Kharkiv, dawn, 24 February 2022. From the rooftop of SBU headquarters, Major Pavlo Kovalenko - a battered forty-five-year-old veteran of Debaltseve - watches a mushroom cloud bloom over his city and knows the long-feared war has finally come. With the call sign "Falcon," he transmits the codeword that activates Operation Ark and is ordered to a metro-station rendezvous for an extraction his general calls their "last chance."

Then his mother phones. She has fallen. Her legs won't move. She is alone in a flat across the burning city.

Torn between the iron of his duty and the last vestiges of his humanity, Pavlo runs into the apocalypse - through shattered streets, past bodies discarded like broken dolls, chasing the small, defended light still flickering inside him: that invincible summer Camus once promised lives in the midst of every winter.