The silence didn’t end. It throbbed. A held breath stretched so long it became painful. Siya lay on the cold concrete, eyes open, lungs burning, unable to tell whether she was breathing or simply remembering how. The world felt paused mid-vibration, like a record needle lifted but still humming with momentum.Then sound crept back in. Not the Choir. Not the Conductor. Human sound.Marks coughing. Ragged. Close.“Siya… Siya, can you hear me?”Her fingers twitched before her voice returned. The hum inside her chest was still there, quieter, restrained, like a predator crouched in tall grass.“I’m here,” she whispered. The words scraped her throat raw.Light flickered overhead. Emergency strips along the chamber walls pulsed weakly, throwing fractured shadows across collapsed equipment and fractured Cantor rods. The Array was still standing, its crystals dimmed but intact, humming in a low, unstable register.Marks was kneeling beside her, face streaked with dust and blood she didn’t re

For a long moment after the Conductor named her, nothing else happened in the way people expect something to happen. There was no explosion, no sudden lunge, no catastrophic rupture that could be neatly described. Instead, the world thinned. It thinned around the edges of the chamber, around the frame of the observation window, around the lines of Marks’s shoulders and the sharp angles of the console. Reality did not break so much as grow porous, as though the hospital were holding its breath and forgetting, for an instant, how to be solid.Siya did not move her hand from the glass. The pressure beneath her palm remained constant, not forceful, not gentle, simply present, like the steady weight of a tide that never receded. Inside her chest, the hum had changed its quality. It was no longer something that vibrated against her ribs. It lived deeper now, threaded through muscle and bone, woven into her pulse. Groote Schuur was no longer breathing in slow, measured draws. It was breathin