“Deciphered a section,” he said, his voice even. "But it's incomplete. And... somewhat contradictory."

X set down the equipment and turned fully. “Go on.”

Santali relayed the deciphered content, omitting the part about Nyxl. Not a lie—merely a delay. Some truths required the right moment, the right shape.

When he finished, she was silent. Then she moved to the workbench, called up a map on a tablet—a satellite image of the Arctic Circle, dotted with dozens of red markers.

“Recorded anomalous energy fluctuations within the Arctic Circle,” she said, fingers sliding across the display. “Past thirty years. Look at the distribution pattern.”

Santali studied it closely. The points weren't random. They were arranged along a specific geometric pattern—a massive, hexagonally tessellated grid spanning the polar cap.

"This is..."

“An array,” X cut in. “Or a receiver antenna. If Crimson Tide’s right—if Arcana is ‘awakened’—this could be the instrument.”

Her finger tapped the center of the map—a location marked not with a red dot, but a black star.

“The Archaea Institute. The array’s epicenter.”

Santali stared at the star. Over three thousand kilometers in a straight line from their current position, deep in the Arctic. Hostile, extreme, perpetually ice-bound.

“An altar,” he murmured.

"Or a tomb," X powered down the tablet. "Depends on where you're standing when the dust settles."

By evening, the equipment check was complete. All weapons calibrated. Comms linked and tested. Med-kits stocked with the latest hemostatics and stimulants. Even the polar gear—extreme-cold suits, insulated boots, ice axes—laid out in duplicate, waiting.

“We depart at 05:00,” X said, her voice cutting cleanly through the stillness. “Train to Murmansk first. Then we transfer to an icebreaker, specially modified for discretion. It will take the Northern Sea Route into the Arctic Circle. Estimated transit: forty-eight hours.”

“The vessel?” Santali’s question was a single, quiet bullet.

“The owner owes the Master a life debt. An old contact of The Veil.” Her tone was flat, factual. “He believes we are environmental researchers, there to study polar climate change. A common enough cover in academic circles. It won’t raise alarms.”

Thorough. Santali gave a slight nod of acknowledgment.

Dinner was a spare meal of sandwiches and thin broth. They ate facing each other across the narrow table, the silence between them a tangible thing. It was not an awkward quiet, but the heavy, expectant hush that precedes a storm—a low-pressure zone thick with unspoken things.

Afterward, X slid a small box across the table.

“A parting gift,” she said, her inflection neutral. “Open it.”

An unmarked box of black velvet—Santali lifted the lid. Nestled inside were a pair of cufflinks. Their platinum settings were sharply geometric, almost severe. But set within them were two gems of a deep, violet-blue—a color so saturated it bordered on the abyssal, yet they caught the light with a restrained fire that mirrored the exact hue of his own eyes.

“These are…”

“Transmitters,” her voice came from across the table. “The stones house micro-emitters. Signal strength is precisely attenuated. Effective range: fifty kilometers. Anti-jamming capability is moderate, but sufficient for one-way triangulation in most urban or shallow subterranean environments.”A deliberate pause. “In case you go silent. Or find yourself in a situation… where being found is necessary.”

Santali picked one up. The metal was cool against his fingertips, quickly warming to his touch. The craftsmanship was impeccable; the cut of the gem and the setting were worthy of high jewelry, the seams flawless, betraying no hint of the technology within. It felt less like a piece of field gear and more like a genuine offering—a personal artifact meant to be treasured.

“Why this form?” he asked, his gaze still fixed on the cufflink, as if evaluating an aesthetic indulgence in a tool. “A standard button transmitter is more discreet.”

X’s eyes shifted to the window, where dusk was rapidly consuming the sky.

“Because a standard-issue device is something you might discard if necessity demanded,” she said, her voice lower now, yet each word distinct. “A gift… raises the threshold required to abandon it.”

Santali’s breath caught, just for a fraction of a second.

He understood. But the implications nested within her words were so complex it took his mind a moment to unravel them.

