Two days after the incident, your entire body is a tuning fork. You move gingerly through alleys and avenues, every nerve calibrated to the numinous. The city is not supposed to hum, and yet you taste the high pitch of Ley current in your teeth, feel the ultraviolet itch of static in your scalp whenever you're within a kilometer of a power substation. The Nexus artifact rides at the bottom of your battered satchel, double-wrapped in cloth and paranoia, but it makes little difference now. Something in it—something in you—has been permanently rewired.
You work hard at appearing unremarkable. Not quite invisible, but at least a little less than real. You favor delayed showers and low-rent synthetic blends, clothes that the olfactory circuits in the overhead drones can't get a bead on. Your walk is an asymmetric algorithm of self-occlusion, sharp angles and imperfect pacing designed to defeat pattern recognition. To a practiced observer, you'd be the embodiment of suspicion—but everyone here is too busy surviving their own noise.
You've got quarters in North Lumina, the artist's block, owing more to proximity than taste. At 1:17 AM, you're slouched in your mold-farmed armchair, triple-locked windows cracked just enough for the city's wet light to seep in. Your scar itches under the gauze, a constant glow that makes you flinch whenever you reach for anything metal. There's a letter on the table, every sharp edge of its existence repellent and electric. It arrived in your mailbox at dusk, gold sigil embossed on the envelope, addressed in a cartographer's hand to:
FAIRVIEW, A.
C/O HISTORICAL SOC.
PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
You stare at the thing as if it's a trap—not because you suspect forgery, but because its existence presupposes your own. Eventually you break the seal with your left thumb, careful not to let the light fall on your right hand. The contents are briefer than expected:
MR. FAIRVIEW,
YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED AT THE ARCANUM. BRING ALL PERTINENT ARTIFACTS.
EVALUATION AND INDUCTION TO FOLLOW.
SIGNED,
D. LYRA VEXINGTON, PH.D.
ACTING PROVOST, ARCANE ACADEMY
You trace the sigil with the tip of your tongue. Taste is always the first sense to go. Every part of you wants to ignore the summons—for a day, an hour, or forever. You could let it disintegrate in the composter and tell yourself the city has plenty of Guardians already. But the scar in your palm contracts, and you know the artifact would never let you.
Come 4:53 AM, the city's kinetic architecture is at its most restless. You shoulder your pack and set off, navigating the birth-pale streets by memory and reflux. The Arcanum is technically a museum, but everyone calls it the Conjunction—the old world's cathedral, fused into a neoplastic hive by generations of remakes. Its security gates are supposed to be impassable, but the letter acts as a skeleton key; the scanners don't so much as shiver as you pass. Marble floors absorb your tread, and the walls are already watching with intention.
The lobby crackles with ley induction, and the only person inside is a woman waiting behind the black stone desk. She wears her hair like an accusation—short, severe, gleaming unlike any natural pigment. Her eyes are raw mercury, irised with little vortices of violet. You recognize the academic insignia as much as the chip on her shoulder.
"You're early," she says, voice colorless but not unkind. "That's good. I dislike inefficiency."
You nod, keeping your hand buried. "I didn't have much reason to wait."
She glances at your bag. "You have it with you."
It isn't a question.
You consider denial, then decide on a lesser sin: "I haven't stopped shaking since the activation. I figured it was safer here than in North Lumina."
That gets the tiniest arch of an eyebrow. She hands you an access badge, iridescent and warm in your palm. "Follow me. We're in the clean suite today."
The elevator has no buttons. She palms a tablet, and the doors whisk open to swallow you both. On the descent, she doesn't bother with pleasantries. "You're the fifth spontaneous conduit we've seen in two years. All local. All Nexus-affected. But your pattern is… anomalous."
You try not to look at your palm, which is blowing faint little kisses of blue through the gauze. "I don't remember agreeing to be special."
The provost's mouth twitches. "Nobody does. But here you are." The elevator doors sigh open. The hallways are glass and pastel, every vector designed to disorient and pacify. You pass two observation cells disguised as display rooms; each one contains, briefly, a cross-section of magic's detritus: a spinning drone dripping iridescent oil, a hunk of ancient obsidian pulsing with algorithmic script, something that might once have been a flower but now registers only as blur to the naked eye.
