The city woke to infrastructure failure the news called "coordinated cyber attack" and the government called "domestic terrorism under investigation" and Arden called "Tuesday." Network outage stretched into its sixteenth hour. No internet. No smart devices. No pathways for Entity manifestation. Zero deaths overnight for the second night running.
But the absence of dying didn't feel like victory. It felt like holding your breath underwater and wondering how long you could sustain it before your lungs made the choice for you.
The substation phone landline, relic from an era when phones connected to walls and couldn't be manifested through rang at 9 AM. Kael answered because answering phones required reading caller ID and Arden couldn't read faces anymore which meant caller ID was just shapes she couldn't interpret.
"It's the mayor's office," Kael said. "They want to talk about last night's network failure."
"Tell them I'm busy," Arden said.
"They're threatening arrest warrants."
