The marble was real.Ethan knew because he pressed his foot down slowly, the way you test ice before committing your weight, and it held. Cold. Solid. Not rendered. Not code pretending to be stone.That bothered him more than anything else in the room.The hall stretched in every direction without ending — not the way a large room feels endless, but the way a number does when you keep dividing it and it never reaches zero. The screens covered the walls, floor to ceiling, each one showing a different person. Names. Vitals. Status tags. Hundreds of millions of them, scrolling in real time.Ethan didn't look at the screens. He looked at the man behind the desk.The desk was wrong for the room. Everything else was marble and light and the kind of architecture that says power without trying. The desk was plain wood. The kind you'd find in a government office that hadn't been renovated since the nineties. It had a coffee ring stain on the left corner.The man sitting behind it looked exactl

Seraphina's question hung in the air.Nobody answered it. The chamber went dead quiet — the kind that hits when everyone reaches the same ugly thought at the same time and nobody wants to say it first.Ethan kept reading her code.The gear wasn't just sitting in her chest. It had roots. Thin filaments snaking through her nerves, her memories, the parts of her that knew who she was. It wasn't only draining her — it was slowly hollowing her out and filling the space with something else.Twenty three days was being generous."Before I answer that," Ethan said, "I need to know something."Seraphina waited."Your ice. Your wings. The healing." He gestured at the empty air around her. "How much of that was actually yours before the System got involved?"She thought about it. Not calculating — actually thinking."I was always cold," she said. "Even as a kid. My mother used to say I was born in the wrong season." A pause. "The wings were the System's. Most of the combat power too. But the col

Ethan pressed both palms flat against the rock ceiling.The stone was cold. Dense. Four hundred metres of it between them and the surface, each layer logged in the Source Code like geological strata in a database — sediment, bedrock, utility tunnels, water mains, the fractured remnants of Sea City's infrastructure sitting on top of it all like a bad header file.He read it fast.[Source Code Access: active.][Structural analysis: Sub-Level 4 to surface.][Identified path: utility shaft — eastern quadrant. Compromised but navigable.][Estimated clearance: insufficient for civilian passage.][Logic edit available: structural expansion.] [Authority cost: 1.2%]1.2%. He'd be sitting at 2.8% when it was done. That was thin. Thinner than he liked operating at open air with the Architects already paying attention.He did it anyway.He found the shaft in the code — a maintenance tunnel running vertically from Sub-Level 2 to a utility basement three blocks from the Holt Tower. Originally half

Ethan closed the door behind him and leaned against the wall beside the console."Tell me," he said.Mara turned back to the console, her fingers moving over the controls like she needed something to do with her hands. The generator hummed. Outside, the shouting had died down — either Thorne had handled it or it had gotten bad enough that nobody was shouting anymore."Three days ago," Mara said, "before you went underground, I was still in the Holt Tower. Holt was already talking to people — displaced hunters, anyone who'd lost their rank and wanted someone to blame. I heard his conversations. All of them." She paused. "Then the System went dark and everyone panicked and I made a decision.""To come here.""To come here and make sure whoever was running this tower wasn't using it against you." She finally looked at him. "Because someone was already trying to. The signal that kept pushing at the sub-levels — it wasn't automatic. Someone was sitting at a relay point somewhere in this ci

The East District looked like a city that had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing.Ethan walked through it with David a half step behind him and Kaelen flanking them both, and the further they went the more it looked less like a place recovering from something and more like a place that had simply stopped. Shops with their shutters half up and half down. A market stall with produce still laid out on the table, owner nowhere in sight. A car idling in the middle of the road with both doors open and no one inside.The Lesser System's absence was a physical thing. Ethan could feel it — not through Source Code View, just through the way people moved. Or didn't move. Men and women standing in doorways staring at nothing, occasionally raising their hands to eye level and looking at the empty air where their HUD used to be. A reflex that had developed in eight months and hadn't learned yet that there was nothing coming back.A woman sitting on the steps of what used to be a pharmacy lo