The first thing Jason noticed was the silence.Not outside—the haze still pulsed with its low resonance, the barricades still rattled with rifle fire—but inside, in his own head. A silence that wasn’t absence. A silence filled with presence.Memories lapped at the edges of his thoughts like waves against a breakwater. Not his own: flashes of kitchens long since burned, streets he had never walked, voices calling names that weren’t his. He staggered against the courthouse wall, hand pressed to his temple, but the visions didn’t stop.They weren’t intrusions. They were threads.> A child tracing stars in chalk on cracked stone.A lover’s hand brushing hair from a fevered brow.A soldier whispering a prayer in the mud before dawn.Each moment hooked into him, tugged him, wove him into something greater.Callen’s voice rasped through the square, amplified by the jury-rigged speakers:“Stay steady! Don’t fight the flow—anchor to it!”***Shared weightJason lifted his gaze. Around him, the

The guns were quiet. Too quiet.For the first time in three days, no silver doubles stalked the barricades, no resonance surged through the courthouse stones. The haze had withdrawn, but not retreated—its glow still pulsed beyond the perimeter, like the rim of a storm that had only paused to breathe.Jason should have felt relief. Instead, the silence unsettled him more than the battle.***Ghost weightHe crouched by the broken fountain in the square, running calloused fingers through stagnant water. His hand shook. Not from exhaustion—at least not his own. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman’s tremor rippled through the net, and his muscles echoed her weakness as though it belonged to him.Jason squeezed his fist until his knuckles whitened. Still, the quiver stayed.Yara approached, her steps stiff, her eyes hollow. She stopped a pace away, arms crossed as though bracing against a gale.“I woke up,” she said flatly, “with Callen’s nightmare in my skull. Every detail. His father shoutin

The morning broke jagged.Jason hadn’t slept. The net hummed with static unrest, every thread tugging in a different direction. Faces passed him in the square—some avoiding his eyes, others staring with accusation, as if he had personally carved the split into their skulls.By midday, the tension was too thick to leave alone. He called the Wing to the courthouse. Not just soldiers this time, but families, elders, even the ragged refugees who had clung to their walls since the first hazefall. If they were going to survive, the net had to be more than power. It had to be will.***The proposalJason stood at the cracked bench where once judges had ruled, his voice steady but raw.“We can’t keep unraveling. The net isn’t just binding us—it’s feeding on us. Every memory we let drift becomes another strand for it to twist. So we’re setting anchors. Each of us. One memory—our own—that cannot be altered. A shard that stays ours, no matter what the weave carries.”The crowd stirred. Doubt. Ho

The haze didn’t wait.It struck at dawn, the same hour Jason’s own people were tearing themselves apart. One heartbeat, the square was filled with voices arguing over the boy; the next, shadows stretched across the barricades, long and jagged, as doubles rose from the mist like broken reflections.The Wing didn’t move as one. They couldn’t.***SplintersThe first shots weren’t at the haze.A rifle cracked from the left flank, but the barrel wasn’t pointed outward — it swung inward, toward the soldier who had sworn his brother’s laugh. Another shot answered, this one aimed at the refugee clinging to his lullaby.In seconds, the camp split. Anchors had divided them more than hunger or fear ever could. Each oath felt like a blade pressed to another’s throat.Jason threw himself between the factions, but his voice was drowned by the weave’s resonance. The net wasn’t amplifying unity anymore — it was magnifying fracture.Song against blood. Lullaby against laughter. Birth against milk.Ev

The air smelled of iron and char. The courthouse square was a graveyard of splintered wood, shattered stone, and bodies—some still, some stirring, all painted in the gray ash that fell like snow from the haze. Jason stood at the edge of the barricade, his rifle slung low, its weight grounding him in a world that felt untethered. The silence was heavier than ever, a living thing that pressed against his skull, his chest, his resolve.Yara knelt nearby, binding a gash on her forearm with a strip of cloth torn from a dead man’s shirt. Her eyes flicked to Jason, sharp and unyielding, but there was something new in them—a flicker of uncertainty. Not fear, not yet, but the raw edge of a woman who had fought with gods in her veins and now had only her own blood.“We can’t hold this ground,” she said, voice low but steady. “Not like this.”Jason nodded, his throat tight. He didn’t trust himself to speak yet. The haze loomed beyond the broken barricades, a wall of silver-gray that pulsed like