Gems: Cut

“If enough people see the truth, the system cannot hold.”

The city of Aethon hasn’t changed. Flint at the base, Quartz above, Jade above that — the same tiers, the same order, exactly as it’s stood for three hundred years. But the system is watching now. Waiting on a question it has no answer for.

So Ezra and Mia build something it was never designed to detect: a resistance threaded quietly through every tier, one person at a time. They call it the Cleave.

To go further — into the archives that remember what the empire was before it became this — means confronting a system that has never once been argued with. And to move it, they’ll have to speak its own language.

And risk becoming exactly what it built them to be.