Raiden walked through the ruined outskirts of Skydome with a clipboard he barely used and a mind running faster than any tool left in the world. The morning air still carried the stale metallic scent of burned-out nanite fields, though the sky had finally cleared to a clean blue that almost felt staged. People worked in small clusters around shattered buildings, lifting debris with ropes and pulleys, hammering scavenged metal sheets into makeshift walls, patching roofs with whatever they could drag over. There were no glowing circuits, no humming drones, no silent orchestration from an invisible network. It was sweat, grunts, dirt under nails, and hands rubbing their own sore muscles.He stopped beside a foundation that had once been a supply depot. Half the floor had caved in, leaving an exposed pit littered with broken crates. A group of survivors were digging through the rubble to salvage anything edible or repairable. Raiden noticed two of them immediately. One bore the faint silv

The recovered data shard was no bigger than Linda’s thumb, a smoked piece of transparent polyglass with half its circuitry blackened by heat. Raiden found it during the afternoon salvage run at the ruins of the Old Core, buried beneath twisted frames of collapsed steel. He didn’t expect anything functional. Everyone assumed Genesis had burned itself out entirely when Charlie absorbed the dying network. Any surviving fragment should have been dead, corrupted, or useless.But as he walked into the Skydome hall that evening, dust streaking his jacket and his shoulders hunched from exhaustion, his hands trembled in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. The shard pulsed faintly against his palm. A slow, rhythmic pulse.Linda noticed it the moment he stepped into the lantern glow. She pushed away from the supply table, sensing something was different. “What happened?”Raiden didn’t answer right away. He placed the shard on the table. Its faint heartbeat-like flicker rippled across the