Written in Dust and Shadow

The restricted collection lived in a hush that felt earned, a thousand small silences layered over one another like vellum. Elara breathed it in and began to feel the ache behind her eyes loosen, the tightness in her shoulders soften. Dust hung in the slant of morning light that crept past the narrow, barred windows. It was always cooler here than in the rest of the Athenaeum, the air touched with the faint mineral scent of stone, ink, and old glue. The room had the stability of a heartbeat. She let it steady her.

On the worktable, she’d arranged the new arrivals from the Sunken City, each on its labeled linen square, each tagged and recorded with neat lines on her datapad. She had a method and it soothed her like a familiar lullaby. Measure. Photograph. Observe. Cross-reference. She cleaned her tools—soft brush, bone folder, non-reactive tongs—then reached for the first item: a shard of glazed tile, sea-green and crazed with a thousand tiny cracks. She cradled it carefully, turning it under the lamp until the light glinted off the uneven glaze. Someone had pressed a symbol into the damp clay long ago—an eye with four lashes and a slight curve above it, like a brow. She took a slow breath and typed.

The city’s name had been lost, swallowed by salt and time, but its fragments refused to be quiet. They carried secrets in the way they were made, in the residue that clung to their edges, in the way they reacted to light. Elara stroked the brush over the shard’s surface in feathered passes, coaxing away grit without disturbing anything that wasn’t ready to leave. Under the dust a second mark appeared, faint as a memory: a shallow chevron pointing left. She leaned closer, her hair falling forward to frame her view, and smiled before catching herself. She never smiled at work. She only noted.

She logged the finding and set the shard aside. The next piece was heavier: a copper disc with a hole punched near the top, verdigris blooming like watercolor across its face. She eased it into the stand and cued her scanner, watching the numbers flicker. Minimal residual energy, non-reactive to heat. Good. She turned the disc with two fingers and saw the etching on the backside—tight, precise lines radiating out from the center. Not decorative. Not random. A mapping of frequencies? She clicked the datapad awake and pulled up a corpus of known symbology from the coast. The match results crawled. She waited, patient, the room holding its breath with her.

This was how she protected herself. In here, she could control the pace of things. In here, nothing demanded she improvise or perform. Her world narrowed to the object before her and the details it offered up only if asked the right way. People could be messy. They took shortcuts. They asked for forgiveness instead of permission. Objects, though, were honest. They were exactly what they were.

Her fingers hovered above the disc, and she thought of Director Valerius’s last message pinging her before dawn—a reminder of the importance of this collection and the need for absolute discretion. She’d saved it and then shut off her comms. She was already here when the city woke; she had stood in the dark stairwell and listened to the world turn on without her.

The match returned. A partial correlation with a set of ritual diagrams from ruins three hundred miles south. She made a note of the discrepancy in line curvature—deliberate, not an artisan’s error. The disc might not be a disc at all but a cut piece of something larger. She adjusted the lamp and found the faintest seam along one edge. Yes. She pictured the original: not a coin, not jewelry. A component.

Elara reached for a vial of distilled water and a cotton swab, dampened it with a care that bordered on reverence, and touched it to the seam. The copper woke a little, a soft green darkening at the edge, and a tiny ridge swelled where the metal had parted from its partner centuries ago. She felt the quiet thrill again and forced herself to keep her notes objective. Her hand didn’t shake.

She set the disc down and glanced at the obsidian sphere waiting in its containment cradle at the far end of the table. It was a study in restraint: matte black surface unmarked by any visible seam, a faint pulse shivering through it so slowly it was almost imperceptible. The central piece. The one that required additional signatures to touch. She had signed her name to the preliminary custody form with a strange, reluctant pride. Not now, she told herself. Later, with the right team present and the protocols followed without exception. She liked rules. They were the bones of a structure that could hold.

She turned back to the tray and plucked up a tiny glass ampoule. It was cloudy, the stopper fused in place, a bubble of something caught in its belly. She held it up and rotated it, tracking the bubble’s lazy drift. Not water, then—too viscous. She logged the observations and set it in a stand. It murmured in the most delicate register, a faint hum that settled somewhere at the base of her skull. She didn’t move for a moment, the hair on her arms rising. The room around her was still, but she felt pressure in the air, like the moment before a storm. Then it was gone. She blinked, rolled her shoulders, and wrote it down. You didn’t ignore anomalies. You cataloged them.

