The corridor snapped shut. Not around Fowler through him. Selene felt the wrench instantly, a violent tug that didn’t pull at his body but at the idea of him.The space where he stood distorted, edges sharpening as causality tightened like a vice. “Fowler!” She lunged, fingers brushing his wrist and the contact hurt.Not pain. Feedback. A sharp, electric recoil that burned up her arm and into her skull. She cried out, stumbling back as the universe rejected the touch. Fowler gasped, teeth clenched. “It’s isolating me.”The precision-lines surged brighter, converging into a narrow channel that wrapped around his outline. Inside it, the air stilled, motion flattening into inevitability.The presence had changed tactics. No persuasion. No integration. Extraction. Selene forced herself upright, ignoring the ringing in her ears. “You can’t take him without collapsing the bloom!”The darkness did not answer. Instead, the substrate shifted, layers compressing as if bracing for impact. The bl

The impact was silent. Not quiet absent. As if sound itself had been stripped from the moment to keep it from tearing apart.Fowler felt Selene leave him. Not her body her presence. The overlap collapsed with a violent recoil, space snapping back into alignment like an overstretched tendon released too fast.He screamed her name. The force hit. It didn’t feel like pain. It felt like being unwritten mid-thought.Light tore through him, not burning but erasing peeling away layers of cause and effect, stripping him down to the raw insistence that he had been. The warmth in his chest flared once, defiant, then fractured.He hit something solid. Hard. The world came back in pieces. Cold ground. Gravity. Air slammed into his lungs like an accusation. He rolled onto his side, coughing, fingers clawing at dirt that smelled real iron, dust, rain.Rain. He sucked in a breath and opened his eyes. Gray sky. Low, heavy clouds bleeding water in sheets. Ruined concrete rising around him in jagged si