They say the world ended without a single bomb.No screams. No flags. No borders breaking.Just… a silence.A breath that caught in humanity’s collective throat — as if the air itself forgot what obedience tasted like.Then came the noise.And the noise has never stopped.The morning after the collapse of the Mirror Core, Kael awoke in a hospital that didn’t exist.Or rather, one that had been erased from every global database — a facility from a time before the Syndicate, buried beneath the charred bones of a city long consumed by quiet compliance.His body felt heavy. His mind was glass.He turned, slow, toward the blur beside him.Lina.Still alive. Breathing.He whispered her name like it might crack open a dream.She stirred. “We made it.”Kael stared at the flickering light overhead.“No. We broke it.”In the days that followed the Mirror’s collapse, the world fractured.News channels went dark. Social feeds became flooded with leaks — coded visions from inside the Seed, showing

The first time Kael heard Ward scream, he was six.Not out of fear.Not pain.But fury — the kind that could break glass with silence. The kind that fractured trust, not from betrayal… but from truth spoken too late.Now, years later, her voice returned not as a scream, but a whisper from a machine older than lies.⸻Back at Threshold HQ, the entire grid surged.All comms routed through one encrypted channel.All frequencies overridden.Lina froze as the voice filtered through the static.“This is Dr. Miriam Ward.If you’re hearing this, you’ve killed the wrong god.”Kestrel grabbed the nearest headset. “Trace it.”“It’s bouncing through too many mirrors,” Lina muttered. “A synthetic daisy chain — she’s using repurposed fragments of the Seed’s collapse to mask her origin.”Kael’s face flickered across the edge of the live feed — cold, wind-bitten, and bathed in the Vault’s pale light.He heard her too.⸻“The Seed was never meant to dominate.It was meant to safeguard.You broke the M

The Vault was colder than Kael remembered.Not the kind of cold that stung skin, but the kind that burrowed into bone—the kind that whispered you were trespassing in a place meant to remain sealed.Prime’s words lingered in his head: You’ll never outrun your design.Kael tried to push them away, but the silence made them louder. Every heartbeat echoed like static in a hollow channel. The cryo-frames lined against the walls seemed to breathe in rhythm with him, blue pulses syncing like a choir of trapped lungs.He forced his hand against the glass of one capsule. Inside, the figure was half-formed. Not a child. Not an adult. Not quite human. Its eyes twitched beneath sealed lids, chasing dreams it wasn’t supposed to have.Kael felt nausea rise. Possibilities, Prime had called them.No. These were cages. Half-lives. Puppets waiting for someone else’s hand.He pulled back sharply. His own reflection stared at him in the glass—eyes hollow, jaw tight. For one raw moment, he didn’t know whi

Kael did not sleep.He sat against the cold steel wall of the Threshold command chamber, his breath shallow, eyes fixed on the flickering emergency lights overhead. They pulsed red every three seconds, a heartbeat that belonged not to him but to the building itself—an organism wounded, fighting to stay alive. The blackout that had rolled through the city still held half of Europe hostage. Reports of collapsed grids, grounded transport, and silent hospitals filled the emergency channels. But inside Threshold, the silence was not about loss of power. It was about Ward.Her message was no longer contained.It had seeded itself into the system, into their very minds. Kael had watched Kestrel’s face go blank, his words reshaped by code he never chose to speak. He had seen Lina freeze in terror, eyes glazed as if something else had looked through her. And he knew—if they were infected, then so was he.He flexed his hands slowly, staring at the faint tremor in his fingers. Whose will is this

Threshold Headquarters was built to endure siege. Every layer of the compound was a wall against collapse — concrete and steel, servers shielded, weapons mounted where no eye could see. But none of those defenses had been designed for what now pressed against its foundations.The Glass Orchard had begun to breathe.Kael stood before the observation panel on the eastern wall, the city below unfolding in crystalline bloom. Buildings once harsh with angles now shimmered with translucent skins. The light of streetlamps fractured into a thousand prisms, beautiful and horrifying.He whispered into the communication link, “Lina. How fast is it moving?”Her voice came low, urgent. “Faster than anything I have logged before. It is not spreading like a virus, Kael. It is synchronizing. Every structure it touches responds instantly, as if it always carried the potential to transform. And once it does—”Her voice cut, replaced by static, then surged back. “—once it does, the systems do not just s