The valley was unrecognizable by dawn.What had been a lattice of light the night before was now a graveyard of scorched steel and charred soil. Towers lay split open like ribs, their cores leaking trails of black smoke into a bruised sky. The air still buzzed faintly with residual static—ghosts of a network that refused to die completely.Elysia woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and the smell of burning ozone in her hair. For a long moment she didn’t move. Her body felt like it belonged to someone else—every breath a jagged tear, every muscle screaming.Then memory returned in fragments. The relay. The explosion. The light swallowing everything.She sat up slowly. Around her, the bodies of the crowd lay scattered across the field, not burnt or broken, but unnervingly still—faces calm, eyes open, faint gold fading from their irises. It looked less like death and more like sleep.She pressed two fingers to the nearest neck. A pulse—weak, but there. The synchronization had stopp

For three days, the sky stayed silver. The storm that once roared with static had quieted, leaving behind a stillness that felt unnatural—too calm for a world that had known only chaos.Elysia walked the perimeter of Vault City’s outer ruins, her boots crunching against shattered glass and metal. The red glow that had once marked the Heir’s signal was gone. No hum. No pulse. Just silence.And yet, silence was never safety.Every few steps, she’d catch a flicker—a half-formed image in the corner of her eye, like a light that wanted to be seen but refused to stay. Sometimes it was Shayne’s face. Sometimes the girl’s. And sometimes, it was her own reflection, flickering between flesh and digital grain.The connection had ended, but something inside her hadn’t shut down.At the edge of the city, she reached what used to be the central uplink. It was a towering frame of scorched steel, its once-gleaming panels now hanging loose like torn skin. The wind sang through it—a hollow, mechanical

The wind carried a low hum across the broken plain—a sound like machines dreaming in their sleep. Elysia had walked all night, boots cutting through the crusted sand where the Vault’s fire had once scorched the world clean. Every step felt like trespass. The ground still remembered.Behind her, the vault ruins were a dull ember against the horizon.Ahead, the sky was dark with static clouds, lightning whispering through them without sound.She’d left too many places behind already. Every city she’d passed had carried the same echo—the same whisper of something trying to return. The Reclaimer. The name had spread like infection. People muttered it in ration lines, scrawled it in soot on cracked walls, painted it above burned churches. No one knew what it meant.But they all said it with faith.That was what terrified her most.Faith was how it always began.⸻She reached an old outpost by dawn. The kind the Accord once used to store energy reserves before the collapse.Half buried, hal

The city was gone.What had once been the Cradle now stretched before Elysia as a silent ocean of smoke and fractured glass. The dome had collapsed inward, leaving its steel skeleton twisted like the ribs of some extinct creature. Light flickered beneath the ruins—residual data still pulsing, searching for a host that no longer existed.Elysia stood at the edge of it all, dust coating her visor. Her hands trembled. She hadn’t moved since the explosion. The silence pressed into her chest like a weight, making it hard to breathe.When she finally pulled the visor off, the air stung her eyes. The wind that swept through carried the acrid tang of melted circuitry, of charred soil and carbonized stone. There were no screams, no movement—just the faint hum of something still alive beneath the wreckage.Rian had kept his promise.He’d bought her enough time to reach the core.And now, he was part of the ash.She crouched, brushing her gloved fingers through the dust. It glittered faintly und

The world was silent for three days.No broadcasts, no signals, no echoes of the old Vault’s hum. The sky itself seemed hollow, as if the static had been scrubbed from reality. But silence, Elysia knew, was never peace—it was what came before something worse.She spent those days wandering the melted basin where the city had stood. The air shimmered faintly with residual heat. Beneath her boots, veins of light still pulsed intermittently under the glass, like blood struggling to circulate through a dying body.The shard’s scar in her palm hadn’t healed. It throbbed in rhythm with those flickers—an echo of something still alive.By the fourth night, the dreams returned.She saw Shayne again, but this time he was silent—no voice, no message. Just the outline of him walking across the dead plains, dissolving with every step until only his shadow remained. When she reached for it, the ground opened beneath her, and from that abyss, a thousand eyes blinked awake.She woke gasping.The scar