Chapter 150

Richard

The tower was supposed to be secure. After everything, the filters, the sabotage, the vanishing clerks, the cathedral collapse, and the shifting council loyalties, we were supposed to have locked it all down. We had reinforced checkpoints, rotated patrol schedules, restricted elevator access, and sealed off tunnel mouths by the dozen. The entire tower complex was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

But the courier still made it to the tower steps.

He didn’t run or fight. When the patrol intercepted him at the eastern stairwell, he froze with his hands half-raised, not surprised in the slightest. Tucked inside his jacket was a split clapper, custom-fitted and sanded smooth. It had been shaped to emit alternating frequencies that didn’t match any standard bell pattern, but they aligned perfectly with the resonance signatures we’d recently traced to the Hollow tunnels. The man had slipped past two checkpoints and made it halfway up the tower before anyone caught him.

I arrived minutes later, just in time to see him loaded into the transport. He stared at me through the armored window like he already knew he wouldn’t be interrogated. Like he didn’t care. That unnerved me more than the device he carried.

The artifact was sealed. The rest of the contents in his satchel were cataloged as standard: cigarette papers, a bag of old coins, and a soft-covered notebook filled with fragmented notes and numbered phrases.

I was the one who kept the notebook.

I skimmed it in the back of the transport while the guards weren’t looking. One line had been underlined multiple times: "Serena’s legacy must be restored." Another scrawled note, buried deep in a page margin, read: "the erased child cannot remain forgotten."

That one hit me in the chest.

I closed the book and pocketed it. I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even Simon. Not yet.

Simon dismantled the clapper within the hour. He didn’t wait for a full report. He called me directly, voice clipped and tense. The tones weren’t ambient background noise. They were commands. Not words. Not language. Something older, deeper.

The device had been tuned to vibrate at frequencies that embedded instruction directly into the brainstem, effective only if the subject had already been conditioned to hear them. This wasn’t random signal corruption or paranormal interference. This was programming.

And it was surgical.

We met in the secure review room late that night. Just me, Simon, and Amelia. She kept glancing between us like she could smell what I wasn’t saying. I kept my expression calm, the notebook hidden in my coat pocket.

“I think they’ve been laying groundwork for years,” Simon said. “These sequences match the bell tones we recovered from the HVAC logs in the nursery and the filter compound vents. Someone has been threading these signals through infrastructure.”

Nathan stood at the map terminal and highlighted tunnel branches, their junction points glowing faint red. Every signal cluster connected to one of the known bell vaults. Every vault had been placed within range of old utility lines. There were no coincidences left.

“They were trying to turn the tower into a transmitter,” Amelia said. “Not just a beacon. A voice.”

I nodded, slowly. “And they knew we’d build around it. They wanted us to.”

She leaned forward, fingers drumming the edge of the table. Her eyes narrowed in thought, and for a moment I saw the shape of what she almost knew. She hadn’t seen the journal. She didn’t know about the name. Not yet.

And I wasn’t ready to let her.

When we returned to my office, the air between us was brittle. We were supposed to draft a joint statement. She was already loading projection logs onto the tablet. I didn’t sit down.

“We can’t release this yet,” I said.

She looked up. “We have to.”

“If we release it now, we’re confirming that the central tower was compromised.”

“Because it was.”

“Amelia.”

Her voice sharpened. “What happens if we wait and someone leaks it? What happens when people learn that we sat on this? Again?”

“There’s too much we still don’t understand. The signal mapping isn’t complete. We don’t know how many targets have been conditioned. If we release it without context, all we do is spread fear.”

She crossed her arms. “Fear they already have. You think not talking about it makes it go away?”

I stepped closer. “I think if we tell them now, we’ll lose our ability to investigate in silence. We’ll lose the chance to act before the Hollow adapts. If they know we know, they vanish.”

Her shoulders were tight. “You always think silence is strategy.”

“And you always think honesty is a weapon.”

Her jaw clenched. “You’re talking to me like I’m reckless.”

“No. I’m talking to you like someone who’s running herself ragged, skipping meals, pretending she’s not still lingering in heat. Pretending her scent isn’t all over every room she walks into.”

She froze. She didn’t breathe for a full second.

I lowered my voice. “You can barely sleep through the night. You can’t sit through a council meeting without sweating. And I’m supposed to pretend none of it’s real just because you say so?”

She turned her back on me. “You don’t get to use my body against me.”

“I’m not. I’m trying to protect it.”

“You’re trying to control it.”

The space between us snapped. I caught her wrist before she could pull away, and I kissed her. It wasn’t gentle.

She shoved me backward. I followed. Her mouth opened against mine, furious and wanting. I pushed her back against the desk. Her coat hit the ground. My hands found the heat beneath her shirt, the skin already flushed and damp. She was breathing hard, eyes glassy. I pulled her pants down, dragging them past her thighs, and didn’t wait. Her leg came up around my hip. She was slick already, grinding against the front of my pants like it hurt not to.

“Tell me,” I said, breathless. “Tell me what you need.”

She didn’t speak. She grabbed the waistband of my pants and dragged them down. I pushed into her in one hard thrust, and she gasped like it knocked the air from her lungs.

She clung to me, arms tight around my neck, hips grinding up into mine, like she wanted to crawl inside me. I rocked into her again, harder, deeper, and her voice cracked with a noise that wasn’t language. She came almost immediately, her body clenching around me so hard I could barely move. I didn’t stop. I lifted her onto the desk, adjusted my grip on her thighs, and drove into her again and again until she was panting and shaking and begging me not to stop.

“Again,” she whispered. “Please again.”

I reached between us and rubbed her clit in tight circles until she cried out. She came again, louder this time, head thrown back, fingers digging into my shoulders. She looked like she was breaking apart. I loved her most when she forgot to be careful.

Her eyes were glassy. Her mouth trembled. I slowed only slightly and kissed her again, gentler now, before shifting our bodies. I pulled her hips to the edge of the desk and fucked her slower, deeper. Her breath hitched. She held onto the edge of the wood like she might float away.

I came with a growl that spilled into her mouth, buried deep inside her, and stayed there until the tremors passed.

Eventually, I helped her dress again. Her hands were still shaking, and she leaned against me without meaning to. I held her up.

“You need to see Simon,” I said.

She didn’t meet my eyes.

“I mean it. If it spikes again, you let him examine you. You can't keep ignoring it, Amelia.”

“You’ll be there?”

“Every second.”

She nodded once, slow.

I didn’t tell her about the notebook. She couldn't handle it right now.