The city did not sleep. It settled into a tense, half-lit vigilance, streets humming with low power, councils rotating shifts, transit routes breathing in short, deliberate pulses.The mesh held, but it held the way a muscle does under strain: responsive, sore, alert to pain. Malik felt it before the alerts came. Not a spike. Not a pull. A compression.He stood near the edge of the staging chamber, palms flat against the cool railing, eyes unfocused.The hum beneath his skin tightened, threads drawing closer together, pressure redistributing with an urgency that felt… intentional. Rina noticed his stillness. “That’s not fatigue,” she said quietly.“No,” Malik replied. “It’s anticipation.”Caleb looked up from his console, brow furrowed. “I’m seeing synchronized latency across multiple sectors. Not failures, delays. Like something’s loading.”Sable’s expression hardened. “They’re staging.”“Who?” Rina asked, though she already knew the answer.“All of them,” Sable said. “Accord proxies

Malik woke to nothing. Not darkness, absence. No hum beneath his skin. No distant chorus of systems or people or motion.Even his own breath sounded wrong, too loud in a space that didn’t echo. He tried to move. Pain answered.It flared sharp and total, racing along his spine, down his arms, through his skull. Malik gasped, the sound tearing out of him, and only then did sensation begin to return, cold beneath his palms, a hard surface pressing into his back, the slow, terrifying realization that he was still inside a body.Just no longer inside a city. “Rina,” he whispered.The name vanished as soon as it left his mouth. Malik forced himself upright, muscles trembling. The space around him was vast and undefined, an endless plane of dull gray, like unfinished concrete stretched to infinity. No walls. No ceiling. No visible source of light, yet everything was dimly illuminated.He reached instinctively for the city. Nothing answered. Panic surged, hot, disorienting. He pressed a hand

Malik did not fall. He arrived. The darkness around him wasn’t empty, it was structured, layered in dimensions his mind refused to parse all at once. Distance folded in on itself.Direction lost meaning. He stood, or thought he did, inside a vast curvature, like the interior of a closed eye that had never known light. The presence surrounded him. Not as a body. As a condition.It pressed no weight against his chest, yet Malik felt heavier than he ever had—every choice, every fracture, every scream the city had ever swallowed settling into him like sediment.You crossed the boundary, something said. The voice was not sound. It did not echo. It did not ask permission. Malik swallowed. “You answered me.”You called without command, the presence replied. That is rare.“I didn’t know what else to do,” Malik said. “They took everything else.”The darkness shifted, not threatening, but attentive. Malik felt the alignment deepen, the call he’d felt earlier now fully awake, resonating not outw

The city did not break all at once. It fractured in layers. Sound went first, voices smearing into echoes, the collective hum stretching until it became a scream too vast to belong to any single throat.Then light followed, the sky’s torn seam pulsing erratically, stuttering between colors that had no names and shadows that moved without owners.Rina felt the ground heave under her knees as she clutched Malik, his body rigid in her arms, muscles locking as if he were bracing against a tide that only he could feel.“Stay with me,” she begged. “Please. Malik, look at me.”His eyes were open but unfocused, pupils blown wide, reflecting not the sky but something behind it. “I can feel it,” he whispered, voice stretched thin. “It’s not pushing anymore.”Rina’s chest tightened. “Then what is it doing?”“It’s… deciding.”The presence beyond the seam shifted. Not forward. Downward.The air thickened, pressure collapsing inward, forcing breath from lungs, bending metal with a sound like distan

Malik fell without direction. There was no down, only acceleration, layers peeling away as if reality were shedding skins faster than his mind could follow.Light fractured into bands that twisted around him, each one humming with a different consequence. He tried to scream Rina’s name again, but sound collapsed before it left his throat, swallowed by the tearing pressure of passage.He wasn’t falling through space. He was falling through decisions. Every choice he’d refused, every outcome he’d disrupted, every future he’d denied the city flickered past him in jagged flashes.In one, towers stood pristine and silent, people orderly and hollow-eyed. In another, the skyline burned while voices sang defiantly in the streets.In a third, there was no city at all, just a scar where something had once tried to live forever. The Counterweight held. Barely.It wrapped around his core like a brace around a shattered spine, not protecting him from the fall but keeping him coherent.Malik felt p