EZREN’S POVThe kitchen smells like burnt coffee and exhaustion.Our safehouse has always been a patchwork of survival… mismatched chairs, flickering bulbs, a table scarred with old field maps and heat rings. Tonight, it feels like a war room disguised as a diner. The kind of place where decisions get made that no one ever wants credit for.The screen propped against the sugar jar shows the words again, looping across every feed in the world:“Which voice would you wish to hear first?”The Gatekeeper’s question has become a virus. It’s everywhere… on news tickers, billboards, even graffiti projected onto government buildings. What started as a line of code has become a collective moral breakdown.People are answering it. Everywhere.In the comments beneath the broadcasts, you can scroll for hours through a flood of names: my daughter, my mother, the last teacher before the flood, the soldier who didn’t come home. Politicians weigh in with statements about “heritage access” and “nation

EZREN’S POVThe kettle on the desk starts to hiss before I remember to pour the water. The sound breaks the stillness, high and insistent, like something pleading to be acknowledged. I let it go another moment, the noise filling the small room, before I finally reach over and twist the knob. Steam billows upward, blurring the edges of the photograph lying in front of me.The girl in the picture is standing in the shallows of a river, her dress clinging to her knees, the fabric caught in sunlight so fierce it almost burns. She’s laughing at something just outside the frame. In that captured second, the world looks unbearably ordinary.I know that voice.The one from the lullaby… the one that has lived behind my ribs since the first time it played. The voice that carried memory like oxygen.Now she has a face.And a note, folded neatly behind the photo: We kept her as promised.Five words. Small, patient, perfect.My fingers keep tracing them, the ink indentations slightly raised under

EZREN’S POVThe desert breathes around us.It’s not wind… It’s something quieter, a low exhale through the glassed dunes. The air still tastes faintly metallic from the old crash dust, and the heat from the day lingers in the sand, radiating upward in ghostly waves. Our campfire burns in a hollow where the slag has softened to fine ash. The flame flickers orange against faces that have lived through too many choices, too many nights like this.Kira sits across from me, boots drawn up, elbows resting on her knees. Her eyes are rimmed red from the grit, but the tears aren’t from the sand. Devon crouches beside her, calibrating the little portable transmitter for the thousandth time, though we’ve had no signal since sundown. Aveline lies back on her bedroll, her face pale in the starlight, notebook open against her chest. Sora’s off at the perimeter, watching the ridge with her rifle propped across her lap, but I know she’s listening. We all are.The desert at night is a strange teacher.

MITCHELL’S POVThe air in the strategy room felt like the inside of a long night… stale, too warm, and heavy with decisions.Maps covered the table, their edges curling upward from overuse. Power cords snaked between data slates and half-empty coffee cups. On one screen, the caretaker’s note glowed in its sterile simplicity:You have shown them. Now show us how you will choose.Mitchell stood at the head of the table, arms crossed, exhaustion settling into her bones like sediment. She hadn’t slept in thirty hours. None of them had, judging by the faces around her.Aveline’s hair was tied back, her voice steady but hoarse. Devon looked wired and hollow at once, eyes flicking between code windows on his wristpad. Kira’s fingers tapped a restless rhythm against her mug, and Sora… always composed… had her jaw clenched so tightly Mitchell thought she might crack a tooth.Ezren sat slightly apart from them, silent, gaze fixed on the screen. His reflection flickered beside the words, unreada

KIRA’S POVThe air inside the first sanctuary felt different from anywhere else I’d ever been. Not holy exactly… too bright for that, too practical… but full of a quiet gravity that made every sound matter.We’d spent months arguing over every detail: the intake sequence, the sensory design, the wording of consent forms. And now, standing in the wide, open atrium with banners fluttering softly from the rafters… each one painted by local artists in colors drawn from desert stone… I felt something I hadn’t dared feel in years.Hope.A tentative, trembling thing, but alive.The elders from the nearby settlements had arrived early. Some wore ceremonial shawls; others just looked curious, wary. A few journalists milled near the edges, murmuring into recorders. Mitchell had insisted on transparency. “If we start in the light,” she’d said, “maybe we’ll stay there.”I adjusted the collar of my jacket, palms sweating against the datapad I carried. Behind me, the team was moving like a slow tid