The West Wing of the High Tower was a sanctuary of silence, far removed from the smoke and screams of the Arena. Here, the air tasted of expensive jasmine and sterilized mana-filters.
I was no longer in a common recovery ward; I had been moved to the Solaris Suite, a gilded cage reserved for those the Royal Family wished to either honor or dissect.
"The Princess will see you now, Lord Valerius," a voice chimed.
It was a Clockwork Automaton, its brass joints silent, its face a porcelain mask of unchanging serenity. It pushed my hover-chair through a set of heavy doors carved from white spirit-wood.
Inside, Princess Aurelia sat by a floor-to-ceiling window, the afternoon sun catching the gold embroidery of her gown.
She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at a holographic projection of the Voss Archive heist. Specifically, she was watching a frame-by-frame replay of Vane using the portable Void-Siphon.
"They call it 'The Glitch'," Aurelia said, her voice soft but carrying the weight of a mountain. "The sensors couldn't categorize the energy. It wasn't mana. It wasn't thermal. It was... an absence."
She turned her chair. Her eyes were a piercing, unnatural violet—the result of the Aurelian Gene-Mod, a royal lineage trait that allowed her to perceive the "flow" of reality itself.
"Supervisor Vane tells me you were 'lost' in the Maintenance Sector last night," she continued, standing up and walking toward me. Each step she took felt like a pulse of gravity. "She believes you are the one who did it. My Father's advisors believe you are a dying spark. I... I believe you are a Variable."
She stopped inches from my chair. She didn't reach for my jaw like Seraphina had. She reached for my chest, her fingers hovering just over the location of my Void-Core.
"Your vitals are failing, Cassian," she murmured. "Your heart rate is forty beats per minute. Your cellular density is dropping. By all laws of Imperial Medicine, you should be a corpse."
"I... I am trying... Highness," I wheezed, letting my head drop back against the headrest. I allowed the Fragility Draught to push my body to the absolute limit. A cold sweat broke out on my brow. "The Void... it doesn't... let go."
"Show me," she commanded.
"Highness?"
"Stop fighting it," she whispered, her eyes glowing with violet light. "Stop holding the it together. I want to see what happens when the 'Zero' is allowed to breathe."
This was the trap. If I let the Void-Core flare, she would see the it. If I didn't, she might use her own mana to "stimulate" my heart, which would cause a violent reaction that could kill us both—or reveal my true strength.
"Vane," I signaled through the shadow-link. "I need a diversion. Now."
"Master, I'm blocked. The Royal Guards have— wait. Mina is in the ventilation. She's dropping the 'Static-Cloud'."
Suddenly, the lights in the Solaris Suite flickered. The holographic projectors hissed, the image of the heist dissolving into digital snow. The Princess frowned, her focus shifting for a fraction of a second to the ceiling.
In that heartbeat, I acted.
I didn't flare my power. Instead, I inverted it. I used the Void-Core to suck the heat out of my own blood, turning my skin an ashen, deathly grey. I let a genuine, violent convulsion rack my frame, my hand catching the Princess's wrist as I "collapsed" forward.
"Help... me..." I gasped, my voice a hollow rattle.
As my skin touched hers, I allowed a tiny, microscopic sliver of Void-Residue to pass into her. Not enough to hurt her, but enough to "blind" her Aurelian vision. To her, it would feel like a sudden, numbing cold that wiped out her ability to sense mana.
Aurelia gasped, pulling her hand back. For the first time, her royal composure broke. She stumbled, her violet eyes wide with a fear she hadn't felt since childhood.
"The... the cold..." she whispered, clutching her arm. Her vision was clouded; she couldn't see the "flow" anymore. She could only see the pale, shivering boy in the chair.
"Guards!" she called out, her voice shaky.
The doors burst open. Seraphina was the first through, her ice-rapier drawn. She looked at the Princess, then at me, slumped over the arm of the chair, "unconscious" and bleeding from the nose.
"He... he overloaded," Aurelia said, regaining her breath, though her hand was still trembling. "The moment I touched him, his core tried to stabilize itself by draining me.
Seraphina knelt by my side, checking my pulse with a grim expression. "He's barely alive, Highness. The proximity to your mana was too much for him."
"Perhaps," Aurelia said, looking at me with a mix of pity and lingering dread. "Keep him in the West Wing. I want him safe... but do not touch him again without lead-lined gloves."
As they wheeled me away, I kept my eyes closed.