GSA Wardspire Annex
New Boston, North Atlantic Federation arc zone
Western Hemisphere,
United Earth Federation
2435 A.D.
Elias and Naia pulled into the subterranean bay of the GSA Enforcement Annex, the hum of their Glow car fading into the low mechanical thrum of the facility. The air here was cooler, tinted with the sterile scent of ozone and metal polish. Overhead, strips of white light reflected off rows of polished vehicles, each marked with the hexagonal insignia of the Gem Security Agency.
As the car settled into its docking cradle, Elias's gaze drifted toward the mirrored glass wall of the bay. In its reflection, a sleek, prism-toned vehicle hovered to a stop behind them—its surface alive with faint, shifting colors.
He frowned. "She followed us."
Naia noticed the expression before he said another word. "Be nice," she murmured, unbuckling her harness.
"I am nice," Elias replied, though the sharpness in his tone betrayed otherwise.
He already knew who it was. He'd seen that kind of Luminian craft before—smooth, organic design with luminal ridges that pulsed faintly with inner light. The fact that it had passed through two GSA checkpoints without issue meant it carried high-level clearance. Whoever was inside wasn't just any envoy.
The car's gullwing door lifted with a hiss, and Elias stepped out just as the Luminia vehicle's canopy unfolded.
"I just need to know what she's doing here," he muttered under his breath.
From the other car, Ellira emerged—graceful even under the cold fluorescence. Her golden hair caught the light as she approached, the faint glow of her markings dimming to a polite shimmer. Elias turned to face her, posture straight, expression composed but edged.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. His voice wasn't harsh, but it carried that clipped, controlled sharpness that soldiers used when courtesy was obligatory.
Ellira stopped a few paces from him, meeting his gaze evenly. Though his tone wasn't openly hostile, she could feel the undercurrent of tension in it—mistrust disguised as professionalism. For a moment, she hesitated. Telling him everything about what had happened in the Hall would only complicate things further.
So she kept her voice calm, diplomatic. "I've been granted permission by the UEF to accompany the investigation," she said. "I'm here to represent Luminian interests in the case."
Naia stepped out beside her brother, catching the shift in his jawline as he processed that. The faint hum of the bay filled the silence between them, punctuated only by the sound of distant Gembots moving crates of evidence.
Elias crossed his arms slowly, his expression unreadable—but his eyes, sharp and calculating, remained fixed on Ellira.
"Of course you are," he said quietly.
And though his words were polite enough, the weight behind them told Ellira everything she needed to know—this was not a welcome partnership.
"So… what's the next step?" Ellira asked, her tone calm but edged with curiosity.
"It's none of your—" Elias began, his voice flat.
"We're heading to the Evidence Collection floor," Naia cut in smoothly before he could finish. Her tone was brisk, professional, but her eyes flicked toward Ellira with a hint of reassurance. "We'll be reviewing the bomb remnants, see if we can extract any residual data from them."
Ellira studied the siblings as they spoke. Elias stood rigid, arms crossed, his expression a wall of quiet disapproval—every line of his posture told her he didn't want her here. Naia, on the other hand, was the opposite: composed but open, her voice gentler, her gaze curious instead of guarded. Two halves of the same family—one all iron and distance, the other warmth restrained by discipline.
"Thanks," Ellira said softly, choosing to ignore Elias's tone.
They started toward the elevator, footsteps echoing against the smooth alloy floor. The corridor lights reflected faintly off the polished walls, catching the faint golden shimmer in Ellira's markings as she followed them in silence.
Inside the elevator, the hum of the descent filled the quiet. It wasn't a long ride, but the stillness made it feel endless. Ellira stood beside the siblings, the subtle tension between them saturating the confined space. She clasped her hands lightly in front of her, forcing her mind to still, but her thoughts drifted back to earlier—Marienne's firm voice echoing in her memory:
"The Concord wants answers, Ellira. We need to know how deep this goes—whether this was just an act of terror or something far greater."
Now, standing beside two humans who could barely stand each other's silence, she wondered just how far those answers would lead her.
A faint movement caught her eye. Naia was watching her.
Their gazes met, and for a heartbeat, neither looked away. Then Naia's cheeks flushed—an almost imperceptible flicker of color under the sterile light—and she quickly turned her head aside, pretending to study the display panel. The gesture was small, but in the stillness of the elevator, it was almost loud.