She adjusted her chair, consciously straightening her posture, and brought up the manifest. Some of the items had come in wrapped in waxed canvas, knotted with cursive handwriting that had bled from seawater. She smoothed one of the labels against the table and made out two words: Binding and Breath. She breathed out slowly, as if the paper needed the example. Her stomach knotted in something like anticipation. New threads. New paths.

The hours shaped themselves around her work. She sank into the rhythm, the small rituals—checking the calibration of her scanner every hour, sanitizing the tools between artifacts, sipping at the tea she’d brought and forgotten to drink until it had gone lukewarm. A clock chimed somewhere down in the main hall. She barely registered it. This was where she was most herself, stripped of whatever the Athenaeum needed her to be in meetings and briefings and donor receptions. She belonged to the objects, and they belonged to her in the way patients belong to a careful physician. She would keep them safe, and they would tell her what they could bear to remember.

When she lifted the last item in the tray—a narrow strip of hammered silver etched with a line of text—she recognized the script immediately: a dialect from the western isles, antique but readable. Her mouth curved again despite herself. She felt a little absurd, smiling at metal. She translated under her breath, slow and certain. “Where the water listens, the door opens.” Her gaze slid, unbidden, to the obsidian sphere. The pulse within it seemed to align with her heartbeat, quiet and steady.

Elara added the translation to her notes and tagged the strip for containment with the sphere for later correlation study. She wasn’t one to indulge in dramatic predictions, but a simple thread was becoming a braid. The ampoule that hummed. The copper component. The glass and the etched words. The breath, the binding, the listening water. She could feel in her bones that it wasn’t coincidence. The Sunken City had not sent them a random assortment of ruins. It had sent them a language. And she, here in the hush of the restricted room with her tools and her patience, would learn it.

The door wasn’t supposed to open without a knock. It never did. The thick oak usually took its time, hinges inhaling before exhaling into a careful swing that respected the room. This time it banged and bounced off a stack of empty specimen boxes with a blunt thud.

Elara flinched, her stylus skidding a crooked line across her notes. She closed her eyes for the breath it took to school her face. When she looked up, he was already halfway across the threshold, the smudge of travel still on him, the easy slant of his mouth suggesting he wasn’t sorry.

Kael. Field Agent. Director Valerius’s favorite blunt instrument.

He cut the room in half just by filling it. Dark hair shoved back with damp fingers, a bruise fading yellow along his cheekbone, the kind of presence that made people shuffle to accommodate without knowing why. A battered pack slung over one shoulder; the other hand balanced a sealed containment case like a lunchbox. He wore the Athenaeum’s field jacket open over a gray shirt clinging in places it shouldn’t have to. Dust flaked off his boots onto her clean floor.

“This place always smells the same,” he said, a low laugh in his voice. “Old books and judgment.”

He said it like a compliment. He moved toward her table and set the case down with a gentle care that didn’t fit the rest of him. Elara’s pulse beat once, hard, as the obsidian sphere at the end of the table gave a slow throb as if acknowledging a rival star.

“You’re late,” she said, more to the universe than to him. Her gaze flicked to the case’s seals. Intact. Thank the gods. “And you broke protocol.”

“I’m early.” He wiped his palm on his pants and tipped his chin at the case. “Valerius wants this with your pretty collection. Said to put it in your hands personally.” His eyes slid to the artifacts arrayed in meticulous lines. “He didn’t mention how many tiny, breakable things I’d have to dodge to get it to your worktable.”

“You could have knocked.”

“I could have.” He grinned, very white in his tired face. “But then I’d miss the look you get when something unexpected happens. All the air gets sharp in here.”

Heat pricked along her neck. She raised her chin and reached for the scanner, letting the ritual give her an excuse to ignore him. “Documenting transfer,” she said, already logging the case’s ID number. “State your name, agent.”

“That hurts.” He clucked his tongue, but he complied. “Kael Aurelian, returning item Forty-SE-Prime from field site Delta.”

