The weight felt good in his hands. It was a simple, unadorned block of dark metal, cold to the touch. It was not an anomaly, but it was made from one. A shard from AMG-088, "The Unchanging Weight." It was a piece of AMG-088-A-E, an Anchor-class Echo. It did not hum or whisper. It was just heavy. It was a problem he could solve with his muscles. It was simple. It was clean.
Sven placed it back on the rack with a soft, definitive clink. The sound was swallowed by the humming silence of the Crucible. He was alone with the burn in his arms and the simple, solid truth of gravity.
He went back to the Nidus, the residential warren that felt less like a home and more like a barracks for an army that fought shadows. He walked to his room and stepped into the shower for the second time that day. The hot water was a ritual, a washing away of the night's residue, the sweat from the gym, the lingering memory of the nightmare. He scrubbed at his skin, as if he could erase the memory of the tar and the hands and the silent, dissolving faces. He could not. The water just ran over the scars, a reminder that would not wash away.
He put on his uniform. The white fabric was crisp and clean, a stark contrast to the things he carried inside. He made himself presentable. It was a uniform, not a suit of clothes. It was a statement.
He walked to the Director's Sanctum. The corridor here was wider, the air colder. The door to the office was made of a dark, polished wood that seemed to drink the light. It opened before he could knock, as it always did. The mechanism made no sound.
The room was not what one would expect. It was not an office of power, of screens and maps. It was a library that had forgotten it was a library. Books lined the walls, but they were not books about history or science. They were ledgers of lost things, catalogs of sorrow. There were no windows. The light came from nowhere and everywhere, a soft, source-less glow that illuminated but cast no shadows. In the center of the room stood a desk that was not a desk, but a single piece of sculpted stone, its surface smooth and cool. There were no chairs for visitors.
Director Anya Petrova sat behind the stone desk. She was imposingly tall, even while seated. Her hair was the color of moonlight on snow, a flowing platinum blonde that seemed to hold its own light. Her most striking feature was not her hair, or her sharp cheekbones, but her left eye. It was not an eye. It was a sphere of polished, swirling silver, constantly, subtly moving in its socket, observing layers of reality invisible to him. The artifact, AMG-099-B-R, "The Watchful Orb," saw things he could not even imagine. It was a polished stone that held a galaxy of secrets. She did not look up as he entered.
"Sven," she said. Her voice was calm, a low melody that held the weight of command.
"Director," Sven replied. He stood before the desk. He did not sit. There was no chair.
He waited.
She looked up, and her gaze was a physical pressure. She offered a weary smile, the kind given at the end of a very long night.
He asked, "Is this about the Vanity Patchwork?"
Anya sighed. "It is not just that."
She leaned back, the movement fluid and precise. "Your work is efficient. Brutally, beautifully so. You find the nail and you hammer it down. It is what makes you effective."
She paused then. A soft whirring sound filled the quiet. A large, white projector screen began to unroll silently from the ceiling on one of the vast, book-lined walls.
The screen flickered to life. It was not a single news story. It was a waterfall of information, a cascade of light and sound. It showed the digital ghost of Stellar. Her perfect face smiled from a thousand different screens, a thousand different angles. The influencer who vanished. The headlines scrolled. Stellar: What Happened?The Mystery of the Missing Influencer.Conspiracy Theories Flourish in Absence of Stellar. The screen split into fragments, each one showing a different theory about her disappearance. Some were close to the truth, in that terrifying way that internet conspiracies sometimes are, brushing against a truth they could not possibly understand.
Anya said, "This is clumsy. A loose end."
Sven's gaze was fixed on the screen, on the face that was not her face, not anymore.
"My priority," Sven said, his voice flat, "was the containment of AMG-1875."
"While that is true," Anya corrected, her voice still gentle but firm, like a parent correcting a child who has the right answer but for the wrong reasons. "The seal holds. The door is locked."
He looked at her, his single visible eye unblinking, and finally finished the mantra. "The anomaly is secured."
Anya nodded slowly. "It is. But a loose end, no matter how small, is still a loose end. And loose ends add up."
Sven said nothing. He just watched the digital river of grief and curiosity flow past. He knew about loose ends. He had created enough of them himself.
