Mikhail Volkov wakes with a gasp that sounds like drowning. His apartment in Chicago is dark and cold, the kind of cold that seeps through the brick walls from the lake and settles into the bones. For a moment he doesn't remember where he is. Then the medals on the wall catch the streetlight and he remembers everything.

The nightmare was the same as always. A child. Small, no older than six, holding something that was not a toy. The child's face was blurred, like a photograph left in the rain. But the weapon was clear. Clearer than anything he had ever built. It had a curved magazine and a wooden stock and a barrel that glowed faintly, like a finger pointing at the world.

When Mikhail opens his eyes, the wall of medals is staring back at him. Five of them. Gold-plated. Sent from Washington in a red box with a black ribbon. He earned them for something he no longer believes in.

He gets out of bed and counts. Every night for twenty years, since he left Minsk, he has kept a notebook by the bed. In it, he writes down the names from his dreams. Sometimes they are real names—Americans killed in places where Mikhail has never been. Sometimes they are names he invents because the dream has no language for the faces it shows him.

Forty-seven names now.

He pours water from a glass pitcher into a chipped cup and drinks it standing in the kitchen, looking out at Lake Michigan. The lake is black and flat, like a mirror turned away from God.

Elena sleeps in the other room. Her back is to him, the way it has been for three years. They used to play piano together—she on the upright in the corner, him tapping rhythms on the table with a fork. She was a concert pianist in Minsk before they came to America. Before she was forty-five and her hands had become stiff claws and her fingers could no longer find the keys. Arthritis, the doctor said. Stress, Mikhail thought. The stress of watching a woman who could make Chopin weep sit in a dim Chicago apartment and stare at the wall for hours.

He walks to the corner where the piano sits, covered with a faded green cloth. He pulls back the corner and presses a key. Middle C. The note is flat, slightly out of tune, but it is music. He plays one more note, then pulls the cloth back and goes to the living room.

The medals are mounted on a dark board above the fireplace. He has never taken them down. He tells himself this is because they represent something important. The truth is, he is afraid of what would happen if he touched them. They feel hot when he looks at them too long, though they are at room temperature.

His apartment is a museum of a life that should have been glorious. Red star medal. Defense Excellence citation. Meritorious Service from the Defense Department. He does not know what half of them are for. A clerk in Washington typed some Latin words on a certificate, a factory in Maryland stamped gold onto a metal disc, and now it hangs on his wall.

The telephone rings. Mikhail freezes. No one calls at three in the morning.

It rings again. And again.

He picks up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Mikhail." A man's voice, smooth and warm, the kind of voice that makes you trust it before you realize it is designed to make you trust. "It's Richard. I know what time it is. I'm sorry."

"Richard Sterling. CIA. Or at least, that's what they call you now." Mikhail's voice is flat, devoid of the surprise he is supposed to feel. "How did you get this number?"

"You gave it to me. Fifteen years ago, when you signed the NDA. I have a memory for numbers." A pause. "Listen, I don't have much time. I was driving through Chicago on my way to San Diego and I thought—I don't know, I thought I should call."

Mikhail looks at the medals. They are gleaming in the moonlight. They look like teeth.

"What do you want, Richard?"

"I want to know if you're all right."

The question catches him off guard. Nobody has asked him that in fifteen years. Not genuinely. Not with the tone of someone who might actually care about the answer.

"I'm fine," he says.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

Another pause. Longer this time. When Richard speaks again, his voice has changed. It is softer. Almost gentle.

"Mikhail, my wife's brother just came back from Honduras. He's twenty-two. He's missing both legs. They told him it was a minesweeper. But the way he talks, the way the wound looks—it could have been a Model 47. One of the captured ones."

Mikhail says nothing. He has heard stories like this before. He has learned not to respond. Not responding is a form of self-preservation.

"I'm not saying it was your gun," Richard continues. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying—the world is big, and the things we build come back to haunt us in ways we never imagined."

Mikhail looks at the notebook on the kitchen counter. Forty-seven names.

"Goodnight, Richard."

He hangs up. He goes back to bed. He closes his eyes. And he waits for the morning, because the morning is no better but it is different.

The next day, he goes to a diner on South Halsted Street and drinks coffee that tastes like burnt nuts and talks to no one. He is sixty-two years old. He worked at a Chicago machine shop for thirty years, then retired at sixty when his back gave out. Before that, he was a machinist. Before that, he was a designer. Before that, he was a man who believed that building something beautiful could make the world better.

He used to tell people he designed guns. Now he tells them he designed parts for factory machines. It is not a complete lie. The skills are the same. The metal remembers.

Outside, the Chicago wind cuts through his coat. He walks back to his apartment in the afternoon light, which is pale and thin, like tea that has been watered down too many times.

