Ilya was no longer a guest of his era; he was its prisoner.
He understood this with the same clinical clarity he brought to his ballistic trajectories. The difference between a guest and a captive, he realized, was simply the agency to depart. And Ilya could not depart. He was bound to the war, to Moscow, and to the frantic, blood-inked carousel of maps and telegrams that spun beneath the suffocating weight of other men's expectations.
He wasn't kept by the vanity of rank or name—those were merely decorations, as hollow as medals pinned to a shroud. He was kept by something far more lethal: utility. He had become a ghost whom the High Command could not afford to exorcise, a necessary demon tolerated only because he kept winning. And in this war, victory was the only sacrament that could cover a multitude of sins.
Meetings blurred into a singular, purgatorial cycle. Days shed their names and identities. Maps were unrolled, hemorrhaged upon with colored ink and frantic lead, only to be discarded for fresh sheets that would suffer the same fate within hours. Red and blue arrows clashed across the vellum like ancient enemies, overlapping in jagged embraces, only to be erased by the trembling hands of staff officers who had forgotten the taste of sleep. Through it all, Ilya stood at the mahogany table, watching generals barter lives for kilometers like merchants haggling over bolts of rotted cloth, waiting for the silence that signaled his turn.
He no longer offered his voice unbidden. He had buried that confident young strategist—the one who spoke with the arrogance of the gifted—somewhere in the permafrost outside Moscow. Now he waited to be summoned like a tool, a whetted blade, the precise instrument he had become.
"You," Stalin would mutter, peering over a barricade of telegrams with flat, unreadable eyes. "Speak."
Only then would the Prophet of Moscow begin his geopolitical alchemy.
"The offensive is a feint. They lack the logistical spine to sustain a push here."
"They will not strike the center. Not yet. They are bleeding our attention north while massing in the shadows of the south."
"The breakthrough will occur here, on the southern flank, at 04:00. Fourteenth Army, second echelon. They will strike the seam where the gap is widest."
Once. Twice. A score of times. His predictions were vindicated with such violent, visceral speed that doubt died before it could take root. He knew the coordinates of German panzer divisions before reconnaissance could confirm them; he could hear the supply lines snapping as if the ice were cracking in the enemy's own warehouses. He was precise to the minute, accurate to the man.
No one spoke of "coincidence" anymore; the word was too frail to carry the weight of his work. Generals began to draw the lines Ilya described before they even debated strategy, treating his utterances as gospel delivered from some unholy mountain. And Stalin's gaze shifted over the months—moving from clinical curiosity to a kind of cold, predatory efficiency that was more terrifying than open suspicion.
Trust was a luxury neither of them possessed. Stalin trusted no one, least of all a man who could see the future through the eyes of the dead. But usefulness was a currency Stalin traded in better than any man alive. And Ilya was irreplaceably, devastatingly useful.
Ilya paid for this influence in blood and insomnia. He slept in his chair, waking to the smell of dregs and fresh casualty reports. His name would never grace a history book—Stalin saw to that, scrubbing his shadow from the official records—yet his fingerprints were all over the orders that shifted the world's axis.
He often asked himself in the dead of night, when the telegrams finally ceased their incessant chattering: What if I am wrong just once?
He knew the calculus. Wrong once, and thousands die. Wrong twice, and he vanishes—into a cell, into a shallow grave, into the memory hole where the State unmakes its inconvenient men. The math was simple. The math was absolute.
Anna remained in Moscow, a shadow within a shadow.
Reassigned to a logistics hub in the rear, she lived far enough from the front to be safe, but close enough to the suffering to never forget the war's appetite. She relearned the geography of her own body through months of agonizing therapy, her limp a constant memento of the day the sky opened up to swallow her.
She spent her days navigating mountains of soul-killing paperwork and wards filled with men who were mere fragments of the boys they used to be. She learned their hometowns, wrote letters for hands too mangled to hold a pen, and held the fingers of children-turned-soldiers who cried for their mothers in the dark.
She rarely saw Ilya, but she felt him in every headline. Whenever the radio crackled with tinny announcements of a stalled German advance, she would pause, her heart skipping a beat. That was him, she would think. That was his mind, saving lives that will never know his name.
