The chill in the abandoned subway station was a damp, bone-deep cold that had nothing to do with the rain outside. They had found refuge in the darkness, a ghost station that hadn't seen a train in over a century. The air was thick with the smell of stagnant water and decay. Sounds from the city above were a distant, muted rumble, the ghost of a world they no longer fully belonged to.
Ronan sat on the edge of the derelict platform, tending to a deep gash on Zara's arm, his usual witty banter replaced by a grim focus. The encounter with Kael had shaken them. It was one thing to fight guards or evade security systems; it was another thing entirely to fight an enemy who could weaponize your own perception of time.
"His power isn't just an attack," Liam said, his voice echoing slightly in the cavernous space. He was pacing back and forth, trying to map the feeling of Kael's temporal distortion. "It's a scalpel. He doesn't overpower you; he just… edits you out of the fight for a second at a time. How do you defend against an enemy who can make you forget you're in a fight at all?"
"We don't," Zara said through gritted teeth as Ronan tightened the bandage. "We don't fight him. We avoid him. Which means we need to move faster. We need the other components, and we need them now." She looked at the list Silas had given them, which Ronan had transcribed into a small notebook. "Next up: 'never-been-used vacuum tubes from a pre-Shattering radio'. The vendor said they belong to Orville Finch."
While Ronan had been patching her up, Zara had already been at work on her encrypted data-slate. "I've been digging," she said, pulling up a file. "Orville Finch. Old money. Made his fortune in early audio technology decades ago. Now he's a complete recluse. They call him the 'Collector of Lost Sounds'. He lives in the penthouse of the Artagan Tower downtown, a fortress that makes the Society's security look like a picket fence. Biometric scanners, pressure plates, automated defense turrets. A direct assault is suicide."
"Can you read the probabilities of his security?" Liam asked Ronan.
Ronan shook his head, frustration etched on his face. "It's all shielded. Too much tech, too much wealth insulating it. It's like trying to read a book through a lead wall. There's no luck, good or bad, to be found there. It's a sterile environment."
A familiar silence fell between them. A brute-force attack was impossible. A luck-based infiltration was off the table. That left only one, unconventional path.
"We can't break in," Liam said slowly, an idea forming in his mind. "So we have to be invited. Or, at least, we need a key. Not a physical one." He looked at Zara. "We need something he owned. Something he touched. Something with a strong memory."
It took Zara half a day of calling in favors and navigating the city's web of information brokers. Finally, she returned with a small, unassuming object: a dusty, framed copy of a fifty-year-old magazine. The cover story was a profile on a much younger Orville Finch, a brilliant, idealistic inventor hailed as the future of audio technology. The picture showed a young man with a bright, hopeful smile, holding a strange, intricate device of brass and copper wiring.
"It's the best I could do," Zara said, handing it to Liam. "It's the original copy from the magazine's archives. He held it for the photo shoot."
Liam took the frame, his fingers tracing the glass over the faded image. It was enough. He found a quiet corner of the station, sat down, and placed the magazine in his lap. He closed his eyes, filtering out the echoes of the station itself, and focused all his senses on the object. He reached out with his mind, not to ask a question, but to listen to the story the object had to tell.
He fell into the past.
He felt the flash of the camera bulbs, the reporter's fawning questions, the confident pride of the young inventor. But this was just the surface. Liam pushed deeper, following the psychic resonance from the man to the device he was holding. And that's where he found the true story.
He was no longer in the subway station. He was in a sunlit workshop, filled with schematics and the smell of solder and ozone. He *was* a young Orville Finch, his mind alight with a singular, desperate purpose. He wasn't building a commercial product. He was building a miracle. He was building a sophisticated acoustic device designed to bypass conventional hearing and transmit sound directly to the brain's auditory cortex.
And he was building it for his younger sister, Elara, a girl with bright, intelligent eyes who was slowly being enveloped by a world of silence due to a degenerative condition. Liam felt Orville's desperate love for his sister, his frantic race against time, the burning conviction that his genius could save her from her fate.
Then the memory shifted. It was the day of the test. Elara was there, a nervous but hopeful smile on her face. Orville made the final adjustments, his hands trembling with anticipation. He activated the device. For a glorious moment, it worked. Liam felt Elara's shock and joy as she heard the first clear note of a piano, a sound she hadn't heard in years.
