The rain had stopped twenty minutes ago, but the streets still held its memory—black asphalt slick with reflected neon, puddles trembling every time a car rolled past. Ethan Cross checked the delivery app clipped to his handlebars. One more order. Just one, and then he could go home and pretend his life made sense for eight hours of sleep.*Westbridge Towers, Apartment 41C. $4.20 tip.*He almost laughed. Four dollars and twenty cents for a forty-minute round trip through traffic that smelled like wet concrete and exhaust. He'd take it anyway. He always took it anyway.His phone buzzed with a text from his landlord. He didn't open it. He already knew what it said—he'd read three versions of the same message over the past week, each one a little less patient than the last. Rent was twelve days overdue. His bank account had eighty-three dollars in it, and forty of those were already spoken for by a gas tank that hadn't been full in a month.He pedaled harder, not because the order was ur

The image was gone, but it had burned itself into Ethan's mind with perfect clarity—every street, every turn, every layer of the city peeled back to reveal the thing buried beneath it. He sat in the dark of the warehouse for a long moment, hand still tingling where the ring had quieted itself, and ran through every reason this was insane.He had no money. No home. No job. A countdown he didn't understand ticking somewhere in his chest like a second heartbeat.He had nothing left to lose. That, more than courage, was what got him moving.The map had shown him a station. Not one he recognized by name, but its shape matched something he'd seen once on an old transit map taped to the wall of a pizza place—a station marked *closed* decades before he was born, swallowed up when the city rerouted its rail lines after some accident nobody talked about anymore. It took him two hours of walking through emptying streets, sticking to shadow, checking constantly over his shoulder for the black sed

The pendant felt warmer than it should have, sitting heavy in Ethan's palm in the dust-choked dark of the abandoned building. He turned it over, fingers tracing the engraved crest, the same one burned into the ring fused to his hand, and felt something shift in his chest he didn't have a name for. Not quite recognition. Something closer to a question finally finding its shape."Follow the resonance,"* Astra said, quiet inside his mind.As if in answer, the pendant pulsed—faint, rhythmic, a heartbeat of its own. Ethan closed his hand around it and stepped back out into the city night, letting that pulse guide him the way the ring's map had guided him before, deeper into a part of the city he'd delivered food through a hundred times without ever once suspecting what lay beneath it.The trail ended at a cathedral that had been boarded up since before Ethan was born, its stone facade crumbling, stained glass windows long since shattered or stolen. He slipped through a gap in the fence sur