The words didn’t fade.
“You will be taken.”
They lingered in the air like something physical—heavy, pressing, inescapable.
Emily stood very still.
“…Taken where?” she asked quietly.
No answer came.
Not immediately.
But the sky—
Flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then settled into a deeper, more focused stillness.
Emily’s skin prickled.
“…Okay,” she muttered. “I don’t like that silence.”
Kael’s gaze was fixed upward.
“They’re not responding,” she said.
Theodore’s voice was low.
“They are deciding.”
Emily swallowed. “Deciding what?”
The ground beneath them trembled faintly.
Not violently.
More like something shifting its weight.
Far below.
The answer came a moment later.
Not from above.
From everywhere at once.
“You are unstable.”
The voice didn’t echo this time.
It simply w
