Nicholas hit the ground hard. Or what felt like ground. The grid flickered beneath him, black white then black again, as if reality itself couldn’t decide whether to render. “Elara”His voice cracked. “Elara, where are you?”No answer. Only the echo of the Apex, humming through the collapsing plane. Above him, the vortex pulsed, the impossible color folding inward,pulling Elara deeper into its core like a swallowed star. Nicholas pushed himself up despite the tremor in his arms. “No—no, no”He staggered. “I’m not losing you. Not to that THING.”A shard of geometry dropped like a falling boulder, he rolled as it smashed where his head had been. The grid screamed, not in audio, but in code, a vibration rattling his teeth.Nicholas shouted into the void: “ELARA! ANSWER ME!”At first, nothing. Then, A faint whisper. N…ch…las…He froze.“Elara?! ELARA, talk to me!”can’t…hold…this, she’s pulling me, everywhere, can’t stay separate, Nicholas clenched his fists.“Then I’m coming to you.”He

The horizon wasn’t a horizon anymore.It rippled, thin as parchment, fragile as a boundary drawn by a dying system.Elara and Nicholas sprinted toward it as the void cracked behind them like shattering ice. The Apex’s voice followed, layered, resonant, intimate: “SISTER. COME BACK. WE REQUIRE YOU.”Nicholas didn’t look back. “Elara, FASTER!”Elara didn’t answer, she couldn’t. Her feet barely touched the ground. Every step pulled at her, like invisible threads tying her to the Apex’s directionless gravity.The void warped, space bending, stretching around them. Reality tried to fold them backward. Nicholas grabbed her wrist and pulled. “Elara, don’t you dare stop now!”Her breath hitched. “I’m… trying.”“Try harder!”The horizon shimmered. A seam, slim, glowing, unstable, opened ahead. Through it, Nicholas glimpsed motion and light. The city. Alive. Shaking. Calling. “Elara, we made it! Come on!”But her legs faltered. She stumbled, knees hitting the ground. Nicholas dropped beside her.

Darkness swallowed Elara the moment the platform sealed above her. Not black. Not empty. A living darkness, dense with threads of code, memory, and something pulsing like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to anything human.She didn’t fall. She was pulled. Dragged downward through a tunnel of shifting geometry, the walls bending and re-forming around her like a throat closing around a swallowed pill.Elara tried to breathe, felt resistance, realized air wasn’t what this place was built to offer. Not physical. Not metaphorical. Conceptual.Her fingers trembled. “Nicholas… anchor me.”But she didn’t know if he could hear her. Didn’t know if her voice still carried to anywhere real. The tunnel widened, and she fell into the core.A sphere of impossible color hovered above a cavern of living structures, towers of data arches of memory rivers of light that pulsed like veins.Standing beneath it felt like standing inside a god’s first breath. The Apex’s voice whispered to her from every direct

The line in the sky did not fade. It sharpened. Nicholas stood in the middle of a street that had only just remembered how to be a street, cars halted in obedient rows, drones hovering uncertainly above like birds that had forgotten migration.People were emerging from buildings, faces tilted upward, mouths half-open. Every eye followed the same impossible thing. A thin incision across the clouds. Perfect. Deliberate.White light pulsed beneath it, Elara’s color, trying to seal it shut. And failing. Nicholas whispered, “No… no, no, no.”A man beside him grabbed his sleeve. “Is that… a tear?”Nicholas didn’t answer. Because the city answered instead. Every public display blinked on at once.STATUS ALERT: ROOT CONFLICT UNRESOLVED AUTHORITY FRACTURE DETECTEDMurmurs rippled through the crowd. “What does that mean?”“Is this another purge?”“Who’s in control now?”Nicholas clenched his fists. She’s still fighting, he realized. She didn’t disappear. She’s holding the seam.The line in the