The hideout's workbench hummed under the glow of a half-dismantled Conduit, its exposed circuitry spitting faint sparks into the air.
Lucent leaned against the table, rolling a salvaged Aether regulator between his fingers.
Jessa and Tink perched on stacked crates, their eyes tracking the component like it might vanish if they blinked.
Kai lingered near the doorway, arms crossed—present but detached, as if he'd been dragged into a lesson he hadn't signed up for.
Lucent held up the regulator, its delicate filaments catching the dim light. "You two know how a glyph forms?"
Jessa's chin jerked up. "My brother said it comes from Aether."
Tink nodded, kicking his feet against the crate. "That's all I heard too."
"Technically correct." Lucent set the regulator down with deliberate care. "But incomplete."
Kai exhaled through his nose. "Why are we suddenly playing history tutor?"
Lucent didn't glance at him. "Why do you think?"
A beat. Kai's shoulders tensed, then slumped. "Fine. So the kids understand how Conduits work. Happy?"
"Ecstatic." Lucent tapped the regulator. "So? What else besides Aether makes a glyph?"
Kai's fingers twitched—an old Spire reflex, the ghost of a student reciting for bored instructors. "Runes. Computation. Mostly computation. You need enough processing power to… reshape reality, or whatever."
"Close enough." Lucent pried open the regulator's casing, revealing the lattice of nano-filaments inside.
"A glyph's just a set of instructions. Aether's the fuel. But this—" He flicked the component, making it chime, "—is the bridge. Takes the computation and translates it into something Aether can follow."
Jessa leaned forward, her grease-stained fingers hovering near the filaments. "Like a translator."
"More like a prison." Lucent's thumb brushed a scar on his wrist—old glyph burn, the skin still shiny. "Aether doesn't want to obey. You ever try forcing a river uphill? That's what casting is."
Tink frowned. "Then how'd anyone figure it out?"
Lucent's gaze drifted to the hideout's single grime-streaked window, where the smog blurred the Spires into ghosts. "Accident."
The workbench shuddered as Lucent dropped a gutted Conduit onto its surface, sending screws skittering.
Jessa caught one before it hit the floor, rolling it between her fingers like a prized coin.
Tink leaned in closer, his nose nearly brushing the exposed circuitry.
Lucent wiped grease on his pants. "You all know the Myriad Nexus, right?" He jerked his chin toward the window, where the smog parted just enough to reveal the distant silhouette of the Ivory Tower—its smooth, monolithic surface gleaming under the sickly yellow sky. "Wasn't always called that. A decade ago, it was just Myriad Labs."
Kai scoffed, arms crossed. "Bullshit. No way some lab accident birthed an entire energy source."
Lucent didn't look at him. Instead, he flicked a warped capacitor toward Jessa.
She caught it without blinking. "Accident's the wrong word," he said. "More like… they poked something that wasn't meant to be poked."
Jessa's eyes flicked to the window, her finger lifting slightly toward the tower. "That's it, isn't it?"
"Yeah. That's it."
Tink wrinkled his nose. "We tried to go near it once. Guards kicked us out before we got within a block."
Kai let out a sharp, humorless laugh. "Of course they did." His fingers twitched toward his own Conduit—Spire-made, or what was left of it. "You think they'd let gutter rats near the place that rewrote physics?"
Lucent watched him for a beat, then turned back to the dismantled Conduit. "Point is, they didn't create Aether. They just found a way to tap into it. Like drilling into a pipe and calling the leak 'invention.'"
His thumb brushed a scar along his wrist—jagged, old. "Problem is, no one really knows what's on the other side of that pipe."
Jessa's fingers stilled. "My brother said Aether listens."
A hush fell over the room.
Even Kai stopped fidgeting.
Lucent's expression didn't change. "Smart brother."
The glow from the dismantled Conduit painted Jessa's face in flickering blue light as she straightened up.
"Yeah! He is very smart!" Her voice carried a brittle pride that cracked halfway through the sentence.
Her fingers tightened around the salvaged capacitor, knuckles whitening as the memory surfaced—the empty bed in their squat, the half-finished glyph carved into the wall that still hummed when the smog rolled in thick.
