The silence of the archives was no longer a sanctuary. It was a crime scene. Zeta stood amidst the scattered leather-bound volumes and the twisted metal frame of the collapsed shelving unit. The Overclockers agent lay beneath the weight of the wreckage, his life extinguished in an instant. The air was thick with the scent of pulverized paper and the metallic tang of leaking coolant fluid from the agent's internal systems. Zeta felt a tremor in his hands, but he forced himself to breathe evenly, his mind already partitioning his fear into a cold, logical box. He knew that the system would flag the agent's missing status within minutes, and the library would be flooded with security protocols.
He looked down at his own hands, his mind racing through the sequence of necessary actions. The
