Silence here had a density to it, as if sound itself had been weighed and found wanting. The Echo Chamber held the residue of the node’s last bloom: a faint blue ring around the central lattice, a ghost of white-hot light that dissolved too slowly to be merely technological. The rim still ticked 43 in a way Riven could feel more than read.
Idris lay with his face to the floor, fingers flexing in a rhythm that wasn’t his own. Calyx hovered at the edge of the node, palms clenched against his knees, gaze quick and precise. Riven watched both of them and tried to measure himself against the distance between them—curiosity on one side, the instinct to protect on the other.
A thin sound began that had nothing of the human voice in it: a mechanical staccato, like distant typebars trying to form