Ellira blinked, a little surprised, and found her own gaze lowering instinctively, a trace of warmth flickering across her expression.
Elias noticed the subtle exchange through the mirrored wall of the lift. He said nothing, but the corner of his jaw tightened. He knew exactly what was happening—not between the two of them, perhaps, but within his sister.
Naia might have mastered her composure, but she couldn't turn off what she was. He could feel it in her stillness—her Facet quietly active, her senses brushing against the emotional signatures around her. Even now, she was absorbing it: Ellira's steady calm, his own unease, the faint ripple of curiosity and awkwardness weaving between them. She just didn't show it.
They stepped out of the elevator into a corridor of brushed steel and polished crystal. The air here was cool, humming faintly with the sound of circulating vents and distant machinery. Ahead stood a security window, half-translucent, with a drone hovering beside it—its lens tracking their every movement. Behind the glass, a uniformed officer sat slouched in his chair, his attention fixed more on the datapanel before him than on the arrivals.
"ID," the officer said without glancing up. His tone was flat, mechanical, the voice of someone deep into the end of a long shift.
Elias held out his lumenpad. With a soft flick, a holographic badge materialized above it, casting a sharp blue light across the counter. The officer barely reacted—until he caught the clearance tag scrolling beneath the ID: Senior Field Agent – GSA Enforcement Division.
That made him look up.
"Ah. You can go ahead," the man said quickly, straightening in his seat. A faint beep followed, and the reinforced door beside the window slid open with a hiss.
They stepped through into the Evidence Collection Vault—a vast, temperature-controlled chamber that stretched several floors deep. The walls were lined with crystalline shelving units, each hexagonal frame housing smaller pocket-space drawers. Threads of light danced between them, forming an intricate lattice that shimmered faintly whenever a storage unit was accessed.
The air here smelled faintly of ozone and sterilized quartz. Everything was spotless, metallic, and silent save for the occasional hum of the stabilizing field. Elias checked his lumenpad, scrolling through data logs until he found the code marker tied to the bombing investigation.
"Section Theta-Seven," he said, moving toward one of the silver shelves.
He pressed a glyph on the panel, and a drawer slid open with hydraulic precision. Inside was a sealed case—transparent, reinforced crystal—with scorched fragments suspended within faint stasis light. Pieces of shattered circuitry, melted gem shards, and singed metal floated in orderly arrangement, each one tagged with spectral identifiers. The faint smell of burnt carbon clung to the containment field.
"Here we are," Elias said, pulling the case out and placing it on the central analysis table.
Ellira stepped closer, and the glow of her markings dimmed under the sterile white light. Her eyes swept over the fragments with both curiosity and unease.
"How are you going to collect data from this?" she asked. "Shouldn't an Analyst be the one to examine it first?"
Elias's tone was calm but certain. "My sister's Hue allows her to access the Resonant Network."
Ellira's brows lifted slightly, her curiosity piqued. "Really?"
The Resonant Network—the term alone carried weight. Every Luminia knew of it, though few humans could truly interface with it. It wasn't merely a communications system. It was a hybrid lattice of photonic data streams, gem-based teleportation relays, and mag-lev transit grids—a luminous web threading through every city, nation, and orbital station on Earth.
But it also existed on a mental layer, a harmonic consciousness mesh linking those attuned to resonance. Thoughts, emotions, and sensory impressions could ripple across it as data, traveling faster than any signal.
Ellira turned toward Naia, now understanding why the air around her always carried that subtle, almost melodic vibration.
"So you can see what the world remembers," she said softly, not as a question but as a realization.
Naia didn't look up from the case as she adjusted her lenses. "Something like that."
The faint radiance of Naia's Hue shimmered across the containment case, casting ripples of gold and white over the scorched fragments. The air vibrated with a soft hum as the Resonant Network came alive—threads of invisible data connecting through her like veins of light. Tiny motes drifted upward, projections of memory and frequency encoded into the fragments.
Her pupils glowed faintly as layers of information unfolded before her—chemical traces, resonance frequencies, emotional echoes imprinted at detonation. Her mind sifted through the noise, aligning fragments of sound and light until the pattern revealed itself.
