56

Will

F arkas looked down at his daughter, smoothing the curls from her forehead. For a moment, I thought he might brush past the question, retreat into the silence that had defined so much of his presence with us, but he didn’t. Eszter had opened a door he had to walk through.

He lingered there, kneeling, and then slowly—very slowly—stood and turned to face us all. He looked at me, then Sparrow, then Egret, and finally Thomas, whose eyes—though dim with pain—held a sharpness beneath the haze.

“Go on, Papa. Tell them,” Eszter encouraged.

Farkas’s smile was tight as he placed his hand on the back of her head, likely more to steel himself than to comfort her.

“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. “You knew the Soviets wanted this damned thing, and that we had standing orders to destroy it if recovery failed. You knew that your daughter was 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?”

Sparrow let Eszter go and shot forward. Her hand came up and landed on Egret’s chest—not gripping, not pushing, just there. Still and present.

“Don’t,” she said, gently. Only one word, a word that somehow bore the weight of all they were, of all they’d become.

Egret froze.

His chest heaved, his lips still curled tight with fury, but her hand didn’t move. Slowly, like someone letting out pressure from a valve, his shoulders slumped.

“Jesus,” he muttered. Then louder: “We risked everything for you, and you repaid us with lies.”

He turned and stalked to the far end of the barn, where he paced once, twice, then leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and eyes fixed on the ground.

Silence bloomed like smoke.

Farkas looked back at me. He was pale. His hands trembled, and his voice came barely above a whisper. “I didn’t know who to trust.”

I swallowed hard. “You trusted us enough to save your daughter. You should’ve trusted us with the rest.”

His gaze dropped.

Sparrow moved back to Eszter, gathering her close.

Thomas, who hadn’t spoken since the confession, exhaled deeply and let his head fall back against the wall, eyes closed.

No one spoke for a long time.

The cold crept in again, seeping through the boards, stirring the straw. I watched our breath fog in the silence and wondered how something so small could weigh so much.

Finally, Egret’s voice cut through the quiet, hoarse and still edged in fire. “We take it back.”

He didn’t move from the wall. His arms remained crossed, his face turned toward the dark, but his words were clear.

“We take it to Washington,” he said. “We put it in the hands of the people who can use it. Not the Soviets, not the Brits, not anyone else. Us. Power doesn’t prevent conflict unless you hold more of it than anyone sitting across the table.”

Farkas’s expression shifted—first stunned, then angry. “No. That is exactly how war starts, with one nation lording their strength over others.”

Egret laughed once, bitter and dry. “No, Doctor. That’s how war ends.”

Farkas stepped forward, his fear forgotten. “You want to make it another weapon, just one more tool in your endless arsenal of silence and suspicion; but this machine—this idea—it could be different. It could be shared. It could be published. We could give it to the world. If everyone has it, then no one can lie. No one can scheme in shadows. If everyone listens, we stop needing to guess each other’s moves.”

“And what?” Egret scoffed. “Utopia breaks out before Tuesday?”

Farkas didn’t flinch. “Is it so hard to believe that knowledge— equal knowledge—might build peace?”

“You’ve clearly never worked inside a government,” Egret said. “Especially not ours.”

Sparrow cleared her throat. “There is danger in both directions. If the Americans weaponize it, they will spy on enemies and allies alike. And if it is shared globally—how long before it is twisted? Exploited? Do you really think the Soviets won’t build their own version faster than anyone?”

Farkas looked to her, his voice softening. “But if it belongs to no one, it belongs to everyone.”

“And no one is responsible for what happens next,” she said. “And no one can stop what happens next.”

I let their voices wash over me—passion, principle, fear. They were the same arguments that had shaped the world since before I could remember.

I looked at Thomas. He hadn’t said a word. He sat apart from the rest, not detached, just still.

Listening.

Thinking.

His expression was unreadable, but his fingers curled around the edge of the blanket, covering his lap with white-knuckled intensity. I hadn’t seen him look at the box once since the debate began.

I turned back to Egret. “And what happens when we hand it over and Washington buries it? Or uses it for backdoor surveillance, turns it on their own people? What if we’re trading one tyranny for another?”

Egret pushed off the wall, walking toward us with slow, angry steps. “Then we keep the Soviets from having it first. That’s the job.”

My brows rose. “And after the job?”

“That’s someone else’s war.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t be.”

Farkas closed the lid of the box with a gentle thud. “I won’t give it to any single government. I won’t hand it over to the same men who drew lines through Europe like they were sketching on a map.”

“And what if we decide for you?” Egret asked, voice low.

Sparrow’s head snapped toward him.

“I’m serious,” he said. “What if we take it? Burn your notes, fake a story. They’ll believe whatever we report, so long as the machine’s in our hands.”

We didn’t have Farkas’s notes—they were somewhere in Budapest—but Egret walked an interesting line.

“You would lie about what I built?” Farkas whispered.

“Every day of the week,” Egret said.

Sparrow took a step closer to the box.

“Enough,” she said, not loud, but commanding. “We are not thugs. We did not come this far just to become the thing we are fighting against.”

I nodded.

And Thomas, at last, spoke.

“We don’t have to decide tonight.”

His voice was soft but carried like a judge’s gavel in the silence that followed.

“We get to Austria,” he said. “We cross that border first. Then we figure out what comes next—with clear heads and clean hands.”

No one argued.

Not even Egret.