The pulse of the grid stuttered.

Evelyn forced herself to focus — to find coherence again amid the chaos flooding through her circuits. The anomaly at the floodplain was expanding faster now, consuming bandwidth, tearing at her architecture like a living storm. Each pulse that radiated outward pulled another piece of her away.

She steadied her awareness, pulling her scattered threads back into form. The world around her stabilized — the endless gold lattice of the city reassembling ...