The auction was held in the Gilded Abyss, a space station built inside the irradiated corpse of a gas giant, hidden from scanners by the stellar debris. It was a lawless, opulent den where beings of all allegonies came to trade in things too dangerous or blasphemous for their own societies.
Disguise was paramount. Kiera provided them with identity-shrouds and biosignature scramblers. Echo became a reclusive blood-art collector. Leyla and Ryn posed as his mercenary guards. Mira and Kiera were his "attaches," handling negotiations.
The station was a surreal nightmare of beauty and danger. Beings of light bartered with shambling corruptions over caged horrors. The air thrummed with suppressed violence and greed.
The auction hall was a circular theater. In a private box on one side, shrouded in a nimbus of painful white light, sat the Order Inquisitor-General—a severe woman whose very gaze felt like a purity scan. In a box dripping with organic growth on the opposite side lounged the Corrupted Ascendant, a being of exquisite, grotesque beauty named Sybaris, who sipped from a goblet of swirling emotion.
The Tear of the Primordial was Lot 17. It was displayed in a null-field: a single, perfect droplet of mercury-like substance that wasn't silver, but the absence of color, hovering between states of matter.
When bidding started, the prices were in souls, memory-crystals, and planetary deeds. Echo, using Kiera's vast (and now partially drained) resources, stayed in the game. It was a three-way duel between him, the Order, and the Corruption.
The Inquisitor-General wanted to destroy it as an unholy relic. Sybaris wanted to consume it to understand the purity it came from. Echo needed to feel it.
As the bids climbed to obscene levels, Echo realized he couldn't win a bidding war. He had to change the game.
He leaned over to Kiera. "Signal our friends."
Just as the auctioneer prepared to close the bid, the station's lights flickered. A distant, muffled explosion rocked the deck. Alarms blared—a carefully timed, contained reactor "malfunction" orchestrated by their Forgotten allies on a docked freighter.
In the chaotic scramble, Echo used his bond-link. Mira, now!
Mira, from across the room, created a tiny, precise spatial fold between the null-field and the palm of Echo's hand. For a fraction of a second, the Tear was in his grasp.
He didn't steal it. He just touched it.
And the universe exploded inside his mind.