Pressure shifted. Their "creativity" was now demanded on a deadline. Charlotte wanted progress on entropy stabilization and null-field projection.
Roxana took to lingering in their lab, her sarcasm a needle probing for leaks. "Working on your lullaby for the angry giant?" she asked, watching Sage model harmonic interference patterns. "It's sweet, really. Trying to sing it to sleep. But some things don't want a lullaby. Some things just need a stronger cage."
She picked up the fossilized spiral stone from Sage's desk, where he'd left it as a "curiosity." Her fingers traced the pattern. "Pretty. Like a snail shell. Helpless thing, really. All that effort to build a perfect little home, just to be crushed." She set it down with a sharp click. "Don't get too attached to pretty ideas, Pendragon. They're fragile."
Her warning was clear. Their every move was being aesthetically judged, and found sentimentally lacking.
That night, via the waste hatch, they received a package. Wrapped in sound-dampening cloth was a resonator—a foot-wide, perfect bronze casting of the Stillpoint Spin, its lines filled with what looked like clear crystal. A note from Lysander: "Sing with this. The river provides the voice." Included was a thin, surgical injector tool, designed to pierce a service port on the Chamber housing.
The plan was no longer abstract. They had the pattern, the resonator, and the tool. All they needed was the pure Vitae to charge it, and a moment of catastrophic distraction.