The silence of the cavern was not an absence of sound, but a presence. It was the slow, patient breath of the stone, the infinitesimal shift of continents, the weight of a city pressing down from above. In that absolute stillness, the hum of the crystal shard was not just a sound in Luka's ears; it was a resonance in the hollow of his bones, a second, quieter heartbeat syncing with the first.
He sat with his back against the cold, damp rock, the velvet-wrapped shard a burning brand against his chest even through the layers of cloth and leather. The adrenaline of the chase had faded, leaving behind a corrosive fatigue and a clarity that was sharper than any blade. The Institute knew him. They wanted what he carried. And the thing he carried was no longer just an object; it was a tenant in the house of his soul.
Unwrapping it again felt like a violation, an unveiling of something that should remain hidden. The smoky amber light within swirled, languid and sentient. The low, pure tone softened, becoming almost a question.
*What are you?* he had asked. It had not answered with words. It had answered with a map etched in light behind his eyes. It had answered with the cold, calculating insight that had let him turn a steam pipe into a weapon. It was changing him. Sanding down the rough, reactive edges of the street brawler and replacing them with the predatory patience of something older, far more dangerous.
He needed to move. The ash-haired woman was not the type to give up. She would have called for reinforcements, triangulated his possible escape vectors. The Under-District was a web, and the Institute held many of its threads.
But the shard had other ideas.
As he made to stand, a fresh wave of sensation hit him, so visceral it stole his breath. It was not a vision of light this time, but a memory of *stone*. He felt the immense, crushing pressure of the deep earth, the patient, glacial flow of time, the specific mineral taste of ancient bedrock. And through that geological memory, he felt a *wound*.
A fissure. A place where the skin of the world had been torn, and something had been inserted that did not belong. Something cold, artificial, and humming with a familiar, malevolent energy. It was a magitek seal, a massive one, buried deep beneath the sector known as the Rust Gardens. And it was failing.
The image was accompanied by a sudden, desperate pull, a psychic gravity drawing him toward that wounded place. The shard didn't just want to be delivered. It wanted to *see*. It wanted to *know*.
"No," Luka growled aloud, the word a rough stone in his throat. "Aethelburg Archive. That's the job."
The pull intensified, a dull ache behind his eyes. The pure tone in his mind shifted, acquiring a new harmonic—a note of profound sorrow, of a responsibility neglected. It was the sound of a conscience, remembering its duty.
Cursing, Luka shoved the shard back into his inner pocket. The connection didn't break; it simply became a throbbing compass needle in his mind, pointing insistently downward, toward the deep dark. He was a seeker. And he was being sought by the very thing he carried. The irony was a bitter pill.
He moved out, not toward the upward routes that would lead to the Spire District and his payday, but descending deeper, following the shard's silent, sorrowful tug. The tunnels grew older, less fashioned by human hands and more simply claimed by them. The air grew thick and heavy, smelling of wet clay and the metallic tang of deep-well water. The ubiquitous hum of the Geothermal Converters was fainter here, replaced by the drip of water and the occasional, distant groan of settling rock.
He was in the territory of the Diggers, the half-mad prospectors and relic hunters who believed the true secrets of Atlan—and the true wealth—lay not in the spires above, but in the poisoned soil below. He passed makeshift camps, their inhabitants watching him with eyes that had seen too much gloom and not enough sun. They were gaunt, their skin often showing the tell-tale grey mottling of slow magitek poisoning. They saw the purpose in his stride and left him alone. Purpose down here was usually synonymous with death.
After an hour of descent, the shard's pull became a sharp, physical pressure. It led him to a cavern that was not natural. The walls were sheer, tool-smoothed stone, part of some ancient, pre-Cataclysm foundation. In the center of the floor was a circular metal hatch, twenty feet across, its surface etched with long-corroded warding runes. In the center of the hatch was a control panel, dark and dead. But from the seams around the hatch, a faint, sickly green light leaked out, pulsing in a slow, arrhythmic cadence. The air crackled with static, and the taste of it was like licking a battery.
