Chapter 38 The Resonance of Blood
Chapter 38 The Resonance of Blood
The dark result of Jorren’s file didn’t just cause anxiety for Voras. It scared her. She feared that if she let Jorren exist as he had been all this while, the system would crumble. So, she made it a personal vendetta to catch him.
But she had a problem. As far as she was concerned, Jorren had gone invisible. Her seal had failed, and the only person capable of tracking him was being inconsistent. She didn’t have time to convince Davan Rell.
With the current state of things in the Spire, Sel Voras decided she no longer needed to operate within the rules of the Evaluation. She had lost Jorren’s signature to the deadzones, and her desperation to find Jorren forced her to do the only logical thing she thought possible.
She turned her gaze to the only logical tether remaining.
Karyn Thale, Jorren’s sister.
Jorren was standing in the shadows of a venting pipe. He watched a group of Spire Justicians clad in matte-black armor patrol the perimeter of the communal living block. They were not looking for a criminal. They were looking for an individual who had gone ghost.
Kael, the lead scavenger he had marked in the shattered fields, emerged from the steam of a nearby laundry vent. His gear was practically invisible to the Spire sensors, but to the naked eye, it looked like junk.
“There is trouble, Thale,” he started.
“What happened?” Jorren urged him to continue.
“They moved her,” he said. “Your sister. They termed it a mandatory soul evaluation. She was dragged out of the infirmary an hour ago, and she’ sbeing held in the fifth-tier detention center.”
“An evaluation for a non-candidate,” Jorren’s jaw tightened. “That is a breach of the civic code.”
“I don’t think Voras is checking her soul,” Kael said. “They are using her as a tuning fork. They want you to get close enough for them to detect your signature. The moment you step into that block, the identity seals will scream your name across the entire ridge.”
Then it dawned on Jorren. Sel Voras was adamant to find him. It was in that moment that the instruction of the Codex made sense. But he wasn’t going to abandon his sister. He was going to intervene, but he won’t do it as himself.
He pulled the Codex from the ether and the silver pages flipped frantically unti they settled on another diagram of a hollowed Vessel. His strategy was to breach the center, and he would use Kael to do it.
He pressed his hand against Kael’s chest, subtracting Kael’s presence further, then weaved a thread of his own negative resonance into the marble’s gear. Now, Kael would be a messenger carrying a silver of Jorren’s consciousness. But if the seals detected the foreign frequency, both of them would be erased.
Jorren sat in the filth of the sub-levels and closed his eyes. His vision shifted, and he was now seeing through Kael’s eyes, a grainy grey scale world of cold metal.
When Kael walked through the first gate, the identity seals hummed, sensing the void that walked through, but they were trained to detect the presence of a Thale signature, not the absence of a person.
Kael moved like a shadow through the corridors of the detention center until he arrived at cell zero to find Karyn. He leaned against the bars, pretending to check a maintenance panel. Karyn looked small against the barrier of the containment field with a pale face and eyes wide with a fear she struggled to hide.
“Karyn,” Kael whispered, the voice that followed coming as a low, resonant echo of Jorren’s. “Don’ t look. Just listen.”
“Jorren?” She froze, a flicker of hope crossing her face. “Where are you? They said you were… you failed. They said you’re dangerous.”
“I’m close. I am going to get you out, but I need to read the seal first. You need to stay perfectly still for me to do that.”
Jorren used the Codex to scan his sister’s architecture through Kael’s eyes, and what he saw made his blood run cold. Floating above her heart was a jagged, purple glyph. The dead man’s seal, a high-level spire trap designed by someone with a master’s understanding of “Negative Resonance.”
The seal was tethered to Jorren’s specific frequency, acting as a proximity trigger. If Jorren stepped within forty feet of his sister, the seal would read the negative resonance as an attack and instantly collapse, consuming Karyn’s entire soul to fuel a localized explosion.
Sel V0ras had turned his sister into a human landmine that only he could detonate.
“Jorren,” Karyn whispered, noting the sudden, cold silence. “Jorren, what’s wrong? Tell me what is going on.”
Back in the sub levels, Jorren’s eyes snapped open. He stood up and paced the length of the space around him. He was sweating, his chest tightening with fury. Voras used his sister to set a trap for him, and while he had already cut ties with his old life, this was not something he was prepared to allow.
The light from the codex made him stop, and when he turned, a page was open. When he got close, the text on the page made his fury grow.
Observation recorded: the system has weaponized the anchor. Proximity = Lethality. Emotional variables can compromise structural integrity.
When Jorren stopped pacing, his body trembled slightly with anger. He knew that Voras was doing everything in her power to find him because he wasn’t just against the system. He was defying it. Voras didn’t know this yet, but she knew Jorren’s absence was trouble.
What Voras and the other people loyal to the system didn’t know was that Jorren was not pulling away from the system. He was developing independence, and he was doing it by learning how to play the math. He was going to show Voras what happens when the equation reaches zero.