Jake stepped off the trawler and the city hit him like a physical blow.
Petrograd didn't smell of the sea. It smelled of burning wood, unwashed bodies, and a desperate, gnawing hunger that seemed to rise from the frozen cobblestones.
His contact was a boy named Dmitri, barely twenty years old. His eyes were wide with the terrified fervor of a true believer who has just seen his theories become real, breathing monsters.
"It's chaos, Comrade Koba," he whispered, his voice cracking. He pulled Jake into a maze of icy, narrow alleyways, away from the main streets. "The city is a powder keg. Delivering the gold to the designated cell will be impossible."
Jake shifted the weight of the heavy bag on his shoulder. It was filled with a king's ransom in German gold, meant to fuel a tiny, isolated Bolshevik cell.
A plan made a world away. A plan that was already obsolete.
They turned a corner and the sound hit them first—a low, massive roar, like the sea. Then they were swallowed by it. A river of people, a flood of humanity, poured down the street.
It was not an organized march. It was a raw, angry torrent of women. Thousands of them. Their faces were chapped and grim from the wind, their eyes hollow with hunger but blazing with a fire that had finally been lit.
Their shouts echoed off the frozen, ornate buildings.
"Khleba!" Bread!
"Mira!" Peace!
Jake froze, his blood turning to ice in his veins. The 21st-century historian in his mind screamed.
Oh god. No. It's not just a riot. I know this date. February 23rd on the old calendar. International Women's Day.
His mission wasn't just impossible. It was irrelevant.
It's starting. It's starting right now, and I'm standing in the middle of it.
Ahead, the river of people slammed against a wall. A line of Cossacks sat on their horses, blocking the wide expanse of the Nevsky Prospekt. They were a grim, silent barrier of gray wool, dark fur, and cold steel.
The crowd faltered. The raw momentum of their anger met the hard, disciplined reality of state power. For a long, suspended moment, the revolution held its breath.
Dmitri tugged desperately at Jake's sleeve. "We must go back! They will fire on the crowd! This is madness!"
Jake looked at the Cossacks, their faces unreadable. He looked at the women, armed with nothing but their own desperation. He looked at the shivering, terrified boy beside him.
His mission—to deliver gold to a handful of Bolsheviks hiding in a basement—was absurd. A joke. The real revolution, the real engine of history, was happening right here, in the street, and it was about to be shot to pieces before it could even begin.
He had the fuel. The fire was right in front of him.
In that moment, he wasn't Koba the revolutionary. He was Jake Vance, the man who knew the ending of the book. And he decided, in a heartbeat, to tear out the page and write a new one.
"Open the bag," Jake said, his voice calm and steady.
Dmitri stared at him as if he were insane. "Comrade? But the gold... it is for the Party! For the cause!"
"The Party is in Switzerland," Jake said, his eyes never leaving the tense standoff ahead. "The revolution is here. Open it."
Dmitri's hands trembled as he fumbled with the leather straps. He pulled the bag open, revealing the dull, heavy gleam of the bullion inside.
Jake reached in. He didn't pull out a handful of coins. He pulled out a single, heavy bar of pure German gold. It felt impossibly solid, the weight of a dying empire, in his hand.
He didn't try to bribe the officer. He didn't make a speech. He did something that defied all logic, all revolutionary theory.
He did something insane.
He took a step back, hefted the bar, and with a grunt of effort, he hurled it. It flew in a high, glittering arc, end over end, into the very heart of the crowd of women.
The gold bar landed on the cobblestones with a heavy, definitive, metallic thud.
For a single, impossible second, there was absolute silence. The chanting stopped. The shouting died.
Then a woman screamed, a high, piercing cry. "Zoloto!"
Gold!
The spell was broken. The crowd's energy, which had been a mix of political anger and desperate hunger, transformed. It became something older, more primal.
Greed. Hope. A frantic, desperate desire for a miracle.
The crowd surged. Not forward, towards the Cossacks, but inward, towards the source of the impossible gleam on the ground. It was a human tidal wave, a chaotic explosion of bodies. The women pushed, shoved, and scrambled, their political demonstration forgotten in the face of a tangible fortune.
The Cossacks on their horses watched, bewildered. They had been prepared for rocks and insults. They had been prepared to charge into a wall of righteous anger.
They were not prepared for this. They saw not a revolutionary mob, but a crush of desperate mothers fighting over a piece of heaven that had fallen from the sky.
The line wavered. One of the younger Cossacks was seen to grin. The officer's shouted commands were lost in the roar.
Then Jake threw another bar. And another.
The chaos intensified. The crowd, now a swirling vortex of frantic humanity, spilled past the ends of the Cossack line. They weren't charging it; they were flowing around it, ignoring it completely. The wall of steel was made irrelevant. It was broken not by force, but by a madman's brilliant, cynical gambit.
The revolution, re-energized and utterly transformed, poured into the Nevsky Prospekt, the heart of the city.
Amid the chaos, Dmitri stood frozen, staring at Jake. His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated awe and terror. He had been taught that revolution was a science. This was not science. This was black magic.
He looked at the erupting city, at the broken line of soldiers, at the river of humanity flooding the arteries of the capital. Then he looked at the calm, grim-faced man beside him, the man who had lit the fuse with a lump of metal.
"Who are you?" Dmitri whispered, his voice trembling. "The Party never said... they never said they were sending a demon."