"Grab me, Lyra! Don’t let go!" I screamed, but my voice was a distorted glitch, a sound of tearing metal and radio feedback."I’m trying!" Lyra lunged again, her hands passing through my chest like it was smoke. She tumbled through me, hitting the wet pavement. "Elion, you’re vanishing! I can see the bricks through your heart!"I looked down at my hands. They were a jagged mess of golden pixels, vibrating so fast they hissed. Every time the Crown cruiser pulsed its blue light from above, another piece of my physical shell dissolved."Connectivity... thirty percent," I croaked. The air tasted like copper and old math. "I'm being pulled into the broadcast. Lyra, the bag! The Priest's satchel!"She scrambled toward the vegetative Inquisitor, ripping a leather pouch from his belt. "What am I looking for? It’s just rocks!""They aren't rocks!" I fell to my knees, though I couldn't feel the ground. I was a ghost floating in a world of solid objects. "Aether-Crystals. Raw. Give me one!"Lyra

"Walk like you own the air, Adrian," Lyra whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the Academy’s anti-grav lifts. She looked out of place in the shimmering hallways, a scavenger draped in stolen silk, but her eyes remained sharp. "If you stumble, the sensors will see the static. And if they see the static, we're dead."I straightened the high-collared tunic of the Royal Academy, the fabric embedded with micro-conductors that felt like needles against my skin. "I don't just feel like a ghost, Lyra. I feel like a fraud.""You aren't a fraud. You're a ghost in a dead man's suit," she snapped, checking her data-pad. "The biometric loop is holding. To every scanner in this building, you are Adrian Vance, son of the High Chancellor. Act like it."We stepped out into the Grand Atrium. It was a cathedral of glass and gold, but the air didn't smell like incense; it smelled like burning silicon and ozone. Hundreds of students moved in synchronized patterns, their eyes glowing with th