They met in the fugitive hours of the night. No long embraces. No wasted words—words were too dangerous. Ilya needed to confirm she was still made of pulse and heat; Anna needed to ensure he hadn't yet turned into a statue of salt, looking back at the burning world until he was no longer capable of loving her.
Sometimes they sat in a silence so profound it felt like a prayer, his head in her lap while she ran her fingers through hair that was turning gray at the temples. They talked of small, defiant things: the crumbly texture of the bread, a book she'd salvaged, a bird on a windowsill. Never the war. Never the math.
The turning point came after a midnight session that had exhausted three sets of candles. Stalin dismissed the generals with a negligent wave—that famous, casual flick of the wrist that could signal a promotion or a firing squad.
The room grew thick with the scent of tobacco and state secrets. Stalin lit a cigarette, watching Ilya through the haze.
"What is it you want?" Stalin asked abruptly.
Ilya froze. The question was an anomaly. The war was a machine that took; it never asked for a man's desires.
"I want her to stay," Ilya said finally, his voice slow, weighing each syllable as if it were a battalion. "With me. Permanently."
Stalin exhaled, the smoke curling toward the ceiling like a question mark. "You imagine this a reward for your service?"
"No." Ilya met the gaze of the man who had erased millions with the casual indifference most reserve for swatting flies. "It is the condition of my utility. She is my tether. Without her, I am only machinery. And machinery breaks."
The silence stretched like a wire pulled to the snapping point.
"You are a strange man," Stalin said finally. "You lack the fire of a patriot. You do not burn with revolutionary zeal. You seem unwilling to be ground into dust for the State."
Ilya offered no denial.
"But," Stalin continued, crushing his cigarette with a thumb that seemed to grind the very air, "you have never once let the State lose. You deliver victories like a factory delivers shells. That has value. More than patriotism, sometimes."
He walked to the window, staring out at the lightless city. "Very well. She will live with you. Consider it a recognition of... exceptional service."
The wedding took place on a night of bitter, breathless snow.
There were no invitations, no music, no joy. The venue was a cleared conference room draped in utilitarian red cloth—the color of revolution, or perhaps just blood.
A political officer read the secular vows from a tattered pamphlet. His face was a mask of professional apathy. Outside the locked doors, guards stood with orders to let no one pass. Outside, the world was on fire. Inside, it was a tomb.
Anna wore a simple white dress scavenged from a warehouse. It was slightly too large, making her look fragile and ethereal—a ghost wandering into the wrong century. She held a bouquet of wilted asters that smelled faintly of autumn.
Ilya stood across from her, his hands trembling. He had faced panzer divisions without flinching, but here, looking at this woman, his hands shook like a boy's.
Stalin sat in the corner, a dark, silent observer. He wasn't there for the union; he was there to inspect his investment. He was ensuring his most valuable asset remained human enough to function, yet tethered enough to control.
"I do," they said in unison, their eyes locked, creating a world where the man in the corner didn't exist. There was no applause, only the scratch of a pen and the quiet exhale of tobacco smoke.
Stalin rose, his shadow lengthening across the red table like a stain. "Do not make me regret this," he warned, his voice a low vibration. Then he walked out, the click of the door sounding like a gavel.
Anna laughed—a broken, breathless sound. "Married in a conference room. With the General Secretary as our witness."
Ilya took her face in his hands. "I am sorry it couldn't be—"
"Don't," she whispered, pressing her fingers to his lips. "We are alive. We are together. That is more than the world usually allows."
That night, they moved into a small, requisitioned room on the edge of the city. A bed, two chairs, and a window looking out onto a courtyard where children's laughter had been replaced by the howl of the wind.
Anna sat on the edge of the bed, the wilted flowers on the table. Ilya stood by the glass, watching the snowflakes drift like small ghosts.
"But the war isn't over," she said softly.
He knelt before her, taking her cold hands in his. "I know. That is why I have to keep winning. I have to win until there is no one left who has the power to take you away."
Anna looked at the man the war had made. "And then what?"
He had no answer. The war was all they knew—a horizon that never moved. Outside, the snow fell, covering the blood and the bodies in a shroud of white. And far away, through the darkness and the silence, the front lines waited for his next answer.
They always would.