He then remembered. His wife, Alma. His daughter, Bianca. They were innocent too. Yet they died all the same.
Anya tried to be compassionate. "I understand," she said, "that you want to hunt for the entity responsible for what happened to you in the past. But this cannot continue."
Sven looked at Anya, a new, unfamiliar tightness in his chest. He asked, "Is it about the apprentice thing again?"
Anya smiled. It was a sad smile. "I know you are not ready for that. And you also," she added, her gaze softening for a fraction of a second. "You destroy too many A.N.T.s. It is a problem."
Sven asked, "What's this about, then?"
Anya snapped her fingers. The sound was sharp in the quiet room. The office door swung open again, without a sound.
Sven looked behind him, to the door.
There stood a woman, still heaving slightly, as if she had been running. She was of short stature with a soft, curvy build. Her long, messy brown hair was tied in a loose bun that was already coming undone. She wore a Scholar's Coat, but it was too large for her, the sleeves covering her hands, giving her a bookish, slightly overwhelmed look. A pair of round, thick-framed glasses sat on her nose, and she pushed them back up with a finger. She looked like she had just discovered a new species of butterfly in her own backyard, her face alight with a purely intellectual excitement that had no place in the Director's Sanctum. She had not even been invited.
Before Anya could say anything, the woman's attention snapped to Sven's feet.
"Fascinating," the woman said, her voice crisp, carrying a distinct Cockney accent. "The polymer composite in the sole is a variant of the material we stabilized from AMG-044," she announced to the room, as if continuing a conversation they were already having. "The micro-articulated design for localized gravitational manipulation. It is a prototype."
Anya chuckled, a low, warm sound that seemed to warm the cold air for a moment. "Conservator Sven," she said, her tone formal. "This is Curator Eleanor Vance, better known as Enola."
The woman, Enola, suddenly looked up, her cheeks flushing a faint pink. "Oh. Right. Sorry. I am Enola. It is good to finally meet you in person. I have been reviewing your field data for the past eighteen months. Your last A.N.T. modification lasted only four point seven seconds under a full Omega-class strain. The data was… insufficient for a full stress model."
She looked embarrassed, but only for a moment. Then she looked at Sven's jacket.
"If you would permit a suggestion," she said, stepping closer without any hint of personal space awareness. "The left shoulder seam," she continued, peering at the fabric. "A seven-degree offset would reduce the snagging hazard by at least thirty percent without compromising the armor weave. The tensile strength would be remarkable."
Sven realized. "So the real package from the said Curator Vance," he said, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, dreadful certainty. "The upgrade is not just in that crate."
He looked at the woman in front of him. "It is you."
Enola asked, "My tools should have been sent ahead. The crate should have been here."
Anya said, "The intention is for you to work together. To begin immediately."
Sven asked, "Do I even have any saying in this?"
Anya asked in return, her voice quiet but clear. "Don't you want to be better prepared?"
At this point, Enola was not listening to their conversation. She was already meddling, her fingers tracing the line of the concealed armor beneath Sven's jacket. "The current layering creates a stress point at the clavicle. It is a design flow."
Sven pulled his jacket tighter, a reflexive gesture of annoyance. He was still annoyed at Enola. Enola quickly apologized.
"It would be better," she said, "to work in the Armory."
Anya just said, "It would be interesting to see your performance next month."
She dismissed them with a wave of her hand, a gesture of absolute finality.
Sven and Enola walked out of the Director's Sanctum. Sven was silent, as usual. But Enola walked like she was a tourist in a city of the dead, her head on a swivel, taking in the impossible architecture of the True Gallery.
Sven just refused coldly. "No, I won't be your tour guide here."
He kept walking to the Armory, the place they called the Axiom Forge.
Enola pouted a bit, her lower lip pushing out in a gesture that was surprisingly childish for a woman of her intellect. She thought for a moment.
She then muttered, almost to herself. "I'm currently developing an electric bike specific for a Conservator's needs. It would be nice," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "if I could have someone who would like to test it."
Sven stopped in his tracks. He looked at Enola, squinting his eye.
He asked, "You read my file and requests to the armory?"
Enola just smirked at him, a knowing, teasing look in her eyes.
"Keep walking," she told him, her Cockney accent making the words sound like a challenge.
He did.