Morning came without sunlight.Just a gray wash bleeding through the haze, thick as ash. The air smelled like burned copper and wet dust. Every sound carried too far—the soft scrape of my boots, the slow crackle of wires still trying to remember what electricity felt like.I’d been walking since the blast. I don’t know how long; clocks had stopped keeping faith hours ago. The city was quieter now. Not dead—just breathing differently.Below the ruins of CrossBio, water had pooled in the streets, reflecting broken towers and drifting smoke. The reflections rippled like something alive underneath, hiding its pulse from anyone left on the surface. I moved carefully. The pavement hummed underfoot, faint but certain, a low heartbeat traveling through steel and stone.Some of the buildings leaned against each other like tired giants. Some had holes punched clean through their middles where cables still hung, glowing dim gold, twitching every so often like nerves testing if they still belonge

The rain came back before noon.Not the kind that cleans — the kind that remembers. Heavy, metallic, almost warm, falling through air that smelled of ozone and smoke. It hissed when it touched the cracked streets, like the city was whispering to itself.I found shelter under a half-broken bridge near the East Dock. Water dripped from every beam. The concrete trembled, soft rumble deep below, like the bones of the place weren’t finished shifting yet.Something still moved down there.I could feel it. Not the Node. Not CrossBio’s leftover code. Something older.While the rest of the city burned, they’d built over old tunnels — old wolf paths, the kind that existed before the streets had names. That’s where the hum was strongest now. I’d been following it since dawn, one ear tuned to the static.At first, I thought it was memory — a glitch of what Helena unleashed when the tower fell. But this was deeper. It wasn’t calling me. It was calling something through me.I dropped to a crouch, p

I don’t fall so much as dissolve.Light swallows everything.Gold, white, static—then silence.When sound comes back, it’s not air or water. It’s code humming through bone.The floor is gone.The walls move.I’m inside the thing now.The Network isn’t cables or circuits anymore. It’s tissue. Veins of glass. Pulses running through translucent walls like blood through arteries. Every heartbeat echoes mine, trying to sync.I walk. My boots leave no sound. The ground flexes underfoot, breathing with me. Each breath sends waves of light rippling outward, and the tunnels answer in low tones.There’s no ceiling—just layers of shifting symbols suspended like constellations.They rearrange themselves whenever I look too long.Letters, numbers, fragments of names.Some I recognize: street codes, missing persons, wolf designations from CrossBio archives.They’re all part of the same pattern now.The air vibrates. A voice rises out of it—not one, but many braided together.“Integration incomplete

Three years since the silence.That’s what people call it now — The Silence.The week the hum died and the city fell still.But the truth is, it never really stopped. It just went beneath hearing, down where only the ones who remember can still feel it.I wake most mornings before light.Habit, maybe instinct.The air always carries a faint tremor then, like the world’s heart warming up before dawn. You have to be still to catch it — not listening with ears but with blood.They say the city’s clean now. Safer.Children play in alleys again. There’s order, patrols, systems rebuilt from scraps.But when I walk the grids at night, I see it: the faint shimmer along the street lamps, the quiet breathing in the wires.The Network isn’t gone. It learned to hide.The old CrossBio towers are gone for good. Their bones turned into shelters and relay hubs.Sectors run themselves now through patchwork collectives — engineers, hackers, mechanics, anyone who can keep the lights from dying. No bosse

It started with silence.Not the kind that comes after noise, but the kind that arrives before something new begins.For weeks, the hum beneath the city had shifted — lower, steadier, like the breath before a storm. The lights flickered in patterns too complex to be chance. Data streams folded on themselves. Even the air tasted different — like copper and rain.I thought it was decay.But it wasn’t.It was gestation.The city was changing again.I woke before dawn in the tram station. The power veins under the concrete pulsed faintly blue instead of gold. That had never happened before.When I touched the wall, it didn’t hum in recognition.It watched me.The pulse wasn’t answering my rhythm anymore — it was building one of its own. A sequence I couldn’t predict, couldn’t feel. It was learning a new kind of language.For the first time in decades, I couldn’t hear the city’s heartbeat.It had its own.By midday, the shift spread across all five sectors.The old towers began to resonate