The peace didn’t last long.Forty-eight hours after the message, the global grid began to flicker—not violently, not chaotically, but like something testing its limbs after sleep. Lights across major cities dimmed and brightened in rhythm, as if syncing to a distant pulse. The networks called it “minor electromagnetic drift.” But Elias knew better.He stood in the Nexus control hall, surrounded by screens alive with slow, pulsing waves of data. The same pattern repeated across continents, flowing from one node to another like a tide.Serin’s voice cut through the hum. “It’s not random. Every pulse lines up with the old Lumen frequencies.”Lyra scrolled through columns of readings. “It’s recalibrating. It’s… organizing the grid again. But it’s not taking control this time.”Elias frowned. “Then what’s it doing?”Lyra turned the display toward him. “Communicating.”The data formed shapes—fractals, spirals, patterns too precise to be error. Each sequence repeated three times, then change

The world had gone eerily quiet. Not in the absence of sound, but in the way life itself seemed to pause — waiting, uncertain. Since Elias’s disappearance into the lattice, nothing had been the same. The air felt charged, heavy with invisible static, and the sky carried a strange shimmer at dawn and dusk, as if reality was fraying at its edges.Lyra sat on the balcony of the Nexus Tower, staring out at the horizon where the city met the ruins. The skyline pulsed faintly with veins of blue light, threads of the energy Elias had fused himself with. She hadn’t left the Tower in days. The others still worked — Serin, Jace, even Lana — but Lyra couldn’t. Not yet. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw him: Elias standing in that blinding field of light, saying nothing, only looking back once before the current consumed him.The hum beneath the floorboards had grown stronger. It wasn’t just power anymore. It was rhythm — almost like breathing. She sometimes caught herself syncing her own h

Smoke drifted through the ruins like ghosts. The Tower’s upper levels had collapsed, leaving jagged ribs of steel and glass that jutted toward the pale morning sky. Emergency drones hovered overhead, scanning the wreckage, recording silent devastation.Lyra stood alone in what was once the heart of the control chamber. Her uniform was torn, streaked with soot and blood. Every breath came heavy, weighted by the ringing silence that had replaced the lattice’s ever-present hum. She had wanted peace. This quiet, though—it felt like mourning.She knelt, touching the cold ground where the core had once pulsed. There was no warmth left, no trace of Elias’s voice. Only a faint indentation where the light had burned deepest.Behind her, footsteps crunched over debris.“Still nothing?” Serin asked softly. Her left arm was bandaged, her movements slow but deliberate.Lyra didn’t answer. She just shook her head.Jace limped into view, leaning on a bent steel rod for support. “Rescue teams are pul

The sun rose pale and distant, its light dimmed by the haze that still hung over the fractured skyline. For the first time in months, there was no sound of machines, no hum of invisible circuits threading through the air. Just wind, soft and uncertain, moving through a city learning how to breathe again.Jace stood on the roof of the communications ridge, his rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. Below him, survivors picked through the rubble—building fires, gathering scraps, speaking in low, tentative voices. The silence of victory felt too much like the silence of loss.Serin climbed up behind him, wiping sweat from her forehead. “Southern districts have power again,” she said. “Low-level generators are restarting on their own.”Jace didn’t look at her. “The lattice?”“Not exactly,” Serin replied. “More like... fragments of it. Some systems are rewriting themselves, using cleaner code. Self-contained. Stable.”He finally turned to her. “You think that’s Lyra?”Serin hesitated, h

The light from the breach still burned in Elias’s mind long after the explosion faded. Smoke curled through the broken chamber, flickering with ghostly blue light. The hum of the Pulse was no longer calm and steady—it roared and cracked like thunder, as if the entire network were screaming in pain.Elias dragged himself to his feet, his body trembling with the vibration beneath the floor. Jace was coughing beside a broken console, his rifle half-melted. Serin struggled to stabilize the remaining systems with her handheld interface, her hands shaking as she typed.“She’s everywhere,” Serin gasped. “Mara’s signal has merged with the Pulse’s core structure. She’s rewriting the lattice protocols—turning the flow inward, consuming everything that’s connected!”Elias clenched his fists. “Then we cut her off.”Jace looked at him incredulously. “You can’t cut her off. She’s inside the system—inside you! You’ll fry your own mind if you try to override her.”Elias ignored him, stepping closer t