"I think I have the answer to your question, Elias," she said, her voice low but sure.
Elias, who had been pacing nearby, turned his gaze toward her.
"This bomb wasn't planted," Naia continued. "It was grafted. Into the bomber's body. Specifically, within an artificial socket system—something like an advanced synthetic Gem socket. It would've required remote activation."
She tapped the case lightly, and a projection appeared above it—a hollow image of a human nervous lattice interlaced with Gem circuitry, pulsing in crimson light.
"The socket's design made the bomb appear inert," Naia said. "Meaning the Vowwalk's detection protocols wouldn't have registered any threat. The system couldn't flag a dormant component."
Elias's expression hardened. "Remote activation," he repeated. "So whoever triggered it could've been miles away—maybe not even in the city."
Naia nodded. "Exactly. And there's more." Her fingers moved through the holographic feed, cycling through data strings. "The socket itself—at first glance, it looks like a Celestex design. Same composite weave, same stability matrix."
Ellira frowned slightly. "House Celestex—the corporation that manufactures synthetic sockets?"
"Yes," Naia said, "but after I accessed the deeper layers of the fragment's code signature, I found black-market metadata. Someone repurposed the design. This particular model could have been bought through the underground exchange."
Elias stepped closer, studying the hovering data projections. "Foreign gem powder," he murmured, "and an Obsidian resonance signature."
Naia blinked, surprised. "How did you know?"
"I've seen this pattern before," he said quietly. "Back during the Genova smuggling operations." His eyes darkened with memory, then he straightened. "I'm heading out. You two check the autopsy records—see if the remains match what you've found here."
"Elias—" Naia started, but he was already walking toward the exit, his long coat brushing against the light as the door hissed open and closed behind him.
The silence he left behind lingered, filled only by the faint hum of the Resonant lattice still dissolving around them.
Ellira glanced at Naia, hesitant at first. "Is he always like that?" she asked finally.
Naia sighed, a small smile tugging at her lips. "Oh, he can be worse."
Ellira's expression softened into something between amusement and empathy. "I'll keep that in mind."
Naia gave a faint laugh, her eyes still glowing with the residue of her Hue. "Trust me," she said, "you'll have to."
****
New Boston stretched across the Atlantic Crescent like a luminous crown of steel and glass—twelve vast districts encircling the harbor, all bound together by the Crown Line Tram Loop, a maglev artery that traced a shimmering crescent across the seawall terraces. Each terrace rose in stacked layers of arc-plates, vertical expansions of the megacity that curved like the petals of a colossal, luminous flower.
By the time Elias was back on the road, the city still pulsed under Amber Vigil—the emergency lockdown protocol that sealed districts until investigations cleared the threat. It had already lasted a full day, and its continuation meant only one thing: the bombing had roots deeper than anyone wanted to admit.
He guided his hoverbike along the gold lane, the restricted traffic line reserved for GSA operatives and emergency responders. The vehicle's hum merged with the low drone of surveillance drones overhead, their blue lenses cutting through the amber haze. The skyline shimmered—tower arcs catching sunlight that fractured through the high-altitude smog. Elias' destination was the Fracture Belt District.
Unlike the marble and glass of the inner arcs, the Fracture Belt was the underbelly of New Boston—a place where the city's veins bled light and industry. It was a shifting, half-forgotten zone, where abandoned factories fused with living ones, where scaffold towers leaned over melted roads, and where fracture storms—violent surges of raw gem energy—bloomed unpredictably across the skyline. The air here shimmered with unstable resonance, distorting light in oily hues.
Built directly above the Node-9 faultline, the district lay roughly 220° to 240° southwest along the Crown Line Loop, about twenty-five minutes by hoverbike, depending on the lattice flux—the electromagnetic turbulence that rippled through New Boston's infrastructure. The entire area sagged nearly three hundred meters below the Crown Line's standard elevation. From above, it looked like a massive scar across the megacity's flank—broken terraces, collapsed lattice bridges, and sub-level chasms that dropped into the undercity.
