Gravity was a merciless judge. It didn't care about justice or revolution; it only cared about mass and velocity.
Julian and Lyra fell.
The slide down the ventilation shaft was a blur of scraping metal, wet moss, and bruising impacts. Julian clutched Lyra's unconscious body to his chest, twisting his own body to take the brunt of the friction. His canvas overalls shredded against the rivets of the chute.
Screech—THUD.
They hit something soft. Not a floor, but a net.
It was a massive debris-catchment web, woven from steel cables and thick hemp, suspended hundreds of feet below the Dregs to catch falling machinery parts before they could clog the Sump pumps.
The net groaned under their combined weight, sagging dangerously over the abyss.
Julian gasped, staring up at the darkness. His lungs burned. His back screamed in protest. Far above them, a faint orange glow illuminated the mouth of the shaft—the fire from the destroyed turbine.
"Lyra?" Julian rasped.
She didn't answer. She was limp in his arms, her head resting against his shoulder.
Julian shifted carefully, the net swaying with nausea-inducing vertigo. He pinned his legs through the gaps in the mesh to anchor himself and activated his hand.
The blue crystal flared to life. It was brighter now, fueled by the adrenaline and the massive discharge of Resonance he had used to break the fan.
In the cold azure light, Lyra looked like a ghost. Her skin was pale, clammy. There was a dark, purple bruise spreading across her jaw where the Silence unit had struck her.
"Come on," Julian whispered, placing his human hand on her neck. Her pulse was there—thready, fast, but there.
He looked at his crystal hand. He hesitated.
Can I?
Serafina had told him to "isolate the frequency."
Julian placed his crystal fingers gently on Lyra's chest. He closed his eyes. He didn't try to push energy into her. He just listened.
He heard the rhythm of her heart—lub-dub, lub-dub. It was a biological engine, fragile and wet. But underneath it, he heard something else. A faint, dissonant hum coming from her ribs.
Crack.
The impact had fractured a rib. The bone was vibrating at the wrong frequency, grinding against the muscle.
Julian took a deep breath. He focused on that tiny, sharp vibration of pain. He imagined the bone not as broken, but as whole. He visualized the calcium knitting together, the frequency smoothing out.
He sent a pulse. A whisper of blue light.
Lyra gasped. Her eyes flew open, wide and panicked. She thrashed, grabbing Julian's collar.
"Easy! It's me!" Julian hissed, holding her steady as the net swung violently. "We're safe. Sort of."
Lyra froze. She looked around at the darkness, then up at the distant fire, then at Julian. She touched her chest, wincing.
"My ribs..." she murmured. "They felt like knives a second ago. Now they just feel... bruised."
"I tried to fix the noise," Julian said simply, pulling his glowing hand back. "I don't know if it worked."
Lyra looked at him, her grey eyes searching his face in the blue gloom. "You Resonated my bones? You idiot. You could have fused my lungs to my spine."
"You're welcome," Julian retorted, exhaustion making him bold.
Lyra let out a short, dry laugh that turned into a cough. She sat up, gripping the cables of the net.
"Serafina," she said, the humor vanishing.
"She didn't make it to the shaft," Julian said quietly. "The Silence... they hit her with the dampening wave. I saw her go down."
Lyra closed her eyes. She didn't cry. In Arcadia, tears were a waste of moisture. She just tightened her grip on the steel cable until her knuckles turned white.
"If they have Serafina," Lyra said, her voice hard as iron, "then the Dregs are compromised. They have the maps. The codes. The safe houses."
She looked down into the infinite dark below the net.
"We have nowhere to go, Julian. The Resistance is headless. The Empire knows what you are. And Elias has unleashed the Void Walkers."
Silence stretched between them, heavier than the gravity.
Julian looked at his hand. He flexed the crystal fingers. Clink. Clink.
"We're not going to hide," Julian said.
Lyra looked at him. "Excuse me?"
"My whole life, I've been hiding," Julian said, his voice gaining strength. "Hiding from the foreman. Hiding from the debt collectors. Hiding from the truth about my father. And today... I ran again."
He looked up at the orange glow of the fire.
"But when I broke that fan... when I heard that Silence unit's mask crack... I realized something. They aren't invincible, Lyra. They absorb sound because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of the noise we make."
He turned to her, his face illuminated by the eerie light of his own corruption.
"My father built a machine to harvest souls. He left me the key to break it. I'm done running away from the lock."
"You want to fight?" Lyra asked, skepticism warring with a glimmer of hope. "Two people against an Empire?"
"Not two people," Julian corrected. "A Tuner and a Thief. And we're not going to fight them. We're going to break their toys."
He pointed down, past the net.
"Where does this drainage go?"
Lyra peered down. "The Sump filters. Eventually, it leads to the Old Rails. The abandoned cargo lines that run deep into the crust."
"Where do those lines go?"
"Out," Lyra said slowly. "Past the city limits. Towards the Wastelands. To the Fog."
"Then that's where we go," Julian said. "If we stay here, we die. If we go out there... maybe we find the truth about the Aether. Maybe we find what makes the Empire so scared of the outside."
Lyra looked at him for a long moment. Then, she reached into her boot and pulled out her knife. She cut a section of the hemp rope from the net.
"You're crazy, Grease-monkey," she said, tying the rope around her waist and tossing the other end to him. "But you fixed my ribs. So I guess I owe you one trip to hell."
Julian tied the rope around his waist. He looked at the crystal consuming his hand. It was a curse, yes. But it was also a promise.
Let them send the Silence, Julian thought. I will make them listen.
"Ready?" Julian asked.
"No," Lyra smirked. "Jump."
They let go of the net.
They dropped into the true dark, leaving the city of Arcadia behind. The air rushed past them, no longer smelling of copper and blood, but of ancient earth and old, cold secrets.
The First Decade was over.
The Dissonance War had begun.