Chapter 10: The Director's Summons
The drip in the study was louder at night. It tapped against Aldric’s skull like a countdown. He waited in the shadow of a towering bookcase, listening until his father’s footsteps faded down the hall. The scent of burnt copper was stronger now, acrid.
He moved to the sleek comm console, its surface still warm. Corvin was meticulous, but arrogance bred blind spots; he’d cleared the active transmission log but not the deep cache. Aldric’s fingers, more used to a sword hilt, stabbed at the haptic interface. He bypassed the simple lock with a merchant’s son’s trick—a sequence of pressure taps on the bezel. The hidden log unfolded.
Director Strom’s face, pale and severe, flickered in a truncated replay. “…signatures are not just stable, they’re communicating. The resonance is from your estate’s own power grid. The child is tuning to it. This is a systemic risk. We need them now.”
His father’s smoothed-over reply. “The mother is frail. Travel could be fatal. We must be seen to care.”
Then, the key phrase, after Strom’s image vanished. Corvin’s own addendum to the physician, voice calm. “Use the Lorazepax. In her evening nutrient drink. I want them both placid for transport at 0200.”
0200. Aldric checked thechrono glimmering on the wall. 2337. He had just over two hours.
The hum of the estate seemed to sharpen, to focus. It was in the walls. The child was tuning to it.
He was out of the study and moving, a shadow in the too-bright halls. He didn’t run. Running drew attention. But his stride was long, purposeful, eating up the polished floor. A servitor drone whirred past, ignoring him.
He reached Anara’s suite. The door was, of course, not locked. Safety was a prison that rarely needed bars. He keyed it open and slipped inside.
The room was dim, only the soft glow of a night light near the bassinet. Anara was on the plush sofa, not sleeping. She had Leo against her shoulder, patting his back. The baby’s inner light pulsed gently, in no discernible rhythm. When she saw Aldric’s face, her own went still.
“They’re coming for you tonight,” he said, no preamble. His voice was stripped bare. “In two hours. My father ordered you sedated. Your evening drink.”
Anara glanced at the empty cup on the side table. She’d barely touched it; the artificial sweetener they used tasted like chemicals to her. “I didn’t drink it.”
“Good. That buys us a few minutes of surprise when they find you awake.” He was already crossing the room, looking for anything of use. There was nothing. Just soft furnishings and baby supplies.
“Where?” she asked, standing up. She moved quickly, but he saw the wince she suppressed. She was still broken, just better hidden.
“Strom’s facility. They think Leo is… talking to the house. Or the power core. It doesn’t matter. You can’t go there.” He stopped his frantic search. It was useless. “We have to go. Now.”
“Out of the spire.” Her voice was flat. “Past all your father’s security. Past Strom’s watchers. With a newborn. In two hours.”
“Yes.”
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You’re a terrible knight. This is treason.”
“It stopped being about orders the moment I pulled you off that wall.” He went to a wall panel, palmed it open. A small maintenance closet housed climate controls. Useless. “We need the service corridors. The arterial ducts for drone traffic. They lead to the lower utility bays.”
“You know the way?”
“I played in them as a kid. Before my father decided exploring maintenance ducts was ‘unbefitting.’” He turned to her. “It won’t be clean. It’ll be tight. Loud. Can you do it?”
Anara looked down at Leo. His amber eyes, so like her own, were open, staring at nothing and everything. A tiny, warm weight that meant everything and terrified her. She thought of the lab, the cold table. She thought of Strom’s impersonal curiosity. She bundled the baby tighter into a sling she’d fashioned from a blanket, securing him against her chest. “What other option is there?”
They moved.
Out into the hall, turning away from the main lifts, towards a section of wall that looked seamless. Aldric pressed hard on a decorative panel. With a sigh of stale air, it recessed and slid aside, revealing a darkened conduit smelling of ozone and dust.
The hum was deafening here. Thevery walls vibrated. Conduits of glowing blue energy snaked along the ceiling, casting erratic, jumping shadows. The passage was narrow, forcing them sideways in places.
“He’s… humming back,” Anara gasped, shuffling along behind Aldric. She could feel the tiny vibrations against her sternum, a feedback loop between her son and the pulsing grid.
“Don’t think about it. Just move.”
They descended ladders, crawled through access hatches. Aldric’s memory was a rough map, fragmented by time. At a junction, he hesitated, peering down two identical, throbbing corridors.