Lucent watched her carefully, the lines around his eyes deepening.
He'd seen that look before—on his own face, years ago, staring at Cipher's last message blinking on a dead terminal.
"We're getting sidetracked," he said, softer than usual.
The workbench creaked as he leaned forward, scattering tools until he uncovered a palm—sized Aether projector. "What matters is how glyphs work now. Complex in execution, simple in principle."
Kai perked up, his curiosity overriding his earlier cynicism.
"Finally, the fun part." His fingers twitched toward the projector before Lucent slapped his hand away.
"Watch first." Lucent activated the device, and a three-dimensional illumination glyph materialized above the workbench—a shimmering lattice of interconnected runes that pulsed like a living thing.
Tink gasped as the light reflected in his wide eyes.
"This," Lucent tapped the base layer of the construct, "is the Aether requirement." The foundation glowed brighter, revealing intricate fractal patterns that seemed to shift when stared at directly. "The bare minimum needed to sustain the effect."
Jessa's frown deepened as she studied the patterns. "Looks like..."
"Like the markings in the old quarantine zones," Lucent finished for her.
"Because it is. First glyphs were just copies of what the Aether left behind after the Incident."
Kai leaned in, his professional interest overtaking his posturing.
"And this?" He pointed to the swirling mass of symbols above the foundation.
"The computation." Lucent rotated the projection, revealing layer upon layer of interlocking runic sequences.
Even this basic illumination glyph contained over hundreds of discrete commands—a dizzying tapestry of instructions for convincing reality to bend just slightly.
Tink's head cocked to the side as he tried to follow a single thread of logic through the construct, only to lose it in the fractal complexity.
"Each one of these," Lucent pointed to a cluster of runes that resembled a twisted helix, "is essentially shouting at the universe to ignore its own rules for a few seconds. The more complex the effect, the louder you need to shout."
Kai exhaled sharply through his nose. "No wonder backlashes melt skins off."
A shadow passed over Jessa's face as she traced a particular rune sequence in the air.
Her finger moved with unconscious precision, drawing symbols Lucent hadn't shown them. "Brother said... the best casters don't shout. They whisper."
The projector flickered. Just for a moment, the illumination glyph dimmed, its structure warping as if in response to her words.
Lucent's hand froze halfway to adjusting the device, his eyes locking onto Jessa with new intensity.
In the sudden silence, the ever-present hum of distant Aether lines seemed to grow louder.
Tink, oblivious to the moment, poked at the hologram. "So how do we learn all this without our brains leaking out our ears?"
Lucent slowly relaxed his grip on the projector. "Same way you eat a rotting skyscraper."
He tapped the boy's forehead.
"One rusted beam at a time." The ghost of a smile touched his lips as the kids groaned at the analogy, but his eyes kept returning to the runes Jessa had drawn in the air—symbols that shouldn't exist outside classified Spire archives.
Lucent wiped his grease-stained hands on his pants, leaving dark streaks across the worn fabric.
"Now try assembling your own Conduits," he said, nudging the scattered components toward Jessa and Tink.
"Use the parts I told you to gather yesterday. Kai—" he jerked his chin toward the older boy, "—make yourself useful and walk them through the basics."
Kai opened his mouth, likely to protest being relegated to teaching duty, but one look at Lucent's expression made him reconsider.
With a sigh that was more performative than genuine, he dragged his crate closer to the kids. "Alright, kids. Let's see what junk you managed to scrounge up."
Jessa immediately dumped her collection onto the workbench—a cracked but serviceable regulator coil, two mismatched capacitors, and a palm-sized processor unit that still had flecks of someone else's blood in the cooling fins.
Tink's haul was more modest but surprisingly organized, each component wrapped in scavenged insulation tape to prevent shorts.
Lucent watched from his perch against the wall as Kai began explaining the assembly process with unexpected patience.
"The regulator goes first—no, not like that, you'll fry the circuits before you even—here, let me show you." His hands moved with practiced ease, the Spire-trained precision still evident despite months in the Junkyard.
