I woke not to light, but to vibration.

  It didn’t travel through the air — it came up through the floor, seeping into my bones as a fine, maddening itch that made me want to claw my own skin off. The crystal in the inner pocket of my jacket, hanging at the head of the bed, answered with a dull hum. The sound wasn’t mechanical; it was like the buzzing of a disturbed swarm of insects trapped inside a bone vessel.

  Efrem wasn’t inside. His bed — a heap of old rags and dry straw — had already gone cold. The door to the shack stood ajar, and fog crept in through the gap, twisting as it moved. Today it was different: dense, heavy, with an unnatural yellowish tint and a sharp aftertaste of burnt bile and ozone.

  That’s what death smells like when it comes from the Order’s alchemical foundries.

  I bolted outside without even lacing my boots. Icy dew soaked my socks instantly, biting into my feet, but I barely noticed. Efrem stood at the very edge of the bog, where moss gave way to a black mirror of stagnant water. His old pipe lay in the mud. He himself was frozen in place, hunched, staring into the gray murk.

  “Has it started?” I asked. My voice cracked on the first syllable.

  “Sooner than I expected,” he said without turning. His shoulders were tense, as if he were holding up the collapsing roof of a mine. “You drank from the circuit too greedily last night, boy. You didn’t just survive — you tore a hole in the ether the size of a house. To them, that’s like a ripped-out tooth. The Order isn’t hunting us. They’re patching a breach in their network — and we’re inside the cleanup zone.”

  I followed his gaze.

  A couple of versts north, above the broken crowns of dead trees, the Fan was unfolding. Five hovering search Spheres moved in perfect formation. From their crystalline pupils, fan-shaped beams of the Light of Truth stabbed into the fog, combing it methodically. Wherever a pale ray touched water, steam burst upward, accompanied by the dry crackle of mana discharges.

  “We run?” I reached for the crystal.

  Efrem caught my hand. His fingers were cold and hard, like forged clamps.

  “If you wake it fully now, they’ll pinpoint us in a heartbeat. The crystal is your second pulse now. If it starts beating at full strength, they’ll see you in their mirrors like a flare of white fire in absolute darkness. Understand? Your life depends on how quietly you can breathe — and how deeply you can bury that light inside yourself.”

  He spun around sharply and strode back toward the shack. There was no trace of old age in his gait — only animal, desperate resolve.

  “Pack everything. Food. Water. Copper shunts for the crystal. We’re abandoning the shack. If they find it empty, they might log it as a deserter’s den. If they find us inside, they’ll burn the sector down to bedrock with alchemical fire. You have two minutes.”

  I burst inside.

  Panic came in hot waves. I grabbed a canvas bag and started throwing everything into it. My hands wouldn’t obey. The toolbox slipped free and shattered across the floor. I cursed and dropped to my knees, scooping clamps and coils of wire straight out of the dirt.

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  My gaze snagged on the table — a forgotten mug with yesterday’s unfinished brew still stood there. A dead fly floated on the surface.

  Yesterday, that table had felt like an anchor. Almost like a home.

  Now it was just a pile of rotting boards inside a purge zone.

  I slipped the crystal back into my inner pocket, fastening every button. It warmed my skin through the shirt, and the heat felt ominous — like pressing a smoldering coal to my chest.

  When I burst back onto the threshold, Efrem was dousing the corner of the shack with a viscous liquid from a flask. The smell hit hard — ammonia and turpentine.

  “What is that?”

  “An alchemical veil. This filth eats mana and warps etheric traces. We’ll blind their Eyes for an hour or two.”

  That was when the sound above us changed.

  The low hum of the Spheres was cut by a sharp whistle. From the fog to the right, a black shape emerged.

  A Hunter.

  A high-speed bone golem of the Order, purpose-built for killing in fog. Its hull, coated in a matte compound, looked like a hole punched through reality. Heavy magical discs beneath it drove the air so violently that the last scraps of the shack’s roof were torn away.

  “Into the water!” Efrem roared.

  We plunged into the viscous muck beneath the roots of a fallen oak. The icy water knocked the breath from my lungs. Above us — no more than five steps away — the Hunter hovered.

  Through gaps in the roots, I saw the crimson crystalline pupil rotating in its head. It moved smoothly, like an insect’s eye. A beam of the Light of Truth slid across the door, across the shattered mug on the table.

  My heart was pounding so hard I was sure the golem could hear its rhythm.

  And then the crystal woke up.

  It vibrated at a tempo that didn’t match my heartbeat. A hum filled my skull, resolving into a flat, emotionless whisper of hundreds of voices. My mind — trained to think in calculations and vectors — interpreted the noise as a directive:

  “Object 4-0-9. Stream synchronization. Initiating Protocol ‘Shadow’. Searching for Zeno resonance…”

  The pain was like red-hot drills being twisted into my ears.

  Reality warped.

  The fog overlaid itself with a grid of force lines. Trees became gray outlines. The bulk of the golem above us turned transparent, exposing a pulsing core — a beating heart of liquid silver and runes.

  “Quiet,” Efrem pressed my head into the mud. He could see the faint green glow bleeding through my jacket.

  The Hunter froze, focusing on our hiding place. It sensed the anomaly. From its bone undercarriage, a needle extended, its tip igniting with a crimson tracking seal.

  “If it fires the marker, they’ll find us even in hell,” Efrem hissed. He pulled out a mirrored shard wrapped in copper wire — a crude mana absorber. “When I say now, run for the channel. Jump the hummocks. Follow the yellow reeds.”

  The drone began to descend.

  “NOW!” the old man screamed.

  I lunged forward, slipping on roots, tearing my palms raw. Behind me came a dry crack — then a shriek from the golem, rising into a thunderous roar.

  The forest exploded in corpse-blue light.

  The shockwave slammed me into a hummock. I tore through sedge as red points flared in the fog — activated warding seals.

  The crystal howled in my pocket.

  Tree outlines shattered into rune lattices. Water looked like flowing code. And in that chaos, the voice came again — clear, human.

  Zeno’s voice.

  “Run to the triangulation node, boy. Don’t let them close the circuit. Efrem knows… Efrem is not the exit…”

  I froze, waist-deep in icy water. My heart was ready to burst.

  “Zeno?” I croaked.

  The fog was empty.

  A column of black smoke rose above the shack. The Fan’s searchlights were tightening their ring. Five Spheres were turning the bog into a cage.

  Efrem was nowhere to be seen.

  I was alone — with a burning stone in my chest and the voice of a dead man in my head.

  Ahead, another rumble rolled in — reinforcements flying toward the Fan on heavy winged chimeras. I had maybe thirty seconds before the Spheres burned the fog away and turned me into a perfect target.

  “I’m sorry, Efrem,” I whispered —

  and dove underwater, hoping the layer of silt would smother my magical pulse for just a moment longer.