CHAPTER 10 — Empathy Simulation
SkyDock North Face → Sector 3 Spillways → Gray Market Safehouse
They didn’t have time to process the message. Not really.
A city can be calm for years and still flip in minutes. Vesper was flipping now. The shift was visible in the way sound traveled—sirens no longer softened at corners, public music no longer masked tension, even the white noise of climate control felt harsher, more raw, like the Arcology had lost interest in pretending it was a spa.
Rio stood on the maintenance balcony looking down at the storm of civilians and drones, and he felt the old discipline inside him do what it always did in crisis:
compress.
Not emotionless. Focused.
Behind him, SkyDock’s outer steel vibrated faintly. The dome above was a pale blue bowl holding a city tha
