EZREN’S POVThe alien voice chews at the back of my skull through the earbuds: “WE ARE RETURNING.” I’ve played that clip until the edges of the syllables blur, like when you stare at a word too long and the letters unglue. The rooftop is cold concrete against my spine, the city below a scatter of fragile lights, but nothing in the view steals my focus from the rhythm that lives between the words.It isn’t in the vowels or consonants; it’s in the breathing that separates them. A pattern: one-two-three, pause; one-two, long pause; one-two-three-four. My finger draws it in the air like a conductor’s baton, and my hand remembers it the way muscle remembers a dance…stiff, precise, inevitable.My tablet buzzes on my thigh…Devon’s relay feed. Usually, it’s background noise, the kind of dying static you get used to and stop listening to. Tonight, the feed is different. Seventeen relays have whispered back to life in the last twenty-four hours: feather pulses, barely above machine hearing. Ti

AVELINE’S POVThe briefing room tastes like stale adrenaline. Coffee and recycled air and the metallic aftertaste of too many bad decisions. Mitchell presides at the head of the table like a tired statue: shoulders drawn in, eyes rimmed red. Devon’s lattice blooms across every screen—an ugly, exact geometry overlaying the whole planet. Twenty-four hours until harvest, maybe less. The number sits between us like a live wire.“Small recon only,” Mitchell says. Her voice is thin, but it cuts through the low hum of nervous conversation. “In, scan, out. No heroics.”“Who’s leading?” Morrison asks. His fingers drum the table like a warning.“I am,” I say before anyone else can. It’s automatic—muscle memory from more nights than I can count in server rooms and dusty archives. Heads turn: relief, skepticism, the kind of look that measures whether you’ve got a death wish or the right stubbornness.“I’ve spent more time with their tech than anyone except Devon,” I add. “I know what to look for.

ZARA’S POVThe files on my desk look like a morgue’s catalog: clean white paper, sterile diagrams, margins full of numbers that mean death—schematics of something that blooms inside a skull like a metallic flower. Client lists with names I used to respect. Shipping manifests that read like itineraries to erasure. My coffee—once hot enough to bribe sleep away—has gone lukewarm and bitter while I stitch together Sora’s raid logs and Aveline’s platform captures. Every hyperlink, every checksum, points in the same direction: Synthesis.My secure line buzzes. Mitchell’s voice sounds small through the speaker, the way it does at three a.m. after a long day. “You awake?”“Barely,” I say. My fingers are already typing an emergency motion into the template I keep for nightmares. “Draft injunctive relief. Freeze Synthesis operations worldwide. Classify proto-harvesters as contraband under an international treaty. Pull in every ally — political, legal, and moral. We need unanimous optics.”“Tim

EZREN’S POVThe test chamber smells like antiseptic and bad choices. White tiles that never learned to be anything but bright, fluorescent lights that hum like a distant generator, the air thick with the metallic aftertaste of recirculated stress. Devon’s chair is colder than it looks; the leather squeaks when I sit. He tapes electrodes to my temples with the same awkward tenderness he uses when he apologizes… fingers lingering like he’s trying to patch something that can’t be seen.“You sure about this?” he asks again, the words soft enough that Kira can’t hear through the observation glass, but loud enough that they thrum in my skull.“No,” I say. “But we need to know how far it reaches.”Devon presses a palm to the activation panel as if it’s a mousetrap, and he keeps waiting to hear the snap. “Beginning test sequence,” he tells the room and the recording array. “Subject voluntarily interfacing with suspected neural synthesis network. Time: 14:30.”Kira stands pressed to the glass,

AVELINE’S POVThe archive lab is a cave of humming racks and cold light… no windows, no sun, no clock but the little pulse of cooling fans and the slow blink of status LEDs. Data crystals sit like fossilized memories in racks, film reels in crates, everything stacked so tightly you can hear the past breathing. I’ve been here eighteen hours, one bloodshot eye pressed to afterimages of code, tearing apart scraps salvaged from the platform for something that’ll make sense of the harvest. Anything.The coffee at my elbow is a lukewarm apology in a thermos. I sip and try to convince myself the bitter helps me focus. Mostly it just tastes like the exact shade of dread I’ve been cataloging.This fragment is different. Older… buried in lower substrate layers, tagged with a header that reads Ethical Implementation Primer. The phrase should comfort; instead it crawls under my skin. I boot the playback and a voice, calm and almost lullaby–patient, fills the room.“Species-preservation protocols