The morning sun felt like a spotlight.
Silas Vance stepped onto the university campus with the stiffness of a man who had survived a war overnight. In truth, that wasn’t far from reality.
Every muscle in his body ached. His ribs still burned from Arthur Sterling’s punishment on the ice. His shoulders were raw from crawling through steel ventilation ducts. And somewhere beneath the fatigue, the memory of the heartbeat behind the Vault pulsed like a second rhythm inside his mind.
He hadn’t slept.
Not even a minute.
Yet here he was, walking through the clean, bright pathways of Oakhaven Institute of Technology like nothing had happened.
Students laughed around him.
Someone argued about exam formulas.
A group nearby debated whether the cafeteria coffee tasted like battery acid.
Normal
