The vial sat on Sage's table, a tiny captive storm. Its light pulsed irregularly, a sickly silver compared to the steady azure glow of his rationed Aqua Vitae.
Corrupted potential.
Lysander's words echoed. Sage plugged the data-chip into his pad, bypassing the standard Syndicate OS with a few clumsy, self-taught commands. A map rendered. It was the old pre-Desiccation hydrological chart, but overlaid with new markers. A path snaked from the Low-Sector, through the derelict Ironheart Foundry, and into a warren of old flood-control tunnels that ran deep, beneath the official Aqua Vitae conduits.
The destination was marked: The Echoing Font.
Valentine would call it a trap. A spontaneous, careless leap into the dark. She'd be right.
He poured a drop of his pure Aqua Vitae into one dish, and a drop from Lysander's vial into another. Using his scanner's public-analysis mode, he ran a basic comparison.
The rationed Vitae read as 99.98% pure H2O with trace, stable energy signatures. Perfect. Inert.
The corrupted sample was a chaos of readings. Unstable isotopes. Spiking magical resonance. It was water that had been… stressed. Forced.
A soft chime came from his door panel. The official log. A message from Regina Altureign.
Pendragon, V. – Re: Northern Tunnel Scan Discrepancy. Your device's data-wipe has been remotely verified. Stand by for potential re-assignment to Surface Conduit Maintenance. Efficiency reports are paramount. – A.
They were checking. They were moving him. Isolating him from the "crack."
Sage looked at the map, then at the two samples. One was a lie of purity. The other was a dangerous truth.
The routine was a trap. The curiosity was a compass, however perilous.
He sent a single, encrypted line to a frequency Lysander had embedded in the chip: I'm in.
Then he began to pack.