The magnetic door shivered again, a metallic whine that set Ravelk’s teeth on edge. It was a dying beast, trapped in the agony of a localized power fluctuation. Tavren, oblivious to the imminent danger of the shuddering alloy, stepped closer, his boots splashing through the thin, slick film of coolant leaking from the overhead conduits. The journalist’s eyes were wide, alight with a feverish, dangerous curiosity that looked entirely out of place in a detention block designed to crush the human spirit into dust. "You’re late," Ravelk said, his voice rasping against the humid, ozone-thick air of the cell. Tavren didn't look up immediately. He was busy tapping a sequence into his stolen data-slate, his fingers moving with the frantic grace of a concert pianist playing a concerto while the concert hall burned. "I’m not late, Ravelk. I’m precise. There’s a difference between arriving when you want to and arrivi

The magnetic door shivered again, a metallic whine that set Ravelk’s teeth on edge. It was a dying beast, trapped in the agony of a localized power fluctuation. Tavren, oblivious to the imminent danger of the shuddering alloy, stepped closer, his boots splashing through the thin, slick film of coolant leaking from the overhead conduits. The journalist’s eyes were wide, alight with a feverish, dangerous curiosity that looked entirely out of place in a detention block designed to crush the human spirit into dust. "You’re late," Ravelk said, his voice rasping against the humid, ozone-thick air of the cell. Tavren didn't look up immediately. He was busy tapping a sequence into his stolen data-slate, his fingers moving with the frantic grace of a concert pianist playing a concerto while the concert hall burned. "I’m not late, Ravelk. I’m precise. There’s a difference between arriving when you want to and arriving when the system is primed to let

The interrogation room was a brutalist masterpiece of cold steel and flickering, sickly yellow light. It was a space designed for the extraction of secrets, yet here, seated across from Chief Vane, Ravelk felt as though he were the one doing the excavating. Every time Vane leaned forward, the fluorescent tube above them buzzed like a dying hornet, and every time the man breathed, the air felt thin, as if the oxygen were being sucked out of the room to fuel the massive machinery deep beneath the Bureau’s floorboards."You look tired, Ravelk," Vane said, his voice a smooth, calculated baritone that grated against Ravelk’s senses. The Chief flicked a switch on the console. A holographic display hummed to life, projecting a wireframe schematic of the city. It wasn’t a map of streets or districts; it was a map of power nodes, glowing in pulsing blues and sickly greens. "They tell me you’ve been causing… disturbances. A few blown conduits in Block C.

The interrogation room was a tomb of high-frequency hums and cold, suffocating intent. Ravelk sat perfectly still, his wrists chafed by the magnetic binders that clamped him to the chair. Every muscle in his body felt like it was strung with piano wire, pulled taut to the point of snapping. Across the table, Chief Vane watched him with the clinical detachment of a scientist observing a volatile chemical reaction. Vane didn't see a man; he saw a variable. He saw a problem that required a specific, catastrophic solution."Let’s stop the dance, Ravelk," Vane said, his fingers tracing the edge of the holographic schematic. He tapped a node in the center of the city’s display. It pulsed red, a jagged heartbeat in the sea of stagnant blue. "You think you’re just unlucky. You think your life is a series of unfortunate events triggered by some cosmic spite. But in this city, there is no such thing as 'luck.' There is only infrastructure. There is only load, resistance, and the inevitable fail

The interrogation room had become a pressure cooker of static and suffocating silence. Chief Vane’s declaration hung in the air a cold, mechanical promise of integration. He wanted Ravelk to be a fuse. He wanted to shunt the city’s accumulated systemic rot through Ravelk’s own body, using his inexplicable ability to draw misfortune into himself as a drain for the city’s failing, overloaded grid. Ravelk looked at the red, pulsing node on the holographic map. It was a mirror, a reflection of the crushing weight he had felt in his own chest since he had arrived in this city. He realized then that his presence hadn't just been bringing bad luck; he had been acting as a magnet, drawing the inherent entropy of a crumbling civilization into his own aura. The Bureau hadn't caused his affliction; they had simply weaponized the byproduct of their own decay. "You don't get to choose who serves the architecture, Ravelk," Vane mur