The breach had not gone unnoticed.
Alarms didn't blare—there was no dramatic wail of danger—but the silence itself had grown sharper. Crisper. Luma noticed it first, the way her own breath sounded louder, like it was echoing through a tunnel no one else could hear.
They descended into the crevice torn open by the gas expansion tech. Jagged metal veins ran along the walls, and the rock around them was warm with residual energy. Ion moved like he'd been here before—not this exact place, perhaps, but somewhere designed by the same hands.
Luma glanced at him. "You're doing the tight-jawed memory-face again. Want to share with the class?"
Ion exhaled slowly. "This place wasn't on any Spire maps because it predates the current administration. This was a lab once. And a grave."
The tunnel opened into a vast subterranean chamber. Lights shimmered along the walls—not artificial, but refracted, bouncing from crystal conduits buried in the stone. Suspended in the air above them were several machines, some barely held aloft by magnetic stabilizers. Their cores pulsed with colors that hurt to look at too long—purples and greens that seemed to vibrate on frequencies just outside reason.
Juno whistled. "So, uh… mild question. Are we inside a science temple, a weapon testing site, or the inside of a migraine?"
Ion stepped forward, eyes narrowing at the largest structure: a rotating sphere nested inside a gyroscopic frame, its rings inscribed with equations. At the center, energy arced between tiny nodes, dancing like lightning on a lazy afternoon.
"This is it," he murmured. "A spectral siphon. One of the earliest prototypes for entropy engines."
Luma stared. "This is what they're using to make reality… fall apart?"
"Not this one," Ion said. "This one was scrapped. Too unstable. But the designs evolved. They found a way to stabilize the collapse long enough to seed chaos in small areas."
Juno frowned. "Wait. This isn't destroying things… it's converting them. Breaking ordered systems into unpredictable flux."
"Entropy," Luma whispered. "Weaponized unpredictability."
They stepped deeper into the chamber, ducking beneath a crystalline arc. Holograms flickered to life—logs, schematics, and old test footage. Kaelen appeared in some of them, younger, fire-eyed, arguing with others in lab coats.
"He was fighting it," Ion said, voice low. "He knew it had gone too far."
Luma found a smaller room, cluttered with notes, coils, and chalkboards filled with equations she could barely keep up with. One phrase was repeated several times: "What breaks can be tuned. What unravels can be retied."
She grinned. "That's going on a T-shirt."
They didn't notice the motion-activated recorder blink on in the corner.
"Unauthorized access detected," a cold voice intoned. "Data upload in progress."
Luma's gauntlet pinged with a warning just as a vent hissed overhead. A slow mist began to pour in, thick and luminescent.
"Gas field!" Ion shouted. "Spectral-laced! Everyone out—move!"
They raced through the tunnel, the mist chasing them like fog made of static.
Back above ground, coughing and panting, they regrouped near the broken ridge. Ion looked at the faint glimmering trails left behind and shook his head.
"They wanted us to find that," he said. "This was a trap—but not to kill us. To monitor us."
Juno wiped her goggles. "Great. So they know we know. What now?"
Luma looked to the horizon, where the first morning light kissed the spires of Silex.
"Now," she said, "we find the rest of Kaelen's trail—and we end whatever's happening before it reaches the surface."