#Chapter 150: The Tower Hand

Richard The tower was supposed to be secure. After everything, the filters, the sabotage, the vanishing clerks, the cathedral collapse, and the shifting council loyalties, we were supposed to have locked it all down. We had reinforced checkpoints, rotated patrol schedules, restricted elevator access, and sealed off tunnel mouths by the dozen. The entire tower complex was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. But the courier still made it to the tower steps. He didn’t run or fight. When the patrol intercepted him at the eastern stairwell, he froze with his hands half-raised, not surprised in the slightest. Tucked inside his jacket was a split clapper, custom-fitted and sanded smooth. It had been shaped to emit alternating frequencies that didn’t match any standard bell pattern, but they aligned perfectly with the resonance signatures we’d recently traced to the Hollow tunnels. The man had slipped past two checkpoints and made it halfway up the tower before anyone caught him. I ar