The night was thick with river-mist. From the broken warehouses along the waterfront, the city's lights shimmered like dying lanterns, refracted in the black water where the bridges should have stood. Every creak of timber or lap of wave sounded magnified, as if the world itself had grown more hollow, every echo too loud in the absence of stone arches that once tethered the districts together.
Rienne Solas walked alone, her crystalline arm wrapped in linen. She could still feel it glowing faintly beneath the cloth, its strange pulse tied to the rhythm of her heart. She tried not to look at it. Tonight, her thoughts could not bear it.
She carried a case of brass and glass tucked beneath her other arm. Heavy. Familiar. The second Resonator.
Her steps drew her farther from the warehouse where Lyra and Kael rested, where the Codex waited like a sleepless oracle. She had told them she needed air. That was true — but the deeper truth pressed against her ribs like a blade: she had come to decide the fate of her invention.
If she cast it into the river now, the fractures might ease. If she destroyed it utterly, perhaps the Veil would settle, the city spared another night of calamity.
And yet… it was the only tool they had. Without it, they were blind.
The choice weighed heavier than the case itself.
She found herself in the shadow of the old Foundry Arch, one of the last remaining industrial chimneys along the river. The arch had no bridge anymore — only jagged supports jutting from the water, reaching to nothing. The ruins of steel frameworks twisted like broken ribs.
Rienne set the case down on the stones and sat beside it. The mist clung to her hair and the crystalline prosthetic glowed faintly through the linen.
She remembered the first Resonator — the grand one, built in her youth with the arrogance of brilliance. It had hummed with promise the night she activated it, its glass rods and brass coils singing like a choir. She had thought herself on the edge of discovery, about to chart new laws of physics.
Then the screams had come. Entire neighborhoods had lost days. People awoke not knowing the sun had passed, unable to account for missing hours, for meals they never ate, for wounds that had appeared without cause. Some said they saw themselves in the mirror and the reflection did not move.
Rienne had carried that weight ever since.
Her crystalline arm — fused with alien glass when the Resonator imploded — was the most intimate reminder. She flexed her fingers now, hearing faint cracks like ice shifting. Sometimes at night, she felt them grow longer than her flesh, shadows of fingers that reached into dimensions she could not see.
The Resonator case gleamed in the moonlight.
Destroy it, she thought. End this cycle.
But another voice, colder, rational, whispered: And what then? Let the Codex guide you blindly, while the Veil unravels at its own pace?
She pressed her forehead to her knees.
Footsteps scraped behind her. She startled, hand flying to the case.
It was Kael. His armor flickered faintly as it always did, caught between ruin and repair, between existence and erasure. He stood at the arch's edge, watching the water with the posture of a soldier keeping vigil.
"You shouldn't walk alone," he said. His voice carried a weight that could cut stone.
Rienne forced a tight smile. "And you shouldn't follow scientists who need to think."
"I follow comrades who carry burdens too heavy."
Her breath caught. She wanted to retort, to shrug him off, but the sincerity in his scarred face stilled her tongue.
Kael stepped closer. His gaze fell on the case. "The machine."
"Yes."
"You mean to destroy it?"
"I don't know." Her voice cracked, raw. "If I keep it, I risk tearing the Veil wider. If I destroy it, we lose our only means of seeing what's happening. Either way, I damn us."
Kael knelt beside her, resting his heavy hands on his knees. His armor flickered through states — one moment dented and burned, the next gleaming with heraldic etchings. "In my world, we often swore oaths before battles. We swore to protect, to endure, to hold ground. But no oath was ever clean. Every choice was shadowed. Sometimes we defended one city by letting another burn."
Rienne's chest tightened. "So you're saying sacrifice is inevitable."
"I'm saying choice is what makes us human — even when the cost is unbearable."
She looked down at her arm, the crystalline glow pulsing beneath the linen. "But what if the choice is between becoming a monster or watching the world fall apart?"
Kael's eyes softened. "Then you fight to master the monster before it masters you."
He rose and left her with the river, the mist, and her silence.
She lingered there until the hour before dawn. The mist grew thick enough to veil the opposite bank, where lanterns burned like distant stars. The air carried the faint scent of iron.
Then — impossibly — she saw it.
A bridge.
Not stone, not steel. A bridge of shimmering glass stretched across the water, forming arch after arch like frozen waves. It glowed faintly in the mist, its surface transparent, every span reflecting a fractured sky.
Rienne staggered to her feet. The Resonator case hummed, vibrating faintly. Her crystalline arm answered, glowing brighter until the linen shone through.
She could not resist. She opened the case. The Resonator's coils quivered, brass filaments shivering like struck strings.
The phantom bridge sharpened in the mist. She heard voices — laughter, cart wheels, footsteps — as if people were crossing. But the bridge was empty. Echoes of memory, or of futures denied.
Her heart hammered. This was the proof: the Resonator revealed fractures, yes, but also glimpses of what might be restored.
She reached out her glass fingers. The phantom bridge pulsed brighter, as though waiting for her touch.
And then — it shattered.
The vision collapsed into shards of light that fell into the river and vanished with a hiss. The Resonator case went still.
Rienne fell to her knees.
Dawn cracked the horizon in pale gold. Lyra found her still sitting by the arch, the Resonator case at her side. Her eyes were red from weeping, though she tried to hide it.
Lyra crouched quietly, her cloak brushing the stones. The Codex was clutched to her chest, always breathing with silent ink.
"You've been out here all night," Lyra said softly.
"I saw a bridge," Rienne whispered. "Not real, but close. As if the Veil was showing me what it wants. What it could give back. If I can learn to control this—" She tapped the case. "—then maybe we don't have to lose everything."
Lyra tilted her head, eyes searching Rienne's face. "And if you can't?"
"Then the fractures worsen. And I become the monster my reflection promised."
Lyra was silent a long moment. The river lapped gently against stone, as if listening.
At last she said, "Then it's still better than blindness. The Council will never trust you, Rienne. But Kael and I do. If this Resonator is our only candle, even if it burns us, we must carry it."
Rienne's throat tightened. She looked once more at her crystalline hand, flexed the alien glass that pulsed like a heart. She imagined hurling the case into the river. She imagined smashing it against the stones until brass and glass bent beyond repair.
But she did not.
She lifted the case, hugged it to her chest, and whispered, "Then I will master it. I swear it. Not out of pride. Not out of fear. But because if I turn away now, I abandon more than myself. I abandon hope."
The Codex stirred in Lyra's arms. Words scrawled across the open page without ink or hand:
"Choice binds. Choice scars. Choice creates."
Rienne stared until the letters blurred.
The Scientist's Choice was made.
That evening, in the warehouse, she laid the case on the table before Kael and Lyra.
"I won't destroy it," she told them. "But I won't let it destroy us, either. Every test will be under my hand alone. If it begins to harm, you end it — even if that means ending me."
Kael's jaw tightened, but he inclined his head. "I will honor your oath."
Lyra touched the Codex gently, as though calming a restless animal. "Then let this be recorded: three Veilbearers bound not by fate, but by choice."
The Codex answered with a whisper of parchment: "The oath deepens. The Veil listens."
Rienne shivered. For the first time, she felt not just fear in her glass veins, but something sharper: resolve.
The Resonator would not be her shame any longer. It would be her weapon.
Whether the city hated her or worshipped her, she would carry this burden.
Because choice, once made, was heavier than stone.
And hers had been made beneath the mist of a vanished bridge