The sky had gone quiet, but it was the silence of a predator holding its breath.
The Devourer fleet, disrupted but not defeated, hovered in a fractured formation above the city. The Symphony of Chaos had bought them a moment, a glitch in the hive mind's perfect order. But a glitch is not a victory. And a predator does not stay confused forever.
"They're rebooting," Olli's voice crackled over the comms in the extraction hub. "I'm reading massive data purges across their network. They're deleting the art. They're scrubbing the music. They're treating the Symphony like a virus, and they're running an antivirus."
Arden stood by the ruined extractor machine, her hand resting on the warm metal. She was trembling, her reserves of mental energy scraped hollow. Kael held her upright, his own face pale with exhaustion.
"How long do we have?" Arden asked.
"Minutes," Olli said. "Maybe less. And Arden… the command ship. It's not rebooting. It's changing."
