The fight in the Fang valley had hovered on a suspended chord, its outcome balanced on a knife's edge thousands of meters above and far into the mountain. In Lupus Haven, though, tension was another beast entirely—a suffocating, shrieking pressure to make the great lie Kael was spinning an international reality.
While Kael had put his life on the line on a bluff, Lyra had put millions of lives on the line on an algorithm.
The Cura app was no longer a silent thing waiting for its users. It was now a virtual predator, unleashed. Its unofficial, unwritten installation on thousands of devices across Europe was a monolithic profanation, a necessary sin that sat in Lyra's gut like a lead sinker. Every time a new green dot appeared on the main screen—another cell phone infected with their lovin
