Evelyn returned to the core chamber before dawn.

The others were still asleep—Gray slumped over his workstation, Hale resting on the lower catwalk—but her mind wouldn’t settle. That flicker had followed her into sleep, vibrating through her dreams until it felt like the hum of the world itself had changed pitch.

She powered on the secondary console and keyed into the diagnostics shell manually—no visual feed, no overlay, just raw code. She preferred the silence of this view, the way ...