To reach it, Elias had to divert from the main loop and cut through the Verdant Emergency Causeway—a seldom-used access route lined with containment pylons and collapsed tram conduits. The causeway wound down through layers of damp concrete and fractured gemlight, where the air grew heavy with metallic scent and static charge. The deeper he descended, the more distant the civilized hum of New Boston became—until only the pulse of the Fracture Belt remained, a steady, dangerous heartbeat beneath the city.
As Elias crossed into the district, the world around him fractured into motion. The Breakline Avenue was alive—its pavement rippling with the unstable rhythm of the Node-9 reflexes that pulsed beneath. Segments of asphalt split apart without warning, exposing glowing vein-rifts where raw gem strata pulsed like open arteries. Vendors had learned to adapt—bolting their stalls to the ground with ratchet anchors, shouting over the metallic grind each time the street flexed. Steam vents hissed from ruptured conduits, carrying the faint, acrid tang of burnt lumenis through the smog-laden air.
Elias guided his hoverbike through the chaos, weaving between rust-scarred loaders and flickering street lamps that bathed the avenue in an unsteady amber hue. He slowed as the narrow lanes widened into the Glazier Yard—New Boston's infamous open-air black market. The place was a labyrinth of tarps and makeshift stalls, stitched together with cables and weathered canvas. Under the tarps, illegal gem recutters worked in silence, sparks flickering like fireflies as they reshaped contraband shards. Portable furnaces lined the alleys, each one breathing waves of distorted heat into the night.
Elias parked near the perimeter, scanning the crowd. Smugglers, tech-runners, and gem thieves moved like ghosts between the tents, their faces hidden by masks or augmented visors. Every shimmer of light hinted at a deal being made, a secret exchanged. The Glazier Yard had always been alive this way—too loud, too bright, and yet eerily quiet beneath the noise.
He couldn't shake the memory of the bomb's make. He'd seen the same composite alloy—Obsidian-resin matrix fused with synthetic socketing components—during a mission two years ago in the European Directorate. That case had ended cold, the trail vanishing into diplomatic cover stories. And now, the same design had surfaced here, in the North American Federation zone. The explosion at the Hall of Radiance couldn't be a coincidence. Someone was connecting the dots for him—just not the way he'd hoped.
Elias cut the engine and stepped off, eyes narrowing beneath his visor's spectral readout. He spotted movement near a pile of scrap—Boone, a lean teen in oil-stained coveralls, half-buried in a trash bin, scavenging for dead gemtech cores. Elias had messaged him earlier, though from the boy's expression, that hadn't made the meeting any warmer.
Boone straightened, squinting against the dim light. His mismatched cybernetic lenses clicked into focus, reflecting Elias's insignia.
"Great," Boone muttered, wiping grime on his sleeve. "You actually showed up. You know how bad it looks, having a shiny GSA officer walk through here like he owns the grid?"
Elias didn't answer right away. He simply looked past the boy, surveying the shifting market as the Breakline rumbled again. The tremor rippled through the tarps, and for a moment, it looked as if the entire yard breathed in unison—one vast, unstable organism.
"Do you have what I need?" Elias asked, his tone flat beneath the low hum of the market.
He ignored the wary glances from nearby vendors and scavvers—eyes that flicked between his uniform and the emblem on his shoulder. Reputation meant nothing here; results did. Boone shifted uneasily, glancing over his shoulder before slipping something into his pocket—a lumencard, thin as a wafer, glinting faintly with embedded circuits.
Elias caught the motion but said nothing. He followed as Boone drifted toward the outer edge of the Glazier Yard, weaving through the maze of flickering stalls until the roar of the furnaces dulled to a background hum. Only then did Boone stop, casting another nervous look around before jerking his chin toward Elias's wristband.
Without a word, Elias slid the lumencard into the Lumenpad mounted on his forearm. The device pulsed once, scanning the encrypted data. Holographic script and image fragments bloomed into view—schematics, personnel logs, location traces—each line unfolding with cold precision.
"Kestrel 'Kest' Muir, alias Anaya Muir," Elias read aloud. His eyes narrowed as the data streamed. "Former Celestex materials technician. Dismissed for conducting illegal facet-surgery research… manufacturing synthetic sockets."
He scrolled further until a grainy profile image appeared—a woman with streaked hair, angular features, and the sharp, restless look of someone too clever for her own good. The coordinates listed her last sighting deep within the lower sub-rings of the Fracture Belt.
