The fading of Elara was the final trigger.
Yohan's mission was no longer abstract, it was painfully personal.
He had to find the truth, not for the city, but for her. His thoughts returned to Lyra, the madwoman in the Marches. She had been his only source of unfiltered truth, but her revelations had been scattered, poured out in paranoid bursts.
He needed more.
He needed proof, direction, something solid to guide him through the madness.
He remembered the scraps of paper pinned to her walls, the frantic handwriting.
Had she mentioned a journal?
The thought surfaced faintly, a half-remembered detail from their chaotic meeting.
He had to go back.
Leaving Elara in her calm, dreamlike state was agony. He kissed her goodbye as she prepared for her day at the archives. Her smile was sweet and empty.
"Have a good day," she said, the words automatic. "Be safe."
The phrase, once full of real concern, now sounded hollow. He felt as if he were leaving behind a beautiful, lifelike doll.
The journey back to the Unrendered Marches was driven by cold determination.
The Concordance Protocol felt weaker out here, its influence thinning along with the fabric of reality. The crawling static in his eye seemed calmer, as if the chaos of the Marches suited it better than the city's enforced order.
He found Lyra's cottage again, with it humming softly. He knocked, harder this time.
Lyra opened the door. Suspicion crossed her face, then something like grim recognition.
"Back so soon, little antibody?" she rasped. "Did you notice the strings? See the paint on the backdrop?"
"My partner, Elara," Yohan said, his voice tight. "She's fading. The Concordance Protocol is erasing her."
For a brief moment, something close to sympathy crossed Lyra's face. Then it vanished, replaced by her usual hard edge.
"Of course it is," she said. "That's what it's meant to do. Simplify. Quiet things down. Turn a symphony into a single dull note. It's the Dreamer shutting off the complicated parts of his own mind.
She's a memory of a lost love, isn't she? A painful one. Easier to let it fade."
"I need to stop it," Yohan said. "You mentioned a journal. In your report, you wrote about the dreaming mind. You must have written everything down. Your research. What you found."
Lyra studied him for a long moment, her sharp eyes weighing his desperation. It was as if she were deciding whether to hand him his own ruin.
Finally, with a sigh that sounded like stone grinding on stone, she turned and walked into her cluttered room.
"Silas thought he destroyed all my work when they took me away," she muttered, kicking aside a dusty rug. "He's practical, but he lacks imagination."
She pried up a loose floorboard, revealing a small hidden space. From it, she pulled out a thick, leather-bound book, its cover warped and stained.
"He searched my mind," she said, a flicker of triumph in her eyes. "But he never thought to search my floor."
She handed the journal to Yohan. It was heavy, filled with the same dense, frantic handwriting that covered her walls.
Yohan opened it with his hands shaking.
It was all there.
The journal began sixty years ago, during the Psychic Squall. It described her early observations, her growing belief that the anomalies were too precise, too symbolic, to be caused by panic alone.
It detailed her secret research and her discovery of the same historical gaps Yohan had uncovered.
Then came the breakthrough: her analysis of a "reality bleed" from the city's early days, where she isolated a psychic signal that was not human, something vast, ancient, and asleep.
The entries grew darker.
She wrote about following that signal to its source, a dangerous descent into what she called the subconscious sea.
The pages described the true nature of their world in broken, terrifying detail. The final entries told of her confrontation with Silas, her attempt to make him see the truth, and his cold refusal.
He hadn't argued with her. He had simply declared the truth unacceptable, a threat to survival.
The last page held a single sentence, written just before they came for her:
"He is not a liar. He is a zookeeper. And we are the animals. And the zoo is on fire."
But one passage in the middle of the journal made Yohan's blood run cold.
Lyra had analyzed the Harmonizer network itself. She believed it wasn't just a tool for maintaining the Consensus.
Its central hub, the Sanctum of Concord beneath headquarters, was not just a machine.
It was the main interface with the Dreamer's sleeping mind, and it was the central control point that regulated the dream.
It was the source of the power holding their world together, and therefore the source of the great lie, the place where the truth was most deeply buried.
The journal wasn't just confirmation.
It was a map.
It pointed straight to the heart of the conspiracy, to the one place where the truth, and possibly the power to change everything, waited.