The hum of the suppressor had become a comfort.

Casper Darling sat hunched over his workbench, the Resonance Suppression Array still glowing gently in the center of the lab. The air around it was cool now, still, like a storm had passed but left the sky tense—bracing for another.

Susanna's vitals, monitored through the resonance tether, were holding. But only just. The alien frequency had paused its spread, stalled by Darling's prototype, but it hadn't stopped adapting. That was the problem.

"It's learning," he muttered to himself, tweaking a crystalline harmonizer node. "Of course it is. They always learn."

He reached for a screwdriver, missed it, then found it again. His hands were shaking. Too much caffeine. Not enough food. A dangerous combination when working with volatile paranatural circuitry, but time wasn't a luxury he had anymore.

Across the lab, a low pulse throbbed through the air. The Array flickered.

Darling's heart jumped.

"No, no, no, stay with me," he whispered, sprinting to the terminal. He typed fast—override commands, recalibrations, feedback diagnostics. The suppressor's output had dipped by seven percent in the last ten minutes. The resonance was adapting faster than he'd predicted.

"It's not a pathogen," he said aloud, pacing. "It's not a foreign frequency. It's a resonant intelligence. It doesn't want to control her—it wants her to become part of it."

That idea chilled him. Not possession. Absorption.

Darling took a shaky breath, then slammed a palm on the table. "Then I'll speak its language."

He moved with purpose now, digging through a drawer for a set of tuning lenses—experimental, half-built components based on harmonics taken from Astral Plane leakage. High-risk. Unstable. But potentially capable of one thing he'd never tried:

Counter-resonance injection.

"If it wants to overwrite her, fine," he muttered. "Let's give it a fake operating system to play with."

Piece by piece, he reconstructed the heart of the suppressor—integrating the tuning lenses into the harmonization matrix, building a feedback loop that could trick the resonance. If it tried to evolve again, it would encounter noise it didn't recognize. It would loop. Spin. Stall.

Not forever. But long enough.

Long enough to build a true stabilizer.

The final component was a pulse-core emitter designed to fluctuate its signature every millisecond—never letting the resonance settle, never giving it a target to adapt to.

He stepped back, chest heaving.

Then he powered it on.

The Array roared to life, brighter than before—almost alive. Energy coursed through the coils, the sound of it like layered voices humming in near-unison. But unlike before, there was rhythm. A beat. A human element.

The tether monitor updated within seconds.

Susanna's vitals surged—still faint, but stronger. The resonance plateaued. No adaptation. No response.

It was confused.

Darling laughed. Not maniacally. Just... exhausted. Relieved. For once, the unknown hadn't outrun him.

He tapped the comms.

"Director Trench," he said, smiling through the static. "Tell Kate... it's holding. We've got a chance now. A real one."

He looked at the suppressor, now glowing a soft violet.

"You hear that?" he said quietly. "We're not letting go of her."