"Sounds possible," Elias murmured.
He ejected the lumencard, crushed it between his fingers until its internal circuits flared and died in a brief spark of blue light. Without looking back, he mounted his hoverbike, the engine igniting with a soft whine.
As he sped off into the fractured glow of the district, the air behind him shimmered with the residue of burnt lumenis—silent proof that the hunt had begun.
****
Kest's workshop—the Orchid Forge—sat deep within Shardrow Alley, a narrow artery of steel and shadow where the air itself seemed to vibrate with gem dust. The alley wound beneath flickering conduit lights and rusted signage, lined with old tramcars that had been hollowed out and refitted into workshops. Cutters hunched over their benches, their hands glowing faintly as gem powder shimmered across their palms. Every clang of metal or hiss of fusion torches echoed off the low ceilings, trapped by layers of resonance—turning the alley's noise into a ghostly chorus of metallic bells.
The Orchid Forge was easy to miss: a converted hydra-container clamped beneath a shifting tram girder, suspended like an iron cocoon. The walls were ringed with sound dampers, their matte finish absorbing stray vibration, while the outer panels gleamed faintly with echo-suppressant resin, dulling every sound that touched them. Around the perimeter, dozens of glass talismans hung by threads of copper wire, catching light from the alley's dim glow and scattering it into cold, prismatic rays.
It was an old human custom, dating back to the first decades after the Luminia Arrival. People had believed that hanging glass could repel the aliens, reflecting their light at them. Superstition wrapped in craftsmanship. The belief had long faded, yet among the anti-Luminian fringe, it survived—a ritual of defiance disguised as ornament.
Elias slowed as he neared the boundary. The air changed—charged with the subtle hum of barrier fields and gem residue. He did not step through the talisman ring. Instead, he stood still, centering himself. Though he wasn't a Sensor like Naia, his own perception-based Facet was more than enough for this.
He exhaled, slowing his heartbeat until it matched the steady rhythm of the city's lattice flow. His right hand opened—fingers spread in a practiced motion—and a faint crimson shimmer bled from his skin. Radiant Vein-his perception focused Facet, activated.
Thin micro-filaments of plasma unfurled from his fingertips, invisible to the naked eye but radiant in his inner sight. They spread through the space like living threads, tracing every surface, every fold of metal and resin. The feedback came rushing in—a pulse of electromagnetic textures rendered in heat and shape within his mind.
In his perception, the world unfolded as a 3D heat-field—the tram girder above, the forge's inner walls, the resonance flow of hidden circuits—and there, at its center, a moving signature, faint but distinct. Someone was inside the Orchid Forge.
Elias kept his distance from the forge, positioned in the shadow of a fractured girder, but his visual perception—enhanced by his Facet—rendered the scene in sharp, radiant detail. The world before him shimmered in layered gradients of energy and motion.
Through the walls of the Orchid Forge, he saw her.The woman's lattice network—the web of living energy channels that ran through every gemcrafter's body—glowed like a constellation beneath her skin. It pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, fine threads of light branching through muscle and bone. Elias traced the lines where her lattice converged upon her socket anchors, the embedded organs that allowed humans like him—and his sister—to interface with their Gems. At each junction, pulses of light surged and receded, proof that her internal flow was stable and active.
His gaze shifted outward, scanning the perimeter of the workshop. The talisman field surrounding it wasn't just decorative superstition—it was functional. Each glass ornament suspended along the boundary resonated faintly, refracting ambient light into geometric prisms. Now he could see why: the glass was not glass at all, but a low-grade Gem, reprocessed into translucent wards. Their combined frequencies wove an invisible barrier, humming with controlled resonance—a clever use of outdated tech and old fear.
Elias's perception deepened as he studied the barrier's structure. The filaments of energy coiled around the Gems like threads in a loom, each strand anchored in resonant harmony—a delicate balance of physics and metaphysics.
To most, Gems were mere mineral marvels dug from the earth's mantle. But to Elias—and every true gemcrafter—they were far more than matter. Gems were crystallized laws—condensed metaphysical constants, born at the meeting point of three primal elements:
Aetheric Matter, the flawless lattice of physical perfection, structure bound to atomic symmetry.
