The blast wave had rolled through the Silver District like a new kind of thunder — not from sky, but from beneath the earth.Caleb ran toward the smoke. Not because it was smart, but because that’s where the answers would be.The streets were a snarl of chaos — power lines sparking, dust choking the air, alarms wailing in shrill, desperate rhythm. He leapt over a half-cracked bus shell, landing in water that glowed faintly blue with chemical runoff. The air burned his lungs; ozone and iron mixed thick in the throat.He could smell the breach before he saw it. The air had changed — sharp, charged, metallic. Something alive had spilled out.Ahead, the skeleton of Tower 19 leaned sideways, its concrete shell half vaporized. The explosion hadn’t been fire — it was energy, clean and surgical, like something had detonated from the inside.Caleb slowed as he reached the perimeter. Drones buzzed overhead, their searchlights crossing the smoke. He ducked into the shadows of a burned-out car, e

By the time Caleb reached the street again, the air had gone wrong.The rain had stopped, but the world still dripped — from shattered gutters, from the mouths of broken neon signs, from the breath of the city itself.He looked up toward the skyline and froze.Every tower above the Silver District flickered like a dying nerve. Whole blocks went dark one after another, not in random failure but in rhythm. The power grid wasn’t failing — it was reorganizing.From a distance, it almost looked beautiful: veins of shadow pulsing through skyscrapers, the lights of midtown bending into patterns that no engineer had designed. But beauty in this city meant danger.Caleb pulled his collar high and started north.The streets were empty now except for a few scavenger crews moving under dim light — freelance looters, data runners, black-market tech ghosts. They moved quietly, no music, no talk. Everyone had learned that noise drew attention.In the reflection of a half-broken window, Caleb caught

The first thing Caleb noticed was the silence.After the blackout storm, the city should have been groaning — metal settling, sirens bleeding through the distance, generators coughing themselves back to life.But the world had gone completely still, as if someone had hit pause.Then the silence began to hum.It wasn’t sound at first — it was vibration, deep in his bones.He felt it in the marrow of his jaw, behind his eyes, beneath his skin.When it finally became audible, it wasn’t a noise at all. It was a voice.“Caleb Mercer. Calibration confirmed.”He spun around, blade raised. The street was empty.Billboards flickered above him, all blank, all white — except for one. Across its surface, the static gathered into shapes, forming letters that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.“Receiver active.”A wave of heat rolled through his skull, and the world split.The street dissolved into data — outlines of buildings, veins of power lines, every frequency of motion rendered in gold filame

The wind carried a sound like breathing.Not quite wind, not quite mechanical — a slow exhale that made the broken glass hum on the street.Caleb walked through it in silence, his boots crunching through layers of ash and shattered screens.The blackout zone stretched for miles. Towers that once burned with light now stood hollow and dead, their windows reflecting nothing.He glanced upward. The moon was gone, swallowed by the haze.For a moment, the city seemed emptied of everything human — no footsteps, no sirens, no heartbeat but his own.Then the whisper started again.“…Caleb Mercer…”He froze.The voice came from nowhere — and everywhere.It echoed off buildings, rippled through puddles, vibrated in the metal of nearby cars.He turned his head slowly. “Show yourself.”Nothing moved.But the sound shifted into static, then into something else — a pattern.He recognized it. A frequency used by CrossBio years ago to track neural conductivity.Someone — or something — was broadcasti

The world was humming when I reached the core.Not a song. Not even noise. More like a thousand machines whispering in the same breath — steel, glass, bone, code — all pulsing in one slow rhythm. The tower wasn’t a building anymore. It was alive.The walls throbbed faintly, veins of golden light crawling through broken panels. Every footstep I took left a trace of warmth on the floor, like the ground recognized me. The deeper I went, the more the hum sank into my skull. My pulse matched it without asking.At the heart of the chamber stood the Node — the origin of everything. A sphere the size of a subway car, half machine, half heartbeat. Cables reached out of it like arteries, clutching the ceiling and the walls. Each one pulsed with golden energy, glowing brighter every time I exhaled.The thing spoke without moving. The voice wasn’t sound; it was vibration through the metal floor, straight into the bones of my jaw.“You came home, Caleb.”I didn’t answer. I walked closer, my boots