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“I didn’t mean to deceive you,” Farkas said, voice low and worn. “Not in the ways that matter.”
“Start with what’s in the box,” I suggested. “Is it the ‘brain’ Eszter mentioned?”
Farkas closed his eyes and nodded once, then he reached down beside his bedroll and lifted the box with both hands. He held it with the reverence of a holy relic, bringing it closer before settling it on a small crate in the center of the barn. We gathered around him, drawn in like moths.
He unlaced the leather straps and opened the lid with a soft creak.
Inside was a metal housing no bigger than a typewriter’s carriage—sleek, brushed, with rounded edges and a cluster of small dials along one side. I saw rows of narrow slots—some marked with symbols I didn’t recognize, others labeled in Cyrillic, German, English, and every other form of letter I could imagine—and a few I couldn’t. Nestled in the middle was a glass core, a delicate structure of filaments, tubing, and what looked like a floating spool of punched film, coiled inside like a sleeping snake.
“This,” Farkas said, tapping a gloved finger on the casing, “is the cognitive sequencing unit. It processes cipher logic through an evolving predictive model rather than static mechanical alignment. The gears back in Budapest, they align, they rotate, they stamp, but this”—he pointed to the glass core—“this learns.”
A sharp breath escaped Sparrow.
“Learns?” I asked.
He nodded. “It remembers frequency and context. It adjusts cipher complexity in real time, which means, once it’s seen a system once—even a partial code—it can suggest likely decryptions faster than any known system.”
“And the Soviets don’t know?” Egret asked, eyes narrowed.
“Yes and no,” Farkas said, drawing a sharp frown from Egret. “They have the shell and the gears. They know I am close to completing the device, that I am in the testing phase, fine-tuning when things aren’t quite right, but very close to completion. They have no idea I completed my work months ago.”
Thomas whistled and shook his head in disbelief. No one fooled the Soviet state that long, not when every bit of evidence they needed to know the truth was in their possession, sitting beneath their iron gaze.
“But without this,” Farkas went on, motioning to the box, “they have nothing more dangerous than a glorified letter sorter.”
No one moved at first.
Then Thomas leaned forward, one hand on his knee, the other tight around his ribs.
The rest of us just stared at the thing nestled inside the case—the coils of wire, the filaments, the elegant little core that looked more like a musical instrument than the deadliest cryptographic weapon of the decade. It was small, unassuming. Its power was terrifying.
Egret exhaled, a sound like someone had punched the wind out of him.
And then he exploded. “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”
Farkas flinched. Eszter shrank back toward Sparrow, who wrapped an arm around the girl.
“You kept that . . . that thing?” Egret’s voice was rising fast, louder than I’d ever heard from him—likely louder than he ever let himself be on a mission. “You’ve had the brain of the goddamn machine with you this whole time? Would you have let us walk into Budapest blind—probably die—just so you could sneak out with this little bastard tucked under your arm like it was your own personal prize? What were you planning? Sell it to the highest bidder? Help Germany rise again? Maybe go to the Japanese or Italians, bring the band back together? What the actual hell, Doc?”
Farkas’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. His hand hovered protectively over the box, like he thought Egret might reach out and smash it.
“Egret,” I said, low and warning, trying to put a hand on his shoulder. “Take a breath.”
He shoved my hand off, not violently, but with enough force to make it clear I wouldn’t be the one to stop his tirade.
“You’re fucking insane,” he growled, stepping forward. “Youknewthe Soviets wanted this damned thing, and that we had standing orders to destroy it if recovery failed. You knew thatyour daughterwas nearly lost to buy you time—and you didn’t say a goddamned thing? Were you seriously going to let us walk back into the lion’s den for no fucking reason? Are you so callous to throw our lives away for . . . for fucking nothing?”
Farkas backed up a step, his hand now covering the lid of the box. His eyes darted to Eszter, to me, then Sparrow. He looked like a man who might bolt.
He looked terrified.
Good, a part of me thought.He should be.
“Do you even understand what we would’ve been walking back into?” Egret spat. “Budapest is swarming with Soviets and Hungarians hell bent on finding all of us. By now, they know there’s a part missing, and I would bet my life that they know it’s the final piece. They’ll lose their minds, send every possible resource, kill anyone in their way, just to get their hands on that damned box. They’ll have our faces plastered in every alley, every checkpoint; and now we’re not just ghosts slipping through—we’re thieves carrying a superweapon in a lunchbox!”
“I—I didn’t mean—” Farkas stammered.
“Didn’t mean what? To get us all killed? The people who fucking rescued you and saved your daughter’s life?”