Indigo's Owl [Indigo Rewrite]

Chapter 19 - Persuasion

The Surge never came.

Neither did the four after it.

Indigo seemed to take that as confirmation that Reader had indeed been the cause of the Surges, but Athira wasn't convinced. After one too many nights spent lying awake, sure that a Surge would strike when she least expected it, she'd used the extra time to write down every action, word, and thought she could remember from her encounters with Reader and came up with a new theory.

The Wardens were inside the Elites — or at least, Reader thought they were.

It explained a lot — his apparent willingness to be arrested, the fact that he'd called the Keepers on himself, his final comment about delaying 'them' for as long as he could — and it made sense. The Elites controlled Sirah, and if the Wardens were 'everywhere', there was no better place for them to be.

Athira was yet again considering her theory when she entered Kione's Tech lab with a plate of food in each hand.

It'd become a daily routine. Unless an alert came up — which happened far more often than Athira cared for — she spent the mornings in the training room with some combination of Raph, Zoe, and Shift, often with Talia lurking in the background, and a little after lunchtime, she'd bring Kione food and make sure he ate it while they used the rest of the afternoon for research.

They'd focused their research on anything that might provide a hint about the Surges. Artefacts or abilities that might be capable of causing them, supposed 'Colourless' people with visions like the kid Reader had found, Sins, Rathe, Wardens — if there was any potential link, they'd dug into it.

While they were yet to find any solid answers, they'd found a number of other concerning things — particularly how many Colourless went missing without ever being reported to the district's Keepers.

Athira placed Kione's plate directly in the middle of his keyboard — the only spot she'd found that guaranteed he'd notice it. "One sandwich, courtesy of Zoe. Any progress on that secret Project database yet?"

Kione glanced down at the sandwich and moved it out of the way to continue typing.

"A little," he said. "Without getting technical, I backtracked a few pieces of leaked data from other files that aren't as secure, so I know that Karma is somehow involved in this Project, whatever it is. The problem is, the Project file itself is locked. The only way to access it is with the physical Frame that acts as the key."

Kione still thought Reader was nuts, but he'd humoured Athira's 'Wardens are Elites' theory and included it in their afternoon research. Athira hadn't been able to get Karma — the tattooed Elite from her Keeper interview — out of her head, so they'd started there. Karma's file had been surprisingly vague for an Elite, even one who used a pseudonym, and it'd eventually led Kione to a secure, hidden database titled 'Project Spectrum'.

After Reader's comment to Zoe about Spectrum, it'd felt like too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Athira frowned, taking her seat and a bite of her sandwich as she listened. "There's no way to replicate that Frame?"

Kione snorted. "No. Orange is the counterpart to Blue, and the same way Blue has a rune to represent every word, Orange has a unique way to represent everything in a Frame."

He flicked open a glowing, Orange datasphere. "Like for example, the Frame for my dataspheres, they're —" He stopped, catching Athira's blank look. "— okay, the point is, Frames can be designed to do anything, limited only by their creator's knowledge. This 'key' is a Frame that uses a precise pathway to generate a very specific code. You're basically asking if I can perfectly replicate a 3-dimensional maze I've never seen before from scratch."