larger, a network of loyalty and fear that would outlive them all.
The first sign of Yagoda's counterattack arrived on a gray, wet afternoon.
Pyotr, Jake's runner, stumbled into the cellar clutching a slip of paper as though it might burn him. "Comrade Soso," he whispered, "they're appearing everywhere. In papers. On benches."
Jake took the pamphlet. It was cheaply printed, unevenly inked—but the words were sharp as razors.
WHO JUDGES THE JUDGES?
He read on.
Comrades, we are told that the traitor Orlov has been exposed. But how? Where is the proof? Where is the trial? The confession?
Instead, we are asked to accept his disappearance on faith. We are told he has 'vanished,' a victim of the Okhrana. Convenient, isn't it?
Beware the man who saves you by becoming your master. Beware the Georgian butcher, Soso, who names himself judge, jury, and executioner. Today, his justice strikes a traitor. Tomorrow, whose neck will hang in his noose?
The words were poison, elegantly distilled.
Jake read it twice, his pulse steady but his stomach cold. The rhetoric was precise, the attack deliberate. It didn't deny his story—it used it, twisting his victory into tyranny.
This was Yagoda's work. Not brute violence, but ideological warfare. He was striking at the foundation of Jake's power—not the body of the revolution, but its soul.
Kamo spat on the floor. "Lies! We should find the printers and hang them from the lampposts!"
Jake folded the pamphlet carefully and slipped it into his coat. "And prove him right?" he said, voice quiet, deadly calm.
Kamo blinked, startled. "What do you mean?"
"He's not fighting us in the alleys anymore," Jake said. His tone carried the weight of a teacher explaining a terrible truth. "He's not trying to kill our bodies. He's trying to kill what the people believe we are."
He looked at the pamphlet again, the ink still damp between his fingers.
"This isn't propaganda," he said. "It's a mirror. And if we're not careful, we'll start to believe what we see in it."
The war had changed. No longer fought with pistols or dynamite, it had shifted into a new and treacherous theater—one where words could wound deeper than bullets, and the revolution could die not from betrayal, but from doubt.