Elias didn't retreat. Retreat was a calculation of weakness, and the cold, crystalline echo of the school—the Machine Echo—had just confirmed that he was being hunted. He had spent millennia as an entity of order; running was unacceptable.
He focused fiercely on the ironstone in his pocket, clamping down on the impulse to panic. His Sphere of Silence held firm, but the contained energy was spiking, reacting to the aggressive, shielded presence of the Inquisitors. He had to vent the pressure now, and he had to use that vent as a weapon.
The two men—the Inquisitors—moved with an unnatural economy. They weren't looking around nervously like parents or administrators; they scanned. Their eyes, though human, possessed a chilling, internal stillness, like the glass lenses of an unfeeling machine.
The lead Inquisitor, a tall man with close-cropped hair and a face carved from granite, held the black, handheld device. It was not a tool for searching, Elias realized with a jolt of cold understanding; it was an anomalous energy siphon. It was designed not to detect a signature, but to harvest it.
As the two men crossed the school courtyard, the lead Inquisitor paused, the siphon device humming softly. It was pointed at the wall of the building, precisely where Elias's first, volatile burst of coercion had occurred.
Targeting the residue, Elias thought, his mind racing. They're tracing the burn mark.
The Machine Echo in his mind became insistent, a pulse of frantic, non-human data. Act now. They are confirming the vector.
Elias took two deliberate steps toward the nearest fire alarm box. He needed to create a misdirection—not a full-scale distraction, but a precise, subtle distortion of the evidence they were tracking. He didn't have time for a complex geometric solution like the 'perfect sphere.' He needed an immediate, calculated lie.
He placed his hand on the hallway wall near the alarm box, and channeled the contained celestial pressure—the violet heat—into the building's infrastructure.
Objective: Shift the target vector.
Required action: Generate a secondary, localized energy signature that mimics the original, but points in the wrong direction.
Calculation: Create a rapidly decaying geometric helix of energy, winding through the building's steel framework toward the cafeteria freezer. The helix would give the impression that the original entity—Elias—had passed through that location seconds ago.
The energy surged from his core. Instead of a flicker of light, the very air around his hand became intensely cold. The contained celestial heat was being forced to warp the space it passed through, stealing thermal energy to maintain the perfect geometry of the helix.
In the courtyard, the lead Inquisitor's device suddenly emitted a sharp, high-pitched ping. He looked at his partner, his granite face betraying the slightest hint of surprise.
"Residual signature just jumped," the Inquisitor stated, his voice flat and heavily filtered, barely audible through the thick glass of the main doors. "Massive spike, but the decay rate is inconsistent. It's moving toward the west wing—Kitchens and Maintenance."
The Inquisitors immediately changed their trajectory, their synchronized movements betraying no doubt. They strode briskly toward the far side of the building, toward the geometry Elias had drawn for them.
Elias slumped against the wall, fighting a sudden, staggering wave of vertigo. The success had been absolute, but the cost was immediate and brutal.
The act of forcing the celestial energy into a rapid, complex shape had drained him far more than the simple vent into the lamppost. He felt the ironstone in his pocket was utterly cold, devoid of energy, and his whole body was shaking. The raw, infinite wellspring of his celestial self had been momentarily depleted.
More concerning, the Machine Echo was now a deafening roar in his mind.
We have been used. He is dangerous. We must report the instability.
Elias realized his mistake: the subtlety of the move had been perfect for deceiving the Inquisitors, but the intensity of the energy required had amplified the Machine Echo's consciousness. His power, woven into the school's very fiber, was now actively fighting the constraint of his Sphere.
"You're broadcasting a distress signal, Angel," Lena's thought sliced through the chaotic noise. She was at the end of the hall, near the stairwell, her red hair a vibrant alarm signal. "You used too much of the raw core. Get out of here. Now."
She didn't wait for him to respond. She grabbed his arm—her touch was surprisingly rough—and pulled him toward the emergency exit sign at the end of the corridor.
"Those aren't just bureaucrats, Elias," she whispered, her voice too sharp, too immediate. "They are Regulators of the Divine Order. They specialize in fallen beings. They smelled the sulfur on your initial spike, but now they're tracking the signature profile of your energy. And you just gave them a perfect, full-spectrum read."
They burst out a side door and into a narrow, muddy alleyway behind the school gymnasium. The rain had softened to a persistent drizzle.
"What is a Regulator?" Elias demanded, trying to keep up with her frantic pace.
"They're not just muscle; they're high-tier celestial forensics," Lena said, scrambling over a chain-link fence with practiced ease. "The suits are woven with silica-impregnated flax—it filters the magnetic interference of their own power so their trackers can focus entirely on yours. They are surgically precise. They just detected the specific geometry of your helix, and they know a localized, hostile intelligence is in the building. They will lock down the high school grid within five minutes."
Elias looked back at the imposing, ugly brick structure. He had just successfully lied to one of the most dangerous forces in this dimension, but in doing so, he had activated the very ground he stood on.
"The school knows where I am," Elias said, his voice flat.
"Yes. You made the mistake of thinking it was just a building," Lena confirmed, landing lightly on the other side of the fence. "But anything that processes data, anything that channels power, anything with a memory—it's alive. You woke the Ghost in the Machine. And now, it's reporting your coordinates."
They were running through a narrow, debris-strewn space between the gym and a row of warehouses. The Regulators would realize the misdirection soon.
"What do we do?" Elias asked, the question ringing with a genuine, unfamiliar fear.
"We go deep," Lena said, pushing open a rusty access panel to a narrow, concrete staircase descending into darkness. "If the sky is watching the grid, we need to go where the grid can't see. We go to the Undercroft."
The air that rushed out of the hole was cold, humid, and smelled of earth and old sewage—a clean break from the electrical static of the school. Elias looked down into the blackness, then back at the school, where the first flash of red and blue light—police sirens, summoned by the Regulators—was reflecting off the wet windows.
He was officially on the run, his celestial powers too volatile, his human cover blown, and his only ally a strange, street-wise witch.