Years of habit had not brought Micah down these halls. The aroma of old rock, dust, and confinement chemicals burned his nostrils the instant the beefed up doors closed in front of him. Far underground, deep under the government facility that had been called the Foundation Site 7, was a crypt prison to which only four people in the world had keys and of those two of them were dead.He stepped with the lights flickering. They used always to do down here. It had not been neglected so much as it had been regularly undergoing maintenance from power-dampening weaved fields which ran through the walls and in which a man felt his thoughts being squeezed into silence. Nova followed with him in silence and watchfulness. she stared in every corridor, in every fluctuation.You make sure it is worth it? she asked. Micah smiled humorlessly. Dom does not speak to anybody. Years, no. However, once Olivia is reaching her endgame, then he may want to step up and play his role.At the last chamber th

There were the tensions in the lab. Nova was bent over a table whose surface was covered with a network of maps, the tips of her fingers a blur across the surface of a digital tablet, connecting cities, coordinates, names through a branching web of information. With dozens of red dots, the map resembled the splash of blood into a suspiciously familiar cluster of places Kyiv, Aleppo, Caracas, Lagos, Seoul. Faults of previous battlefronts.She analyzed the digital grid in zoom mode. iture Each name had an associated timestamp, each timestamp an associated signal of activation. Not a myth, this was the Red Thread Protocol. The lullaby was just but one key. The pupils were already beginning to get up.This was not simply control but, Nova mumbled to herself, sweat prickled her neck, it was about control. It was of anarchy.One of Caspian latest drawings was in Eelsie hands as she hovered over the door. She stared at it as her fingers simply had to tremble. Scorched earth, a girl, not more

In the white room there was no ceiling. No walls. No floor.Only space.And children.They hung about him tens, nay hundreds, standing, motionless, grey, a few inches above the earth. All of them were deprived of faces initially. Shapeless. As the shadows of a soul. His eyelids blinked, but as they did those things grew clear.They had hollowed eyes. With scarlet thread their mouths were sewed. Not to bleed And so was done, as secrets. And the skin on their bodies was gleaming a little, as though memory were being pulled dry over bone.Caspian was barefoot with his hospital gown fluttering although there was no wind.There were screams of silence.Yet he felt not afraid.He moved into the advance. No response came back. Where is this?A boy turned up his head The stitches of a girl moved.That silence did not change but was disturbed. The manner in which still water vibrates, when something below is breathing.Laying a finger against his chest, Caspian said, - His pulse was a little b

The atmosphere in the compound in which Olivia lived was no longer the same and it was now thicker with life and buzzed with energy just waiting to burst out like the walls of the compound remembered what happened here. As they moved another step toward the centre of the place Nova shifted the way her pulse reader gripped her, the blue signal climbing every time.Time is near, she told Jayden in a low whisper, and he moved in front of her tracking movement like a wolf in strange woods. Behind them Caspian trod along unobtrusively in his diminutive form tipped with faint light beneath the shining sigils along his limbs.They got to a point of wall covered with rusty biometric locks. Nova moved to the front where she inserted the old interface card that belonged to Olivia.with a moan the wall opened.a winding tunnel of crimson-veined rock apace went downward like a throat behind it. The murmur became low quote of frequencies. Nova felt the vibration ground to her teeth.On the bottom

There was too much silence in the medical wing.Elsie sat on a chair beside the hospital bed, her hand was on Caspian. His lifeless figure was rendered still more frail by the pale white sheets over which it lay. Machines meeped softly in the background smooth, unvarious. His heart was going. His lungs were in motion. but Caspian did not wake.The two days had gone since the Echoheart core had exploded.The entire compound had been jolted off by the explosion. Elsie had been rescued by Nova out of the rubble. Jayden was bleeding in his forehead and was screaming after Ava. Dag chere! but she was away. The kernel was missing. There was no network. And Caspian...It was so with him.Unmoving.Unreachable.So he was not dead.Elsie did not want to cry. Not here. Not where he could in some sense experience it. Instead she used slow circles on the back of his hand, and whispered about their past, as though they were still in the greenhouse, lurking There.Guards stood at silence outside th