The air inside the mobile laboratory hummed with a sterile, focused energy. It was a sound Victoria Kane had come to love—the whisper of advanced climate control, the subtle thrum of servers, and the absolute silence of electromagnetic shielding. This wasn't her father's dusty, rage-filled bunker. This was a temple of precision, a forty-foot trailer packed with technology that would make a university physics department weep with envy, all paid for by anonymous transfers from foundations with old, European names.
Before her, suspended in a non-reactive gel within a transparent containment cylinder, was a sample that defied conventional physics. It wasn't a tissue or a blood sample. It was a capture—a minuscule, stabilized fragment of the energy pulse that had erupted from Luna Blackwood on her fifth birthday. It glowed with a faint, impossible silver light, a captured piece of a moment that had broken the rules.
