Adriana didn't walk toward the souls. She walked toward the Librarian. He was the "File Clerk" of this dead station, the one point of stability in a sea of forgotten data. If the Unclaimed were the fuel, he was the Control Rod.
"You've kept them silent for too long," Adriana said. She didn't use the Key to open a door; she jammed it into the Librarian's chest, right where his heart would have been.
The Librarian's eyes widened, then turned a blinding, electric green.
"Caius! Hook the ship's intake to the station's main frame!" Adriana shouted.
As the Key short-circuited the Librarian, the "Silence" he had maintained for decades began to break. It didn't release as emotion; it released as Raw Kinetic Potential. The "Zero-Point Souls" at the tables began to vibrate. The filing cabinets groaned, their drawers flying open as the pressure of the compressed data was suddenly unleashed.
"The engine is catching!" Elias yelled from the cockpit of the Icarus. "But it's not Resonance—it's Pure Static Energy! The wings are turning black!"
The ship was no longer fueled by the "Northern Lights" of New York. It was being powered by the Inversion. The violet glow of the spirit-threads was replaced by a jagged, obsidian fire. It was a darker, more volatile fuel, born from the things the world had refused to see.
"The station is collapsing!" Caius warned. Without the Librarian's "Silence" to hold the filing cabinets together, the lighthouse was being shredded by the Sea of Static.
The Librarian looked at Adriana, his form dissolving into pixels. For one brief second, the "Silence" in his eyes vanished, replaced by a look of profound relief. "Finally," he whispered. "A noise loud enough... to end the story."
The Icarus-01 roared to life. The engines didn't hum; they screamed.