[Ava's POV]
The weight of the Crucible’s lessons—the phantom aches of emotional severance, the hollow echo of isolation—was a shroud Ava carried with her as she descended.
The steel-cold silence of that training room had been bad enough, but it was the returning noise of the Bond that now felt alien, a symphony she was conducting without ever having learned the score. She needed a different kind of quiet, the quiet of facts, of history, of a past that might explain the terrifying present. She sought the archive, and the woman who lived within it.
Deeper than the barracks, deeper than the armory, in the Vault’s sub-basement where the air grew thick and cold enough to fog the breath, was Sable’s domain. It was less a room than an archaeological dig of the digital age. Banks of servers, s