Lumenis Flow, the living current of light, consciousness, and vitality that gave motion to existence.
Intent Memory, the emotional and conceptual echo of creation itself—the imprint of purpose forged into form.
When these three harmonized, the world's Resonance Laws condensed into tangible reality—a Gem—a fragment of universal will shaped by both nature and thought. And in that moment, as Elias studied the living lattice before him, he understood just how dangerously precise Kestrel Muir truly was.
While she was only a Resonant-tier Gemcrafter, Elias could tell from the density of her lattice and the sharp precision of her socket output that her expertise lay in weapon gems—and that made her dangerous. Skills like that wasn't about raw power; it was about precision, control, and timing. Whether she belonged to a Combat-class division or not, Elias wasn't about to underestimate her. In a place like the Fracture Belt, a single mistake could mean being cut apart by a gem-forged filament before he even saw it coming.
****
Kestrel Muir sat in the dim half-light of her workshop, her back propped against the rusted shell of an old cooker as the small screen above flickered with the ongoing Hall of Radiance bombing coverage. News anchors spoke in tense, clipped tones, their holographic overlays showing the shattered dome, the smoke, the wounded. The glow from the broadcast reflected in her coffee cup—rippled, distorted.
The lockdown meant no deliveries, no movement through the Crown checkpoints. Her supply runners were trapped, her buyers unreachable. For a woman who lived off the black market's rhythm, silence was more dangerous than chaos.
"Idiots," she muttered under her breath. She slid her tools aside and stood, the hem of her coat brushing the scattered gem shards littering the floor. Her movements were calm, but her mind ran hot with calculation.
She crossed into her workshop bay, cradling her coffee in one hand. Holo-screens flickered to life at her presence, illuminating schematics of socketed ordnance and energy matrices—her designs. On one of the blueprints, the pattern of the bomb casing matched the image flashing on the news feed.
"First New Geneva," she whispered, eyes narrowing. "And now New Boston…"
A bitter laugh escaped her.
Someone was busy using her creations. The composition of the detonation pattern and the lattice field distortion were all of her creations, yet Kest's current product moved on from that. She had abandoned those bombs due to the upgrade she had recently come across.
"Hopefully the GSA hasn't put two and two together," she murmured, taking another sip of her coffee as if it could steady her nerves.
But the faint tightening in her grip said otherwise. Deep down, Kestrel knew the kind of person the GSA would send if they had. And she knew he or she would already be on their way.
It was at that exact moment—mid-thought, coffee still warm in her hand—that a crimson-gold filament sliced through the ceiling. The blade was so impossibly thin it would have gone unnoticed by the naked eye. Only the ocular interface embedded in Kestrel's right eye caught the anomaly—a sudden spike of radiant heat and energy signature, threading straight through the upper floor.
She reacted on instinct, dropping the cup and diving to the side. The filament struck the metal plating where she'd been standing.
With a sharp pulse, it expanded, unraveling like a glowing thread of molten wire. A burst of electromagnetic discharge rippled outward, shredding her workshop's systems. Holo-screens burst into static. Power conduits screamed and died. The once-steady hum of her resonance engines guttered out in an instant.
Kest rolled behind the containment bench, her breath catching in the haze of vaporized dust. The smell of burnt lumenis filled the air, acrid and electric. She reached for her sidearm, eyes darting toward the breach in the ceiling.
Through the crackling residue of static, a shadow descended—lean, deliberate, framed by the dying sparks of the filament blast.
Elias Vasselheim landed lightly amid the debris, the faint glow of his eyes catching the drifting haze. His radiant vein eyes shimmered beneath, veins of gold threading outward from his irises like living circuitry.
He had already scanned the forge before entry—mapping its layered barrier field through spectral resonance. Finding its weakest point had been simple: a place where two talisman frequencies overlapped out of phase. A perfect opening.
From there, he had used his first Cut Facet, Ion Saber, to project a single filament of plasma, threading it through the gap in the barrier like a needle through cloth. Once inside, he detonated it—not to kill, but to disable. The resulting EMP pulse had overloaded every powered device within the workshop, silencing it in one calculated strike.
Now, standing amidst the flickering ruin of the Orchid Forge, Elias watched the bombmaker rise from behind her cover, eyes narrowing in recognition.