Silence has weight.

  After the screams, the shattering stone, the torrential rush of truth, the silence they placed me in was the heaviest thing I had ever known.

  They didn’t put me in a cell.

  They put me back in my room. As if Korr expected there was nothing I could do to make things go wrong. Maybe there wasn’t.

  I sat on my bed, hands on my knees. They’d taken my field tunic and given me a new one, a softer grey. My disc lay on the desk.

  A badge. Or was it a monitor?

  I replayed Finn’s visit in the sterile quiet.

  Your mother, Elara. A prodigy. She heard the Taint as a library. She died in a convenient accident when she carried you.

  Korr had been her supervisor. He had written the report.

  The pieces didn’t fit together. They locked, with the finality of a vault door. I was the son of his two greatest failures. A living reminder. Was I a chance at redemption? Or just a more fascinating subject?

  And Lira. Three days.

  A soft chime. The door slid open without a sound.

  Warden Thale stood there. He wore the simple grey of a senior administrator. He carried a slate. He looked at me with the focused curiosity of a gardener examining a rare, volatile bloom.

  “Kieran. May I come in?”

  I nodded. He entered, the door sighing shut.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired.”

  “That’s to be expected.” He tapped the slate. It glowed with indecipherable data. “Do you know what you did in the auditorium?”

  “I caused a breach.”

  “No.” He said it gently, correcting a minor error. “You identified a critical flaw in our substrate and triggered a controlled failure. You contained what would have flooded the wing.” His kind eyes were earnest. “You saved lives, Kieran. From our perspective, it was an act of remarkable control.”

  The lie was clean. Beautiful. My loss of control was being framed as a heroic sacrifice. My terror was being cataloged as “efficiency.”

  “What happens now?”

  “Now,” Thale said, a hint of excitement in his voice, “we learn. Your compatibility is off the scale. Your resonance is unlike anything we’ve recorded in a very long time. Standard training is insufficient. Possibly harmful.” He paused, his eyes scanning my face as if reading fine print. “I’ve recommended you for the advanced seminar on latent absorption. It’s for second-year Hollows, but Korr has approved it. It starts today. You’ll be an observer only.”

  He wasn’t just here to check on me. He was here to guide me. To usher me into the next phase of their experiment. The news about the seminar wasn’t a suggestion; it was a directive, wrapped in the soft velvet of his voice.

  “An observer,” I repeated.

  “For now. The others will be curious, but it’s a controlled environment. The best place for you to… acclimate.” He placed a small, folded slip of paper on the desk. “The schedule. The lecture hall is on Floor Six. Korr will address the group first. He likes to welcome exceptional candidates personally.”

  There it was. The reason for the visit. Not to console, not to explain, but to deliver my next set of instructions and to ensure I was where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there. He was a shepherd, and I was the prized, peculiar lamb.

  He left as quietly as he’d come, leaving the silence behind, now charged with purpose.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The lecture hall was small, windowless, lit by a cool blue light. About twenty people sat on stone benches. Most were Hollows, their tunics darker, their faces etched with deep, intellectual fatigue. A few Wardens in white made notes.

  I took a seat at the back. Every head turned. The scrutiny was palpable—analytical. I was the new variable.

  Before the instructor could begin, the door at the front opened. High Sage Korr entered, not in his ceremonial blue, but in a severe grey robe that matched the walls. The room stiffened.

  His winter-salt eyes swept over the assembled Hollows, landing on me without lingering, yet I felt pinned.

  “You are here because you represent stability,” he began, his voice smooth and carrying. “Or the potential for it. The Tower does not merely contain the Taint. It studies it. We understand our enemy. Some of you will contribute to that understanding in ways beyond simple absorption. You will learn to listen to its patterns. To map its echoes.”

  He paced slowly, hands clasped behind his back. “This work requires discipline. Not the discipline of a soldier, but of a scholar. Of a surgeon. You must observe without becoming infected. Analyze without sympathizing.” He stopped, and though he addressed the room, his words felt aimed at my skull. “Some believe the Taint speaks. That it has memory. That it pleads. This is the corruption talking. It is a mirror, reflecting our own fears and frailties back at us. Your task is to see the mirror for what it is—glass and silver—and not the faces in it.”

