Chapter 41
CHAPTER 41: WHEN SYSTEMS LEARN TO BREATHE The city had stopped feeling like a place under recovery and started feeling like a place under observation. Not by people, not by gangs, not even by governments that pretended to care from a distance, but by something quieter, more distributed, and harder to define. Isabella noticed it first in the rhythm of information. Reports no longer arrived as isolated incidents. They arrived as patterns already partially interpreted, as if the city itself had begun to summarize its own behavior before anyone asked. It was subtle enough that most would miss it. But she didn’t. She stood in the war room long before anyone else arrived, watching the live map refresh itself in real time, and for the first time since Moretti’s fall, she felt something close to
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