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Chapter forty seven: voices in the dark
last update2025-09-18 15:36:21

The blackout did not feel like victory. Not yet.

Shayne pressed his palms to the reinforced glass of his containment cell, watching the grid outside collapse in waves. Towers that once pulsed with sterile white light now loomed like skeletons against the skyline. Streets below were a tangle of stalled cars and flickering drones, their searchlights cutting through smoke like blind eyes. Somewhere, alarms wailed—but their cadence was broken, jagged, as though even the machines had lost their rhythm.

Elysia stood just behind him, her breath unsteady but her posture sharp. She had seen collapse before—in war drills, in manufactured riots staged for the Accord’s propaganda—but this was different. This wasn’t simulation. This was fracture.

“Do you hear that?” Shayne asked, voice low.

Elysia tilted her head. At first, only static hissed through the cell’s comm vents. Then, beneath the static, came voices. Dozens, then hundreds, bleeding through frequencies that should have been locked.
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