"Emergency alert!" Marcus's voice cracked across the command center like a whip. "Priority one transmission from the Ancient Consciousness Collective. They're... they're screaming."
The words hit me like ice water. In three years of communication with entities that had existed for thirty-seven million years, I had never heard urgency in Marcus's voice when discussing them.
"Screaming how?"
"Across seventeen dimensional frequencies simultaneously. The quantum consciousness entities are going dark. The mathematical awareness forms are... breaking down. Something's wrong, Selene. Something's very wrong."
I ran to the communication array, pushing past technicians whose faces showed the kind of terror I hadn't seen since the collective crisis. The transmission that came through was unlike a