Then came the tragedy. A single, flawed vacuum tube—one he'd pushed past its limits—overheated. It caused a catastrophic feedback loop. Liam experienced the moment not as an observer, but as Orville. The high-pitched, unbearable shriek. The smell of burning electronics. The flash of blue fire. The shattering of glass. Elara's scream of pain.
The accident didn't just fail to cure her; it created a violent sonic blast that destroyed what was left of her hearing instantly and permanently. The event shattered their family, leaving Orville with a burden of guilt that became the core of his existence. He became a recluse, his idealism curdling into a bitter, obsessive need to collect the world's "perfect sounds," the very thing he had failed to give his sister. He wasn't a collector; he was a penitent, forever surrounding himself with the ghosts of his failure.
Liam pulled back, gasping, the emotional backlash hitting him like a physical blow. Tears streamed down his face—not his own, but the echo of Orville's fifty-year-old grief.
"Liam? What did you see?" Ronan asked, kneeling beside him.
"His ghost," Liam whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "The ghost in his machine."
They couldn't blackmail a man with a tragedy like that. It would be a monstrous act. But Liam's discovery had given them a different kind of key. Not one of coercion, but of connection.
Their new plan was far more dangerous than a simple heist.
That night, they stood before the Artagan Tower. Getting inside was the first hurdle. "There's a maintenance power grid for the top three floors," Ronan explained, looking at a schematic on his datapad. "During the nightly diagnostic, it reboots. For exactly ninety seconds, the emergency generators kick in, and the security system is at its most vulnerable. It's a one-in-a-thousand chance that a city-wide power fluctuation could happen at the same time, causing a total system crash." He grinned, rolling his dice. "I like those odds."
They waited. At exactly 2:17 AM, the lights on the top of the tower flickered. "Now!" Ronan yelled. Zara shot a high-tensile grappling line to a maintenance balcony, and they ascended, the city sprawling beneath them like a carpet of stars.
They found Orville Finch in his private museum. It was a vast, silent room, filled with gramophones, Edison cylinders, towering pre-Shattering radios, and a thousand other artifacts of sound technology, all kept in pristine, silent condition. In the center of it all sat an old man, his face etched with a profound loneliness, listening to nothing.
"Who are you?" Finch demanded, his voice raspy from disuse as he rose to his feet. "How did you get in here?"
"We're not here to rob you, Mr. Finch," Zara said, her hands held up to show she meant no harm. "We're here to trade."
"I do not trade," he snapped, his hand moving towards a panic button on his desk.
"We need a set of unused cryo-vacuum tubes," Liam said, his voice cutting through the tension. "From a Zenith Model 7G605 Trans-Oceanic radio."
Finch froze, his hand hovering over the button. "How could you possibly know I have those?"
"The same way I know about Elara," Liam said softly.
The name hit the old man like a physical blow. All the arrogance and anger drained from his face, replaced by a deep, hollow shock. "You have no right to speak her name."
"I know about the device you built for her," Liam continued, stepping forward. "I know it worked, just for a moment. I know you were trying to give her the world. And I know the guilt from that day has been the only sound you've truly heard for the past fifty years."
Finch stared at him, his defenses utterly shattered. He wasn't a fortress anymore; he was just a broken old man, his deepest wound laid bare. He sank back into his chair. "What do you want?" he whispered.
"The tubes," Liam said. "We need them for something important. Something that might help fix a small piece of this broken world."
Finch was silent for a long time. Finally, he nodded towards a reinforced display case. "There. In the back." He looked at Liam, his eyes filled with a desperate, pleading hope. "The device I built… the prototype. It's in my workshop. If I let you take the tubes… will you… can you use your ability on it? Tell me what you see. Tell me if she was happy, even for just that one second."
They followed him to the workshop. The device was there, a twisted wreck of brass and melted glass. Liam placed his hand on it, and this time, he didn't need to search. The memory of that one, perfect, successful note, and the pure, unadulterated joy on Elara's face, flooded him.
"She heard it," Liam said, his voice full of an honesty that transcended his power. "And it was the most beautiful sound in the world to her. She was happy, Mr. Finch. You gave her that."
For the first time in fifty years, a genuine, tearful smile touched the old collector's lips.
They left with the vacuum tubes. As they prepared to depart from the balcony, Finch stopped them one last time. "The final piece on your list," he said, his voice raspy. "The phylactery. Be careful. I collect things that were once alive with sound. The Curator of the Silent Sanatorium… he collects things that were once alive with souls. And his collection is far more possessive than mine."