Nobody debated this. Nobody asked for clarification or additional context or a moment to process the information that the facility was now actively trying to kill them through a different mechanism.
The bee lifted from Zeph's palm and settled on his shoulder.
Zeph ran. The bee rode. They had an understanding.
The walls made a sound they had not made before.
The breathing—the expansion and contraction that had synchronized with the egg, the facility's rhythm that had guided them through corridors and announced the Harvester's proximity and served as the background frequency of everything that had happened in this place—stopped.
Not gradually. Not with the winding-down quality of something losing energy over time. It stopped the way things stopped when the mechanism driving them ceased to operate, which was immediately and completely, the cessation as total as a heartbeat that simply did not produce a successor.
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.