  He was talking about my mother. About Aldric. He was drawing a line in the sand of my mind, warning me which side to stand on.

  He left as abruptly as he’d arrived, leaving a colder silence in his wake.

  The instructor began speaking about “energy signature decay.” Jargon. I let it wash over me, my mind churning.

  Three days.

  Lira’s face swam before me. Then Tavin’s, twisted in agony as they dragged him away. Garrett’s words: Deep Isolation. Not gone. Worse.

  I couldn’t save everyone. I couldn’t break the Tower in three days. But maybe I could do one thing. Maybe the knife—the strange, iridescent blade my father made—could do what the Wardens couldn’t. Maybe it could pull the corruption out of Tavin, like it had eased the pressure in his disc. It was a frail, desperate hope, but it was a thread to pull.

  The lecture ended. People filed out. I stood, unmoored, and as I turned, the knife in my boot shifted. I hadn’t strapped it tightly enough. It slipped free and clattered onto the ivory floor.

  I froze, heart hammering. But no one seemed to notice the sound over the shuffle of feet. I bent to pick it up.

  And stopped.

  The blade wasn’t lying flat. The tip was tilted, pointing unmistakably toward the wall—and downward. As I watched, disbelieving, the metal gave a faint, almost imperceptible shiver, a vibration that traveled up into the hilt. A pull. A compass needle finding its north.

  Deep. It was pointing deep into the Tower.

  “See something interesting?”

  I snatched up the knife and straightened. Garrett stood nearby, his disc the old lead-grey. He looked older up close, his eyes holding that flat patience.

  “Just dropped it,” I muttered, shoving it back into my boot.

  “Your friend. The counter,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “He’s in Deep Isolation. Not gone. Worse.” He didn’t look at me, his gaze on the emptying doorway. “Sometimes breaking the right thing means breaking it before they can turn it into a weapon.”

  He was gone before I could form a question.

  I turned and saw a figure lingering by the door.

  Gawain.

  He was staring at the empty podium. He slowly raised a hand and pressed his palm flat against the ivory wall.

  For a fraction of a second, the wall softened.

  Not cracked. Not broken.

  Softened—like stone remembering it was once liquid. A faint, sickly yellow light pulsed from the spot, then vanished.

  Gawain lowered his hand. He turned his head. His eyes met mine, full of a terrible, cognizant sorrow. He opened his mouth. No sound came out. Just a faint, echoing sigh that wasn’t his—a whisper of crumbling stone and collective grief.

  Then the moment broke. The sorrow drowned in vacancy. He shuffled out.

  I stood alone in the blue-lit hall, the phantom sensation of the knife’s pull still humming against my calf.

  Back in my room, the silence was different. It wasn’t heavy anymore. It was thin. Stretched. Waiting to be filled with action.

  Three days.

  I pulled the knife out again. In the low light, the iridescent metal seemed to swirl with its own captured storm. I held it flat on my palm. Slowly, deliberately, I turned.

  The blade shivered, its point drifting like a slow, determined finger until it aimed straight at the floor.

  Down.

  The Deep Archives. Deep Isolation. Where Tavin was. Where the answers were. Where my family’s ghosts were kept.

  Korr wanted me to study. Thale wanted me to acclimate. They wanted a scholar, a surgeon, a stable Resonant.

  But the knife wanted something else. And so did I.

  It was impossible. Suicide. The Deep Levels would be guarded, warded, locked.

  But I had the knife. And I had the pull. And I had a direction.

  I had to at least try. For Tavin. For the friend who counted to keep himself sane. If the knife could ease his suffering, even for a moment, it was worth the risk. It was the only thing I could do that felt like my own choice.

  I strapped the knife securely to my calf. I lay on my bed, staring at the curved ceiling, listening to the Tower’s false heartbeat.

  The plan was simple, born of desperation, not genius. Tonight, after the Third Bell and the shift change, I would go. I would follow the pull. I would find a way down. I would find Tavin.

  It was a plan with a thousand ways to fail, and only one way to succeed—through sheer, stupid will.

  I had three days before Lira’s test. Before my own fate was sealed.

  But tonight belonged to me.

  The Tower’s hum seemed to deepen, a low note of anticipation vibrating in the bones of the world.

  Or maybe that was just my own heart, finally beating a rhythm of its own.