"Quinn, drop the weapon," Vedic said, his voice stripped of all tremor. It wasn't a request; it was the sound of a structural foundation shifting into place. "Holding that pulse-caster is only forcing the Auditor to increase its hostility toward you. It’s reading your intent as a threat, which means it's marking you for immediate deletion."Quinn looked at the heavy, humming barrel of the pulse-caster, then back at Vedic. "And if I drop it? What then? We just stand here and wait for the sky to finish unravelling? Look at the horizon, Vedic! That’s not a sunset. That’s the end of everything."Above them, the sky—formerly a vaulted dome of simulated sapphire—was curling away in long, jagged strips. Beneath the peeling blue lay not darkness, but a blinding, terrifying void of raw, unformatted white. It was the color of a blank page, the color of a screen before the operating system boots, the color of absolute, uncompromising potential.Sanan drifted between

The pulse-caster drifted downward, but before it could impact the ground, it simply disintegrated into thousands of glittering, binary shards. Quinn stared at the empty space where her weapon had been, her fingers still curled in the shape of a grip. She looked up at Vedic, her eyes wide, reflecting the blinding white void that was consuming the reality they had once called home."It’s gone," she whispered, her voice sounding unnervingly crisp in the silence. "Just like that. No noise. No impact."Vedic stepped forward, his feet finding purchase on nothingness. He didn't sink; he stood on the sheer density of his own resolve. "The weapon was a ghost of the old rules, Quinn. You don't need a tool to occupy space that no longer has a perimeter."Sanan drifted closer, her golden edges now almost completely translucent. She looked less like a person and more like a shimmer of heat above a summer road. "He’s right. Look at the horizon. It’s stopped shrinking. T