Noel didn't look back as the estate doors shut behind her.
The sun had already dipped low, casting the Crestmont grounds in long shadows. Her satchel weighed more than before—though the sync key was small, it carried the heft of revelation. She crossed the lawn quickly, boots crunching through gravel and dead leaves, each step harder to steady than the last.
Jack's voice threaded into her thoughts, cautious. "We need to talk about next steps."
"I know," she said. "But not yet."
Behind her, the old mansion stood quiet. Watching. Waiting.
....
Across the city, a meeting was already underway.
A circular chamber, deep underground. Clean lines. Seamless panels. Glass that shimmered with faint color-coded hues. At its center: a crystalline sphere suspended in air, rotating slowly. Violet and blue lines of energy pulsed inside it—erratic, not fully stable.
A Spectra sentinel stood at the edge of the chamber, arms folded behind her back.
"Confirm the reading," came a voice from the communicator.
"The signal's consistent with prior shard activity. Low-level pulse first registered near the southern quadrant, then again—stronger—from the Crestmont sector."
"Source?"
"No clear ID yet. No camera feeds, no witness pings. Whoever it was knew how to stay off grid."
A pause crackled through the line.
"No ID on the source?"
"None. Whoever it was masked their trail. But the resonance pattern was precise—structured. Not a random flare."
Another pause.
"Then it wasn't an accident."
"No, sir. Someone was deliberately interfacing with old resonance tech."
That caused silence.
Then: "Begin the sweep. Quietly. If someone's tampering with the old lines, we need to know who. And why now."
.....
Noel rode the train with her hood drawn low, tucked into a corner seat, half her focus on the city lights blurring past the window. The rest was on the sliver of crystal now tucked inside a padded compartment beside the two larger shards.
Blue. Violet. And now... this.
"Still nothing from your memories?" she asked Jack quietly.
"Bits and echoes. That device—it wasn't active in my time. Or if it was, they never told me."
"So someone took your legacy and made... what? Weapons? Anchors?"
"Tools for control," Jack said grimly. "Spectra wanted awakeners they could command, not just empower."
Noel's hands tightened on her knees. "And the Crestmonts helped them do it."
"Looks like."
She stared out at the skyline. The city looked the same. But things were shifting underneath.
Spectra might not know her name. Not yet.
But they'd felt the echo.
And they were starting to move.
.....
The train hissed to a stop at a quiet underground platform—an older one, mostly decommissioned except for local traffic. Noel stepped off, pulling her coat tighter as she merged with the sparse crowd and slipped into a maintenance corridor behind a rusted gate.
A short walk brought her to a narrow stairwell, the kind not listed on public maps. At the bottom: a plain steel door, no sign, just a faded red sticker peeling away at the edge.
She knocked twice, then once more after a pause.
The lock clicked open, and the door creaked inward.
A woman stood behind it—short, sharp-featured, with pale blue hair braided tight against her neck. Tech goggles perched on her head like a forgotten crown. She didn't open the door all the way.
"Wrong place," she said.
"I'm looking for Ava," Noel replied. "Jack sent me."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "Jack? That's not a name people drop lightly."
"I know," Noel said quietly. "He's… not gone. Not completely. I'm connected to him. Don't ask how—it's complicated. But I need your help."
Ava studied her for a beat, eyes flicking once to the satchel slung over Noel's shoulder. She opened the door.
"Inside. Talk fast."
....
The room was a converted server vault. Monitors lined the walls, flickering with low-level data streams. The centerpiece: a hollowed-out resonance core, wires curling like veins across its glass surface.
Ava shut the door behind them and folded her arms. "So you're telling me Jack's alive in your head?"
"Not alive. Present. There was an accident… or an echo. I don't fully understand it yet. But he speaks to me, guides me sometimes."
"And you just found him?"
Noel gave a grim smile. "He found me. I was drawn into something bigger—resonance fragments, old Spectra tech. I touched a shard. It touched back."
Ava leaned against a desk, exhaling slowly. "Jack always warned the higher-ups. Said the resonance wasn't just memory—it was a tether. A pattern. He was right. And Spectra didn't listen."
"They listened," Noel said. "They just used it anyway."
She reached into her bag and produced the sync key, carefully unwrapping it. "Found this in the Crestmont estate. Hidden behind a sealed panel. Spectra's mark was on it."
Ava's brow furrowed. She stepped forward and took the crystal using gloved hands, turning it under the light. Her expression hardened.
"This is legacy-code tech," she muttered. "First-wave stuff. Should've been dismantled years ago. Bloodline locking, embedded resonance fields, multi-sequence failsafes... Who the hell gave you this?"
"Spectra didn't give it to me," Noel said. "They left it behind. And now they're starting to notice the ripple."
Ava muttered a curse. "This thing's a gatekeeper. You trigger the wrong pattern, it pings the grid. Quietly, but traceable."
"Is it active?"
"No. Dormant. You're lucky. If someone had embedded a live beacon in here, Spectra would already have you tagged."
"Can you crack it?"
"Not safely. Not all the way. But I can peel the outer layer—pull metadata, maybe find out what it was keyed to. Give me a day."
"And in return?" Noel asked.
"I want to know what Spectra's planning. I didn't leave just to hide—I left because the experiments crossed a line. If they're waking up old tech like this, they're getting ready to burn everything down."
Noel met her gaze. "You help me decode this, I'll tell you everything I find."
They shook hands.
As Ava moved to her tools, already setting up a scan, Jack's voice surfaced faintly in Noel's mind.
She was one of the last who walked out when I fell. If anyone can crack this cleanly, it's her.
Noel said nothing, just pulled her hood back up and headed toward the exit.
...
The city outside buzzed with quiet electricity. The threads were pulling tighter. And even if Spectra hadn't yet seen her face, they'd already felt the echo she left behind.
The next move would come soon.