The anchor rejected her. Not gently. The moment Rina stepped into its radius, the chamber screamed, light surging up the carved channels in violent arcs as the air itself seemed to recoil.A force slammed into her chest, hurling her backward into Malik with bone-jarring force. She hit the stone hard, breath ripped from her lungs.“Rina!” Malik shouted, dragging himself toward her on shaking arms.The anchor’s glow stabilized, dimming just enough to be terrifyingly precise. A voice filled the chamber. Not sound. Criteria mismatch.Rina coughed, pain blooming across her ribs. “That’s… not fair.”Malik pulled her close, shielding her with his body as the collector’s presence swelled, pressure crushing down from above. “It won’t take you,” he said hoarsely. “It never would.”Her heart pounded. “Because I’m not enough?”“Because you’re not what it was built to hold,” he replied, voice breaking. “You’re not fractured the way I am.”The ceiling groaned. The collector forced more of itself th

The first district vanished without sound. Not an explosion. Not a scream. Just absence. Rina felt it like a phantom limb, something that had been there her entire life suddenly not, leaving behind a hollow ache her mind couldn’t fill.The impression of the city above them flickered again, a section dimming into nothing as if erased by an unseen hand. “No,” she whispered, knees buckling. “No, please”Malik staggered as the loss hit him, a sharp, disorienting pain lancing through his chest. He clutched at the air, breath hitching as the echo of lives, thousands of them, snapped out of his perception like threads cut clean. “That was Old South,” he said hoarsely. “I can feel where it was.”The presence did not slow. Correction is proceeding within acceptable variance, it pressed. Divergence minimized.Rina screamed, a raw, wordless sound, and surged forward, shoving both hands against Malik’s chest. “No,” she cried. “You don’t get to do this to him. You don’t get to make him pay for you

Rina hit the ground hard. Not stone, metal. Warm, vibrating faintly with the pulse of the city.She rolled onto her side, lungs burning, the roar of systems and sirens crashing back into her like a wave she’d been holding at bay. “Malik!” Her voice broke raw as she pushed up, scanning the space.They were in an upper maintenance concourse, half-lit, half-flooded with emergency glow. People were running. Shouting. A distant alarm rose and fell in uneven cycles, like a city gasping after near-drowning.He wasn’t there. The truth hit slower this time. Heavier. Rina staggered to her feet, swaying, hands shaking as she pressed them to the wall.The sub-foundation had sealed. She felt it, like a locked door in her bones. Caleb burst through a side corridor, skidding to a stop when he saw her. “Rina! We lost your signal, are you”She grabbed his jacket. “He’s down there.”Caleb’s face drained. “Down where?”“Below everything,” she said hoarsely. “In the sealed layer.”The alarms spiked. Ligh

The corridor sealed behind Rina with a sound like a held breath finally released. Not a slam. A decision.She didn’t slow. The path ahead curved downward, walls formed of layered alloy and something else, memory-fiber, Malik had once called it, matter that carried intention the way copper carried current.Light pulsed beneath her feet in soft intervals, syncing with her heartbeat before she could stop it. “No,” she muttered, forcing her pace to steady. “You don’t get to sync to me.”The Spine answered by dimming the lights. Not hostile. Attentive. Her comm crackled violently. Malik’s voice burst through, sharp with panic. “Rina, where are you?”“I’m exactly where it wanted me,” she said, breathless. “Which means it didn’t expect me to say yes.”A pause, then, quieter: “You shouldn’t be there.”“Neither should you,” she shot back. “Yet here we are.”The corridor widened into a vast vertical chamber, a throat of interlocking rings rotating at different speeds, each etched with symbols t

The world didn’t end. That was the first, disorienting truth. Rina expected annihilation, the Spine collapsing inward, the city screaming itself into dust, Malik dissolving into light or silence or something worse.She expected consequence to arrive like a hammer. Instead, Everything paused.The light she’d stepped into fractured and froze, suspended around her like shards caught mid-explosion.The pressure that had been crushing her bones eased just enough for her lungs to drag in a raw, painful breath. The Spine hesitated.Rina hung there, half inside its core logic, half in the decaying corridor, blood pounding in her ears.Her vision blurred, then sharpened in impossible ways, she could see layers, structures behind structures, decision trees folding and refolding as the city tried to resolve a paradox it had never accounted for.Malik. She felt him before she saw him, his presence a counterpoint to the city’s vast, trembling indecision. He was still behind her, still real, still