His voice dipped on the code, just enough to make it sound like he was trying not to laugh. She didn’t look up. “Condition of the item?”

“Unhappy.” He shifted, and she felt rather than saw him look around the room again, cataloging exits and shadows the way he always did. “And noisy if you poke it wrong.”

Elara glanced at his hands. A thin line of dried blood on his knuckles, the edges roughened, as if he’d climbed rock. The bruise at his cheekbone wasn’t new, but it wasn’t old either. She didn’t ask. Instead she keyed the first lock and listened to the case accept her signature. The seals released with a soft sigh. Her stomach tightened.

“Agent Aurelian,” she said, keeping her tone neutral, “if this item is dangerous, it should be directed to Hazard Containment. My work requires stability.”

“It’s not dangerous,” he said lightly, and then, “It’s complicated.” The look he gave her was less teasing. “He wanted you on it.”

Valerius. Of course he did. She tried to ignore the mix of pride and irritation the Director’s confidence stirred in her. Kael’s gaze caught on the obsidian sphere and he whistled, low. “So that’s the infamous rock.”

“It’s not a rock,” she said, before she could stop herself. “It’s a Warden. And it doesn’t like to be called names.” She felt the sphere’s minute pulse again, as if it were eavesdropping.

“Duly noted,” he said, hands up. “I brought it a friend.”

She should have made him wait. She should have told him to leave the case and go. Instead, she slid the lid back enough to see.

Black again, but not matte. The object inside was a smaller sphere nested in a cradle of dull silver bands. The surface caught the light like wet stone, and beneath it something moved in a slow spiral, a smoke curl trapped under glass. It was beautiful in the cold way stars are beautiful—distant and dangerous and utterly indifferent.

Elara’s breath went shallow. “You brought a core.”

Kael leaned a hip against a free corner of the table that wasn’t meant for leaning. “Found it in a pocket in the reef wall where the last dive team swore there was nothing. Had to sweet-talk a sentry eel and wedge my shoulder into a hole meant for a much thinner man.” He angled his body just enough to make the fabric pull along his torso. She pretended not to notice. “It didn’t like leaving.”

“Of course it didn’t.” She forced her hands to be steady, reaching for the non-reactive tongs and an antistatic cloth. “Next time, you’ll bring a handler. Or you won’t touch it at all.”

“Next time, you’ll come with me,” he said, too casual to be casual. “You’d make fast friends with the eels.”

Her mouth opened, then closed. He laughed under his breath, softening it at the edges. When she didn’t rise to it, he shifted closer, still not touching, and she was suddenly aware of how warm he was. Of how the quiet in the room had changed since he entered, charged where it had been smooth.

She slid the cloth under the cradle and eased the smaller sphere out, every muscle working to keep it level. The bands hummed against the fabric. The spiral inside quickened, then slowed, as if matching her breath. Kael went completely still.

“You hear that?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

She did. The same low murmur she’d felt from the ampoule, now richer, as if it had grown a spine. It pressed against the inside of her ribs. She set the core down in the designated zone and stepped back, not trusting herself to move smoothly.

“Logs say the core registered as inert when the site team first scanned it,” Kael said, voice back to normal. “And then… not inert.” He looked at her hands. “You’re shaking.”

She wasn’t. She was, a little. “Adrenaline,” she said, with a small shrug. “You opened the door without knocking.”

“Right.” He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly less sure of his place in the room, and it did unexpected things to something soft in her chest. He always did this—barged through and then took the measure of the damage with a boy’s contrition. “So, how does this work? You point that datapad at it and it tells you its secrets?”

“It’s not a field report, Kael,” she said. “This requires patience. And not touching.” She adjusted the containment field’s settings, the quiet click of each switch as satisfying as a matched heartbeat.

He drifted to the edge of her map of artifacts, eyes scanning labels she knew he didn’t care to read, and said, “You heard Valerius? He’s pairing us for the final analysis.” He said it like it was a joke he was waiting for her to enjoy.

Her jaw tightened. “Of course he is.”

“Come on,” he coaxed, stepping back into her space. “You love a challenge.”

