Lyra didn’t breathe for a full second.She couldn’t.Adrian’s words—soft, almost apologetic—landed like a fracture through her ribs. His skin was hot beneath her hands, pulsing with an unstable gold that wasn’t quite light and wasn’t quite electricity. It felt alive. Reacting. Responding.And resonating.She swallowed hard. “Adrian… look at me.”He tried. She saw the effort in the way his brows knit, in the tremor that rippled along his jaw, in the way his gaze flickered like a damaged signal trying to re-stabilize. His pupils dilated, contracting sharply as another external pulse hit him.The debris outside the window brightened again—slow, deliberate, a breath drawn by something with no lungs.Lyra gripped his face, forcing the world to narrow to her eyes. Her voice was steady, calm, surgical.“You’re still here,” she whispered. “Not them. You.”Adrian exhaled shakily. “Lyra… I can feel them thinking.”“Block it out.”“I’m not sure I can.” His throat worked. “They’re not screaming.

The echo of Adrian’s last word still trembled through Lyra’s neural field long after the sky went quiet.Find me.It wasn’t a message.It wasn’t even speech.It was a reflex, the kind a consciousness gives when it’s being torn apart.And Lyra—who once believed she had exhausted every form of grief in the years before the Shift—found herself grappling with a new one: the grief of losing someone who was not supposed to be lost.The outpost around her hummed with emergency power. Mira had already taken Jace inside, stabilizing him near the diagnostic panel. Distant sirens from other sectors echoed through the valley—alert calls triggered by the global network’s sudden disturbances.But Lyra barely heard them.She stood in the open, wind tugging at her hair, the night sky wide and empty where the vortex had vanished. Every part of her felt stretched thin. The neural interface in her wristband throbbed in erratic pulses, mirroring her heartbeat.For the first time since the Core Shift, she

Adrian hit the world like light, not like a body.The collapse hurled him into open atmosphere, the sky ripping past in streaks of white and gold. Shards of the lattice fell with him—millions of bright fragments scattering like a storm of glowing rain. Some burned out. Some circled him in erratic spirals, confused, errant, newborn without their parent mind.Adrian couldn’t breathe.He didn’t know if it was because of the fall, or because part of him still felt unstitched—still echoing with the voices that tried to rewrite him.Template incomplete.Identity divergence.Lyra variable—critical.Her name pulsed through him even now.His heart seized.Lyra.Where—The wind roared past him before he could finish the thought, tearing a scream from his throat as his descent accelerated, the world below sharpening into a wide sweep of ocean and fractured clouds.And then—Something struck him from the side.Arms. Warm. Human. Fierce.Lyra.Her weight slammed against him as she caught his fall,

Lyra held Adrian so tightly she felt his heartbeat through every point of contact—too fast, too uneven, as if the mark inside him was still adjusting to the rhythm of his human chest. His breath trembled against her shoulder, warm and unsteady, and she could feel the faintest pulse of golden heat beneath his skin like a second heartbeat struggling to synchronize.The deck around them was silent now. The crew had stepped back, some in awe, some in fear, all watching the two of them as though afraid a single wrong movement might shatter the fragile quiet left in the wake of the swarm. Somewhere behind Lyra, someone muttered that command had to be informed immediately, that this was beyond protocol, beyond anything the cutter was equipped to handle. But Lyra barely heard them.Her focus was entirely on the man shaking in her arms.“Adrian,” she breathed, pulling back just enough to cup the sides of his face. His skin was cold, too cold, but his eyes—God, his eyes—glowed faintly like embe

The hidden access platform was deserted—just a broad expanse of polymer flooring, trembling faintly under the strain of the sector’s failing power grid. Overhead, the cavernous chamber of the Central Observatory loomed.The air smelled of static, metal, and something else—something colder, older.Adrian felt it immediately.The tether inside him tightened like a warning.Lyra noticed the subtle change in his expression. “Another pulse?”“Not a pulse,” he murmured. “A presence.”She stepped closer—not touching him, but anchoring him with the gravity of her attention.“Stay with me. We’re walking into the deepest archive on the continent. If the government hid anything… it’s here.”He nodded, though the ache behind his sternum flared again.Whatever was stirring inside him was watching this place.Waiting.They crossed the access deck. The platform doors slid open with a low hydraulic groan, revealing a long, descending corridor lined with black composite walls polished to a faint mirro