Chapter 114: Light Worth Hiding
They stepped through the gap and the tunnel fell away like a curtain.
Light happened.
Not from them - from the stone itself. The chamber opened into a low cathedral of crystal, a geode big enough to hold a whole house, all of its ribs packed with Luminite. Every surface caught their lamp beam and multiplied it until the dark forgot its job. Colors moved - milk-blue at the core, sliding through pale greens and silver pinks - each facet throwing a thin halo onto the next. If someone shattered the beautiful, unstained sky, it would have looked like this.
Obi said nothing.
Raizen didn’t either. He felt his breathing slow without asking it to. The hum they’d followed was no longer behind the walls. It lived here, clear and patient, a single note that the room had chosen. He’d heard Luminite sing before - in the burial hall back at the Academy, the tall pillars that glowed when you walked a hand near them - but this was different. Purer. Clearer. Closer. As if the crystals weren’t proud of themselves, just awake.
Obi lifted his lamp just enough to let the beam skate across a fan of plates. The light ran down each edge like water on glass. "Okay" he whispered finally, reverent for once, "That? That’s ridiculous."
Raizen stepped one foot onto the shallow bowl of the chamber floor. The ground was different here - smoother, as if someone had polished the path with a thousand quiet trips. Between the crystal ribs, a frame of dark support metal webbed the space. He reached out and stopped the last centimeter. "Don’t touch anything" he said automatically.
Obi looked at him, then at the closest spear, then at his own hand, and touched anyway.
Only a fingertip. Only a breath.
The nearest plates answered.
A thin pulse ran out from the point like a ring on water, each crystal catching the line and handing it to its neighbor, the whole wall sighing with light. The hum rose a hair then fell back, pleased. No shock. No bite. Just a polite "hello".
Obi grinned despite himself. "You can yell at me later."
Raizen, against the pressure, smiled. "Consider yourself yelled at."
They walked the bowl’s edge the way you do at a place that makes you want to walk softer. The crystals weren’t uniform. Some grew like combs of ice. Others curled like frozen ferns. A few, clear enough to see through, held impossibly tiny fractures that looked like lightning caught in glass. Most were clean - too clean - no sediment, no clouding, no dirt tracked along the lattice. Purity you could taste in your teeth.
Obi hummed a note under his breath, low and round. The geode matched him on the second beat and held it when he stopped. He laughed, then hushed himself, as if he’d giggled in a church. "I could live here" he said, honest and quiet. "Eat snow, sing to rocks... You know, I’d die happy."
"Please don’t" Raizen said. "You’ll ruin the beautiful echo."
At one buttress of metal, a pad of older foam clung to the brace with thumbprints in it - human touch on top of geology. Tucked beside it, half hidden under a spill of small shards, sat a pouch. Obi nudged it with the toe of his boot and drew it out. Empty. The cloth smelled faintly of machine oil and pine.
"Miners were here" he said. "Not officially." He held the pouch up, then set it back exactly where it had lain.
"Why close it?" Raizen asked. "Collapse hazard doesn’t look like this."
Obi squinted at the wall where the metal frame met the crystal plate. "Because if you find a room like this and tell everyone, the mountain fills with strangers" he said. "And strangers don’t listen."
"So... You think that they’re going to steal and exploit... In the shadows?"
"Hey, if I were them, that’s what I’d do. Can’t blame me!"
Raizen thought of the camp - cold faces warmed by soup, the young cook pretending not to care if people liked his food, Hikari’s tired hands under a bandage’s last wrinkle. He pictured stampedes. He pictured greed. He pictured the way news moved: faster than wisdom, always.
He shook his head. "No samples" he said.
"I wasn’t going to" Obi answered, easy - and for him, that was true restraint. He lifted both palms as if swearing a vow to someone who would find it funny.
They drifted to the far side of the bowl, lamps angled down. In the low center, the crystals changed - smaller, denser, a drift of clear shards like frost on a window, all tipped toward the same invisible point. The hum was stronger there. Raizen crouched, set his blade’s spine across his knee, and held the edge close to the cluster without touching. The hair between his knuckles lifted. The crystals brightened a fraction in a pulse that matched his breath.
He pulled back. They dimmed. He leaned in. They brightened again, just barely.
"Like the pillars" he murmured.
Obi watched, then frowned in thought. "Alive enough to know a body’s near" he said. "Or polite enough to pretend."
They stood quietly until even their whispers felt too loud. The color in the room wasn’t color so much as temperature - cool where nothing moved, warmer where their bodies made the smallest wind. A loose thread on Obi’s sleeve lifted and settled. Far above, the geode roof bristled with daggers that looked sharp enough to think.
