**The Flesh**
Pain had a frequency. It was not the scream of a violin string or the shatter of glass, but a low, dense thrum—the resonant complaint of meat against entropy. Sophia learned to listen for it in the white hours of the Geneva morning, watching the cardiac monitor trace its green mountains across the screen, each peak a testament to the stubborn percussion of her surviving heart.
She was no longer the Breaker Chord. The Null had taken that from her, burned the Pattern out of her synapses like a laser cauterizing a wound. She was specific again. Finite. A closed system of blood and bone and brittle certainty.
"Your neural activity is baseline," the doctor said, his voice carefully neutral. He was a man who had been present at the CERN facility during the event, who had seen the aurora borealis dancing at noon, who understood that his patient had contained a supernova and survived as ash. "No detectable entanglement with the substrate. You're... clean."