She leads you through a lattice door and into a laboratory that smells like ozone and sand. The walls are textured to absorb vibration. A single desk holds a white ceramic tray, empty except for instruments and calibration meters. Dr. Lyra Vexington gestures, and you know better than to hesitate. You place the cloth-wrapped artifact on the tray.
In this light, the artifact looks as if it's only pretending to be inert—every facet vibrating just a nanometer out of sync with the world. The concavity where you'd pressed your palm is now perfectly molded to your hand. Even through the cloth, you feel it pulling, eager, hungry.
Vexington pushes up her glasses, revealing a lattice of silvered tattoos along her temples. "Do you know what this is?"
You recount what you've read, what Professor Evergreen told you, the theories that kept you awake before the artifact took that job for itself. She listens, brain on overdrive, fingers dancing across her tablet as you speak.
At one point you say, "I think it's like a router for Arcane Ether. Or a receiver. And I think it's somehow… alive."
She looks up, eyes sharp. "Not alive. But yes, aware. This is the first one that's made contact directly—no interface, no buffer." She leans in, and you smell coffee and heated circuitry. "Show me your hand."
You peel off the gauze, revealing the blue scar wreathed in networked veins. The phosphorescence is soft, but pulses at a regular interval now—almost like it's trying to communicate.
Instead of recoiling, Vexington snaps an image, then runs a stylus along the edges of the scar. "No rejection. No necrosis." She's muttering to herself now, but you catch it: "He might survive."
You swallow, abruptly parched. "So… what now?"
She glances up, a feral delight barely kept in check. "I want to see what happens when you touch it again. Are you ready?"
Every molecule in your body wants to run but something else—some deeper, nastier thing—wants to know. You nod, and she removes the cloth with the same deliberate reverence as a bomb technician.
You press your right hand to the artifact.
The sensation is nothing like the first time. Instead of detonation, there is a sense of boundaries collapsing: you are the crystal, and the crystal is you. For a brilliant, impossible second you perceive the world recursive—fractaled into meaning, every vein of ley-current mapped and indexable down to the femtometer. You see Dr. Vexington as she is: haloed in magnetic signature, every breath a rainbow of probability. Beyond the lab, the city's drop towers are tense with contained power; deeper still, an erratic heartbeat ripples under the entire province, errant and sick.
You pull away, breathless, blinking rainbows in the dead air.
Vexington's face is pure shock, but her voice is hungry. "What—what did you see?"
You describe it, as best you can, and realize that the words are insufficient, like describing a new color to someone who's never seen the spectrum. Still, she absorbs it all, nodding faster with every word.
She's about to ask more when there's a knock at the lab door. You both freeze: security protocol dictates zero interruption in these matters. The door creaks open, and Professor Evergreen enters, his craggy features drawn into a twin mask of concern and curiosity.
Vexington is up immediately. "Arden, he's attuned. Full resonance. The theory is confirmed."
Evergreen doesn't acknowledge her triumph; his gaze is on you, the scar, the trembling in your fingers. "Are you stable?"
You test your pulse, your vision, the air. Everything is vivid, but you feel… possible. As if your body knows something your mind won't catch up with for days. "I'm fine," you say, and it's true.
He nods, cautious satisfaction in his eyes. "Good. Then you're ready for the next phase."
You almost laugh, because of course there's a next phase. There always is.
Vexington is already preparing a sheaf of forms, each page brimming with legalese and warnings. "You'll need to sign these. Release of liability. Consent to treatment. Informed participation in the Academy's research program." She glances up. "Once you're in, you're in, Mr. Fairview. This is not a reversible condition."
You look to Evergreen, then back to the artifact, pulsing quietly in the tray.
A part of you wants to run back to your damp apartment, hide the artifact beneath floors and forgo sleep for a week. But the larger, truer part—the one that's fused into your bones—wants every desperate answer.
You sign the forms. Each letter of your name spins fine blue filaments across the page.
Outside, the city drones begin their day, striping the sky with possibilities. For once, you want to see what kind of world you can survive. Or make.