Raizen closed his eyes. For a moment, the world in his head - the cold mouth of the tunnel, the scream on the snow, the shape that had worn his mother’s smile like jewelry - fell back a step. The single note the crystals held found a place just under his ribs and sat there until his breath learned to match it. He couldn’t hold gratitude and anger in the same hand tonight; the room made it easier to pick one.
Obi, who never let silence stand up by itself for long, shivered and rubbed his bandaged palm on his coat. "I take back every mean thought I had about rocks" he said. "Rocks are perfect. People ruin rocks."
"People ruin most things" Raizen said.
"I ruin some. Rarely." Obi allowed. "Not this one."
They did one slow lap, eyes working, cataloguing, not for ownership but to be able to call it back later when the world was unkind. Obi found another bit of human: faint tally marks on a metal beam, counted off in fives and stopped at twelve, then scratched out with something sharp. Raizen found a ribbon, blue like the one on the gate, left to fade. Neither felt like a warning. They felt like someone had come here, alone or with a friend, and promised themselves they would remember.
On the way back to the split in the wall, Obi stopped, considered, then shrugged off his pack and fished for a piece of chalk. He hesitated, caught Raizen’s eye, then tucked it away again. "No mark" he said. "Not even ours."
"Good" Raizen replied.
They squeezed back through the plate’s gap and pulled it shut as best they could, foam smearing their sleeves like bad glue. Obi thumped the corner with his palm until the slab sat true and the words TURN BACK looked convinced of themselves again. He worked a chain back through two anchor points, lifted, and yanked until a link lodged and held.
At the first bend, he paused, faced the way back in, and bowed. Not a joke. Just a small, stubborn act of respect. Raizen stood beside him and nodded once, the sort of acknowledgment you only give a place that made you breathe better.
On the climb out, the hum settled into the stone behind them like a heartbeat behind a wall. It didn’t chase. It didn’t call. It lived there whether anyone listened or not.
At the gate, the night air bit their faces and felt honest. Obi looked at the mess they’d made and then at his tools, expression guilty in a way that didn’t suit him. He jammed a folded wedge into the bent corner of the grid, twisted the chain tighter, and pressed the peeled foam back into its old groove with the flat of his hand.
"From a distance" he said, stepping back and squinting, "we were never here."
"From a distance we never are" Raizen said.
Obi tipped his head, considering. "Philosophical for a guy who just told me not to touch rocks."
"I..." Raizen stopped. He thought of Hikari’s head on his shoulder by the fire, the way her breathing had synced with his without asking, the way the crystals had done the same. He chose a smaller truth. "I like this one."
They took the service path back slow, not whispering but quiet because the night asked for it. The camp’s lights wrote their little circle of gold ahead, sweet as a house in a story. Somewhere beyond, the ridge breathed, and the wind stitched little knots in the snow’s edge and then undid them for practice.
"Tell Alteea?" Obi asked finally.
Raizen weighed it. He pictured the quads coming, the loud mouths, the tools, the promises of safety that sounded like shovels. He pictured the men under the brace, and the way luck took sides. He pictured greed, not as a sin but as a pressure that broke good people down.
"Tomorrow" he said. "We tell her it’s unsafe to open without a team. Collapse hazard. Not a lie. Not the whole truth."
"You’re allergic to whole truths" Obi said lightly.
"I’m allergic to starting stampedes" Raizen replied.
Obi bumped him with an elbow. "We keep this one, then."
"For now."
They crossed back into the light. Tents breathed. A kettle clicked on again, late hands claiming warmth. Somewhere, Ichiro coughed and turned over. Esen snored once like he was trying it out and decided against it. Hikari’s silhouette shifted under a blanket and settled.
Obi peeled his gloves off, flexed tired fingers, and flashed a grin that had finally found its way home. "When this is all over" he said, "we bring them. The ones who won’t ruin it. We stand there. We sing terribly. We pretend the world can hear something pure and not break it."
Raizen hung his coat on the line and loosened his boots and looked back at the dark between the drifts. He could still feel the room - the way the hum sat in the chest without asking, the way the light forgave you for arriving late.
"Maybe" he said.
He ducked into the tent. Obi followed, set his tools in a neat row that would scandalize anyone who knew him, and lay down with a sigh that sounded like relief disguised as theater.
Outside, the ridge held its frozen breath. Behind a welded plate and a foam seam and a hand-lettered warning, a room full of Luminite kept singing to itself, pure as it knew how, as if it had been waiting forever for someone to find it and walk away without taking a piece.