This was a form of brutal honesty, expressing a degree of trust, or perhaps… dependence. She was saying: I trust you not to cast this aside lightly, just as I trust you not to abandon this alliance.

—It was a fragile tether, intricately woven from something more than mere pragmatism.

Yet sometimes, such bonds prove stronger than any contract.

“Thank you,” Santali said, closing the velvet lid over the cufflinks resting in his palm. “It stays with me for the duration.”

X nodded and stood to clear the table. Her movements were as efficient as ever, yet a subtle difference lingered—a fractional hesitation, an almost imperceptible elongation of time spent on simple motions. Not inefficiency, but a form of instinctual delay. A silent waiting.

Santali rose too but did not immediately move toward the door. He remained on his side of the table, watching her back as she turned away, the dim kitchen light tracing the sharp line of her shoulders.

"X." His voice was not loud, yet cut cleanly through the quiet.

She turned off the faucet. The rush of water ceased abruptly. She did not turn, remaining still, the rinsed porcelain cup held in her hand.

"When this is over," Santali began, each word measured as if placed on a scale, "if you do find that place—the one with the cat, the flowers, where the morning sun wakes you…"

He paused.

"…would it permit a visitor?" The word was restrained, almost formal in its politeness, yet in the stillness between them, it landed with unexpected softness. "Just to see it. Perhaps to share a cup of tea you’ve brewed."

The question hung—a stone dropped into a pool of absolute zero. X’s figure went rigid.

Her back was to him; he could not see her face. But he saw the subtle tightening along her shoulders, the prolonged stillness of her fingers on the edge of a dish.

The silence stretched so thin he could almost trace the frantic calculations turning behind her eyes. So long that he began to shape the words to retract it—Forget I asked.

Then, she turned.

The dim kitchen light pooled in her eyes, forming two deep wells, unreadable. All emotion was sealed away, leaving only the weight of her gaze, heavy upon his face.

"Alright," her reply was quiet, yet crystalline. "But you bring the String Zither. I want to hear…" she weighed the word, "…the full piece."

A simple assent, and an unexpected condition.

Santali smiled. A slow, genuine softening that reached the deep violet of his eyes, settling them into something calm and profound.

"Agreed," he accepted, his voice steady. "I’ll bring the finest I have."

X nodded and turned back. But in that fleeting pivot, Santali caught it—the barest upward quirk at the corner of her pressed lips.

It vanished in an instant, swift as a mirage.

But it had been there.

Deep night. The only light in the temporary guest room bled from the Moscow skyline, a dull urban glow that stained the edges of the window.

Santali lay on his back, awake. The cufflinks were clenched in his left fist, the platinum now warmed to the temperature of his skin; only the facets of the gems occasionally snatched a sliver of that distant light, winking coldly in the dark like the watchful eyes of a predator—or the final, stubborn pulse of a dying star.

Memory, unbidden, surged upstream.

He remembered younger days—before the scent of blood and rust had tarnished the very idea of innocence—when Nyxl would drag him out to watch the stars. The Moscow air was clearer then; on certain still, crystalline summer nights, you could almost reach out and trace the dusty band of the Milky Way. Her small, determined hand would clamp around his, pulling him into the velvety darkness as she mapped the heavens with a child’s fierce ownership: that bright one was Father, the one beside it Mother, and a small, fiercely glittering point in the corner was herself.

“And me?” he had asked, indulging her game.

"You’re the moon!" she’d laughed, the sound bright and unguarded in the dark. "The moon always follows me, so I’m never afraid to walk in the dark!"

An innocent prophecy, now freighted with a heavier truth.

He saw it clearly now—the moon does forever hang over her night, but it holds no light of its own. It only borrows. It reflects. Its radiance is a debt, its fullness a brief, beautiful lie before the long, slow waning that is its truer state. So it was with the bond between them: moments of clear, brilliant confluence, yes, but more often, long stretches of concealment and distant vigil—a dance of intimacy and separation, brightness and obscurity.

Santali’s knuckles tightened. The sharp, precise edges of the cufflinks bit into his palm, a clean, anchoring pain. He closed his eyes.

