The night after stabilising Mira, the academy refused to sleep.
Every light seemed too bright, every sound too sharp. Even the wind across the spire carried a faint metallic whine.
I kept catching that pulse again the same low vibration I’d felt when the fragment network tried to link.
It was quieter now, but constant, like a hidden heartbeat under the campus.
“Eight hundred meters?” I whispered. “There’s nothing down there.”
Kira, hunched over the terminal across the room, glanced up. “There isn’t supposed to be. The schematics stop at Sub-3. You sure that’s not residual static?”
I turned the wrist-band so she could see the data stream. “Static doesn’t come with coordinates.”
She frowned. “Then we’re heading into off-map territory.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
---
By midnight
