Gray stumbled through the breach and fell to her knees.

The world around her was half-dream, half-nightmare—light and void intertwined, pulsing like the inside of a living machine. Fragments of architecture hung suspended in the air: broken catwalks, twisting corridors of glass, walls made from liquid code.

The core wasn’t a place—it was a storm pretending to be one.

She forced herself upright, one hand clutching the neural stabilizer at her temple. The pulse in her head was deafening, ...