Just a little longer.

Just this last stretch.

When this is over, when all secrets are finally dragged into the merciless light, when we can both shed these borrowed skins…

Then, I will tell you everything.

Who I am. Who you are. And… these seventeen years, adrift in a sea of bloodshed.

Outside, Moscow sank into the profound silence of midnight. From afar, the heavy, bronze chime of the Spasskaya Tower bell broke the stillness—once, then again—each strike slow and implacable. The sound cut through the silent streets, struck the cold facades of sleeping buildings, and rippled outward in invisible, concentric circles—like a lone prayer tolled for all the unquiet dead, and for all the secrets still drifting, unanchored, in the dark.

The safe house bedroom was unlit. X stood motionless before the window, the miniature vial containing the "red lunar" resting on her palm. The faint moonlight filtering through the casement glanced off the glass, casting a sinister, yet breathtakingly beautiful, luminescence upon the stagnant, mute-red liquid within—like congealed flame, or long-dried blood.

Fragments of their daytime conversation returned to her:

“Would you let me see it?”

Why had she agreed? A momentary crack in her defenses before a high-stakes mission? Confusion at being approached with such unguarded vulnerability—a sensation long foreign to her? Or something deeper, more pathetic—an unacknowledged yearning from the recesses of her heart, a wish for someone to truly see, and step into, the future she only dared imagine in faint sketches?

X had no answer.

She only knew that when Santali had said, “I’ll bring the finest,”something in her chest had faltered. Not alarm, not fear—something stranger, a loss of control that carried a trace of warmth.

Dangerous.

The warning was clear. This warmth was peril. It could only soften her vigilance, cloud her judgment, become the flaw that unravels everything at the critical moment.

Yet she had still offered him the transmitter-concealed cufflinks. Still spoken of that ephemeral promise about an “after.”

Perhaps because, in the frigid existence of an assassin, one occasionally needed to draw upon a sliver of illusory warmth—even if it comes sheathed in thorns.

She unscrewed the vial, tipping a dark red coagulum into her left palm. The solid mass began to soften slowly against her cool skin（below-average body temperature）, its texture awakening like old blood gradually reviving, releasing a faint, metallic scent.

She dipped a finger into the red substance, raised her hand, and began to draw on the cold windowpane—

The lines were hesitant, uneven.

A lopsided, childlike outline of a lunar crescent took form upon the glass, already smudged with the grime on the pane.

Like the one she’d drawn at age four.

Imperfect. Not round. But it was a moon.

She stood a long time, gazing at the blood-red symbol superimposed upon the Moscow night. Then she raised her sleeve and wiped it away. The fabric whispered against the glass until the stark red was entirely gone, the pane restored to a hollow transparency.

Like deleting flawed code. Like erasing a dream that should never have been.

She turned, walked to the bed, lay flat, and closed her eyes.

Darkness surged in, swallowing all sight. Only the faint sensation in her left palm remained—a cold, clinging tackiness, like a brand not easily removed.

Tomorrow, the operation would commence. Destination: the Arctic, the possible location of the "altar."

It would be the final objective, perhaps the end of all puzzles, or the grave of all hope.

Before that, she needed rest. Clarity. Absolute clarity.

For survival. For the mission. And for… that faint, flickering promise of a cat and flowers,trembling like a mirage in the depths of despair.

The night deepened, Moscow sliding through its false tranquility toward an uncertain dawn.

And in the safe house basement, Crimson Tide’s notebook lay open on the workbench, the Whites’ symbols on the exposed page gleaming with a dull, aged luster under the light.

They read:

[On the night of the full lunar, the lock will open.]

[The price is blood. The reward is truth.]

[The choice is yours, my child.]

But this page, Santali had not seen.

Because he had deliberately skipped the next page—the page bearing symbols he dared not let X read.

Their message was simple, a single line:

[To unravel the silver, you must first weave its end.]

The night swallowed these words, as it swallows all secrets meant to stay buried.

And below the horizon, the dawn slowly brewed.