Cormicy had gone silent.
Not from abandonment — but anticipation.
Word of the Schönwerth incident had rippled through the Ministry's inner ranks like the low tremor before a quake. No official statement had been made, no memorials declared, but every senior analyst knew one truth: something had changed.
And at the center of it all was Emil Laurant.
Not wounded. Not triumphant.
Changed.
In the lower vaults of the forge, Emil worked alone.
For three days, he neither ate nor slept. The design consumed him — an architecture not pulled from logic or tradition, but from the memory gifted to him in Velatonya's city of echo. What he was building now had no precedent in France. Or the world.
Fournier and Rousseau watched from behind the reinforced glass, unwilling to interrupt.
"He hasn't said a word," Rousseau muttered. "Not a request. Not an order. Just... writes."
Fournier nodded slowly. "Whatever he saw in that chamber, it made him see the war differently."
Rousseau folded his arms. "The rest of us are still trying to survive it."
The blueprint had no title.
Just a single line of script at the top — written in Emil's hand, but in a language no one could translate.
The schematics below showed a machine with no weapons. No turrets. No armor in the traditional sense. It was tall — nearly twelve meters — shaped like a rising pillar with spiraled ribs, layered like an exoskeleton. At the center was a chamber encased in harmonized alloy: a resonance crucible.
But this time, it wasn't built to destroy.
It was built to listen.
Lisette Arban joined the forge on the fourth day.
She brought new alloys from a prototype lab in Brittany — metals that could withstand multi-frequency pressure without fatigue. But when she saw Emil's design, she went still.
"You're not making another Null," she whispered. "This… this is a conductor."
Emil nodded once.
"Not of force. Of memory."
She stepped closer. "This thing doesn't generate resonance."
"No. It amplifies what it receives."
"And from what source?"
He looked up at her.
"From the ones trying to speak."
By the end of the week, the first components were complete.
They assembled it not in the field hangar, but in Vault 7 — the deepest chamber in Cormicy's underground complex, once used to store artillery shells. Now it was a sanctuary. Engineers lit it with amber lamps and lined the walls with acoustic insulation. Not to protect the machine — but to protect the world from it.
Because unlike Charogne or Unit Null, this machine didn't need a crew.
It needed a listener.
Emil chose not himself.
He chose Rousseau.
The lieutenant blinked. "Me? I'm not a strategist. I don't know resonance."
"You know loyalty," Emil said. "And that's rarer now."
Rousseau shook his head. "But I wasn't in that chamber. I didn't hear her."
"You will."
Rousseau's induction took seven hours.
Lisette configured the interface helmet — not for control, but for exposure. The inner chamber of the machine — now code-named Laminaris — was designed to respond not to commands, but to emotional frequency.
"You'll speak in memory," she told him. "The machine will answer in kind."
Rousseau swallowed. "And if I think the wrong thing?"
"It won't activate."
"And if I think nothing?"
"It might never stop."
As Rousseau stepped into the crucible, Emil watched in silence.
Not with hope.
Not with fear.
With trust.
The chamber sealed.
The machine hummed.
For ten seconds, nothing happened.
Then came the first note.
Soft. Low. Like the deepest key on a piano struck beneath water.
Lisette gasped. "It's syncing."
The ribs of the machine began to move — not mechanically, but in harmonic rhythm. Like the breathing of something long asleep.
The central pillar lit with vertical bands.
Then the whole vault trembled.
Not from force.
But remembrance.
And Rousseau spoke.
Not in words — but in memory.
He saw a battlefield near Soissons, his brother dying beneath rubble. He remembered the taste of earth in his mouth. He remembered singing a hymn to himself in the mud.
The machine answered.
That same hymn echoed from its core, played in a dozen keys, layered like voices across time.
It didn't fabricate the memory.
It had heard it before.
From someone else.
Somewhere else.
Rousseau wept.
Laminaris wept with him.
Upstairs, Fournier stared at the seismic monitor.
"Sir," he radioed down to the vault, "you're registering harmonic leakage. The local radio band just picked up echoes."
"What kind of echoes?" Emil asked.
Fournier hesitated.
"They're in French. But… wrong."
Emil's blood froze.
He sprinted to the communications room, slapped the amplifier on full.
The audio hissed.
Then a voice.
"Nous nous souvenons…"
"We remember…"
Then silence.
Then, from a second band:
"Namen wir den Stille…"
"We name the silence…"
German.
Amélie Moreau received the report within the hour.
She stood at her office window in Paris, watching snow fall on the Seine.
Behind her, Lavalle read the transcript aloud.
"Two simultaneous broadcasts. French and German. Neither transmitted from within their respective nations. Both repeating memory-coded phrases from known military cemeteries."
He looked up. "What does it mean?"
Amélie didn't turn around.
"It means the Choir has begun."
Later that night, Emil sat beside Laminaris in the darkened vault.
The machine had gone still again. Rousseau rested nearby, drained but unharmed.
Lisette approached. "Did it work?"
Emil nodded.
"Rousseau remembered something the Choir also remembered. It echoed him. That's how we know it hears."
"What now?"
"We do it again."
She frowned. "And if the other side has built their own Laminaris?"
"They will."
Emil stood.
"That's why we're not building weapons anymore."
He turned toward the vault's door.
"We're building witnesses."