SORA’S POVSand whispered and crunched under my boots. My fingers adjusted the night vision goggles, revealing a tableau that felt more like a battlefield than a cargo drop: contractor vehicles arranged like sentinels around a humming transport. The crate at the center radiated low-frequency vibrations that seemed alive, communicating in a language only machines—or maybe the right kind of human—could understand.The air reeked of jet fuel, sharp and acrid, tangled with the ozone snap of electronics burning beyond civilian specs. My stomach clenched at the thought: whatever this equipment did, it wasn’t for a power outage or corporate logistics. Orbital consciousness modification tech—requiring systems far beyond anything a normal lab could handle.“Three transports, twelve hostiles, grid’s hot,” Jared whispered, his voice tight over our encrypted comm. “This isn’t civilian security, Sora. They move like soldiers.”I scanned thermal readings, my pulse quickening. “What about the carg

AVELINE’S POVThe lab hums like a living thing at 2:47 a.m.—low electrical thrum through steel bones and glowing screens. Most of the facility sleeps. Not me. My desk is chaos: half-drunk coffee gone cold, notebooks filled with half-mad scribbles, and fragments of Devourer artifacts scattered like bones from some dead civilization.On the projection wall: star charts spanning three million years.“Pattern recognition algorithm complete,” the AI intones, voice flat, mechanical, echoing down empty corridors.Seven months. Seven months of decoding the impossible—symbols etched into Devourer relics, patterns of behavior reconstructed from scraps of history, theories stacked like unstable towers. Seven months of believing they were parasites. Invaders. Predators who fed on human minds.But the stars tell me otherwise.“Display correlation matrix,” I whisper, though my voice barely sounds like mine. The screen shifts, and astronomical data knits itself into behavioral overlays—coordinates,

DEVON’S POVThree monitors glare at me, each bleeding red warnings about Shuttle Hermes-7. Klaxons rattle my bones. Orbital maps scroll with jagged trajectories, slicing across the screen like fresh wounds.“Devon, talk to me!” Abdul yells over the noise. His voice cracks—he hasn’t slept in thirty hours. None of us has.I push sweat off my forehead, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Hermes went dark ninety seconds ago. Last telemetry says uncontrolled descent.”Abdul swears. “Uncontrolled, as in what? Drifting? Or—”“As in tumbling.” My throat goes dry. “Attitude thrusters offline. It’s coming down somewhere between Portland and San Francisco.”Lisa twists in her chair across the room, hair falling loose from its bun. “Jesus, that’s hundreds of miles of coastline. What’s it carrying?”I pull up the manifest. When the screen populates, my stomach lurches. “Micro-relays. Consciousness transfer hardware.” I scroll further and stop cold.“And?” Abdul presses.“Class-Seven exotic matter

EZREN’S POVBottles crowd the windowsill, empty glass catching the thin spill of alley light. Devon hunches over his laptop, tapping his fingers in a rhythm like Morse code against the table edge. Sora sits across from him, wiping her knives with such slow precision that it makes my neck prickle. Aveline bent over the map on the wall, eyes tracing the red pins like she had memorized every missing person and ruined site.“Two hundred people,” Sora mutters, not glancing up. “Two hundred bodies packed for orbit like livestock. And we’re in here playing house.”I lower my glass. The whiskey burns my throat, but it doesn’t touch the acid sitting in my stomach. “We’ve saved thousands—”“Have we?” She swings her head toward me, eyes catching the dim light like coals. “Because last I checked, the networks are growing. Platforms multiplying. Your so-called allies still squabbling while kids vanish.”“Sora—”“No.” The knife point bites into the wood between us, vibrating. “Don’t you dare. Not a

COMMANDER MITCHEL’S POVThe coffee tastes like burnt forest and regret. I’ve been nursing the same cup for three hours—cold now, skin tightening around the rim—while the emergency council unravels around me. The situation room smells of recycled breath and overheated hardware: forty-seven people packed into a space meant for twenty, every one of them carrying a brand-new apocalypse on their shoulders.Devon’s decrypted files crawl across the wall screens like a slow infection—equations folding into policy, policy folding into the language of control. The words land in my chest with the rhythm of a guillotine: twelve thousand years. Experiment. Integration.“Species preservation through systematic integration,” The Ambassador reads, her voice thinner than the paper in her hand. She looks up, and the hollowness around her eyes is a geography I know how to read. “Population optimization metrics. Behavioral correction algorithms.” She lets the tablet hang between both hands, as if it mig