Valine's safehouse was not in the decaying undercity, nor among the glittering spires above. It existed in the space between—a forgotten architectural seam in Aethelgard's colossal skeleton. She led him through a rusted maintenance door, down a ladder into a steam-veined sublevel, and finally to a reinforced bulkhead hidden behind a waterfall of leaking pipes.
The door hissed open to reveal not a dank hideout, but a chamber of quiet, organized chaos.
The room was long, low-ceilinged, and lined with humming servers, their cooling fans whispering like distant insects. Dozens of holoscreens floated in the air, displaying scrolling lines of luminous code, star maps, and what looked like real-time feeds from across the city. One screen showed the alley they'd just left, now swarming with more Unseen enforcers in clean-up gear. Kaelen looked away.
"Sit," Valine said, gesturing to a worn but comfortable-looking chair beside a cluttered workbench. She shrugged off her coat, revealing simple, durable clothing underneath. She moved with an efficiency that spoke of long practice.
Kaelen sank into the chair, the last of his adrenaline leaching away, replaced by a deep, trembling exhaustion. The wrongness in his bones had faded to a low hum, but it was still there—a new layer to his existence.
"You called me an Echo-Born," Kaelen said, his voice steadying.
"I did." Valine tapped a console, and a holographic model of a human nervous system sprang to life, overlaid with pulsating golden nodes. "Standard Gifted awaken a single Affinity—fire, gravity, telekinesis. Their power is a stable, resonant frequency. Yours…" She zoomed in on the model. The golden nodes were unstable, branching, *mirroring* a dozen different frequency patterns at once. "Yours is a blank slate. A resonator. You don't have a frequency. You copy others'. You echo them."
She turned to face him, her silver eyes catching the holographic light. "The System you see? It's a containment and monitoring protocol. Its primary function is to stabilize reality. Echo-Borns are… glitches. We generate uncontrolled metaphysical feedback—Resonance Cascades. What you felt in the alley."
"The world started to bend," Kaelen whispered, remembering the rain falling sideways.
"It was bending. Left unchecked, a full Cascade can unravel local physics. Turn a city block into a nightmare of scrambled space-time. The Unseen are the clean-up crew. They find nascent Echo-Born and… silence them before that can happen."
"By killing them."
"By erasing them," Valine corrected softly. "There's a difference. But yes."
Kaelen processed this, a cold weight settling in his gut. "And you? You're a Warden?"
Valine nodded. She pulled up her own sleeve. Etched into the skin of her forearm was a complex, faintly glowing sigil—a circle interwoven with locking runes. "I am bound to the System on a deeper level. My module is **Administration**. I can modify System parameters, impose temporary stabilizations, and monitor Echo-Born. I am supposed to report anomalies like you for neutralization."
"But you didn't."
"No." Her gaze held his, unflinching. "I have my reasons. For now, you need to understand the cost. Using **Echo** isn't free, Kaelen."
She gestured to the hologram again. It displayed the data from his fight.
`[ACQUIRED: GRAVITONIC PULSE - TEMPORARY]`
`[ACQUIRED: THERMAL CONDUCTION - TEMPORARY]`
`[FUSION ATTEMPT: GRAVO-THERMAL FEEDBACK]`
Beneath the data, a new graphic appeared: a silhouette of a human form. With each "Acquired" line, a small, dark patch appeared on the silhouette's form—one on the right shoulder, another over the heart.
"These are Resonance Scars," Valine said. "Metaphysical wounds. Every time you Echo a power, every time you use it, you burn a piece of your own native resonance—your 'silence,' for lack of a better term. Your stability. Too many scars, and your coherence fails. You become a walking Cascade. A beacon for the Howling."
"The Howling?"
Valine's expression darkened. She minimized the hologram. "That's a lesson for another day. For now, you have two acquired abilities decaying in your buffer. You can let them fade, which is safest. Or you can choose to **Anchor** one."
"Anchor?"
"Make it permanent. A part of your permanent skill set. It will give you a reliable tool, but it will also carve a deeper, permanent scar. It will change you. And it will make the System… notice you more."
Kaelen looked at his hands. He remembered the surge of inverted gravity, the blast of blue fire. A terrifying power, but also a lifeline. "What happens if I don't anchor anything? If I just… never use Echo again?"
Valine smiled, but it was a sad, knowing smile. "The Unseen have your signature now. They will hunt you. Other factions will too, if they learn what you are. Power is currency in Aethelgard. You are a walking mint. You can choose to be defenseless, or you can choose to be a weapon. But you must choose knowing the price."
She walked to a cabinet and pulled out a small, metallic injector. "This is a Stabilizer. My design. It won't stop scarring, but it will dampen the Cascade risk after use. It's why you're not currently melting reality right now." She tossed it to him. It was cool and heavy in his hand.
"Thank you," he said, meaning it.
"Don't thank me yet," she said, her eyes drifting to a screen that was flashing a silent, red alert. A complex symbol appeared—an abstract eye surrounded by geometric arms. "I diverted you from one enemy. But using that fused power… you sent up a flare."
`[SYSTEM ALERT: ARBITER PROTOCOL ENGAGED]`
`[ANOMALY LEVEL: THETA]`
`[DIRECTIVE: PURGE]`
The symbol pulsed on the screen.
"The Arbiters are the System's immune response," Valine said, her voice now tight with a tension she hadn't shown before. "Ancient, autonomous constructs. They don't erase. They *purge*. They will come here. Soon."
Kaelen stood up, the fatigue replaced by a new, sharp urgency. "Because of me."
"Because of us." Valine began shutting down terminals, her movements swift. "We need to move. I have another location. But we need to be ghosts."
"What about the Anchoring?" Kaelen asked, the injector clenched in his fist.
Valine paused, meeting his gaze. "That's your choice, Kaelen. Right now. Do you walk away with nothing, or do you carry a piece of the storm with you?"
Outside, in the bowels of the city, a deep, harmonic hum began to resonate through the metal walls—a sound like a colossal engine awakening. It was the sound of judgment approaching.
Kaelen looked at the System interface hovering in his mind.
`[GRAVITONIC PULSE: READY TO ANCHOR - COST: 1 PERMANENT RESONANCE SCAR]`
`[THERMAL CONDUCTION: READY TO ANCHOR - COST: 1 PERMANENT RESONANCE SCAR]`
The humming grew louder. The lights in the safehouse flickered.
He made his choice.