Chapter 29 · The Other Me in the Ruins

The drums were still beating when the tower screamed.

Not the deep, animal roar that had rolled beneath the streets. Not the metallic shriek of the buried beast being dragged back into the maintenance shaft. This sound came from the ruins of Tower Nine—thin, human, and horribly familiar.

“Don’t let them erase that hour.”

Lio froze with one hand pressed against the glowing lines of the Third Seal.

Around her, the people of the Lower Wards were still connected to the network. Thousands of palms, trembling shoulders, bare feet, and ragged breaths held the floating city in place. Blue-white light ran through the alleys like water through cracked glass. Every drumbeat carried a pulse into the seal. Every pulse answered the weightless dark below Veyra.

Then the voice came again.

“Lio.”

Her name slipped through the smoke.

The light beneath her fingers flickered.

Cael noticed immediately. He stood ten paces away in the wreckage of the maintenance yard, one knee braced against the half-collapsed shell of the dragon-hunter construct. Silver energy crawled over his arms and vanished into the machine’s crushed core. Sweat darkened his collar.