“I love order,” she corrected. His breath brushed her temple—coffee, salt, metal. She forced herself not to move. “And quiet.”

He leaned away, wicked-pleased. “Then we’ll whisper.” He tapped the case with one knuckle, careful now, thoughtful in a way she didn’t expect. “You’ll make sense of it. You always do.”

She knew he meant it. The room’s weight shifted around that truth. Elara exhaled and nodded once, unable to help the small flare of satisfaction. “Document complete,” she said to the recorder, if only to pull herself back into the script of work. “Item Forty-SE-Prime received by Senior Archivist Elara Vayne for correlation with Warden ensemble.”

Kael watched her lips shape the words like he was memorizing them. “Elara,” he said, testing the sound. Most people used her title here. He made her name sound like an invitation.

She refused to meet his eyes and reached for the stylus she’d dropped. Their fingers brushed. The contact was nothing—skin on skin, a fleeting pass—but it sent a clean, bright line through her. She snatched her hand back and pretended it was to reach the anti-static switch.

“Don’t touch anything,” she said, and it came out softer than she liked.

He grinned at the reprimand and then did the rarest thing she’d seen him do inside these walls: he obeyed. He stepped back, hands sliding into his pockets, shoulders lowering. “You have my attention.”

For a beat, the only sounds were the hum of the core, the patient pulse of the Warden, and their breathing finding a shared rhythm. The air felt different. The room felt smaller. Elara cleared her throat and pulled the first schematic into view.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

She dragged the schematic closer and angled the display so he could see. It was pointless with him standing that close; awareness of him sat against her shoulder like a weight. Still, she tapped the glowing cross sections, the layered scripts, the slow, breathing pulse of the Warden’s energy readout. Structure steadied her.

“We follow a nine-step intake,” she said, crisp. “Calibration, baseline, imprint scan, pattern isolation—”

“—and then we light the fuse,” he said, cheerful, as if he were finishing her sentence for a cake recipe. “Skip to the fun.”

Her spine tightened. “There is no fuse. There is a method.”

“Methods can be fun.” He leaned, pretending to squint at a column of readings. “These little glyphs—are they judging me, or just you?”

“Just you, when you ignore posted regulations.” She slid a pair of gloves toward him without looking up. “If you’re going to stand in my workspace, at least don’t shed.”

He laughed. “You say the most romantic things.” But he tugged the gloves on, the material tight over his knuckles. The veins stood out when he flexed. “Do I get a badge if I follow directions? Gold star? Sticker chart?”

“You get to not contaminate a priceless artifact with whatever you smeared on your way in.” She poured the admonishment like cool water over heat. “And you get to stand there and keep your hands to yourself.”

He made an elaborate show of clasping his gloved hands behind his back. “Yes, Senior Archivist Vayne.”

It was impossible to tell if he was mocking her or not. Both, probably. “We start with calibration,” she said again, tapping a steady rhythm on the console. “We let it tell us what it is before we tell it what to do.”

He tipped his head, watching her instead of the data. “And if it takes too long? You going to be here all night whispering sweet nothings at it?”

“If that’s what it requires.” The answer came out dry, but heat slid lower than it should have at the shape of his mouth. “I don’t rush. That’s how mistakes happen.”

“Field rule number one,” he said, lips quirking. “Never rush unless everything is on fire. Then you sprint.”

“We are not on fire.” She glanced pointedly at the small flame carved into his jacket from some earlier mishap. “Yet.”

He snorted, then sobered as the core’s spiral quickened in response to her proximity. “It likes you.”

“It likes the containment field,” she said, though she felt the pull like a tide. “And predictable inputs.”

“You’re an input now?” His voice softened, teasing edged with something else. “Congratulations.”

She ignored that. “Agent Aurelian—”

“Kael.”

“—you are here to provide field context. Not commentary.”

“Commentary is my field context.” He lifted his brows, all innocence. “Like, for instance, if you tap that top band with a magnetized probe, the inner coil hums. Just a little. Friendly hum. Like a cat.”

“No.” The word landed hard. She didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t need to. “We do not tap. We do not hum. We observe. We catalog trends over hours, not minutes. We do not touch anything until we have a full spectrum and a redundancy plan.”