At home, he finds a letter on the table. It is from Elena. Her handwriting has deteriorated over the years—shaky, uneven, the loops of the e's growing wider and more desperate, like hands reaching for something that is no longer there.

"Mikhail," it says. "I have been sitting by the piano for two hours today, trying to play the first movement of Chopin's Ballade No. 1. I can't remember the notes. I know them in my head, but my hands won't obey. I think about playing it at your memorial—if you die, which I think you might, soon, because your heart is not strong and you are not eating—and I can't even imagine what I would play. I used to play for you. Now I can't even play for the ghost of who I used to be."

He reads it three times. Then he puts it in his pocket and goes to the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror.

He looks like a man who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time. His face is lined, not from age exactly but from the accumulation of small decisions not to do things—don't look at the medals too long, don't answer the phone after midnight, don't ask what the Model 47 is being used for in the places where it is being used.

He splashes water on his face. The water is cold. It does not help.

That night, he dreams of a factory. Not a gun factory—a proper factory, with machines that make parts for things that do not kill people. He sees himself at a lathe, young again, his hands steady, his eyes bright with the same fire that once made him stay up for three days straight perfecting a gas-operated mechanism.

In the dream, the gun comes out of the factory and it is beautiful. It is simple and strong and efficient. It is what he always wanted it to be—a tool, not a curse.

But then the factory grows. And grows. And grows. Until it fills the entire city. And every machine is making the same thing. The same gun. The same curved magazine. The same wooden stock. The same barrel that glows.

He wakes at 3:17 AM.

Forty-seven names.

He gets up. He sits by the lake. He takes the first medal off the wall at home before he leaves—the Red Star, the one with the star made of actual red enamel—and walks to the shore.

The lake is dark. The wind is cold. He holds the medal over the water and looks at it. The red enamel catches the streetlight and flickers, like a candle about to go out.

He drops it.

It makes a sound like a bullet hitting water. Then it is gone.

He returns home. He takes down the second medal. The Defense Excellence citation. Gold-plated. Heavy. He holds it for a long moment, feeling the weight of whatever it is supposed to represent. Then he drops it.

He does this five times. Five medals. Five names. Five drops.

When he is done, the wall above the fireplace is bare. Just nail holes and faded rectangles where the medals used to block the dust from the brick.

He sits in his armchair and stares at the empty wall. He feels nothing. That is the worst part. He expected relief. He expected catharsis. He expected the universe to sigh and say, "At last, Mikhail. At last you understand."

But the apartment is just a apartment. The lake is just a lake. The medals are just metal at the bottom of dark water, sinking slowly, silently, like everything else.

Morning comes. He goes to the kitchen. He makes coffee. He drinks it. He goes to work at the machine shop. He machines parts for factory machines.

The Model 47 continues. It always will. It is in the hands of soldiers and rebels and criminals and children. It is in the museums and the armories and the graves of places with names he cannot pronounce.

He sits at his lathe and machines a brass bracket for a conveyor belt. His hands are steady. The machine hums. The metal shavings curl and fall like golden ribbons.

He does not think about the medals at the bottom of the lake. He does not think about the forty-seven names. He does not think about Elena's letter.

He machines the bracket. He checks it with a micrometer. It measures 2.47 centimeters. Exactly as specified.

He machines the next one. And the next. And the next.

The sun goes down. He goes home. He sits in his armchair. He stares at the empty wall above the fireplace.

And he waits for morning, because morning is different, even if it is no better.

Forty-seven names. Forty-eight tomorrow.

He does not sleep. He does not cry. He sits in the dark apartment, surrounded by the silence of a life that was supposed to mean something, and he becomes the thing he has been afraid of becoming all along.

A ghost. Not dead. Not alive. Just present. Like the rust on the fire escape. Like the dust on the piano. Like the faint, golden reflection of medals on the bottom of a lake that no one will ever visit.

The city hums outside. Somewhere, a Model 47 is being fired. He cannot hear it. He chooses not to hear it.

In the morning, he will machine another bracket. It will measure 2.47 centimeters. Exactly as specified.

And that is enough.

Not good. Not heroic. Not redemptive.

Just enough to fill the time until the nightmare comes again.

At 3:17 AM.

Always at 3:17.

---

Author Note & Copyright:

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- シュバッパスホイシャチー[⾘、　] 中国 ویگ ⭑⭰ Росусуттет Меценененесцесцес Дкедошенн 🎉 Passnummer عرق جراز سفر CHN Passport)

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net

Author Note & Copyright:

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- シュバッパスホイシャチー[⾘、　] 中国 ویگ ⭑⭰ Росусуттет Мецесесцесцес Дкедошенн 🎉 Passnummer عرق جراز سفر CHN Passport)

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net