The gunshot cracked through the night like a full stop at the end of a sentence written in blood.
Jake froze. Time slowed to a crawl as his eyes locked on the boy below. Giorgi jerked once—then crumpled, limbs folding like a marionette with its strings cut.
From the alley, Kamo reacted instantly. His revolver snapped up, the motion fluid, instinctive. He fired once at the shattered window above, a single defiant echo of rage. A scream answered him. The fifth man vanished from sight.
Then came the silence—heavy, absolute. The echo of the shot lingered in Jake's skull, humming like electricity. The air reeked of gunpowder, sharp and metallic.
On the street below, movement. Giorgi twitched, then staggered upright. Alive. A strangled scream tore from him, piercing and wild. He clutched his arm; blood spread darkly down his sleeve, staining the thin wool. He wasn't dying—just broken in some new, invisible way.
"Get down here, Professor!" Kamo's voice roared from below, dripping with scorn. "The work isn't done! Move!"
The word Professor cut deeper than any bullet. Jake's face burned with humiliation. He pulled back from the ledge and scrambled toward the fire escape. The iron rattled beneath his weight as he descended into the wreckage he had helped create.
When his boots hit the street, the scene was worse than anything he could have imagined. Four bodies sprawled across the cobblestones, limbs twisted, dark stains spreading beneath them. The smell was overwhelming—blood and smoke and something faintly chemical. The kind of smell that clung to the back of the throat long after it was gone.
Kamo was already working, efficient and unflinching. "Don't just stand there," he barked, seizing the trembling boy by his uninjured arm. "Pyotr, keep him quiet. Soso—search them. Papers, weapons, money. Go!"
Jake knelt beside the nearest corpse. The man's eyes stared upward, wide and unseeing. His mouth hung open in a small, permanent gasp. There was a neat hole above his brow, the skin around it dark with powder burn.
Jake's stomach lurched. His hands shook so badly he could barely unbutton the man's coat. The fabric was still warm. His fingers brushed flesh.
He turned away and vomited into the gutter. The sound was drowned out by Kamo's cold voice. "You can retch later. Move now. We've got minutes."
Jake wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing bile and blood together. He forced himself to keep going—searching pockets, collecting pistols, cartridges, scraps of identification. He moved like an automaton, eyes averted, breath shallow.
At the final body—an older man with an officer's bearing—his hands struck something solid inside the coat. He pulled out a small leather-bound notebook. Smooth. Heavy. Important.
He didn't look at it. Not yet. He shoved it into his coat. The weight felt obscene against his ribs.
"Enough," Kamo snapped. "Drag them off the street."
They hauled the bodies into the dark mouth of a nearby alley, the sound of scraping boots and shifting limbs loud in the dead air. The cobblestones glistened where the blood smeared. Then they were gone, ghosts vanishing into the maze of Tbilisi's narrow streets.
They didn't return to Kato's. Kamo led them down to the docks, to a half-flooded cellar that smelled of seawater and rust. A sympathetic dockworker handed them blankets and slammed the door shut behind them.
A woman was waiting there—a medic, her expression sharp and weary. She worked on Giorgi in silence, cleaning the graze on his arm while the boy stared blankly ahead, his breathing shallow and mechanical.
Kamo lit a lantern. The yellow glow carved deep shadows on the damp walls. He sat heavily at a wooden crate and pulled the small notebook from Jake's pocket.
"Let's see what the Tsar's dogs were carrying," he said.
They leaned close as he flipped the cover open. Inside was a ledger—pages filled with cramped handwriting, neat columns of numbers and names.
Kamo let out a low whistle. "Informants," he muttered. "Every snitch in Tbilisi."
Jake leaned in, his eyes scanning the entries. Names. Trades. Payment amounts. Each one a life bought and sold for a handful of rubles. His pulse quickened. This was a map of betrayal.
Then Kamo's finger stabbed the page. "There. Look."
Jake followed it—and felt the breath leave his lungs.
"Fikus," he murmured. Fifty rubles.
His lie, his desperate improvisation, was true. He had guessed the traitor—and been right.
But his eyes drifted lower, to another line. A name that should not have been there. A name he recognized from every history book he had ever taught. A lion of the revolution. A man who, in another timeline, would stand beside Lenin and later fall to Stalin's purge.
Jake's blood turned to ice.
He pointed. "This name."
Kamo leaned in, read it, and froze. For a long second, he said nothing. Then he spat on the floor.
"Forgery," he said flatly. "The Okhrana's trick. They plant one truth in a sea of lies to poison us. To make us devour ourselves."
"Kamo, it's written in the same hand—"
"It's poison!" Kamo thundered, snatching the notebook from Jake's hands. "That man is a comrade. A hero. You think I'll believe the Tsar's worms over my own eyes?"
He lifted the book toward the lantern flame.
"Wait—" Jake began.
But Kamo's jaw was set. "No. We burn it. Before it burns us."
The firelight flickered in the man's eyes, reflected in the sheen of the leather cover.
Jake stood frozen. He knew what Kamo didn't—that the name in that ledger was real. That this was no forgery. History would prove it. The purges, the accusations, the executions to come—all would confirm what was written here.
He had sacrificed a boy's innocence, traded his soul, orchestrated a massacre—only to watch the truth about one of history's future traitors go up in smoke.
And in the flickering light of that cellar, Jake realized with a sick, heavy certainty that he was standing at the beginning of a history he was supposed to teach—now condemned to live it.