The west arboretum was another world inside the cavern. The air grew thick and wet, clinging to his skin like a second layer. It smelled of rich, dark soil and flowers so sweet it was almost rot. Seraphina led the way, her blue robes a calm river flowing through the chaos of green. Kaelen followed, with Orion chattering at his side and Lucius Thorne a silent, predatory weight at his back. His goal was simple: pass the test. Make a dead flower bloom.
They stopped in a small clearing. In the center, on a raised bed of black soil, sat the most unimpressive plant Kaelen had ever seen. It was a single, gnarled stem of dark, woody fiber, studded with what looked like thorns. At its top was a single, tightly closed bud, the color of a deep bruise. The Chronoblossom. It looked less reluctant to bloom and more like it was already dead. This was the lock he had to pick, and the key was a feeling he didn’t have.
— The principle is harmony, not force, — Seraphina said, her voice soft. She gestured to the plant. — Find the quiet space inside you, Kaelen. Let your resonance reach out and invite the bloom to open. Don’t command it. Persuade it.
Orion Vale gave him an encouraging thumbs-up. — Think of your happiest memory and push it right into the stem! That’s what I do. Sometimes it works!
Lucius Thorne said nothing. He simply crossed his arms, a faint, smug smile on his thin lips. He was waiting for the fraud from the outer districts to fail, to prove that all this talk of “unique perspective” was just Seraphina’s sentimental nonsense. The pressure was a physical thing, a tightening in Kaelen’s chest.
Kaelen stepped forward, his boots sinking slightly into the soft earth. He stood before the dormant Chronoblossom. This was it. The performance. He closed his eyes, faking the meditative posture he’d seen the other Seers adopt. He slowed his breathing, mimicking calm, focusing on the steady, thrumming beat of the Athenaeum that vibrated up through the ground. Outwardly, he was a picture of concentration.
Inside, his mind was a storm of tactical analysis. He calculated the angles of observation. Lucius was at his ten o’clock, partially obscured by a broad-leafed plant. Seraphina and Orion were at his two. He had a blind spot, small but usable. He let one hand drop to his side, his fingers brushing the pocket where the obsidian charm lay. He could try. He could actually try to focus, to feel something.
The thought was absurd. It was snake oil. He was an auditor, not a mystic. Data was real. Resonance was a fantasy.
He made the choice. He would not rely on faith. He would rely on a tool. He shifted his weight, a subtle movement, turning his body just enough to shield his right side from Lucius’s view. The price was clear: if he was caught, his mission, his life, it was all over. He was trading the slim chance of genuine success for the high-risk certainty of a lie. His fingers closed around the cool, smooth metal of his cracked data-slate.
He pretended to adjust his robes, his hand disappearing into a deep pocket. The slate’s surface was cold against his palm. With practiced, minimal movements, he activated the screen. The light was shielded by the fabric of his pocket. His thumb moved across the cracked glass, inputting the command sequence he had prepared. It was a simple override, a burst of targeted energy. He keyed in the frequency: 1.21 gigahertz. A hard spike of energy, invisible to the naked eye, designed to shock a plant’s biology into a stress response. He pressed execute.
For a second, nothing happened. Kaelen’s heart hammered against his ribs. A cold sweat broke out on his neck. He had miscalculated. The system had failed.
Then came a soft pop, like a cork leaving a bottle.
The Chronoblossom erupted. It was not a gentle unfurling. It was a detonation of life. The bruised, dark bud exploded outward into a starburst of petals the color of liquid gold. A cloud of glittering, shimmering pollen billowed into the air, catching the dim light of the arboretum and turning the clearing into a swirling galaxy of tiny, brilliant suns. The bloom was unnaturally perfect, impossibly vibrant.
— Whoa, — Orion gasped, his voice full of genuine awe. — I’ve never seen one do that! It’s like a firework!
Kaelen opened his eyes, feigning a slight dizziness from the “effort.” He looked at Seraphina. She was staring at the bloom, her mouth slightly open. Then she turned to him, and a slow, truly impressed smile spread across her face. Her trust in him, he could feel it solidifying. It was a warmth in the air, a shift in her posture from mentor to peer. He had moved deeper into her world, a positive step on the board that felt like a slide into quicksand.
— Remarkable, Kaelen, — she said, her voice quiet. — Truly a radical resonance.
He had succeeded. The lie had worked. The infiltration was secure.
But Lucius Thorne was not smiling. His rival’s eyes were narrowed, his head tilted. He wasn’t looking at the flower anymore. He was looking at Kaelen. Lucius, the proceduralist, the man who understood rules even if they were mystical, saw not a miracle but an anomaly. The bloom was too fast, too symmetrical, too explosive. It wasn’t harmony; it was a violation. Kaelen could almost hear the gears turning in his rival’s head, the cold logic of suspicion clicking into place. He felt Lucius’s gaze as a physical audit, a hostile scan that found a critical error. The man’s suspicion, Kaelen calculated, had just jumped by at least 25%.
That was the cost of his unsubtle success. He had won Seraphina’s trust by earning Lucius’s certainty.
As they walked away from the glittering, impossible flower, a sharp, lancing pain shot through Kaelen’s temple. The power draw from the slate, though brief, had not been without consequence. The air around his hand smelled faintly of ozone, a smell no one else would notice, but to him it was the lingering scent of his fraud.
— With that kind of focus, — Seraphina said, falling into step beside him, — you could help me with a real problem. The lower-level archives are a mess of discordant records. I’m granting you access. See if you can bring some of your… harmony… to them.
He had his reward. He had a key. He was being invited deeper into the system he was meant to corrupt.
The last of the golden pollen settled on the broad, dark leaves of the surrounding plants. The air was still and warm again.