He grinned, undeterred. “So you’re saying there will be touching later.”

She met his gaze then, flat. “If you keep this up, I will personally have you reassigned to cataloging mildew samples in Sublevel C.”

“That’s cruel and unusual.” He swept his eyes over the neat trays, the labeled vials, the perfect alignment of her tools. “You line your pencils up, don’t you?”

“They’re styluses,” she said, and then heard herself. He chuckled. She pressed her lips together. “Order makes results repeatable.”

“I like chaos. It makes stories.” He gestured at the core. “You ever think it’s bored? All that structure. Maybe it wants someone to ask it a fun question.”

“The last agent who asked a ‘fun question’ in my lab vented a week’s worth of stability into the floor.” She adjusted a dial by a fraction. “We are not here to be fun.”

“You’re very good at not being fun.” He said it admiringly, which made it worse. “So. Nine steps. Where are we?”

She took the lifeline. “Two. Calibration continues until the baseline fluctuation dips under point-oh-two for a full three minutes. We wait.”

He made a show of checking an imaginary watch. “Three minutes. I can try not to breathe.”

“That would improve matters.” The corner of her mouth betrayed her and wanted to lift. She cursed herself for it and locked her attention on the graph flattening in small, reassuring increments.

He drifted a pace nearer, his voice dropped low and conspiratorial. “You know, I once got through a vault lock that used this same script. If you speak to it first, it gets chatty. Likes compliments.”

“You flirted with a door.”

“It worked.” He angled toward the Warden’s smooth dark curve. “You’re the most beautiful ominous orb I’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t,” she warned, pulse spiking as the sphere’s slow throb answered. He stepped back immediately, palms up again, contrite in the way that always disarmed her more than his swagger.

“All right. I’ll behave.” His eyes flicked to her mouth and away. “Mostly.”

“Try completely,” she said. “For five minutes.”

“Three I can do. Five is asking a lot.”

“Four,” she bargained before she could stop herself.

He grinned like she’d given him something she shouldn’t have. “Deal.”

Silence settled, softer, edged by their shared breath and the hum of contained power. His presence pressed against her focus and made it sharper in self-defense. She let the structure of the steps hold her, spoke them aloud because voices were anchors, because control sounded better in the air than in her head.

“Baseline at point-oh-one-seven,” she narrated. “Holding. Imprint scan ready.”

“And then?”

“And then pattern isolation. If the imprint aligns with known Sunken City matrices, we map the cascade. If not, we build one.”

“Build a map for a place no one’s seen.” He sounded almost reverent. “I get why Valerius threw me at you.”

“Because he enjoys watching me suffer?” She kept her tone even, but the jab slipped out, sharp as a paper cut.

“Because you do the thing I can’t.” He nodded at the neat lines, the measured world she’d made on a chaos of old stone and rumor. “You make sense out of a mess.”

The compliment lodged in her throat, unwanted and warm. She cleared it and gestured at the console. “If you stand there and don’t talk for sixty more seconds, I might make some for you too.”

He mimed zipping his mouth. The graph dipped. The air smoothed. She counted under her breath. He watched her count like it mattered.

When the timer ticked over and the baseline held, she exhaled. “Three minutes,” she said. “Proceeding to step three.”

He leaned in, just enough to share the screen. His shoulder brushed hers. It felt like a promise and a dare at once. He smiled sideways, too close, too sure. “See? Fun.”

A cough from the doorway cut through the narrow pocket of calm. Elara’s fingers stilled on the console. Kael straightened so fast the touch of his shoulder lifted from hers like a pulled thread.

Director Valerius stood just inside the threshold, haloed by the corridor’s sterile light. He didn’t bother with the sleeves of a lab coat; he never did. Power was his uniform. His gaze took in the calibrated fields, the respectful distance between their bodies, the sphere’s steady pulse. Something like approval flickered and vanished.

“Progress?” he asked, and his voice filled the room the way a tide flooded a quiet inlet, steady and cooling.

“Calibration complete,” Elara said, and found her tone without searching. “Baseline stable. I’m preparing to initiate imprint scan.”

Kael lifted a gloved hand in a half-salute. “Didn’t touch anything unapproved,” he said, as if that needed documenting.

