Panic is not chaos.
Panic is urgency without wisdom.
⸻
It begins with silence.
Not the quiet Zane has learned to respect, but the kind that arrives when calculations stop returning answers fast enough to be useful.
Jason feels it in the lattice like a skipped heartbeat.
Then another.
Then a stutter that spreads.
“They’re not converging,” he whispers, eyes wide as the projections loop back on themselves. “They’re… oscillating.”
Zane doesn’t move. The heir sleeps against his chest, breath warm and steady, blissfully unaware of the invisible machinery seizing around them.
“Oscillating how,” Zane asks.
Jason swallows. “Between containment and acceleration.”
Zane closes his eyes.
“That’s panic.”
⸻
The first symptom appears in the outer territories.
Not collapse.
Correction.
A
