"Folding," Arel repeated, his voice devoid of tremor despite the proximity of his own erasure. He pointed a steady finger at the cascading red lines. "Look at the coordinate mapping. They aren't deleting the bakery district. They’re compressing the architectural data into a lower-tier storage cache to free up processing power for the upper levels. If you’re inside when the folder collapses, you don't just die. You get trapped in a non-Euclidean loop of half-rendered geometry. You’ll be a jagged texture on a wall for eternity."Kael stared at the monitor, his own hand flickering violently, the wireframe grid now pulsing all the way up to his elbow. "That’s why the coffee tasted like glass yesterday. That’s why the sky looked like it was tearing at the seams. They’re stripping the assets."Jara stepped closer, her face grim. "If they’re folding the bakery district, that means the Admin Tower is running out of memory. This isn't a routine maintenance cycle, Kael. It’s a systemic collapse

"They aren't just guarding the Infrastructure, Kael," Arel said, his eyes tracing the flow of data through the console’s interface. "They’re protecting the heat sinks. The Infrastructure is cooling down, but the Tower itself is running hot. It’s a thermal imbalance. They’re folding the bakery district to redirect cooling liquid—or the digital equivalent of it—to the Core. If we want to get out, we don't go through the front gate. We hitch a ride on the coolant flush."Jara stopped pacing, her brow furrowed. "A coolant flush? You want us to ride a data-purge cycle? That’s not a path, Arel. That’s a particle accelerator. We’d be shredded into raw code before we reached the first junction.""Not if we synchronize our signatures," Arel countered, his hands still moving across the console with a precision that bordered on machine-like. "I’ve been tracking the timing of the sectors. There’s a nanosecond gap between the sector-fold compression and the coolant flush initiation. It’s the 'dead

"I’ve been watching the bakery district loop for seventeen years," Arel said, his voice clipped and cold. "In two hours, the Overseer’s routine dictates a hard-wipe of the sector to reclaim processing power. If we’re standing here when that happens, we don’t just cease to exist. We become background noise. We become the bricks in the walls. I don’t know about you, but I’m done being the scenery."Jara stared at the screen, her knuckles white as she gripped the edge of the console. "Seventeen years? You’ve only been 'awake' for a month, Arel.""Seventeen years of being a ghost," Arel corrected, his fingers finally pulling back from the terminal. The screen glowed with a rhythmic, pulsing blue light—a heartbeat in a sea of static. "I’ve been tracking the loop frequency in my head since I was a child. The 'Doctor' wasn't a person, Jara. It was a scheduler. A task-manager. And it’s falling behind on its work."Kael stepped into the cramped space between them, his breath hitching. "You’re

"We don't say anything," Arel said, his voice hard as iron. "We don't exist to them. If we play our cards right, we’re just another data packet being shunted to the incinerator. We don't interact. We observe, we navigate, and we find the override. Kael, you take the rear. Jara, you follow my exact footsteps on the maintenance rungs. If you miss, you fall into the intake fan. And if you fall, I’m not coming back for you. The loop resets in eighty minutes. We need to be on the server backbone before that happens."Jara stared into the abyss, her face pale. "You’re making it sound like a tactical operation. It’s a suicide run, Arel. Look at those conduits. They’re glowing cherry-red. If we touch a live wire, we aren't just erased—we’re vaporized.""Then don't touch the wires," Arel replied, his tone brooking no argument. He stepped onto the first rung, his boots clanging against the damp, cold metal of the shaft. "Are you coming, or do you want to wait for the bakery to turn you into a s

"Arel? Arel, breathe. You’re leaking data."The voice wasn’t Lina’s. It was jagged, synthetic, and smelled of ozone and scorched plastic. Arel’s eyes snapped open. The abyss of the collapsing server was gone. Instead, he was pressed against a cold, vibration-heavy bulkhead.He lunged forward, his hand clawing for the hilt of a weapon he didn't have. "Lina! Where is she? She took the core!""She didn't take it, kid. She became it."Arel turned. Hunched over a glowing terminal in the corner of a cramped, metallic closet was a man who looked like he’d been stitched together from spare parts. His skin was gray, his eyes milky with cataracts, and his fingers moved with a frantic, twitching rhythm across a holographic keyboard."Elias?" Arel rasped. The name felt like a prayer from a dead religion. "You’re the Engineer. You were supposed to be fixing the power grid."Elias didn’t stop his frantic typing. "I’m not the Engineer. I’m the maintenance—the part of the machine that cleans up the c