The day begins in silence.
No school bells ringing.
No lecture casts.
No automated patrols moving down halls reminding students to hydrate or scan their bands. The system is not down—it's withdrawn. Watching. Waiting. Gathering force like a held breath.
The silence is not natural.
It's the kind of quiet that belongs to ruins, not schools.
And yet, Lunaris High still stands.
Still shines.
Still breathes.
But underneath, everything is changed.
I feel it in the halls.
In the way that students walk quicker but talk less. In the way that the normally humming walls give off weak static bursts now—like they're attempting to keep up with the shift but aren't sure what language to speak. Even the air seems thicker. Like every molecule is waiting.
Jin tells me not to linger in open areas.
They're inducting rankers into shadow teams," she speaks over a scrambled comm. "Handing out loyalty points for assisting them in flushing out 'deviants.'"
"Students?"
"Students with power."
"Or students who support me?"
She hesitates.
"There is no difference anymore."
Three students vanish by noon.
One from Dorm West. One from the infirmary. One person I passed in the corridors yesterday was erased from the system. No file. No rank. No record.
Nessa calls it shadow purging.
She tells me not to panic.
But my hands won't quit shaking.
Lio comes upon me at the vent stacks, crouched behind the boiler shaft, hands on chilled metal. He doesn't say anything. Simply sits down next to me, shoulder to shoulder.
Eventually, I say, "Do you think I'm doing this right?"
He's slow to answer.
"There is no 'right.' There's just 'through.' And you're still on your feet."
I nod.
But I don't feel stable.
That evening, the glyphs on my arms pulse wildly.
Miko blames it on the city grid rebelling. Trying to trap me. She builds me a stabilizer coil—a ring I can wear that bleeds excess energy into a containment loop. It hums against my skin like a second heartbeat.
"It won't hold indefinitely," she cautions.
"It only needs to hold until I break them first."
Voss gets back on the air the next morning.
This time, she's on every screen.
Not a voiceover.
Not a thinly veiled threat.
Her face appears, completely still, carved of poise.
Black-robed Strata enforcers loom statue-like behind her.
"Sera Vane is no longer a student at this institution," she says. "She is a hostile actor, a destabilizing force, and an instrument of civilian unrest. Anyone who aids her will be treated as an accomplice."
She pauses.
Smiles—barely.
"To those who are loyal: you are the future. The rest will be erased."
The school divides within hours.
A few students shed their rank badges and slide into silent revolt. Others—those who value order, or power, or simply survival—fall in with Voss.
Tensions escalate quickly.
Two boys brawl outside the kinetic wing.
One of them bleeds sparks.
The other doesn't rise.
By nightfall, patrols have doubled.
Drones hover above each stairwell.
But I move still.
Because I must.
I find a new message graffitied on the hallway wall outside the food lab.
"We remember. We rise."
Next to it, my glyph.
Made tidy.
Precise.
Replicated.
And beneath it, dozens of printed handprints.
Later, I'm sitting with Nessa in the old lecture pit, now set up as an operations hub.
She's tense. On guard. She's seen this before—momentum and then crackdowns. She calls this the tightening phase.
"Control always surges before it collapses," she says. "You can't back down now."
"I'm not flinching," I say to her.
But she sees my hands.
They won't quit trembling.
Lio arrives with new intel.
Voss is relocating a command array to the rooftop observatory—an antique control hub with access to long-distance broadcasts. If she can get it online, she can override the city network, make us out to be terrorists, and close down every sympathetic channel we've built.
I say we should move.
Miko disagrees—it's premature.
Jin offers to take her position in heading the strike.
But I shake my head.
"No more hiding. I go."
They don't argue.
Because they see what I already know.
If I'm the face of this, I have to walk into the fire.
We move at night.
Lio takes out the perimeter beams.
Nessa redirects the patrol loop.
Miko injects a looping override to lock out the suppressor array for ninety seconds.
I take the last stairwell alone.
My glyphs thrum under my sleeves.
The observatory door is open.
Too easy.
I step inside.
Voss is already here.
So are two Strata guards.
She doesn't look surprised.
"Expected sooner," she says.
I don't say anything.
"Did you think you could stop this with tricks? With words? With sparks and slogans?"
I meet her gaze.
"No," I say.
"Then what's your plan, child?"
I raise my hand.
And every screen in the observatory goes white.
Miko's override takes hold.
The guards stop in mid-step, trapped in stalled shockwave fields.
And I speak—not to Voss.
But to the city.
To the channels she thought were still hers.
"People of Velatrix," I say.
"My name is Sera Vane. They told you I didn't exist. That I was broken. That I was weak."
I take off my stabilizer ring and let the glyphs burn white-hot.
"They were wrong."
By the time my voice has finished echoing over rooftops and walls and private terminals, it's too late for silence.
The signal is out.
And the city is listening.
Even Voss knows it.
Her smile tightens.
"You don't win by being loud," she says.
"No," I say. "But sometimes you start by being heard."