The shaft became a crucible of sound. The Syndicate's response was swift and brutal. Over the comms, Regina's voice, stripped of all pretense, issued flat commands: "Override frequency gamma-seven. Deploy sonic dampeners in Sector Delta. Target the unauthorized resonators."
A new, grinding vibration shook the walls—a targeted counter-frequency meant to shatter their crude instruments. One of Lysander's people, a woman humming a steady bass note into a crystalline rod, cried out as her resonator cracked, its pure tone warping into a painful shriek before dying.
"They're targeting the individual harmonics!" Valentine yelled over the din. She was at a small terminal she'd wired into the shaft's systems, her face lit by frantic data. "They're trying to pick us apart note by note!"
Sage's hands were on the bronze Spin, feeling its vibration through his palms. It was the keystone, the central pattern holding the others in relation. "We need to interweave the frequencies! Make them a single, complex signal! Valentine, can you recalibrate the resonators to feed off each other?"
"That requires a master harmonic map—a conductor's score!" she shot back, but her fingers were already flying, pulling data from the dying resonators, modeling the interference patterns.
Lysander moved among his people, his decisiveness a rock in the chaos. "Shift to tertiary harmonics!" he commanded. "If they target the root, answer with the fifth! Be fluid! The river does not break when it meets a stone; it flows around and wears it down!"
The grizzled janitor nodded, adjusting her device. The sound shifted, elusive, harder to pin down. The Syndicate's grinding counter-frequency stuttered, searching for a new target.
It was no longer a battle of strength, but of agility and understanding. The Syndicate knew one song perfectly—the scream. They were learning a new one in real time.