Six months.
Peace was a strange, ill-fitting garment. For six months, the sky had remained empty. The sun rose and set with a simple, predictable rhythm that the city had almost forgotten. The reconstruction was a slow, grinding, beautiful thing. The skeletons of new buildings clawed their way out of the rubble, and the quiet hum of a functioning power grid was a more profound symphony than any orchestra had ever produced.
But for Arden, the silence was a lie. It was a held breath. A silent clock, ticking down to an unknown, inevitable midnight.
Her new battlefield was not a plaza of shattered concrete, but a quiet, sterile room deep within The Archive. The walls were not covered with tactical maps, but with screens displaying a chaotic, beautiful mess: fragments of poetry, masterpieces of classical art, seismic readings of the planet's core, the frantic, joyful rhythms of a forgotten jazz song, the brainwave patterns of a meditating monk.
