The fall should have killed her. In a world governed by the traditional laws of physics, a three-hundred-foot drop onto obsidian would have reduced Giulia Romano to a memory of shattered bone. But as the white core collapsed into a singularity of suppressed data, gravity itself seemed to stutter. Giulia hit the floor not with a thud, but with a pneumatic hiss, as if the air had thickened into a cushion of static.
She rolled to her knees, gasping, her lungs burning as they transitioned from the blue substrate back to the oxygen of the abyss. The chamber was a ruin of fractured light. The white core, once the pulsing brain of the Vathek, was now a jagged crater of cooling glass.
“Matteo!” she choked out, her voice raw and metallic.
He was twenty feet away, staggering to his feet. His blue
