Jonah woke up on the floor. Cold. Breathless. Sweat dripping from his hairline.He blinked at the ceiling, vision blurred, heart pounding as if someone else had been using it. His fingers shook when he pushed himself up. The room around him, the small safehouse he and Lisa shared, looked wrong.The walls glowed faintly in the dark. Soft rings of light were drawn across them. Smooth circles, layered, overlapping, pulsing in quiet waves. Blue in some places. Red in others.Jonah froze. His whisper came weak. “No, no, I didn’t do this.”A shiver ran through him. The circles were too perfect, too clean, too familiar. Hive patterns. His throat tightened. “Not again.”Lisa rushed through the door, hair messy, breathing hard. “Jonah! I heard something.” She stopped dead. Her eyes widened at the glowing marks. “What, what is that?”Jonah swallowed hard. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know.”Lisa stepped closer, touching one of the circles. The light rippled under her fingers like wate

Jonah sat on the edge of the chamber, hands pressed against the shimmering floor. The blue light beneath him pulsed gently, matching the slow beat of his heart. For a moment, he felt calm, almost normal. But only for a moment. Lisa stood a few steps away, watching him carefully. “How long has it been happening?”Jonah didn’t answer right away. He kept his eyes on the floor, studying the patterns rising like breath from the ground.“Jonah,” she repeated softly. “Answer me.”He exhaled slowly. “Since yesterday.”“Yesterday?” Lisa’s voice cracked. “Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”Jonah lifted his head. His eyes glowed faintly, one blue, one gold, each shifting like reflections on water. “Because I thought I could fix it,” he murmured.Lisa stepped closer. “What exactly is it?”Jonah’s jaw tightened. “The network. It’s changing. Splitting.”Lisa’s stomach sank. “The blue and the red?”He nodded. “Yes.”Lisa swallowed. “Show me.”Jonah hesitated. For a brief second, fear flickered a

Morning light poured through the cracked windows of the council chamber, soft and gold, but no one inside felt calm. The room buzzed with anxious whispers, arguments that rose and fell like crashing waves. New Crest’s leaders sat around the long metal table, faces tired, eyes worried.Lisa stood near the center, hands clasped tightly behind her back. Her veins still glowed faint blue from the connection, faint pulses running under her skin like a quiet signal. People tried not to stare, but they did anyway. Some with awe. Some with fear. Most with confusion.Jonah stood in the hallway outside, unable to enter. The council insisted it was safer that way. He watched through the doorway, shoulders tense, the soft glow in his eyes shifting with every breath.Lisa tried not to look at him too often, but she felt his presence like a heartbeat she couldn’t ignore.Councilman Darrin slammed his fist on the table. “This is madness. The towers are waking again. Look at the streets! Every mac

Jonah sat alone inside the tower chamber, the glass walls glowing with soft blue waves. The tower’s heartbeat pulsed through the floor like distant thunder, slow and calm, but Jonah felt none of that calm inside himself. His own pulse came in uneven bursts, jumping from warm gold to cold blue without warning.He pressed both hands to the sides of his head and whispered, “Stop… please stop.”The two voices inside him did not listen. One voice was calm and warm and protective. It sounded like the breath of the spiral, the gentle tone that had guided him the day he merged with the light.The other voice was sharp and hungry and always whispering like a machine trying to crawl into his bones. It sounded like the Residual Hive. It sounded like Olos.Sometimes the two voices spoke over each other. Sometimes they argued. Sometimes they blended together until Jonah felt he was listening to a stranger who lived inside his own chest.Jonah closed his eyes and said softly, “I need to think. J

The underground servers had not stirred in years. They slept beneath New Crest like forgotten bones, cold, silent, and buried under layers of dust and collapsed corridors. Most people believed the old labs were dead ruins, sealed after the Hive’s fall. No one dared go near them. No one except Jonah.He walked alone through the lower tunnels, following the faint pull in his chest. His veins glowed softly in the darkness, blue on one side, gold on the other. Every step he took sent ripples of light down his arms. The hum inside him grew louder the deeper he went.Lisa’s worried voice echoed in his memory. “You don’t need to go there, Jonah… please.”But he did. Because something had called him. A whisper in his sleep. A voice he knew too well.The tunnels opened into a collapsed laboratory. Debris lay everywhere, broken screens, melted glass, bits of old servers held together by rust and stubborn metal. The air smelled of dust, age, and something colder… like still electricity waiting