The call came in before dawn. A homicide at the Ironweave Textile Mill.
When Foster arrived, the scene was a grotesque opposite of his visit just days before.
The great looms were silent, their rhythmic thunder replaced by the hushed, grim sounds of a crime scene.
The air, once thick with productive industry, now stank of blood and death.
Leo, the cheerful mechanic, lay sprawled beside his workbench. His head was a ruin of blood and bone, the weapon a heavy, grease-stained wrench from his own toolkit.
It was a scene of brutal, personal violence. But it was the details that froze the blood in Foster's veins.
The power was out. Not just in the mill, but in the entire block. A localized drain, just like the burglaries. And the air in the immediate vicinity of the body was cold, unnaturally so, raising goosebumps on the arms of the first responders.
Ben Frank was already there, kneeling by the body, his expression uncharacteristically grim.
"Cause of death is pretty obvious," he muttered to Foster as he approached.
"Blunt force trauma. But look at this." He pointed with a gloved finger to Leo's forearms. "Defensive wounds. Deep scratches. Not from the wrench. The pattern is... irregular. Jagged."
_Non-metallic implements._
The words from the Davidson file echoed in Foster's mind, followed instantly by the dry, rustling voice of the old woman from the alley: You hear a scratchin', like metal on old stone.
A chill, far deeper than the one in the room, seized him.
This wasn't a simple murder. It was a resonance.
The same hidden mechanics of the city that had killed Davidson were at work here. The power drain, the cold, the scratches. The Grifter's shadow.
_This world, is everything connected?_
He interviewed a shaken Anya, her sharp eyes now wide with trauma. "He was working late," she stammered.
"On his counter device. He said he'd found a way to make it more sensitive, to pick up 'the whispers in the wires.' He was excited."
She hugged herself. "The lights flickered, then went out. I heard a... a scraping sound. Then a thud. I thought a machine had fallen. I called out, but he didn't answer."
Old man Hemlock was inconsolable, his poetic ramblings collapsed into fragmented sobs. "The music stopped..."
Foster's mind, now trained to see patterns, began to connect the dots.
Leo, the practical genius, had inadvertently built a device that didn't just count shuttle passes. It had become attuned to the hidden energies of the city, the very energies the H.A.M. sought to monitor and contain.
He had been listening to the "whispers in the wires," and something had heard him back.
Captain Hanson arrived, his granite face impassive as he surveyed the scene.
"Ambrose. This is a mess. The press will be all over it. A working man killed in his place of work."
He fixed Foster with a hard look.
"I'm assigning you lead. Work it fast. Find a disgruntled coworker, a botched robbery, something clean. I want this wrapped up before it spooks the city council."
The pressure was on, and the directive was clear: find a mundane solution. And Foster knew the truth was anything but that.
Later, back at the station, he pulled Leo's personnel file.
Address: 4B Sycamore Lane, above a tailor's shop.
The address hit him with the force of a physical blow.
Regent and Sycamore.
The same intersection as the Albright lockbox. The same block as the Davidson alley.
The geography of the city was constricting around him, the significant locations drawing tighter and tighter together, a web with this new death at its center.
As he stared at the address, a uniformed officer brought in a witness statement from a young woman who lived in the apartment opposite the tailor's shop. She'd been up late studying and claimed to have seen a "flash of light" from Leo's window before the power went out.
Foster skimmed the statement. The witness's name was Elara Vex.
His breath caught. It was the same name as the missing chemist.
A coincidence? It had to be. This Elara Vex was a 21-year-old linguistics student. The description noted she wore glasses.
He looked up from the file, his mind reeling. The threads were not just connecting places, but people.
A murdered mechanic linked to a historic lockbox. A missing chemist sharing a name with a witness. A girl with glasses, living at the epicenter of it all.
The world was not just connected, it was whispering to him, and the message was growing louder, and more dire, with every passing hour.