The decision had not been unanimous.
Kael had spoken against it from the first breath, his voice sharpened by battle-honed certainty. "We've seen what the first machine did. It broke days out of the city's memory. You would risk that again?"
Rienne had not answered him directly. She rarely did. Instead, she worked in silence—her crystalline arm moving with inhuman steadiness as she drew designs across parchment, as she scavenged copper wire from abandoned lamps and coiled it with the patience of someone braiding her own noose. Lyra watched, torn between fear and fascination.
The Codex had not moved since its warning. Its pages remained closed, like a sealed mouth, its silence pressing heavier than any prophecy.
And in that silence, Rienne built.
The chamber she chose was not the library but an old storeroom beneath the archives. Dust furred every surface; broken shelves leaned like drunks against the stone. Here, no councilors could spy, no watchful clerks could whisper.
Lyra had followed her there one night, candlelight spilling over the curve of stone steps. She found Rienne crouched over a metal frame no larger than a child's toy wagon. Copper filaments spread from it like veins, soldered into plates of blackened steel. At its heart sat a crystal—not mined, not carved, but grown from the living shard of her arm.
It pulsed faintly, as though listening.
Lyra's voice faltered in the gloom. "You promised him you wouldn't."
"I promised nothing," Rienne said without turning. "I only kept silent. Silence is not the same as surrender."
Lyra stepped closer, unease tightening her throat. "And if Kael finds out?"
"He will." The faintest smile touched Rienne's lips. "But not before I learn if this can help us."
Her arm's glow brightened as she adjusted a dial. The machine gave a low hum, like the breath of something vast beneath the earth. Lyra felt her hair rise against her scalp. The air thickened—cold in some pockets, too warm in others.
"Rienne," she whispered, "what exactly will it do?"
"Not ghosts," Rienne said quickly, as though anticipating the word. "Echoes. Residues of lives the Veil has erased or displaced. They're not spirits. They're fractures made visible."
She hesitated, her face tightening. "At least, that is my hope."
The first activation was a whisper, not a roar.
The Resonator's crystal flared once, then dimmed. The hum deepened until the stones themselves seemed to vibrate. Lyra pressed her hands to her ears, though the sound was not truly audible—it thrummed in the bones, in the teeth.
Then the air shifted.
At the far wall of the storeroom, a figure flickered into being: a woman carrying a basket of bread. Her outline was translucent, wavering like heat-haze. She walked calmly, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. Lyra gasped as the woman passed straight through a leaning shelf without disturbance, her form fading in and out as though the Veil itself objected to her return.
Another figure followed—a child skipping rope, though the rope itself was absent. Then a man in a merchant's cloak, head bent against a wind that wasn't there.
One by one, they filled the room.
Half-seen, half-forgotten.
Lyra's throat tightened. She recognized none of them, yet felt the ache of recognition all the same, like names she should have known but couldn't recall.
"Rienne…"
"They're not here," Rienne murmured, her eyes fixed on the flickering crowd. Her glass arm pulsed violently now, resonating with the device. "They're impressions. Memories left behind when the Veil stripped them from us."
The child skipped through Lyra's candlelight, his form scattering into shards of brightness before reforming again.
Lyra reached out without thinking.
Her fingers met nothing. The child vanished on contact, like a dream interrupted.
Lyra gasped, clutching her empty hand. The skin tingled as though plunged into ice.
Rienne's expression hardened. "You see? We cannot touch them. They are not whole. They are… echoes."
Kael discovered them the next night.
The storeroom door rattled against his fist before he shouldered it open. His armor flickered into half-existence as he stepped inside, instinct pushing it to life. His gaze locked instantly on the crowd of half-visible figures wandering through the chamber like sleepwalkers.
He froze. His scarred face paled.
"What have you done?"
Rienne didn't flinch. She stood with her hand on the Resonator's dial, glass arm glowing like a torch. "What was necessary."
Kael's blade slid into his hand unbidden. He stared at the echoes with open horror. One of the phantom figures—a soldier in strange armor—passed straight through him, leaving his expression twisted with rage.
"You summon ghosts into this place?" His voice rang against the stone. "Do you not see their faces? These are the dead, dragged back against their will."
"They are not dead!" Rienne snapped, louder than Lyra had ever heard her. Her voice cracked like breaking glass. "They were forgotten. Do you understand the difference? You of all people, Kael—you who remember a kingdom no one else does!"
The words struck him like a blow. His sword faltered, but his fury did not.
"End it. Now."
Lyra stepped between them, heart pounding. "Wait—don't you see? If these people are echoes, then the Resonator proves the Veil can be breached. Maybe even mended."
Kael's glare burned into her, but he said nothing. His armor flickered uneasily, as though it too mistrusted what stood before them.
Rienne's hand tightened on the dial. "If we shut this down, we learn nothing. If we keep it—"
The Resonator shrieked suddenly, its hum rising into a piercing whine. The crystal flared so brightly the chamber went white. The echoes froze mid-step, their forms splintering into shards of light.
Then they were gone.
Silence crashed down. The only sound was Kael's ragged breath.
Rienne slowly withdrew her hand. Her glass arm's glow dimmed to a faint ember.
Word spread faster than fire.
A guard had glimpsed the echoes spilling into the streets when Rienne tested the machine above ground. By dawn, rumors swarmed through the city: that the scientist with the glass arm had summoned the dead, that she had loosed phantoms upon the living.
By midday, the word had sharpened into a blade: heretic.
The Council convened in fury. Bells that no longer existed were invoked in curses. Priests spat prayers against her name. Crowds gathered at the archive gates, demanding her exile, some even her execution.
Lyra watched it all from the shadows of the library windows, her stomach twisting. The people's fear was raw, but beneath it pulsed something sharper: relief. Relief that someone could be blamed for the fractures. Someone visible. Someone other.
Rienne bore it with stiff-backed silence. Her crystalline arm gleamed too brightly, betraying the storm within her.
Only to Lyra, in the quiet of their chamber, did she whisper the truth.
"I built the Resonator to find what we lost," she said, voice shaking. "But perhaps all I've done is remind them of their grief. And grief always seeks someone to punish."
Lyra couldn't shake the image of the child skipping rope—an echo that vanished at her touch. She couldn't shake the way her skin still tingled, as if the boy's absence had marked her more than his presence.
If these figures were not ghosts, then what were they?
And if the Veil could return them for even a moment, what else might it take away?
The Codex did not stir.
But Lyra felt its silence like a warning louder than words.