The skyline bent above her as she walked.
Reality warped where her feet touched the pavement, each step leaving no mark but echoing through the data that now threaded through the world. Streetlights flickered as she passed. Some shattered. Others dimmed in silent submission.
She had no name in this world.
No interface attached to her spine.
No prompt waiting to guide her.
No class. No path. No contract.
She was outside the rules.
And that made her dangerous.
The air tasted like old blood and ozone. Buildings still burned in the distance. Survivors screamed from inside overturned vehicles and collapsed stairwells. But she didn't stop for them.
Her silver eyes stared upward, watching the veins in the sky throb in rhythm with the tower at the city's heart.
"He's here," she whispered.
A drone buzzed nearby, its lens scanning in slow sweeps. It caught sight of her for a single second.
Then the feed died.
Static poured into a control center miles away.
Systems blinked red.
[Unregistered Entity Detected]
[System Exception. Logging Error. Administrator Alerted]
She kept walking.
A Nullborn dropped from the side of a twisted apartment building, wires writhing from its back. It let out a shriek that was part machine, part memory.
It pounced.
She didn't flinch. She didn't even look at it.
She raised her hand.
And the Nullborn stopped mid-air.
Not frozen. Not paused.
Erased.
Its body broke apart at the seams, fragments unraveling like tangled thread pulled loose from a deeper weave. Within seconds, it was gone. Not dead. Forgotten.
"I warned you," she said quietly.
She pressed her hand to the side of a rusted car and closed her eyes.
She saw him.
Caspian Vale. Inside the node. Bleeding. Changing. Becoming something else.
Something that worried even her.
"Too fast," she whispered. "Too raw."
She turned toward the tower again.
It pulsed once more.
This time, the pulse wasn't just seen.
It was felt.
Across dimensions. Across systems. Across what was and what should not be.
And in the depths of the tower, Caspian's blood began to burn.