Elias didn’t move.
The floor under his feet still carried the echo of the blast—faint now, just a tight vibration in the soles of his boots. The hum of the system above him hadn’t stopped. Too smooth. Too clean.
He glanced down the corridor. The pod quarters stretched out in both directions, half-lit by overhead strips that buzzed without rhythm. Shadows leaned hard against the walls, drawn long by flickering screens embedded in cracked tal panels. One of them blinked twice, then cut out.
His breath caught in his throat. Not from panic. Just... stuck.
The pod next to him had a dent near the lock strip. Burnt edges. No smoke.
His shard gave a pulse—dull, like it didn’t know if it should be reacting yet. The beat of it sat heavy in his chest, slower than his own. Off rhythm. Unsettled.
Dot hovered low at his side. Her glow traced a small circle onto the floor, just enough to show the scuff marks near his boots. The light reached the bottom of his sleepwear—thin fabric, clinging where the sweat hadn’t cooled yet.
He adjusted his grip on the pod rail. It wasn’t shaking anymore. Just his hand.
No voices yet. No orders. Just the system hum and the buzz of broken lighting.
He exhaled slowly and looked back down the hall.
Sothing had happened. But the systems hadn’t caught up.
Not yet.
The red lights on the bolt-locks down the hall pulsed in slow intervals. Too slow. Too regular. Each one lit the corridor in a dull rhythm, fading before it reached the floor. Their tal casings clicked again. A second lock. The sound rolled down the hallway like the building itself had sealed its throat shut.
Elias didn’t speak.
He stayed still, fingers half-curled at his sides, trying to track the way the air moved. It wasn’t silent—not completely. The overhead vents kept humming. A soft, chanical tone that hadn’t changed since before the blast.
That was the part that got to him.
The systems didn’t care that sothing had gone wrong.
They kept working. Sa speed. Sa cycle. The hum filled the pod quarters with a steadiness that felt... off. Too steady. Like the building hadn’t noticed what just happened to it.
He glanced down the hall. One of the cracked wall panels blinked faintly, throwing a warped reflection onto the floor—longer than it should’ve been, bent across the pod door fras.
The air had that dry, filtered bite again. Recycled too many tis. Cold, but not fresh. It carried the faint sll of dust shaken loose from ceiling panels, mixed with the sharper hint of scorched tal—still clinging from the earlier explosion.
Then ca the voice.
Kikaru’s shout broke through the hallway.
"What the hell was that?"
She wasn’t near. A few pods down, maybe more. Her Ikona flared bright behind the screen of her door—an erratic pulse of gold flickering against the panel, like it was struggling to settle.
She didn’t say anything else.
Faye’s voice ca next, quieter, but closer to Elias. He didn’t turn.
"Was that Vardency?"
There was a shake in her tone—barely there—but enough. It sat under the words like sothing she hadn’t ant to let slip. Her Ikona cast a thin shimr onto the wall behind her pod. Its feathers looked stiffer than usual. Tense.
Then Tidwell’s voice—harsher. Frustrated.
"Damn Epics."
It wasn’t shouted. Just thrown into the air like it didn’t need a target.
Their voices didn’t form anything structured. No questions. No answers. Just a scatter of reactions, overlapping in the narrow hall.
Elias could feel the pod walls holding the echoes too long.
The overhead speaker crackled to life a second later.
Static bled down through the ceiling, sharp and uneven. Then Oliver’s voice ca through—tight. Controlled, but only just.
"We’ve got a breach."
There was a pause. Static again.
"B Block. Rogue shard users. Two, maybe three. Aligned with the Epics possibly. ."
Nothing else followed. The speaker clicked off.
The hum of the systems returned. Sa as before.
Elias found himself holding his breath without aning to, the words sinking too easily into the weight already dragging down his chest.
"For your safety," Oliver continued, voice thinning now, "stay in your blocks. Do not engage. Let us handle this."
The intercom clicked off sharply, leaving a silence that felt worse than the static had.
The red glow of the locks pulsed again, each beat pressing down heavier, like the walls themselves were waiting for sothing to break.
Kikaru’s voice tore through the stillness almost imdiately.
"Those bastards are actually pulling a stunt like this now?" she snarled, pounding her fist against the door. The tal rang hollow under the force of it.
Her Ikona flared again behind her — a brighter, angrier flash of gold spilling through the pod’s narrow cracks, throwing jagged shadows across the wall.
Elias winced at the sharpness in her voice, the uncontrolled edge that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t need to guess what was running through her mind. He could feel it — the sa old warnings Asurik had given them. Warnings about loyalty being paper-thin. About betrayal growing in the places you never looked.
He pressed his hand against his own pod screen, feeling the cold bleed into his skin. His breath fogged the glass, his reflection warping under the faint glow of Dot’s light.
The bolt-locks remained silent. Solid. Unyielding.
A voice cracked the silence next, wavering from a pod a few units down.
Junjio.
Elias didn’t need to see him to picture the way he probably pressed himself back against the wall, wide-eyed and blinking too fast.
"Oh, wow," Junjio said, the words spilling out in a shaky rush. "I really thought this place was supposed to be... calr than this."
The nervous laugh he tried to tack on at the end collapsed under its own weight. His Ikona flickered low behind the cracked screen, barely more than a shadow against the red wash of ergency lights.
Dot floated closer to Elias’s side, her small chi threading gently through the tension.
"They locked those doors tight, though," she said, her voice soft but even — the sa way she always was when things spiraled.
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