“Left,” Anara whispered.
“What?”
“Left. I feel it… the pull is weaker that way.” She wasn’t sure how she knew. It was a cold, empty sensation in the pit of her stomach where the resonance thrummed less.
He didn’t question. He went left.
They emerged onto a gantry overlooking a vast utility bay. Below, humming generator blocks the size of ground-cars sent waves of heat upward. Across the bay, a large freight door promised the outside. And standing between them and it were two estate guards, their backs turned, chatting.
“…odds on the Azure match?” one asked, his voice echoing.
“No bet. That team’s roster is fused,” the other replied.
Aldric put a finger to his lips, drawing his knife. It was a long, brutal combat blade, not meant for subtlety.
Anara’s hand closed on his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She shook her head, her eyes wide. Not killing. Not here. She pointed to a dangling service cable near the guards, then to a rack of canisters labelled ‘Coolant – Flammable.’
Aldric understood. He sheathed the knife, found a loose bolt on the railing. He took aim and hurled it.
The bolt clattered against the coolant rack with a sharp, metallic ping.
Both guards spun, weapons rising. “Who’s there?”
Aldric threw a second bolt, this one striking the high-tension cable. It swung, a pendulous distraction.
“Up there! Gantry!”
As the guards focused, Anara, moving with a medic’s terrible precision, pointed to a specific valve on the nearest generator block. Aldric drew his knife again, this time flipping it to the hilt. He threw it like a dart.
The heavy pommel struck the valve. It gave with a hiss, and a jet of scalding steam erupted, filling the space between the guards and the gantry with a roaring, blinding veil.
“Go, now!” Aldric hissed.
They scrambled down a service ladder, their feet hitting the oily floor. They ran, hunched low in the steam, towards the freight door. Aldric hit the manual release. Motors groaned in protest, but the huge door began to inch upward, revealing a sliver of the loading dock and the night sky beyond.
An alarm began to whoop, strident and deafening in the confined space. The blue lighting switched to a piercing, strobing red.
“They’ve sealed the perimeter!” a guard’s voice shouted, now alert and angry over the comms interference.
The door was only three feet up. Not enough. Aldric got his shoulders under it, his boots slipping on the floor, the muscles in his neck cording. With a guttural roar, he forced it higher, the hydraulics screaming. “Under! Now!”
Anara dropped and rolled under the crushing metal threshold, protecting Leo with her body. She scrambled up on the other side. Aldric let go and dove after her, the door crashing down where he’d been a second before.
They were outside. On the dark, wind-scoured landing platform. The city’s neon glow stained the low clouds. There were no ships. The platform was empty.
“They’ve grounded all civilian traffic!” Aldric yelled over the wind and the now-distant alarm. “They’ll have drones and interceptors up in minutes.”
Anara scanned the platform, despair clawing at her. Then she saw it. Not a ship. A large industrial waste disposal unit, a magnetized sled used for ferrying spent power cells to the reprocessing station on a lower tier. It was parked, unattended, its status light blinking green.
“That,” she said, pointing.
“It’s a garbage sled.”
“It goes down,” she shouted. “And it’s not on the flight registry.”
A grim, desperate smile touched Aldric’s lips. He sprinted for it, hauling himself into the open cockpit. Anara climbed in beside him, clutching Leo. The controls were simple: a lever for magnetic track engagement, a throttle.
Aldric shoved the throttle forward.
The sled lurched, then accelerated with unexpected speed along a recessed track that curved right off the platform’s edge and down the sheer face of the spire. The city yawned beneath them, a dizzying grid of light and shadow. Wind ripped at them, cold and tasting of ionized rain.
Anara looked back, up at the receding, lighted wound of the utility bay. Figures were there now, small and dark, looking down.
But they weren’t the only thing stirring. All along the spire’s facade, the regular pattern of service lights flickered. Then, in a wave that followed their descent, they winked out, then back on, as if a ripple of darkness was chasing them down toward the unseen streets below. A silent, systematic pulse.
Leo began to cry, a thin, reedy sound lost in the wind. Not a hungry cry. A distressed one, as if something loud and friendly had suddenly gone silent.
The sled plunged downward into the city’s hungry dark, the estate’s lights blinking ominously above them, a farewell in a language they were only beginning to understand.