​Chapter 32. A Message Hidden in the Pattern

Two days passed in uninterrupted, exhausting work. No one slept — there was no time. Mark and Derek’s men hauled crates of ammunition, set up firing positions in empty apartments on the upper floors, checked weapons. His body handled the cold and fatigue better now, but under the weight of the crates he still gasped for air, his legs sinking into snowdrifts, tripping over frozen debris.

The veterans who had first thrown wary looks at him — a stranger in a cloak, his face hidden under the hood — had stopped paying him any attention by the end of the first day. He did the same work they did. Here trust wasn’t earned with words but by carrying a crate all the way down the street without dropping it halfway through the blizzard.

Under the howl of the storm, they moved weapons from the Legion’s warehouses into the abandoned industrial zone. In the dark, where streetlights barely punched through the swirling snow, every step was blind, and the snow swallowed sound. Crates of grenades and magazines scraped their hands and backs raw. Snow lashed at their faces, icy grit crackled on their teeth and under their boots.

It felt as if the blizzard didn’t hide them but exposed them — as if someone unseen watched from behind the white curtain. As if every run they made, every crate hauled through the storm, was logged by an invisible camera.

On the roofs of the Cyclone plant and the twin high-rises, they mounted heavy M-92 Reaper machine guns. Boots sank deep into the snow, and every strike of metal on concrete rang too loudly as they hammered wedges into the concrete slab. Rusty slid a piece of rubber under the mount to soften recoil, and the bipods were driven into the concrete. Then they fortified the position with trash bags, dusted it with snow, tamped it down with rifle butts.

A little farther off, they secured a portable mortar on a three-legged stabilizer. They drove the legs in, set the level, turned the rotor for a second — a short whine of the electric servo cut through the silence. Even that second felt too long, as if every rooftop in the district turned to look.

They ran cables for the Hawkeye anti-drone jamming units. They taped over the red lights, fixed the cables. Nearby, a field pulse generator hummed — a box with ribbed metal sides that smelled of ozone and hot iron. They turned it on, and for a moment it disrupted the comms: helmets crackled, their ears filled with pressure, and everyone felt as if the roof itself trembled under their boots.

They set up cover in silence: bags were dropped softly, and metal was placed so it wouldn’t rattle. Only the snow creaked. Someone swore under their breath, shaking ice off fingers blackened with cold. The metal burned their palms with frost, and each hammer strike echoed in their heads like footsteps in an empty hangar. No one looked up — they all pretended to work, though every one of them knew they were building their own graves, bag by bag.

During a break, Rusty wiped his hands with a rag and nodded to Mark.

“Your squad goes to the third floor of the Eastern tower. From there you cover the yard and the street approaches. Don’t shoot right away, wait till we deal with the drones and the police.”

He pointed at the dark gap of the loading gate between the warehouses.

“I’ll mine the entrances. If they push in, half of them will hit the mines. Your job is to finish the ones who break through.”

Rusty spoke confidently, but his voice carried resignation. These people prepared for battle, knowing they had no chance. Borg units and City drones weren’t a neighborhood gang, not street raiders. Against them, sandbags and old machine guns looked like a ritual before inevitable death.

Veterans checked their weapons carefully, as if every click of a bolt and every wiped-down machine-gun belt could delay death. Mark felt like a stranger: his body held up better, the cold didn’t bite as hard — and that difference pushed him away from the unit.

By the end of the second day, everything was ready. The abandoned factories froze, turning into a network of fortifications. Empty workshops with shattered windows became ambush nests, and dark corridors folded into a map of the coming battle.

The high-rises — the western and the eastern — rose like cuts in the murky sky. He tried to imagine how it would go: short bursts, screams, flashes. A fight he hadn’t seen since the war. But then he had been a boy, with only fragmented dreams left in his memory. And the fear was the same — sharp, pressing from inside.

In the evening, he stopped by the Abyss to catch his breath. The bar was almost empty: a couple of regulars dozed at the counter, the smell of tobacco had already faded. People felt trouble coming and didn’t show themselves — they stayed in their holes, as if darkness could hide them from what was approaching.

The screen of an endless synth show cast flickering reflections, bending hypnotically in his glass. Watching this play of light was easier than watching the show itself.

Bran — the bartender with the scar across his cheek — and Nora, the quiet girl from behind the counter, came to his table. She always stayed silent, eyes down, and next to her boss she looked like a shadow — pale, almost transparent.

Bran dropped heavily onto a chair; the boards creaked. He gave Mark a short, narrowed look — the way a fighter sizes up someone before a brawl. Nora sat beside him, carefully, as if afraid to disturb the furniture.

For a while, no one spoke. The Abyss felt too big, too empty — waiting for someone to break the silence first.

“The Legion is grateful for your help. Derek told me to say that,” Bran said. “But first — we settle things.”

He nodded at Nora; she sat without raising her eyes.

“We’re your protection during the fight,” Bran said. “Orders from above. We go with you to the end, General.”

Bran was a fighter — it showed in his posture, in the way he held his hands. Nora was fragile, in a worn-out jacket. She sat motionless, her fingers folded neatly on the table.

“Why do I need protection? Tell Derek...” Mark began and stopped. He looked at Bran but kept Nora in his peripheral vision — her posture held tension, not fear. And were they even Legion people at all?

“The Legion is dead men,” Bran said. His gaze was unnaturally empty, and Mark looked away involuntarily. “Derek can command his own. But we’ll be with you. We’ll take another twenty people.”

Then he added, “You can count on us.”

Nora reached for a glass of water. Her sleeve slid up, and a mark flashed on her wrist: Children of Chaos. Lily.

So Bran wasn’t just a bartender. What had Derek said? They’re everywhere. And Nora wasn’t the shadow she seemed at the counter. Not guards — watchers. Not Derek’s order — Lily’s. To follow him and keep him under control.

