​Chapter 36. End of the Cycle

In the evening, he went to the Abyss.

Outside, soft, lazy snow was falling, filling the streets with emptiness, but inside the bar it was hot and cramped with people. The air—usually thick with the smell of old wood and tobacco—today carried sweat and barely hidden tension.

The Abyss hummed like never before. At every table, in every alcove, people were sitting, and they weren’t the usual regulars. His table stood empty—Bran had taken care of that. Mark slipped into his corner and began studying the visitors.

There, by the counter, two men with raven tattoos on their necks—Pops’ people. At a distant table, three in identical leather jackets with skulls—Eastside. All the predators of the Ring had gathered here, on the victor’s turf.

They weren’t celebrating; they’d come to negotiate. They sensed who was in charge now. The negotiations, apparently, were already over—and rather successful.

Derek sat at a table in the center of the hall. On his left arm was a bio-prosthesis, not yet calibrated. He held himself as if it weren’t an injury, but a new mark of power. Beside him, Rusty and Slim were receiving guests. The Legion was no longer one of many gangs. Today, they were the government of the Ring.

Mark silently drank his whiskey and watched. In the corner above the bar, on an old, flickering screen, the City’s news broadcast began. The bar’s chatter died down; everyone watched it as if waiting for the result of a sports match. They waited—for a declaration of war, a total sweep, for the City’s response to their audacity.

But it didn’t come.

The synth-anchor, with a polite smile, reported yet another BioTech success in life-extension research, then moved on to the weather. And at the very end, in passing: “The City Committee reports that the renovation program of the Old City is postponed indefinitely due to the need for additional infrastructure planning.”

And that was it. Not a word about the battle, the hundreds dead, or the Agency’s losses. In their reality, no battle had happened at all—just a small, boring administrative delay.

A quiet, angry murmur passed through the bar. It was scarier than a declaration of war. The City had no intention of destroying them—it pretended they did not exist. That their victory, their blood, their corpses—were trivial, unworthy of mention.

The City wasn’t fighting an enemy. It was fighting reality itself, and in that war, machine guns were unnecessary.

Derek rose; his face revealed nothing. He issued short, sharp orders. The Legion’s people quietly dispersed, and representatives of other gangs stood up as well, whispering to one another as they left into the night. The curtain fell. The war slipped into the shadows.

Mark remained in his corner, watching the bar empty out.

Bran collected dirty glasses. When he turned, his figure blurred, like a corrupted file, and through the human face, another visage surfaced—a lipless maw and bony spikes instead of teeth. The vision vanished, and the same big, heavy man wandered between the tables again.

The figure of Nora, silently wiping a table, lost its clarity, dissolving into a trembling swarm of dark, iridescent insects, which then immediately gathered back into human form.

Today he had seen others too. Not many, but they were there. A complex pattern of glowing metallic veins flickered on the skin of one of Derek’s fighters. The eyes of the old man sitting in the corner shone with pure white light.

These were the demons. The ones who had awakened.

Their true visages, their real nature, pressed through the thin membrane of the Pact like a watermark on a pre-war hundred. And Mark, looking at them, saw nothing horrifying.

On the contrary—there was something real in them.

Bran, having cleared away the last glasses, nodded to Mark and went into the back room. Only Derek remained in the Abyss, sitting at his table in the center of the hall, watching the screen above the bar.

Finally, he stood up and walked over to Mark’s table. He sat down opposite him, set a bottle and two clean glasses on the table. His left hand, with its rough prosthetic, moved uncertainly.

“Nice way you played me, cop,” he said without anger. “And I fell for it like some green rookie.”

He took a sip.

“What was that whole masquerade for?” he went on, looking straight into Mark’s eyes. “You knew. And you’re just like them.”

Mark stayed silent, watching the dim lamp-light fracture in the amber liquid of his glass.

“It’s more complicated,” he said at last.

“Oh, much more complicated,” Derek snorted.

He seemed to want to ask something else — what Mark was, or what had happened during the fight — but didn’t dare. He stared into the bottom of his glass, at the sparkling liquid that trembled faintly in his fingers.

At last, he lifted his gaze, and in the eyes of the veteran and gang leader there was no fear — only exhaustion, as old as the war itself.

“We’re all done, aren’t we?” Derek asked in a low voice. He wasn’t afraid — he genuinely wanted to know. “Like in those books I buy from your friend. Apocalypse. Kali Yuga. End of the cycle. That’s how it ends, right?”

Mark said nothing. He looked at this strong, tired man searching for answers in ancient myths, and felt something like compassion. Derek was preparing for the end of the world without realizing it had already come. That they all lived on its ruins. The whole world was one endless, uninterrupted end of the world.

“Yes,” Mark said at last. “Everything will change.”

