Jay didn't see a room. He saw… threads.
Countless filaments of shimmering light, gossamer-thin yet impossibly strong, woven into a vast, intricate tapestry that stretched into infinite darkness. It pulsed with life – flickers of color (fear: jagged red; joy: soft gold; exhaustion: dull gray) running along individual strands. Thoughts. Emotions. The tapestry was the collective hum of the city's mind.
Lidia's presence manifested as a single, brilliant silver thread beside him, humming with focused energy. Her voice resonated, not in his ears, but within the weave itself:
Her silver thread plucked a nearby gray strand (a street sweeper's bone-deep tiredness). The emotion vibrated, amplified. Jay felt the ache in his own shoulders.
Her thread reached for his presence in the Weave.
Jay saw himself. Not a body, but a nexus. Where others were single threads, he was a dense, swirling knot of luminous filaments, constantly in motion, pulling threads in, sending faint pulses out. Some threads were bright and familiar – the deep, resonant blue of Mrs. Lea's remembered love; the vibrant, stubborn green of Tom's presence, somehow still anchored deep within the knot. But many were frayed, scorched black at the ends – the severed connections of the dead. And woven through the core of the knot, dark and pulsing like a diseased vein, was a serpentine coil of void– the Devourer's lingering touch, the source of the hunger and the corruption Lidia had observed.
<…is a relay. An amplifier. You don't just perceive the Weave, you interact with it. You pull threads closer, amplifying their signals. You unconsciously broadcast your own state. This is why the dying screamed at you. Why Tom could share your burden. Why the Devourer hungers for you. Your existence makes the intangible… tangible.>
Suddenly, the silver thread (Lidia) pulsed. A complex pattern of light flared from her, washing over Jay's nexus. For a split second, Jay saw through her eyes. Saw his own swirling, damaged, powerful nexus not with awe, but with clinical bordering on obsessive fascination. He saw the fractures in his psychic structure, the stress points near the void-touch, the potential energy radiating from the Tom-thread. He saw himself as a specimen. A fascinatingly broken instrument.
"NO!"
The vision shattered.
Jay wrenched his hand back, scrambling off the cot, chest heaving. His palm burned where Lidia had touched it, buzzing with the echo of her cold, analytical perception. He stared at her, not with rage, but with profound violation. She hadn't just shown him his power. She'd dissected his soul with her mind.
Lidia blinked, her eyes refocusing on the physical world. She looked… exhilarated. And faintly disappointed the demonstration was over. "See?" she breathed, a genuine, unsettling smile touching her lips. "Much clearer than an explanation, yes? The Weave. The Nexus. The Amplification Potential. Fascinating!"
Jay backed towards the door, the image of his own fractured, powerful, studied psyche burning behind his eyes. He needed Cole. He needed the tonic. He needed to forget. But the buzzing in his palm, the imprint of Lidia's clinical sight, told him forgetting was no longer an option. The Serpents didn't just want a weapon. They wanted to understand the machine.
And Lidia looked like she very much enjoyed taking things apart.
---