Mark scanned the hall: the empty bar, the few figures at the counter, the smell of beer and smoke. And the thought cut deep: how many of them were in the Legion? Rusty? Slim? Those who dragged crates beside him in the snow? Which ones were puppets whose strings were pulled by BioTech?

Bran watched him steadily. His eyes — empty, machine-like. Nora kept silent, but her stillness felt menacing. They knew he had noticed the mark and waited to see what he’d do.

“All right, Bran,” he said.

In the end, there was no real choice.

They sat together for ten minutes, tossing empty words about the weather and the fortifications. Bran talked about machine guns and tactics, Nora nodded without lifting her eyes. Her silence weighed more than any words, as if she already knew all his thoughts.

And the longer this conversation dragged on, the stronger he felt another weight — the metal pressing against his pocket. The cuff Amy had given him seemed to drag at him and demanded a decision. Find the pattern, she had said. Hinting at Mari? At her shop? At Lily’s lie? Or at the truth he didn’t want to see?

Was Mari, like Bran and Nora, not who she seemed? He couldn’t stand it anymore and got up from the table.

“Taking a piss,” he said.

Passing the kitchen that stank of rancid grease, he slipped into the staff room. The smell of damp and chlorine. In the corner — crates of beer, and on the wall — a faded calendar from twenty years ago, a relic. He locked the door.

The foreign cuff. A cold piece of plastic and metal Amy had given him at the bar, hinting at Mari. He had to deal with it once and for all. If Mari was connected to Lily, if her shop was part of their network, then... He didn’t want to believe it, but Bran and Nora were already watching him. Who was he supposed to trust — Mari? The Children of Chaos?

He put on the comm. The screen flared — and the world dropped into the past. Calls, Diana, the apartment. The cuff threw him back to where everything made sense, but where he no longer belonged.

“Search,” he said quietly, his voice shaking. “Center and police databases. Keywords: bookshop, crimes above level two. All Cities, last twenty years.”

“Processing,” the cuff chimed in a familiar voice.

The flicker of the light bulb synced to his heartbeat. What if Mari’s name or the Threshold’s address showed up? If she was tied to Lily, if the shop was part of their network? He would be left alone against everyone.

“Search complete. Three matches: theft, City 12, 2130; vandalism at an occult shop, City 2, 2128; owner disappearance, City 17, 2124, case closed.”

Mark skimmed the details impatiently. Ten, fifteen years old. Random events. Nothing about Mari or the Threshold. Relief washed over him — a sharp, greedy breath after suffocation. Amy had lied. She’d just wanted to scare him.

The panic faded — and returned in a new wave.

Because Amy hadn’t given him the cuff for nothing. Find the pattern, she’d said, her cold, calculated voice echoing in his head. Not dirt on Mari, not a line in the database. Something larger.

She’d been certain he would dig — and that he would find it. But what? Something connected to the Children of Chaos? Cults or gangs? Maybe to the borgs?

“Expand the search,” Mark said. His foot twitched in a nervous tic, as if to drown out the inner chaos. “All incidents since 2120. Murders, gang wars, accidents, cults. Correlation with bookshops and occult stores. Spatial analysis.”

Mark waited, rubbing his wrist.

“What’s real is whatever feels real to you.”

She was his anchor in all this chaos. But if she was with Lily... The holo refreshed, displaying the result.

“Analysis complete. Correlation confirmed: in ninety-two percent of cases, mass murders, serial killings, and major tragedies occurred within a radius of up to two kilometers from bookshops or occult stores.”

The screen pulsed with lines of data, but beneath them a hidden contour emerged. There was a connection — just not the one he expected to see.

“Considering the rarity of such shops, a pronounced spatial pattern can be identified. The probability of coincidence: under three percent.,” the cuff added.

There it was — the pattern Amy had spoken of. Bookstores were nodes of death and chaos. Mari’s Threshold wasn’t in the records, but its location in the Old City, amid murders and disappearances, had already woven it into the design.

So the bookshops weren’t just points on a map. They were centers around which death multiplied. Amy had known. And he had not.

The holo went dark, but the pattern remained: numbers trembling in his eyes, street lines crossing, shops gaping like sores on the body of the world.

“My place is where stories end, and where they begin. In the rupture.”

Snow in her hair, a faint laugh. Her image settled over the dry cuff data the same way life lay over death. Rupture. The word echoed in his body’s memory. The shift where the boundary broke. Each fall into that other layer — was it death or birth?

Too many things lined up. Mari had known — she had always known. Her shop, her words, her quiet certainty — everything about her said she wasn’t just part of the Ring. She could be the central node of the entire pattern. And that only made it hurt more: the pattern wove her into a chaos she hadn’t chosen. Or had she?

And her shop? All this time his cuff had been active, yet no borgs had come for him. Diana had told him the geotag was missing. That’s why they panicked and declared him wanted after Cross. How had he not understood?

Did the shop exist in the Ring — or somewhere else entirely? Perhaps in Mari’s dream?

Amy’s voice returned in his memory — and every word was poison spreading through his veins.

Mari... she’s not who she seems. She is dangerous. You think you know her, but you don’t.

There had been hatred in her words, the desire to destroy. To Amy, Mari was a threat far greater than anything else.

Which meant Mari wasn’t part of the Children of Chaos, wasn’t their leader — and wasn’t a bookseller.

Whose words were true? Mari’s — with her quiet confession that she lived in the rupture? Or Amy’s — with her accusation? Rupture or danger?

The holo went dark. The room was left smelling of damp, with a flickering bulb that pulsed like a heart, fading and returning.

He was alone. Bran and Nora waited outside the door — nearby, but not with him. He could trust no one. Not even himself.