The lattice no longer trusted its own pauses.
Every rest that once invited reflection now felt like the instant before a predator chooses which shadow to step from. Minds across the weave held their collective breath longer than necessary, listening for the precise moment when silence stopped being neutral and began to listen back. The altered rests propagated by The Quiet That Waits had not vanished after the confrontation at the rogue planet node. They had metastasized. Subtle hesitations appeared in songs that had previously flowed without interruption. Chemical exchanges between fungal mats developed micro-delays that carried no information yet somehow changed the flavor of every subsequent pulse. Cetacean infrasound sustains developed faint after-rings, echoes that arrived half a bea
