Kamo's whisper barely carried across the cold room, but to Jake it sounded impossibly far away—like a voice echoing through time. His breath caught in his throat. His mind buckled under the collision of two timelines, two worlds folding into each other in the dim light of Tbilisi.
Genrikh Yagoda.
The name detonated in his skull. Not a hero. Not a martyr. A bureaucrat of death. The man who would one day oversee the Gulags, who would turn Stalin's paranoia into machinery, who would orchestrate purges so vast that even his loyalty couldn't save him from their jaws. And here he was, young and unsuspecting, walking through history before it curdled.
"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 had a name. "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 said nothing.
Jake lowered his voice, steady now. "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. 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 landed. Kamo's fists unclenched slowly.
"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?"
Jake's tone softened, but only slightly. "We don't do nothing. 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 really, he was talking to 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 reluctant obedience, but obedience nonetheless.
They gathered their coats. The air between them had turned heavy, their earlier excitement drowned in the weight of what they'd 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 hesitated. His mind searched for something safe, a mask to hide the truth. And from the dark corners of memory—of history—came another name. Another monster.
He looked at Kamo. "Beria," he said quietly. "Giorgi Beria."
The name left a bitter taste, heavy 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 merging with the night. Jake kept his face turned from the light, his thoughts already spiraling ahead.
He wasn't just rewriting history anymore.
History was starting to look back.