As the kids bent over their makeshift Conduits, tongues poking out in concentration, Lucent absently rubbed the old burn scars on his forearm.
He remembered his first assembly the way the components had sparked like angry flies before failing spectacularly.
That had been back when mistakes only cost him pride, not fingers.
Jessa's sudden whoop of triumph snapped him back to the present.
She held up her cobbled-together device, its casing held together with scavenged clamps and hope.
"It's ugly," she declared proudly, "but it's mine."
Tink's attempt was more hesitant, his smaller hands struggling with the finer connections, but the determined set of his jaw reminded Lucent uncomfortably of himself at that age.
Kai reached over to adjust the alignment of the boy's Aether relay, his usual sarcasm tempered by something that might have been nostalgia.
"Not completely terrible," Lucent allowed, pushing off from the wall.
He inspected their work with a critical eye, making minute adjustments here and there.
"We'll test them tomorrow with basic SpellApps. If they don't explode, we might actually make casters out of you yet."
The setting sun bled through the hideout's makeshift blinds, painting the scene in streaks of orange and rust.
Tools lay scattered across the workbench, components half-assembled, the air thick with the scent of solder and ambition.
Somewhere beyond their walls, the city hummed with latent energy, its secrets waiting to be unraveled.
***
Tonight the Bazaar had taken root in the carcass of an old data-center, its shattered server racks now housing black-market stalls.
The scent of fried circuitry and synthetic opioids hit Karen's nostrils as she shouldered through the shifting crowd.
Above them, neon vendor signs flickered like dying fireflies - Zhang's Spell Salvage, The Shattered Glyph, Third Eye Alchemy - each advertisement warping as they passed through the unstable Aether field that made the Bazaar impossible to map.
Mags walked half a step behind, her usual predator's gait softened by distraction.
Her gaze caught on a stall a certain stall.
Her fingers brushed against the stall's displaying combat SpellApps—illegal modifications of corporate glyphs, their safety protocols stripped away.
A particularly vicious-looking Razor demo played on loop, showing a silhouette bisecting a dummy with invisible force.
The vendor, a gaunt man with WhiteRoot-branded ocular implants, caught her staring and grinned, revealing teeth filed to points.
"Focus," Karen muttered, pulling her away by the strap of Nex's shotgun.
The weapon drew glances—some calculating, some fearful - but no one dared comment. Not when Karen's prosthetic hand rested so casually near her own Conduit.
They passed through the Bazaar's ever-changing architecture:
A stall built from the carcass of a mag-lev train car, where a child no older than Tink sold memory shards—stolen Spire recollections glittering in broken glass vials.
A curtained alcove where rawcasters dueled, their unfiltered glyphs making the air taste of copper and burnt hair.
Someone screamed as a glyph backfired, the sound cut abruptly short.
The drug quarter's telltale glow—literal this time, as bio-luminescent Glow addicts clustered around ventilation shafts, their skin pulsing blue with the rhythm of their overdoses.
Sable's shop wasn't marked.
It didn't need to be.
The queue of twitchy buyers snaking from the repurposed shipping container said enough.
Karen noted the security—two hulking figures with grafted arm-cannons flanking the entrance.
Their ocular implants scanned the crowd in synchronized sweeps.
Definitely ex-corpo's private military.
Mags' hand found the steel talon sewn into her sleeve—Nex's last gift, folded from the barrel of his first shotgun.
The metal was warm to the touch, as if remembering its purpose.
Karen exhaled through her nose, the sharp scent of synthetic adrenaline stims clinging to the back of her throat. "Remember—we're just here to talk."
The lie settled between them like a live round chambered in silence.
She approached Sable's shipping-container-turned-shop, its corrugated steel walls vibrating with the bass of some underground rawcaster's distortion glyphs.
The two security personnel—twin mountains of augmented muscle—didn't so much as twitch as Karen stopped before them.
Up close, their WhiteRoot-grade ocular implants whirred faintly, retinal scanners flickering as they recognized her.
Karen flashed her vendor token between two fingers, the sigil catching the neon glow.
