The light consumed everything.

Hale felt his body dissolve, not painfully, but with a strange weightless calm — as if every atom was being rewritten into sound. The pulse of the network wasn’t just around him now; it was inside him, matching the rhythm of his heartbeat until there was no difference between the two.

Doran was beside him, her corrupted form fracturing like glass. Red light leaked from her skin, spiraling upward in ribbons that blended with the blue currents flowing from ...