The ground trembled.
It was faint at first—like a distant giant stretching beneath the earth—but then it rumbled again, firmer this time. Pebbles danced across the path ahead. Luma paused mid-step, eyes narrowing as she glanced toward Ion.
"Tell me that's just an enthusiastic mole."
Ion didn't answer.
Instead, he dropped to one knee and pressed his palm to the cracked soil. His face went pale. "It's not just seismic activity. That's pressure… guided pressure. Like it's looking for somewhere to go."
"Like a kid shaking a soda bottle," Juno said, nervously tightening her tool belt.
Luma turned in a slow circle. They stood near the outskirts of the Lower Ring, an abandoned testing ground once used for terra-stabilization projects by Spire scientists. The buildings were half-swallowed by vines, some now cracked at odd angles. The air felt… heavy. Not hot, but charged.
"This is where they were testing entropy engines," Ion muttered. "Unregulated. Unstable. And now…"
"Now the earth's holding a grudge," Juno finished grimly.
A sharp crack echoed from beneath their feet. One of the buildings in the distance gave a low groan and began to tilt unnaturally.
"Okay! That's not dramatic at all," Luma quipped, grabbing her gauntlet and flicking it into analysis mode. "Reading faultline deviations. Pressure building unevenly in the sublayers. We've got ten minutes max before a rupture."
"Maybe less," Ion said, already yanking a folded schematic from his coat. "Kaelen wrote about using thermal and pressure equilibrium to stabilize localized quakes. We can counter this—if we equalize the stress lines."
Juno cracked her knuckles. "Let me guess. You want to tickle the planet into calming down?"
"More like coax it into dancing," Luma smirked, pulling up her gauntlet's projection. "If we can map the stress lines and redirect the pressure using harmonic displacement… basically a musical tectonic massage… we might buy time."
The team sprinted to a nearby tower—half-collapsed, but still holding a central control room where seismic regulators once functioned. Luma plugged in her gauntlet and began scanning.
Ion connected to an old control node, fingers flying. "We can pulse alternating frequencies through the abandoned pipes and stabilizer rails—like sending calming rhythms into the fault. It won't fix everything, but it'll buy time."
Outside, the earth let out another angry groan. A tree suddenly uprooted itself with a crack and tumbled into a warped trench.
Luma muttered, "Well, the planet's clearly not a morning person."
Inside the tower, lights flickered to life. Old interface consoles sparked back into functionality, their codes struggling to process the decades-old instructions.
"Pressure is peaking!" Juno shouted from the side terminal. "If we don't channel the surge somewhere, it'll blow straight through the canyon!"
"Redirecting now," Ion said.
Luma closed her eyes, feeling the pulse of the earth. Her gauntlet thrummed in sync with the frequencies Ion was calibrating. She began to tap her foot slowly, matching the rhythm, and then clapped—once, twice, three times.
The console flared In response.
"Wait," Juno said, squinting. "You're syncing harmonic frequencies with dancing?"
"I'm improvising," Luma grinned. "Turns out physics loves a good beat."
Ion cracked a rare smile. "Resonance through human motion. Just like Kaelen theorized."
A deep boom sounded from far below. Then another. But this time, they weren't sharp or destructive—they were rhythmic.
The earth breathed. Long, drawn-out pulses rippled outward like waves in a pond. The cracks slowed. The trembling steadied.
Then—stillness.
Juno leaned against the wall and let out a slow breath. "Okay. I think I need tea. Or a nap. Or a nap inside a teacup."
Luma chuckled and stared at her gauntlet, which had cooled and now displayed a message in Kaelen's old code:
:: Pressure redirected. System harmony restored. Temporary only. Core source remains active. ::
Ion's jaw tightened. "That was just a warning shot. The real instability is still coming."
"And it's buried deep," Luma said quietly. "Somewhere beneath the Spire… where no one's supposed to go."
She looked up toward the distant peaks where the Spire loomed, half-hidden in fog and myth.
"Tectonic bonds can shift," she said. "But they can also hold."
Juno raised an eyebrow. "Was that poetic or scientific?"
"Both," Luma smiled.
And with that, the trio turned from the half-collapsed tower, the ground calm beneath their feet—for now.