Valerius’s mouth quirked. “A banner day.”

His attention swung back to the sphere. The obsidian surface breathed, an almost-heartbeat, light threading under its skin in veins of deep red. He stepped closer to the barrier line and clasped his hands behind his back, mirroring Kael’s earlier obedience as if he’d been there to see it. “I’ve reviewed your preliminary notes, Vayne,” he said. “And the incident report from the field team.”

Elara’s chest tightened, bracing for a critique. “You’ll have a complete log by end of day.”

“I’ll have something better,” he returned, and then he turned to include them both in the radius of his focus. “The Warden is central to the Sunken City ensemble. It’s also central to our safety. We can’t afford the slow road here and we can’t afford reckless improvisation. Which means—” He paused, letting the hinge of the moment click into place. “—you two will complete the final analysis together. Imprint, pattern isolation, containment procedure. Both signatures on every step.”

Kael’s brows shot up. “Together together?” He sounded amused, but there was wariness tucked under it.

Elara heard the words like a stone dropped into clear water. She watched the rings spread. “Director, procedure recommends a three-person team for containment tests—”

“We’re short-staffed and heavy-watched,” he said, a shard of truth laid flat on the table. “I can spare support for external monitoring, but I want responsibility inside the room narrowed to two I trust with different strengths.” He flicked a look at Kael. “Field instincts when theory hits turbulence.” He shifted to Elara. “Discipline when instinct runs hot. You complement each other.”

The compliment should have been clean. It was not. Heat rose along Elara’s neck, part pride, part dread. She forced her voice steady. “We already have a plan in progress.”

“You have a plan; he has a bag of rotten habits,” Valerius said without heat. “Between you, we might approximate efficiency without stupidity.”

Kael’s smile tilted. “That sounds like a vote of confidence in my stupidity.”

“It’s a vote of confidence in her ability to keep you alive.” Valerius’s eyes softened a fraction when they landed on Elara again, a familiar mentor’s patience. It should have eased her. “And in your ability to get results when others take a week to do what you ensure in an hour.”

The sphere answered with a longer pulse, as if recognizing its own importance in the director’s cadence. Valerius’s gaze cut to it. For a breath, Elara saw a reflection of herself on its surface: small, precise, contained by her lines and grids. Kael stood beside that image like a smudge of heat.

“You’ll initiate the imprint scan under her parameters,” Valerius said to Kael, no room for argument. “You’ll advise on reactive thresholds. If it resonates like the field samples did, I want your read in seconds, not minutes.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Kael asked, curiosity threaded with practical edge.

“Then you do as she says until it does.” He returned the stare without blinking. “Your impulse to poke the dragon is why you bring trophies home. It is also why our insurance premiums are apocalyptic.”

Kael flashed a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ll try not to bankrupt the Athenaeum.”

“Do more than try.” Valerius’s voice gentled again as he addressed Elara. “You’ll document everything. No shortcuts. If you sense deviation beyond tolerance, you freeze the sequence and call it. He defers.”

Elara’s throat worked. The need to assert control was almost physical, a pressure in her palms. “Understood.”

Kael nodded once. “Understood,” he echoed, less theatrical now.

Valerius looked between them, weighing something she couldn’t name. “You’re both here because I’ve seen what happens when you work alone at your extremes. It makes for good stories and terrible outcomes.” His mouth edged wry. “I prefer dull reports and intact artifacts.”

“I can deliver dull,” Elara said, and the dry humor broke free before she could stop it. It startled a low laugh out of Kael, quick and warm.

“Save the jokes for when the orb is asleep,” Valerius said, but he didn’t reprimand her. “There’s pressure from the Council to shelve this piece until next year’s budget window. I’ve bought us forty-eight hours. Use them. Don’t make me regret it.”

He pivoted toward the exit, then paused with his hand on the frame. “And Vayne—” He didn’t turn back, but his attention found her anyway. “Let him in enough to do what he’s good at. You don’t have to like the method to use the result.”

The door’s pressure seal sighed as it opened, and the quiet of the room rushed back over the space he vacated. The absence of his presence was almost physical. The sphere’s pulse settled into its earlier cadence, as if relieved to be the only one commanding attention again.

