The sun dipped low over the jagged rooftops of Silex City, casting angular shadows that flickered like static across the walls. Luma sat cross-legged on the rooftop of an old observatory, her gauntlet propped on her knee and softly glowing with diagnostic scripts. Beside her, Juno was chewing on a stalk of candied kelp and scribbling equations onto a floating holosheet.
"You ever wonder why we're the only ones doing this?" Juno asked, not looking up.
"Doing what? Sitting on dangerous heights and risking our lives for the truth?" Luma quipped, flipping her gauntlet screen. "Nah, it's a growing hobby."
But the smile faded from her face. Ion had vanished.
One moment he was at the market—inspecting entropy-bent circuit coils for anomalies—and the next, gone. Not a shimmer, not a sound. Just… absence.
And Luma could feel it. Like a broken equation lingering in her mind.
Juno sighed and adjusted the visor over her brow. "I tuned the scanner to check for any unusual spectrum anomalies. You know, stuff that shouldn't reflect or refract like normal light."
Luma nodded, flipping open the side of her gauntlet. "Spectral energy manipulation… think whoever took him used a cloaking grid?"
"Maybe," Juno said. "But I think they bent light around him. Literally. Think diffraction fields—like wrapping someone in a rainbow and telling them to disappear."
"So we track the rainbow," Luma muttered.
They leapt across rooftops, following the flickering path of light-warped graffiti tags left by Selka and Rhon. Each shimmer marked an area where photons had scattered unnaturally—someone trying too hard to hide something.
"Wait," Luma stopped, crouching beside a scratched windowpane. "See this?" She pointed to a smudge that refracted orange even in blue light. "Chromatic displacement. Whoever did this didn't balance the spectrum distortion."
"You mean… the bad guys forgot to carry the color wheel?"
Luma grinned. "Exactly."
They traced the signal to an old amphitheater buried in the industrial district. Luma could feel the frequency in her bones. Her gauntlet buzzed erratically.
They slipped inside. The entire hall was bathed in muted light, as if the world had been dipped in soft wax. At the center stood Ion—suspended inside a prism-shaped field, eyes closed, unconscious.
Around him, small devices buzzed and sparked with bursts of filtered color.
"They're separating light into frequencies and using them to trap him," Juno whispered. "Spectral siphoning. I read about this in Kaelen's journal… they're using entropy fields to hold people inside their own reflection patterns."
Luma narrowed her eyes. "Okay. Weird. Creepy. But solvable."
She pulled two thin coils from her pack, handed one to Juno. "Hook this into the resonator. We're going to refract the refractor."
"What?"
"Just follow my lead and don't sneeze near the mirrors."
They synchronized their devices, sending a pulse of balanced spectrum light through the distortions. One mirror shattered. Then another. The field holding Ion flickered.
Luma leapt through just as it collapsed, catching Ion's weight.
His eyes fluttered open. "Told you not to… leave you unsupervised," he croaked.
"I'm fourteen, not a baby," Luma said, half-laughing, half-tearing up. "Though I did nearly blow up the color blue."
Juno patted her on the back. "Don't worry. Indigo's overrated."
They escaped into the dusk, the colors of the city slowly returning to normal. Behind them, the prism tech short-circuited with a final glimmer of violet light.
"Next time," Ion muttered, "we take the safe path."
Luma smirked. "You say that every time."
And above them, unseen eyes watched from the rooftops—cataloguing, measuring, planning.