Chapter 34 · The Traitor in the Anchor

The silence came first.

Not peace. Not relief.

Silence had weight.

Kellan felt it settle across the neural lattice, pressing down on the millions of minds threaded through his spine. A second ago, twenty-three million people had been screaming inside him—children calling for mothers, mothers praying to dead gods, soldiers remembering the taste of metal and blood. Now every voice had vanished beneath a single, pulsing tone.

A heartbeat.

His heartbeat.

Then the darkness opened.

A map burned across the inside of his skull. Six cities shone like red wounds on the surface of a blue-black continent. Their core towers flashed in sequence, one after another, connected by lines of pale fire. Beneath them, buried under layers of encryption, a seventh point awakened.

Not a city.

A black diamond beneath the ocean.

Kellan tried to breathe. His lungs worked, but the air tasted of copper and ozone. The maintenance deck around him had become a smear of cold steel and emergency light. Sable's hand was still pressed against the ports along his collar. Her fingers trembled against his skin.

“Don’t pull away,” she said.

Her voice reached him from very far away.

Brom Hark coughed somewhere behind them.