Kael blew out a breath. “Well.” He looked at her with an expression she hadn’t seen on his face in this room yet: serious, closer to humble than he liked to be. “I guess we’re… sanctioned.”

She adjusted her gloves, needful of motion. The director’s words had lodged behind her ribs. “Forty-eight hours.”

“Which means no skipping steps,” he said carefully, as if trying out her language. “And no poking dragons. Unless you tell me to.”

She met his eyes. For the first time since he’d swaggered in with his box and his smile, she let him see the tension under her control and the small, hard gleam of trust forming in spite of it. “I’m not in the habit of telling dragons what to do,” she said. “But I can translate them.”

His mouth curved. “And I can keep us from getting scorched.”

“Good.” She turned back to the console, but she didn’t retreat into it. She angled the screen so they both could occupy the same slice of space without brushing. “Then we start like this: I lead the imprint scan. You watch for any sympathetic resonance patterns I might miss while I’m looking at the numbers.”

He stepped in beside her, close enough to share their reflection in the sphere’s glass-dark skin, not close enough to pull her off her axis. “I can do that.”

“Director wants both our signatures,” she said. “You’ll sign on my steps. I’ll sign on your thresholds.”

“Deal,” he said, and the word landed between them with more weight than his earlier bargains.

She set her fingertips against the activation rune and felt the hum travel into her bones. Beside her, Kael’s presence steadied, his focus turned outward, not on her but on the thing that could hurt them both if either of them faltered. The sphere pulsed in answer, as if it, too, understood the shift.

“Proceeding to imprint scan,” Elara said, and her voice did not tremble. The screen lit, and their names sat side by side under the line labeled Authority. She exhaled once, long and controlled, and pressed down.

The console responded with a series of low, even tones. Imprint parameters cascaded down the screen, tidy and contained, exactly how Elara liked them. She adjusted the sensitivity by half a degree and watched the waveform smooth itself like a bedsheet pulled tight.

Kael shifted his weight, the whisper of his jacket brushing his belt. “How long does this part take?”

“As long as it takes to be correct,” she said, eyes on the tapering curve. “The Warden’s interface is algorithmic but reactive. If we rush the imprint, we contaminate the baseline. Then every reading afterward is sand.”

“Right, right.” He was closer now, his breath a faint warmth at her temple. “But if we just ping a minor function—something low-risk—we’ll know if it’s awake. That gives us more than a lot of beautiful numbers.”

She bit the inside of her cheek to hold a response. “These beautiful numbers keep your skin intact.”

“My skin’s fine,” he said lightly, then dropped his tone. “Mostly. I mean—look at this.” He tapped a harmless point on the glass of the barrier nearest the sphere, careful not to cross the line. “Field notes said the peripheral conduits are dead. We trigger a secondary pulse, nothing deep, we get a glimpse of behavior.”

Elara turned to face him, the movement precise, controlled. “Field notes also said the northern relay was intact. It wasn’t. They said the runic language was derivative. It’s not. I’m not basing a plan on assumptions that have already proven wrong.”

His smile tilted, not mocking, just stubborn. “I’m not asking you to scuttle the whole method. Just… let it talk back a little while we listen. It’s a conversation, not a lecture.”

“I don’t have conversations with artifacts,” she said, returning to the console. “I interrogate them until they give up the truth.”

“See?” He laughed under his breath. “That’s exactly it. I charm, you interrogate.”

“That isn’t a compliment.”

“It is when it keeps us alive.” He leaned in, pointing at a section of the readout. “Resonance here—see that jitter? That’s an invitation.”

“It’s thermal drift,” she said, but the jitter was there, and not in the pattern she expected. She increased temporal resolution, letting the data sharpen.

He watched her hands move, his gaze attentive. She felt it like a second heat. “How many days did you say you wanted?” he asked casually.

“Three for the imprint series,” she said. “Two for integration with the containment lattice.”

“Five days to not know if this thing is a matchstick or a volcano,” he murmured. “You’ve got patience I don’t.”

“I’ve got responsibility,” she said quietly. “If this goes wrong, it will go wrong in a way no coffee and a story can fix.”

