ADANNA P.O.V (point if view)
The first thing Eden gives me is silence....not peace, just silence. It's the kind that rings, the kind that follows an explosion when your ears are still trying to remember how sound works. The system retracts slowly, like it's afraid to tear something important on the way out. I'm still standing when the interface disengages.
Barely, my knees lock, my palms are slick with sweat. The white room tilts, then steadies, and the faces across from me are no longer composed.
They are panicking.... red alerts bloom across the walls like spreading blood.
"No," the woman whispers. "Shut it down."
A man shouts outside the door, another voice answers. Too many voices, too fast.
I taste metal. Eden is gone from my head now, but what it left behind is worse knowledge. I know which accounts just emptied themselves. I know which names are being erased in real time, not by me, but by men turning on each other.
The Syndicate doesn't collapse cleanly, it fractures.