But what would change — even he didn’t know. He looked at Derek, at his face scarred with fresh cuts, and asked the question he had wanted to ask him since their very first meeting in the café.

“Why are you afraid of Mari?”

Derek sat motionless, and only his clenched jaw betrayed the tension.

“I don’t know, cop. Honestly. I don’t know how it is for you people in the City, or for... someone like you. But ordinary people are afraid of her.”

He took a sip.

“They don’t tell stories about her, like they do about Pops or me. They don’t say she killed someone or robbed someone. They don’t say anything at all. She just... is. She’s always been here, as long as I can remember. Selling her dusty books. And all the gang leaders, even the craziest ones, avoid her shop. No one knows why. It’s just... how it has to be. Like an old rule no one ever wrote down but everyone knows. Don’t touch her. Don’t ask her questions. Don’t look her in the eyes.”

He fell silent, looking into his glass, then added in almost a whisper:

“They say that if she ever takes off that visor of hers, you’ll die. I haven’t checked, and I’m not going to. Like I told you — it’s better not to touch your kind at all.”

Derek left, abandoning his unfinished whiskey and the silence of the empty bar. Bran quietly cleared the glasses away, and that gesture said more than any words.

Mark returned to the bookshop, and outside the window snow was falling again in thick, lazy flakes. Mari wasn’t asleep. She sat in her chair, book set aside, and looked at him through the visor as if she knew exactly when he would return.

He said nothing, just walked over to the couch, shrugged off his cloak, and sat down. He was exhausted. Not physically — his new body didn’t know fatigue — but mentally. The conversation with Derek, the fight, Mari’s revelations — all of it had worn him out.

Mari stood up, brewed tea, and set a cup before him. She didn’t ask any questions. The eternal hum of anxiety inside his head — as familiar as a heartbeat — finally went silent. He was no longer a hunter or prey. He simply was.

That night he slept well. Without dreams or ghosts. And the morning turned out to be unusual: it was sunny.

Through the dense shroud of clouds that always hung over the Ring, sunlight was breaking through. It didn’t get warmer, but even so, for the Ring it was a rare joy. The overcast sky glowed as if it were about to burst open, and in that unfamiliar light the snowy rooftops and the rusty frames of abandoned cars looked beautiful, like a glossy photograph.

Mark stood at the window and waited. He didn’t know exactly what. A reaction from the City. A new strike. The end.

Mari was asleep. He heard her steady, peaceful breathing. She was his anchor in all this madness, but he knew that soon even that anchor would tear loose.

He was waiting for some kind of sign. The final signal before everything began. And he knew the signal would come. In a broken world, he had learned to sense such things the way an animal senses an approaching earthquake.

And the sign arrived.

It wasn’t a falling star or the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

At first, far to the east, the sky flashed with a blinding white light — soundless.

Then came the roar. Low, barely audible, it didn’t come from the street but was resonated deep in his bones, inside his skull. A roar that made the windowpanes vibrate and the cups on the table rattle.

Twenty seconds later came the crash. Heavy, muffled, rolling.

An explosion.

Mark stood at the window, staring at the sky where the white flash had died. The echo had long since faded, dissolving into the morning air, yet it was still ringing in his ears. He turned away from the window.

The day passed in waiting. The timid morning light quickly surrendered, and the sky over the Ring closed again with its usual leaden shroud. Mark mechanically ate something hot in a nearby diner, tasting nothing. Returning to the shop, he lay for a long time on the old couch, watching Mari sleep under the blanket. Her steady breathing was the only orderly rhythm in his chaos.

When dusk finally drowned the Ring, he rose. Something had to be done — but what, he didn’t know. So he went to the bar.

By late evening, the Abyss was empty. The anxious hum that had filled the bar after the news had ebbed, leaving behind a few grim fighters of the Legion silently nursing their beer, and a thick, smoky stillness. On the screen above the bar, figures in some synth show writhed in silence: perfect faces, sterile emotions, drama polished down to a safe, predictable formula. The City was trying to pretend nothing had happened.

The tension of that heavy, endless day was starting to ease in him. The City had ignored them. It had gone quiet, pulled back, postponed the Renovation. The battle was won. Watching the fake passions on the screen, he almost believed everything truly had calmed down.

He finished his whiskey, feeling the false, chemical warmth spread through his veins, dulling the anxiety. Time to go home. He stood up — and the cuff in his pocket chirped.

A sound — sharp, long-forgotten. He took it out, and a holo unfolded over the table. Three words.

Missed you.

At first, his thoughts stalled; then they spun into a whirlwind. A trap. An Agency game. A psychological trick from Lily. His own mind. Anything. But the message was neither a command nor a threat. He stared at it, and a single name pulsed in his head.