Lysander's people didn't carry weapons. They carried resonators. Smaller, cruder than the bronze Spin, but each one humming with a different, pure frequency. They moved past the stunned enforcers, ignoring Charlotte's shouted orders, and placed their devices against the Chamber housing, against pipes, against the very walls of the shaft.
One by one, they activated them.
A deep, grounding hum arose. A higher, cleaving harmonic. A third that felt like sunlight. They were the other notes of the chord. The missing harmonics.
The Stillpoint Spin, fed by this sudden chorus of sympathetic vibrations, blazed back to life, its light no longer flickering but burning steady and strong. The tone from the port deepened, broadened, becoming rich and complex.
On the monitors, the change was dramatic. The screaming waveform didn't vanish, but it was now entangled, woven through with the healthy harmonics. It was no longer a weapon; it was becoming part of a terrible, discordant, but whole piece of music.
The silver corruption in the Vitae column didn't recede, but it stopped spreading. It swirled, contained, as if held in a net of sound.
Charlotte stared, the null-field projector shaking in her hand. "This is… chaos! You're destroying the extraction process!"
"No," Lysander said, his voice ringing in the shaft. "We're stopping you from destroying the source. You can't control a song, Charlotte. You can only join it, or silence it forever. You chose silence. We choose the song."
He looked at Sage and Valentine. "It's not enough to dampen the scream. We have to replace it. We have to hold this chord, amplify it, until the Chamber itself remembers how to sing. Can you lead them?"
The weight of it settled on Sage. Not a lone act of sabotage, but the conductorship of a desperate, impromptu orchestra. He met Valentine's eyes. She gave a sharp, determined nod. Her discipline was now bent to this single, wild task.
"We can," Sage said.
The battle was no longer one of force, but of frequency. The Spire's control room would be fighting to reassert the single, screaming note. Their job was to hold the space for the symphony, against all the power the Syndicate could bring to bear.