The world was a confined, metallic coldness. Kael's consciousness flickered back to life, not in a surge of pain, but in a smothering absence of sensation. He was awake, but immobile, sealed inside the Purity Suppressor. He could not move, could not speak; his core felt like a vacuum. The nullification gels had done their job: his power was inert.
He was cargo.
He engaged his last remaining faculty: the faint, muted glow of his Karmic Sight. The physical world was a dark blur, but the karmic flows were visible. He saw the shimmering, cold-steel shell of the damaged shuttle and the volatile, greedy chaos of the Akkadian Scrap-Yard outside.
He saw the three figures moving around the wreckage. Silas was working methodically on the jump drive; his concentration was a cold, focused thread. Talon and Echo maintained a tense, vigilant perimeter, their karmic threads taut with the debt of vigilance.
Then Kael saw his own coffin. The Purity Suppressor was a web of heavy, designed-to-last karmic debt, its suppression field a crushing, specialised pressure. His power's threads fought against this immense, manufactured debt.
He heard Silas's voice, low and clinical, talking into a comms unit as he resealed the cracked seam on the Suppressor.
"The unit is temporarily stable, Master Broker. Retrieval will proceed. The delay was unavoidable; the anomaly's accomplice, the Arbitrator, forced a detour to a zero-authority zone. The package is undamaged, but highly volatile. We will bring him to the Dissection Chamber immediately. His Absolution must be analysed before it can be replicated."
Kael's blood ran cold, despite his suppressed state. Dissection Chamber. The Broker wasn't planning a simple execution. It planned to systematically dismantle his power, piece by agonising piece, to understand the secret of the counter-consequence.
He had to move. He had to regain control of the power that he had fought for his survival, even from unconsciousness.
He focused his will, pushing against the crushing suppression field. The internal conflict was agonising a mental battle against tech debt. Every weld, every seal, every molecular bond of the containment unit represented its debt of creation, forming a perfect, self-sustaining loop of suppression.
He couldn't shatter the whole cage. He had to find the smallest, most ignored lie.
Kael remembered Lysandra's methods, refined through fire. He ignored the enormous, obvious debts and concentrated on a microscopic flaw: the fractional debt of tolerance in a single, insignificant emergency release valve. This tiny, ignored piece of engineering was allowed a slight, internal weakness to prevent catastrophic failure.
He poured the last flicker of his internal will into that tiny, specific lie.
"Absolve the Tolerance!"
The effect was silent, internal, and agonizingly slow. The emergency valve didn't open; it simply suffered an instant, total loss of its structural integrity. A hair-thin fissure propagated from the valve, and the heavy suppression field momentarily stuttered—a cold shudder running through the metal.
The Purity Suppressor remained sealed, but a single, infinitesimal thread of Kael's true Absolution—a thread barely strong enough to move a single atom—was restored to his command.
Silas finished his repairs and stood, wiping the caustic gel from his gauntlet. "The jump sequence is ready. We waste no more time. Prepare the package for transit, Echo."
Echo and Talon moved to hoist the coffin. Kael was helpless, secured, and about to be delivered. But with that single, liberated thread of power, Kael felt the subtle energy of the jump drive charging up. He had one, final, desperate chance.
He was going to the Broker's vault. He was going to the Dissection Chamber. And he would arrive with the single purpose of absolute, total chaos.