The sky over the ruins was wrong.Not dark — but fractured. Thin seams of light split the clouds like stress fractures in glass, pulsing in slow, uneven rhythms that made Mira’s stomach tighten. Every sensor on the command deck screamed the same warning.The Gate was waking.Mira stood rigid at the forward viewport, hands clasped behind her back as the stolen cruiser hovered above the shattered cityscape. Below them, the remains of old towers jutted from the ground like broken bones, half-buried beneath drifting debris and collapsed infrastructure.Kapoor’s fingers flew across the console. “Resonance levels just spiked another twelve percent. That’s not a test cycle.”Adrian felt it before the alarms confirmed it.The pressure behind his eyes returned — heavier than before, like the world itself was leaning inward. He steadied himself against the bulkhead, breath shallow, jaw clenched.Lyra noticed instantly.She moved to him without hesitation, hand closing around his wrist. “Hey. St

The sky above the dead city was wrong.Not dark—just… fractured.Broken layers of cloud hung low and jagged, as if reality itself had been torn and stitched back together poorly. Lightning flickered without thunder. Static clung to the air, crawling over exposed skin like invisible insects.Mira stood at the edge of the rooftop, boots planted on cracked concrete, watching the anomaly coil above the skyline.“That’s not a storm,” Rourke muttered beside her.“No,” Kapoor replied quietly, eyes locked on the data streaming across his tablet. “That’s a resonance convergence. Multiple debris fields overlapping at once.”Sari swore under her breath. “So basically—everything we’ve been trying to stop just decided to happen anyway.”Behind them, Lyra tightened the straps of her gauntlets, jaw clenched. Adrian stood a few steps away, unnaturally still, eyes reflecting the fractured sky as if he could feel it pulling at him.Mira turned. “Adrian. Talk to me.”He inhaled slowly. “It’s calling.”S

The silence after the explosion felt heavier than the blast itself.Smoke rolled through the shattered command chamber in slow, choking waves, carrying the sharp tang of burned circuitry and scorched metal. Emergency lights flickered weakly, casting fractured shadows across the broken floor.Mira pushed herself up first.Her ears rang. Her shoulder screamed in protest. But she was alive — and that mattered more than pain.“Status,” she said hoarsely into her comm.Static.Then Kapoor’s voice cut through, strained but intact. “Breathing. Bleeding. Still brilliant.”“Good,” Mira replied. “Sari?”“Here,” Sari said, somewhere to Mira’s left. “Pinned, not dead.”Rourke coughed violently. “Add ‘very annoyed’ to my medical chart.”Mira allowed herself one sharp exhale of relief before turning toward the epicenter of the blast.Adrian and Lyra.They were down near the collapsed control dais, half-buried under debris and sparking cables. Mira’s heart lurched — then steadied when she saw moveme

The silence after truth was heavier than any explosion.The command chamber of the rebel base felt smaller than ever — walls pressing inward, air thick with tension. Holo-screens flickered with frozen data from Chapter 106: intercepted transmissions, genetic schematics, timelines that overlapped too perfectly to be coincidence.Project Echelon hadn’t just been revived.It had never stopped.Mira stood at the center of the room, arms folded tightly across her chest, eyes locked on the central display. She hadn’t moved in several minutes. No one dared interrupt her.Kapoor finally broke the quiet. “If these logs are accurate… then Echelon isn’t a single program. It’s a framework.”“A doctrine,” Sari muttered. “Reusable. Scalable.”“Endless,” Rourke added darkly.Lyra sat beside Adrian at the long metal table, her fingers intertwined with his beneath its surface. She could feel his pulse — steady, but heavier than usual. He was holding something in. She knew that feeling too well.Mira e