The light twisted until it screamed.

Evelyn stood within the maelstrom, surrounded by streams of collapsing code that split into radiant shards around her. The breach was no longer a place — it was an event, collapsing inward and outward at once. Every law that had once governed the Echo strained against the gravitational pull of Victor’s presence.

He stepped through the distortion like a man emerging from a storm, his body half-shadow, half-light. Data flared across his form — ...