Chapter 15 — A Clue in the Ruins

Emberfall Camp after the storm lay under a thin veil of sick-purple haze.

After last night's soul-resonance, the raging higher-dimensional negative-energy rejection in Elias's blood had miraculously settled. Though his face still carried the pallor of lost blood, his lake-green eyes held a cold clarity, sharpened as if all dross were washed away.

In a nearby corner, "Vespera" sat quiet by a pile of scrap machine-parts, head slightly bowed, wiping an iron shard with a worn soft cloth.

Morning light slanted through the corrugated gaps, falling on her long neck, refracting a near-translucent pallor. None could tie this thin, frail amnesiac refugee woman to the lofty God of Ending.

Only Umbra herself knew: beneath that seemingly calm surface, her higher-dimensional divine awareness ran with extreme precision.

That mortal boy's body-heat and will from last night still left a faint burning in her god-core's depths. This never-felt physical sensation had utterly disordered her originally absolute, cold calculus.

"An Anomaly whose home was erased…" Umbra murmured cold in her heart. "When fate drives him to the cliff's edge, when he sees with his own eyes the lofty scar of Law and absolute cruelty — how long can his foolish bond and fury hold?"

She would push this observation to its next stage.

Not mere observation — a cold, cruel experiment. Its subject was rising from the mud at her side, vengeance kindling in his breast.

"Lyra, how's the astrolabe reading?"

Elias walked to the low table at camp's center. On it lay a crude astrolabe pieced from silver-dust and fluorescent crystal; Lyra the off-orbit stargazer, lively and restless with silver-dust forever on her fingertips, was staring hard at the dial, her fine brows knotted.

"Strange… too strange!" Lyra looked up, brushed the hair from her forehead, revealing a face freckled somewhat. "Elias, since last night's radiation storm, the astrolabe suddenly threw up a bizarre micro-frequency decay pulse in the Decay Dead Zone's quadrant! That frequency's no natural ore-emission — more like some… some old-era military device sealed shut by higher-dimensional energy!"

"Old-era military device?" Caleb leaned in, roughly rubbing his military cybernetic eye. "A crashed Divine Court patrol's power-core?"

"No — older, and vaster!" Lyra bit her lip, agitated, sliding her silver-dusted fingertips. "That pulse is too faint, tangled in the sunk main-continent's gravity noise — my current model can't back-calculate its exact coordinates!"

Just then, "Vespera," who had been silently wiping scrap, stood.

She came over carrying a tray of polished old lenses, her clear-cold voice even. "If you nudge the Number Three deflection optical lens half a tick left, you might avoid the higher-dimensional radiation's refraction bias."

Lyra blinked, eyeing this "amnesiac refugee" with doubt. "Half a tick left? That's higher-dimensional star-track physics deflection calibration — how would a refugee know that?"

"I don't know…" Umbra's eyes passed, well-timed, a flicker of confusion and bewilderment; she lowered her voice. "I just looked at these lenses and the image suddenly popped into my head… maybe before I lost my memory, I tended a dashboard on some smuggler ship."

Lyra eyed her two seconds, but urgency to save her brother and passion for the star-chart won out; she immediately, per "Vespera's" hint, nudged the lens beneath the silver-dust astrolabe half a tick.

Hum—!

A miracle!

On the once-chaotic fluorescent astrolabe, the murky sick-purple halo instantly drew in, condensing into one exceedingly clear golden coordinate-point — nailed fast at the bottom of the great rift in Tartarus's sunk main-continent!

"Locked!" Lyra cried in excitement. "My god! This signal signature… it's the Akashic-grade black box! The top-frontline observation station's top-secret black box, used to record the planet's higher-dimensional parameters before Tartarus was destroyed!"

"Black box?!"

Elias and Caleb started as one.

As a survivor of Tartarus's destruction, Elias knew that black box's weight better than anyone. In that cataclysm, all communication and record were vaporized in an instant by divine edict; none knew what truly happened, only that the sky split and the whole world became ruin.

And this top observation station's black box held, complete, all the physical parameters, law-fluctuations, and energy sources of Tartarus's melting moment!

"There's the truth…" Elias's breath quickened; his fingers locked hard on the cutting blade at his waist. "The Divine Court claims Tartarus melted naturally from energy imbalance — but get that black box, and we tear the Divine Court's mask clean off!"

More — the higher-dimensional energy framework and cruising blueprints stored in the black box were the indispensable cornerstone for the mortal vanguard to forge its rebel weapons!

"We must go," Elias said, iron-certain. "Caleb, ready the squad's micro-pressure life-support canisters and heavy ropes — we go deep into the Decay Dead Zone now!"

"Kid, that place is the bottom of the sunk main-continent's rift," Caleb said, grave. "Cliffs up there collapse any moment; gravity anomalies can press a metal frame to a wafer."

"Even if it's hell below, I'll pry that black box out," Elias's eyes were cold iron.

"I'm going too!" Lyra shot up a hand. "The black box's higher-dimensional encryption runs deep — without my astral rune-decryption, you'd bring back a lump of scrap!"

"I'll come with you as well."

A clear-cold voice broke the brief silence.

All turned; "Vespera" stood quiet in the shadow, eyes clear and deep. "I'm sensitive to the rockfall sounds on the Decay Dead Zone's outer rim, and… I can sense micro-pressure gas leaks. With me, maybe I help you avoid the collapses."

Caleb frowned. "Forget it, girl — you can't even lift a cutting blade; you'd only drag the kid down."

But Elias did not refuse at once.

He turned; those deep black eyes locked on the woman who called herself "Vespera."

From the too-steady gait when first found among the star-wreckage, to the precise wild-path avoidance in last night's heavy radiation storm, to the "careless" higher-dimensional lens-deflection calibration just now…

Could an amnesiac refugee truly show, again and again, this calm and acuity above mortal knowledge?

The doubt long buried in Elias's heart grew now like a poison-weed. He faintly felt this seemingly frail woman wrapped a vast and dangerous riddle.

But he did not speak it.

In this universe of calculation and cruelty, the closer to truth, the more you must keep the danger under your own eye.

"Fine," Elias said slowly, breaking the air's stiffness. "You come with us."

Umbra's lip curved a faint, unseen cold smile.

She looked at the boy before her — wary yet resolved — and said cold in her heart: "Go, off-track anomaly. Go see with your own eyes the scar the gods left, see the truth you hate… just how despairing it is."

Half an hour later, a battered hovercar, daubed with lead radiation-paint, rolled out of Emberfall Camp and howled into the Decay Dead Zone shrouded in sick-purple haze.

The abyss opened its maw ahead; and mortal and god's fate, in the ruins torn by star-tracks, approached their cruellest crossing.