Quiet in the command room was the quiet of a deep dive, all breaths suspended as the pack stared at the correspondence Selene had found. The Hegemony signal was not coincidental; it was a conductor, and the Hyperion virus was its orchestra, playing a symphony of death in time with a rhythm from the stars.
The terror was no longer abstract. It was a countdown timer, ticking toward some unimaginable calamity.
"We need to break the pattern," Kael broke the heavy silence. "If the signal is causing the mutation rate to rise, our therapies become obsolete before we can develop them. We're trying to outrun an avalanche on a treadmill."
"Jamming it is out," Lyra said, her focus one-pointed. "We don't even fully know its medium. It's not radio, not microwave. It's something else. A shiver in the
