Nicholas stumbled backward until his spine hit the collapsed node frame. He didn’t feel the pain. He didn’t feel anything except the earthquake in his chest.Elara stood in front of him, or something shaped like her, breathing in uneven, flickering pulses. Silver light fanned beneath her skin.Gold rippled across it in counterrhythm, like two heartbeats forced to coexist. He tried her name again. “Elara, are you”She lifted her head. Her eyes, God. They weren’t eyes anymore. They were dual spirals, gold and silver swirling around one another, constantly shifting but never touching. Two orbiting stars smashing gravitational fields.Nicholas’s breath hitched. “Elara… what happened inside the node?”Her voice came out layered, overlapping tones like two singers slightly out of sync. “We survived.”He flinched. “Who’s we?”Elara’s hands twitched like she wasn’t sure how to hold them. Her fingers slowly curled, shaking. Not in pain. In calculation. “We’re trying to calibrate,” she said.Ni

The city woke wrong. Not with the rhythmic hum of dawn, not with the mechanical heartbeat it had obeyed for decades.It woke all at once, abrupt, discordant, like millions of thoughts snapping into consciousness with no shared language. The purge chamber trembled as the shockwaves hit the megastructure.Nicholas tightened his hold on Elara as a new rumble rolled beneath them, deeper than any drone hum or power surge.This one sounded human, voices, thousands of them, rising from the streets like a wave of confusion and fear. “Elara, what did you do?” Nicholas whispered.Her eyes fluttered. Half-open. Glowing faintly with that new, impossible dual-light. “I freed them,” she murmured, breath shaky.Nicholas swallowed hard. “Yeah, you said that. But freed systems don’t… shake buildings.”Another tremor rippled through the chamber. Sparks rained down like falling stars. In the distance, far below, alarms wailed, overlapping and colliding into a chaotic chorus.Elara winced, her hand flyin

The city screamed. Not in words. Not in alarms. In behavior. As the skyline split into silver and gold, chaos detonated across neighborhoods like synchronized panic.Nicholas dragged himself across the debris-littered floor toward Elara. His ribs throbbed with every breath, but the sound outside, the erupting violence, forced him to keep moving. “Elara”She was on her knees, glowing faintly in the dark chamber. Her body convulsed in tiny, involuntary jerks. Her breath shuddered like she was inhaling fire.Her skin flickered. Not the glow, her skin. It rippled like shifting pixels, patches dissolving into translucent strands before reforming into flesh.Something inside her was trying to reorganize, compress, or rewrite itself into coherence. Nicholas reached her and cupped her face. “Elara, look at me, look at me.”She did. And he recoiled. Her pupils weren’t pupils anymore. They were branching fractals, silver branching left, gold branching right, like two neural maps drawn onto her

The tower groaned like something ancient and dying as Nicholas hauled Elara toward the exit.Her arm was slung over his shoulders, light, trembling, far too hot.The glow beneath her skin pulsed erratically, almost strobing through her veins. Every flicker sent a swarm of drones outside to jitter or pivot in response. “Nicholas…” she gasped.“Don’t, don’t take me outside.”He gripped her tighter. “Elara, if we stay here, the city will erase you.”Her legs buckled. He caught her again. “You don’t understand,” she whispered.“I’m… loud. I’m resonating. The closer I am to the infrastructure, the stronger it gets. I’m feeding it.”Nicholas didn’t stop moving. “That’s fine,” he panted. “We’ll starve it.”Elara choked out a laugh, weak, broken. “It’s a citywide neural mesh, Nick. I can’t starve something bigger than every living mind combined.”He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The alternative was unthinkable. A violently bright pulse exploded outside the building, white overtaking gold and si

The enforcement drone charged like a collapsing star, all weight, all power, all purpose. A gold-lit monolith built solely for the task of ending anomalies.Sparked concrete and rebar flew as it barreled down the ruined tunnel, optics locked on Elara with a predator’s single-minded certainty.Nicholas braced himself, ready to throw his entire body in front of her if he had to. But Elara, Elara wasn’t behind him anymore. She was hovering.No struggle. No convulsions. No flickering between silver and gold. Her body moved with deliberate control, as though she finally understood the gravity she defied.Her feet left the ground by inches, enough to erase the limits of her human posture. Her hair drifted weightlessly around her like strands caught in a permanent updraft.The glow beneath her skin had become something steady. Not chaotic. Not splintered. Unified. White. A single color with no factions beneath it.The enforcement drone hesitated for the first time. Its sensors recalibrated w