Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

The Heart's small lab sounded like it always did when Saffi was alone in it. It wasn't loud, though. The sound lived in the trays, in the little fan on the corner of the workbench, in the box of resistors that rattled when she moved them.

The prototype lay open on a cloth like a patient in surgery. A weird housing sat in two halves, the new mechanism she'd built nested inside, teeth fine as sand, springs clean as bone. Saffi held a magnifying glass to her eye and muttered to the screw that wouldn't catch.

"Half a degree" she told it. "You and me, we are having a philosophical problem about half a degree"

Her tweezers pinched, turned, failed.

She set them down, stretched, picked them up again, and tried a softer hand. The micro-spring slid into its seat with a tiny click that sounded louder than it should have.

She sat back and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Tension lived there now. New roommate. Rent unpaid.

"Again" she told herself. "We can shave another gram. He'll thank me by not slamming into walls again"

Footsteps in the hall. The door sighed open.

Alteea came in like the lab was hers - which it was, but you get the point - with two coffees in one hand and a tablet tucked under the other. Her hair was tied high, a strand fallen and pretending to be a question mark against her cheek.

"How's your philosophy class?" she asked.

"Battling screws" Saffi answered without looking up. "And losing"

"That tracks" Alteea set a coffee by Saffi's elbow. "Don't touch that spring with anger. It'll bite you out of spite"

"It already did" Saffi said.

Alteea leaned her hip against the bench, glanced over the mechanism with the casual accuracy of someone who saw all the pieces and their future arguments at once.

But she didn't say anything about the device. She said, as if finishing a thought she'd been carrying for days, "You asked me why we don't put everything in the Lighthouse, remember?"

Saffi's hand stilled. "By everything, I meant-"

"Everything" Alteea interrupted. "The room we walked last night. The stairs. The files. The names. The book. Whole studies. Everything. So then, why not upload it, Alteea? Why not back it up, Alteea? Why not trust a city that runs on light and trust?"

Saffi set the loupe down. "And your answer"

Alteea looked at the prototype, but her eyes were somewhere else. "Because that spiral holds enough to erase countries"

The lab quiet took a breath.

"From advanced subatomic studies we are not mature enough to repeat, to recipes for Luminite weapons a street gang could build with a decent wrench set" Alteea said, every word even. "Because I am currently the person guarding all that knowledge. Because if even a sliver bleeds into public channels, it will not stay a sliver. It will be copied, embellished, sold, simplified, worshiped, weaponized, misunderstood, and then people die because they wanted to understand the wrong sentence"

Saffi swallowed. Her throat felt dry, like paper.

"If a normal person sees a boulder shattered to dust by one human hand and an avalanche started by a cadet, they don't say "ah, controlled context, specific parameters, we can overlook that!" because they're just not used to this world's curses"

Alteea went on. "They treat Wardens like Gods. I mean, I do suppose they are order. But they also say the Wardens will turn on us. They stop trusting the ones who would take a bullet for them. They break what protects them because fear is easier than trust. Because that is the idiocy that stands in every human mind that wants safety"

"They're just blind" Saffi's fingers had found the bench edge and held it like a rail.

"And if the public sees the anomalies the way we do…" Alteea said. "The clusters, numbers that look drunk, the forms Nyxes take when they are not putting on their polite faces for cameras… If they see that - they panic way more than they need to. They forget to go to work. They forget to care for each other. Panic eats cities faster than any monster we've named. Except for Anathemas, they could become some competition."

Saffi let a beat pass. Then another. "Just like the north recon expedition, huh"

Alteea's head turned. Sharp. "Say what?"

Saffi blew air out through her nose like she'd dropped a wrench on her own foot. An exaggerated sigh. "The recon. North Mountain. Fifteen out. Fourteen dead. No Nyx readings. The one survivor. The… scientist. From inside the walls"

Alteea set her cup down and didn't lift it again. For a second she didn't blink. Then the machines behind her were doing math, and so was she. "Dates"

she said.

"The file was stamped midwinter"

Alteea recognized. "Seven years ago. Nine minutes forty-three seconds, start to end. That one?"

"Yes"

"Five days" Alteea repeated, already somewhere else. "Eiden's gap"

"You mean, what we saw yesterday-"

"Eiden's records had five missing days around the same time. No sign-out. No sign-in. No notes. I told myself a dozen reasons you could lose five days in a city this large. None of them fit. But I didn't pay it any attention. Yet, now you're telling me those five days sit under a body count and a blank reading?"

"I'm telling you what the file said" Saffi answered steadily, because her job was to be steady when Alteea burned too bright. "It didn't name him. It didn't name anything. Just numbers and the wrong amount of silence"

Alteea stared at the far wall like she'd stuck a map to it. "Did he go as an engineer? As a scientist? As himself? Did the Council send him? Did he go because he could not resist a door? If he went, why is he the one who lived? Why did the instruments see nothing when there is always something to see?"

"Too many questions for this hour, Alteea…"

They both sat with that awkward, yet meaningful silence for a few seconds.

"Waait a minute! How did you even know about the expedition in the first place?" Alteea asked, voice suddenly small and sharp at the same time. "I don't speak those numbers out loud unless I have to"

"I…Uh…"