This was the wound. This was the source of the shard's distress.
As he approached, a figure detached itself from the shadows near the cavern wall. An old Digger, wrapped in ragged furs, his face a roadmap of wrinkles and scars, one eye clouded white. He held a heavy, industrial wrench not as a tool, but as a weapon.
"You don't wanna go down there, seeker," the old man rasped, his voice the sound of grinding gravel. "That's no place for the living."
Luka stopped, his hand resting near his dagger. "What is it?"
"The Old Geothermal Lock. City fathers sealed it generations back. Said the pressure was too unstable. A lie." The old man spat a wad of black phlegm. "The pressure's fine. It's what they were *containing* that's the problem. The Bleed. It gets into your bones. Twists things."
Luka glanced at the pulsing green light. The shard in his pocket felt ice-cold now, a shard of absolute zero in the growing heat of his dread. "Twists what?"
"Everything," the old man said, his good eye wide and unblinking. "The rock. The metal. The flesh. We lost a whole crew last cycle. They went down to scavenge the old magitek. They came back... different. Started speaking in voices that weren't theirs. Then their bodies... *flowed*. Like wax." He gestured with his wrench toward the hatch. "The Institute, they come sometimes. In their sealed suits. They take readings. They never go inside. They're not containing it, boy. They're *studying* it."
The pieces clicked into place in Luka's mind with a chilling finality. The Institute wasn't just a benign repository of knowledge. They were playing with forces they barely understood. This "Bleed" was a leak of raw, chaotic energy, perhaps from the same Cataclysm that had shattered the Crystal of Atlan itself. And the shard he carried was a piece of the original, stable power source. It was the antithesis to this chaos. A scalpel for a cancer.
The shard's sorrow was now a directed fury. It didn't just want to see the wound. It wanted to *cauterize* it.
Suddenly, the static in the air intensified. A high-pitched whine built from the dead control panel. The pulsing green light from the hatch seams flared, bright and violent.
From the tunnels behind him, Luka heard the precise, synchronized tread of armored boots. Too fast, too heavy to be Diggers.
The old man's face paled. "They're here. The Institute's Hounds." He melted back into the shadows, abandoning his post without a second glance.
Luka turned. Four figures emerged from the tunnel mouth, clad in the sleek, grey-and-blue environmental armor of the Institute's internal security. Their faces were hidden behind opaque helms, their movements unnervingly fluid and unified. They carried not sonic pistols, but heavy, snub-nosed suppression rifles designed to deliver high-impact stun charges. They wanted him alive. They wanted the shard intact.
The lead Hound's voice emerged from a helmet vox, synthesized and devoid of inflection. "Luka. Surrender the artifact. Your resistance has been logged and quantified. Further action will be met with debilitating force."
The shard was a frozen knot of purpose against his chest. The hatch was behind him, thrumming with malignant energy. The Hounds were in front of him, blocking the only exit. The old Digger was gone.
He was trapped between the disease and the doctors who nurtured it.
The shard made the choice for him. As the Hounds leveled their rifles, it flooded his system not with a map, but with a single, catastrophic equation of force. It showed him the precise angle, the exact amount of pressure. It was a suicide move. But it was the only move.
With a roar that was part his own defiance and part the shard's ancient fury, Luka spun and drove the heel of his boot into the dead control panel. It wasn't a kick of brute force. It was a strike of perfect, shard-guided precision, hitting the one weak point in the corroded housing.
There was a shower of sparks. The high-pitched whine became a shriek. And with a groan of metal that had not moved in a hundred years, the massive geothermal lock began to iris open.
A wave of virulent green light and blistering heat erupted from the opening, along with a sound that was the antithesis of the shard's pure tone—a discordant, screaming choir of a billion broken frequencies. The Bleed poured out.
The Hounds recoiled, their unified front broken by primal instinct. Their leader shouted an order, but it was lost in the cacophony.
Luka didn't look back. He turned and, with the shard's cold light forming a fragile, shimmering bubble around him, he jumped into the screaming, green hell below.