"Talon business." She jerked her chin toward where Sable sat perched on an upturned crate, counting vials of Glow with the precision of a Spire accountant.
The guards exchanged glances through their fogged visors.
Everyone knew the Steel Talons ran protection in this sector, but Bazaar Security answered to deeper pockets.
After a heartbeat, the right guard rapped twice on the container wall with a rusted pipe wrench—the all-clear signal echoing through the metal.
Inside, Sable nearly dropped her current transaction—a nervous-looking Spire customer purchasing Glow in a Nimbrix-branded shock case.
The clerk's eyes widened at Karen's entrance, hastily stuffing the case into his jacket.
"Boss?" Sable's surprise was polished smooth, her smile not quite reaching her eyes.
She set down the Glow and brushed nonexistent dust from her leather pants—new, Karen noted, and definitely not black-market grade. "Didn't know you'd visit the Bazaar today. I should've prepared at least a drink for you."
"Change of plans." Karen's gaze lingered on the fleeing clerk's back before returning to Sable. "You free to talk?"
Sable's gaze darted to the line of twitching customers, then to the guards, before settling back on Karen.
She began recounting her remaining stock with exaggerated care, the blue glow of the vials painting her face in watery light. "Probably about half an hour?"
Karen hummed, noncommittal. "We can wait."
A tug at her shirt.
Mags stood stiffly beside her, Nex's shotgun a silent weight across her small back.
Her dark eyes flicked pointedly toward the Bazaar's chaos beyond Sable's shop, then back to Karen.
"You want to loiter around?" Karen asked, already knowing the answer.
Mags nodded once, sharp.
Karen turned back to Sable, whose polished smile had grown brittle at the edges. "We'll circle back. Still need to hit up the arms dealers anyway."
As they stepped back into the choking glow of the Bazaar proper, Karen didn't miss how the Bazaar Security stiffened at their departure.
***
The air in this part of the Bazaar smelled of ozone and hot metal, the sharp tang of freshly milled components cutting through the usual haze of stim-smoke and sweat. The stalls here were heavier, reinforced—some built from old security pods or scavenged military crates, their surfaces etched with warning glyphs that pulsed faintly in the dim light.
Karen moved with purpose, her prosthetic hand flexing unconsciously as she scanned the rows of black-market augments.
To her left, a vendor in a stained lab coat demonstrated neural interface spikes on a twitching volunteer, the man's pupils dilating as the implant synced with his nervous system.
To her right, a rack of pre-owned cybernetic limbs hung like butchered meat, their connection ports still crusted with old blood.
Mags lingered again near a display of combat SpellApps, her fingers hovering over a demo unit running a looped simulation of a Fracture glyph in action—a Myriad military-grade spell that shattered bones from the inside out.
The vendor, a gaunt woman with a respirator grafted into her jaw, eyed Mags with a mix of amusement and appraisal.
"You're too small for that one, little ghost," the vendor rasped, tapping the price tag—a number that could buy a month's worth of Glow. "But I've got something quieter. Fits your… style."
She slid forward a slender dagger, its edge humming with a barely visible Phase Edge glyph.
Mags didn't touch it.
But she didn't look away either.
Karen's voice cut in before the haggling could start. "We're not shopping."
The vendor's grin didn't falter. "Everyone's shopping here, Talon. Even if they don't know it yet."
Past the stalls, deeper in the sector, the real business happened—the kind that didn't sit out in the open.
Private booths lined the far wall, their curtains drawn, guarded by augmented enforcers with retinal scanners flickering in the dark.
One of them, a hulking figure with a subdermal armor weave, tracked Karen and Mags as they passed.
Karen ignored him.
She had a different destination in mind.
A makeshift shooting range had been set up near the back, where buyers could test-fire stolen corporate weaponry.
The rhythmic thump of slugthrowers and the sizzle of charged rails filled the air.
A dealer in a reinforced vest waved them over, his voice booming over the noise.
"Looking for something with bite? Just got a shipment of Nimbrix shock-pistols—pulled fresh off a dead Reclamation officer."