He was quiet for a heartbeat. “You think that’s what I do? Run on caffeine and luck?”

She swallowed. She shouldn’t have said it that way. “I think you rely on instincts you’ve trained until they feel like luck to other people,” she corrected, and that acknowledgment surprised both of them. “I don’t have that. I have this.” She nodded at the scrolling metrics.

He breathed out, some edge easing. “Okay. Fair.” He angled his body so he wasn’t crowding her, but he didn’t retreat. “Let me meet you in the middle. While you run the scan, I set up a controlled signal. We don’t trigger it. We just build it. When your baseline is done, we have something to send that’s already calibrated.”

She considered, turning the idea around. It wasn’t reckless. Preparation wasn’t a sin. “Fine,” she said. “But you mirror my parameters. No deviation.”

He held up his hands, palms bare. “No poking dragons. Just tying their shoes.”

“Dragons don’t wear shoes,” she said before she could stop herself.

He grinned, pleased to have drawn that out of her. “You never know.”

They worked without speaking for several minutes. Elara adjusted the array to compensate for the faint jitter, isolating it, naming it, reducing it to a known quantity. Kael pulled a coil of emitter cable from his kit and began assembling a field transmitter, each movement confident but precise. He didn’t hum or tap or fidget. His focus was a steady thing, unexpected and almost calming.

“What’s your signal frequency?” she asked finally.

“Not set yet,” he said. “Waiting on your recommendation.” He met her gaze to prove he meant it.

She felt the soft click of something aligning inside her. “Start at fifty-two kilohertz. Modulate up in increments of point five. Watch for phase flicker at sixty-one.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a tease wrapped in respect.

She let it slide because he held her instruction without embellishment. “And… label everything. If we have to backtrack, I want a map.”

“On it.” He scribbled quick notes on a strip of polymer and stuck it to the frame, then paused. “You know how often I write things down in the field?”

“I can guess.”

“Almost never,” he admitted. “Because my partner would roll her eyes and do it all for me when we got back.”

“Elara Vayne does not roll her eyes,” she said.

“Oh, she does,” he said with a half-smile. “Just internally. It’s very dignified.”

She almost smiled back. The console chimed softly—a checkpoint reached. The imprint curve flattened, steady, obedient. She exhaled, tension easing an inch. “Baseline at ninety-eight percent. Proceeding to final capture.”

“Look.” He crouched to adjust the emitter coil, then rose with a fluid movement that brought him close again, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed hers but didn’t. He was careful. “If we find something that looks harmless,” he said, “like a light switch, we flip it. That’s all I’m suggesting. Not a lever, not a release. A switch.”

“It won’t be a switch,” she said. “These constructs don’t telegraph function that way.”

“Sometimes they do,” he said softly. “Sometimes they give you an easy win to build trust.”

“With whom?” she asked, the word catching.

“Us,” he said. “Each other. The piece. The process. I know I push. You know you pull. Maybe this time we do both.”

Her hands were steady, but she felt the truth of that in her chest. She was used to being the brake. He was used to being the throttle. “If we trigger anything,” she said, “we do it after we’ve mapped the periphery. After the data says safe. And we do it together.”

His face went serious, the joking gone. “Together,” he echoed.

The console chimed again. Final capture complete. It felt like a held breath released. She locked the sequence, saved three copies, and set the imprint to write to the archive server. Then she stepped back, aware of the hum in the room and the man beside her and the sphere that waited like a held note.

“Set your transmitter to standby,” she said. “No output until I authorize.”

He clicked a switch, an obedient little sound. “Standing by.”

“And Kael,” she added, surprising herself with the softness of it. He looked over. “We’re not flipping any switches. We’re… observing how the switch feels under the finger.”

His mouth curved, dark eyes warming. “I can live with that.” He tipped his head toward the sphere. “You translate. I’ll watch for sparks.”

She nodded, a small concession that felt larger than it looked. “Then we proceed to the next step.”

“Slow,” he said, repeating her earlier word like a promise.

“Slow,” she confirmed, and let herself stand in that shared pace, the room measured by the pulse of the Warden and the steady cadence of two people learning how to move in the same rhythm without stumbling.