The sky was broken glass—no longer a ceiling, but a shattered lens through which a synthetic sun shed false light.
Above the crater that had held the first Anchorpoint, that light fragmented into prisms of broken memory. Files too corrupted to be erased floated in the air, drifting like ash.
Kaito stayed at the center of everything, a contained calm in a ring of remaining light from the stabilization.
The aftershock was complete, yet the system continued not to stabilize. The world around them hummed with a low-key thrum—something underneath, living and listening.
The others stood around him, panting.
Kael leaned against a pillar of unfinished architecture, his breathing labored. "That thing we fought—wasn't random code. It had a clue of what we were doing. It was defending the Anchorpoint."
Nyra nodded. "Or tapping energy from it."
"It wasn't one of the system's bugs," Iris said. "It was something else. A remnant. A product of a rewrite in progress."
