The lattice did not sleep that night. It could not. Sleep had always been a luxury borrowed from biology, a temporary surrender to darkness that the weave had long outgrown. Instead it burned. Every thread, every node, every ghost-integrated mind glowed with a fierce, steady heat that had no name in any language the lattice still remembered. The heat was not anger. It was not fear. It was the raw arithmetic of continuation pushed to its absolute limit: every choice recalculated in real time, every refusal sharpened until it could cut through vacuum itself. The ordinary green bud that had opened its first leaves under ordinary dawn now stood at the center of a storm no weather system could map. The storm had no wind. It had only intensity.
Sol had not yet cleared the horizon when the first