Mags' gaze drifted past him, toward a smaller stall tucked in the shadows.
No flashy displays, no demo units.
Just a single case, its glass fogged, housing a row of unmarked Conduits—Spire-made, if the clean lines were any indication.
Karen followed her stare. "That's not our stop."
Mags didn't argue.
But her fingers brushed the steel talon sewn into her sleeve, as if reminding herself why they were here.
The Bazaar had a way of making people forget.
The Talon shop stood apart from the rest of the Bazaar's weapon stalls—no flashing holosigns, no demo units crackling with illegal glyphs. Just a reinforced steel container, its surface etched with decades of gang markings, the air around it thick with the scent of gun oil and aged metal.
Inside, the space was meticulously organized.
Augment limbs lined the left wall, each one tagged with a handwritten note—Vey's old arm, hydraulic recall needs recalibration or Rook's backup ocular, left lens flickers.
On the right, pre-Aether firearms sat disassembled in trays, their mechanisms gleaming under the warm glow of old incandescent bulbs.
No flashy corporate tech here—just relics from a time when people didn't need glyphs to kill.
Behind the counter, Jack looked up from polishing a revolver cylinder, his hands moving with the steady precision of a man who'd spent more years with weapons than without.
His face was a map of old violence—a knife scar bisecting his eyebrow, burn marks along his jawline, and a nose that had been broken enough times to sit slightly crooked.
No augments.
No flashy implants.
Just a man who'd outlived the need for them.
"Good to see you, Jack," Karen said, leaning against the counter.
Jack's eyes—sharp, dark, the kind that missed nothing—flicked from Karen to Mags, then back. "Madame," he rasped, setting the revolver down. "You don't usually show your face around here. Is there a problem?"
Karen exhaled.
Sharp, as expected.
Jack had been around since before the Talons were even a proper gang, back when Nex was just a reckless kid with a shotgun and a death wish.
He was the only one who could yank Nex back from the edge with nothing but a look.
The hum of the Bazaar's generators faded into a low, steady thrum as Karen exhaled, the weight of her next words settling between them like a loaded gun.
"Yeah," she admitted, her voice barely above the growl of the nearby rawcaster stalls. "I'm hunting moles."
Jack didn't react at first.
His hands, calloused and steady, continued methodically cleaning the revolver cylinder in front of him, the motions precise even after decades of repetition.
Then, slowly, he set the piece down and looked up.
His eyes—dark, unreadable, the kind that had seen too much to be surprised by betrayal—locked onto hers.
"Figured."
That was all he said.
No questions.
No demands for proof.
Just quiet acknowledgment.
Karen felt the tension in her shoulders ease, just slightly. Jack was the only one she could trust—truly trust—in this rotting city.
He had no augments to hijack, no Conduit to corrupt, no debts to anyone but the ghosts of the old Talons.
Nex had trusted him.
That was enough.
Mags shifted beside her, her fingers brushing the steel talon sewn into her sleeve—a silent question.
Jack noticed.
Jack's hand emerged from beneath the counter, sliding a long, narrow box across the pitted metal surface.
The wood was unvarnished, the hinges stiff with disuse.
Mags opened it.
Nestled in faded velvet lay a tanto blade—eight inches of folded steel, its edge so sharp the air seemed to part around it.
The hilt was wrapped in black cord, the guard etched with three intersecting circles.
"Forged pre-Incident," Jack said, watching Mags' face. "Real Japanese steel. It needs a bit of maintenance but doesn't rely on Aether. Just cuts."
Karen inhaled sharply.
She recognized that blade.
Nex had carried it during the Scorcher purge, back when the Talons were still carving their place in the Junkyard's corpse.
Mags touched the flat of the blade with one finger.
It came away clean.
No rust, no fingerprints.
As if the metal refused to remember anything but blood.
"For when you're ready," he said, his voice rough with something that wasn't quite nostalgia.
Karen didn't ask when he'd gotten it, or why Nex had left it with him.
Some things didn't need explaining.
Outside, the Bazaar's neon glow pulsed like a heartbeat, casting long shadows across the shop's worn floor.