The tapping stopped the exact second Voss raised his glass.
Not faded. Not echoed away. Just… gone. Like someone had pressed a finger to the lips of the building itself. I felt the absence in my teeth, a sudden pressure drop that made my ears pop. Luca glanced at me, one eyebrow raised in that half-joking way of his, but his hand had already drifted toward the pistol under his jacket. He felt it too.
I gave him the smallest nod. Stay sharp.
The Valthornian delegation leader his name was Draven, or so the briefing file had said lifted his own glass and smiled with too many teeth. "To new beginnings," he repeated, voice smooth as oiled stone. "And to the generous hand that lifted us from the ashes of war."
Glasses clinked again. Wine the color of old blood caught the chandelier light and threw it across the white tablecloth in thin red threads. I didn't drink. None of us did. We never did on duty. But I watched every throat that did.
Mr. Voss downed half his glass in one easy swallow and laughed at something Draven murmured about mineral rights. Mara, posted by the far door, looked relaxed to anyone who didn't know her. But I saw the way her fingers flexed once against her thigh counting heartbeats, same as we'd been taught. Torin stood like a statue near the service entrance, eyes half-lidded, but I knew he was cataloging every shadow in the room.
I shifted my weight, trying to ignore the way the focus crystal in my pocket had gone from warm to burning. It felt alive now, like a second pulse arguing with my own. I thought about Mom's last text before takeoff, three heart emojis and a photo of Mia holding up a drawing of me as a superhero with comically oversized muscles. She'd written, "Come home in one piece, big brother. Shadow misses you." I'd laughed at the time. Now the memory sat in my chest like a stone.
Draven leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Your father would be proud, Mr. Voss. Harlan Kane spoke often of loyalty. Said it was the only currency that never devalued."
Voss's smile tightened for half a second. "You knew my father?"
"Only by reputation." Draven's eyes flicked to me for the briefest moment. "And by the stories the people still whisper."
That was when the first waiter dropped.
It wasn't dramatic. No gasping, no clutching his throat like in the movies. He simply folded at the knees beside the dessert cart, tray of chocolate tarts clattering to the floor. A single silver fork spun once in the air and landed point down in the carpet. The room went still.
Then the second waiter fell. Then a third. All of them Valthornian staff, all of them smiling politely right up until their faces hit the ground.
Mara moved first. "Down!" she shouted.
But it was already too late.
The chandelier flickered once bright white, then blood-red and every light in the room died. Not a power cut. Something worse. The darkness felt thick, syrupy, like it had weight. I heard Luca curse under his breath. I heard Voss's chair scrape back. And underneath it all, the tapping started again. Louder now. Inside the walls, inside the floorboards, inside my own skull.
I yanked the focus crystal free just as the first gunshot cracked. The room exploded into chaos.
I didn't think. I dropped low, shoulder-rolling behind the nearest marble pillar, crystal clutched in my fist. Blue-white light flared between my fingers raw Aether. It lit the scene in stuttering flashes: Voss slumped over the table, face gray, lips foaming. Mara on one knee, firing controlled bursts toward the service door where shapes in black tactical gear were pouring in. Torin had already taken two down, but a third man slammed something into the big guy's neck, a syringe, Torin went down like a felled tree.
Luca grabbed my arm. "Elias back door, now!"
We ran.
Or tried to.
The door we'd come through had vanished. Where the oak paneling had been there was now only smooth stone, seamless, like the wall had grown over it while we weren't looking. The tapping had become a heartbeat slow, deliberate, matching the frantic slam of my own pulse.
I spun, crystal raised like a weapon I barely understood. Light poured out in a jagged arc and caught three attackers mid-stride. Their faces were hidden behind black masks, but their eyes… their eyes glowed faint green, the same sick color as the old mining rigs outside. One of them laughed, low.
"Stone," he said, using the nickname like he'd known me all my life. "The veins remember your blood."
I didn't have time to process that. Something slammed into my side needle, cold as winter steel and fire exploded through my veins. My legs buckled. The crystal tumbled from my fingers and rolled across the carpet, still glowing like a dying star.
Luca was shouting my name. I saw him drop his last attacker, saw him turn toward me with terror in his eyes the same eyes that had grinned across the aisle on the plane only hours ago. Then another syringe found his neck and he crumpled.
The last thing I heard before the darkness swallowed everything was Draven's voice, calm and almost gentle, speaking from somewhere above me.
"Easy, boy. The pain is only the beginning. Your father understood that. The mountains always take their due."
I woke up to the smell of damp stone and old blood.
My wrists were chained above my head, ankles bolted to the floor. The room, if you could call it that was a perfect cube carved straight out of black rock. No windows. One door that looked like it had been fused into the wall with molten glass. A single bulb swung overhead, casting sickly yellow light that made shadows crawl like living things.
Luca was chained beside me. Torin opposite. Mara to my left. All of us stripped to our undershirts, bruises already blooming across skin that had been whole only hours ago. Voss was nowhere I could see.
My head throbbed like someone had split it open and stitched it back wrong. The injection site on my neck burned cold. But worse than the pain was the memory of Mom's text, of Mia's drawing, of the way her little hand had waved goodbye at the train station like she believed I'd come back invincible.
Tears stung my eyes before I could stop them. I blinked hard, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. I was supposed to be the one who fixed things. The good son. The big brother. The one who carried the weight so they never had to.
A panel in the wall slid open with a hiss of pressurized air. Draven stepped through, still in his dinner suit, now stained with what looked like wine or maybe something blood. Behind him came two others in white coats, faces hidden behind clear visors that reflected my own terrified expression back at me.
Draven crouched in front of me, close enough that I could smell the faint metallic tang on his breath. "Are You wondering why we haven't killed you yet," he said softly.
I spat blood at his shoes. It wasn't much, but it felt like defiance.
He smiled anyway. "Because death is too clean, Elias Kane. Your father learned that the hard way. We're not monsters. We're scientists. And you… all of you… are the key."
He stood, gesturing to the white-coats. One of them wheeled in a cart covered with instruments that glinted too brightly scalpels, bone saws, syringes filled with swirling green liquid that moved like it was alive.
"The surrender was never real," Draven continued, voice almost kind. "We gave your people our country, our mines, our future. But the Aether veins gave us something better in return. A way back. And the four of you are going to suffer to wake it up properly. Real suffering. The kind that rewrites the soul. The more you break, the stronger the resonance becomes. And when the resonance peaks…" He spread his hands like a conductor. "The mountains will sing again. And this time, they'll sing for us."
The first cut wasn't deep. Just enough to make me scream.
The second one made me wish I hadn't.
By the time the burning iron pressed against my back careful, always careful to avoid anywhere a suit might show I was sobbing openly. Not from the pain alone. From the realization that every scream I gave them was another brick in whatever nightmare they were building. From the knowledge that Mom and Mia would wait by the phone for a call that might never come. From the guilt that I had walked into this with my eyes wide open because I wanted to be the hero who fixed everything.
Luca was whispering my name between his own gasps. "Hold on, Stone… just hold on…"
I tried. Gods, I tried.
But as the next injection slid into my vein and the world fractured into white-hot agony, I realized something that terrified me more than any blade.