Light bent wrong at the dimensional interface.
Bent—the distortion running in colors Sera had no names for, the edges of things blurring as if reality had been drawn in ink and someone had breathed on it before it dried. Where Marcus stood, the rigid boundary between dimensions had begun to soften, and the softening was visible.
The pendant against her sternum burned. Not the familiar warmth of dragon energy channeled through crystal—this was hotter, sharper, the blue sapphire vibrating at the frequency that poured through her body and out through the device and into Marcus and through Marcus into the barrier itself. Five dragons blazed along her skin. Crimson on her left thigh, Gold on her right, Azure spread across her shoulder blades, Vexis climbing her right forearm, Nyx on her left—all of them lit, all of them pouring power through the bonds and into her and through her, and the sensation was like standing inside a river that flowed in five directions at once.
Her muscles shook. The trembling of a body pushed past its design tolerance, every fiber conducting energy that no single human frame was built to carry. Sweat traced the line of her jaw and dropped onto the deck plating, and she didn't wipe it away because her hands were locked in position, fingers spread, channeling the Bound Court's combined output into the device Pip had built and Prime had calibrated and Marcus was dying inside of.
Dissolving. There had to be a difference.
"Calibration holding," Prime said from beside her. His voice was steady—a decision, not a state. Blue light traced the lines of his dark chassis, every channel bright, every processing thread committed to maintaining the frequency's coherence. His optical displays didn't waver from the readings. "Frequency coherent. Propagation rate climbing."
At the modulator, Pip's tiny hands moved across controls with the fluency of someone who had built every component and understood the tolerance of every connection. Eight inches of concentrated will, wings folded tight against their back to avoid interfering with the energy flows, iridescent skin catching the dissolution frequency's light and scattering it in prismatic fragments across the console. The data crystal—Marcus's four years of work, his observations and equations and the poetry he'd written in the margins—was secured against Pip's body, a hard bright weight that Sera could see pressing against their side.
"Modifications stable," Pip said. Their voice was clipped, compressed, every word a component in the work. "Frequency shaping nominal. He's—" A pause. A recalculation. "The path is holding."
Marcus stood at the interface.
Through the energy flows, through the blaze of channeled power, Marcus was translucent—grief contracted in her chest, without name. The source energy that had always run beneath his skin—the golden light of four years spent existing in both dimensions simultaneously—was no longer beneath anything. It was him. His skin and the light had become the same substance, and through that substance she could see the dimensional interface behind him, the colors of two realities bleeding together where the frequency touched.
He wasn't in pain. She could see that much. His expression, what remained of expression on features that were becoming less defined with each passing second, was wonder—the physicist watching his theorem prove itself. The physicist watching his theorem prove itself. The man becoming the proof.
Through the Bound Court bond, she felt him differently than she saw him. The bond was a thing of five books' worth of connection—dragon magic woven through years of separation and reunion and the ache of loving someone you'd thought you'd lost. Marcus had always been a point in that bond. A location. Specific. Now the point was spreading. His presence in her awareness was diffusing outward, becoming less a voice heard from one direction and more a warmth felt from everywhere at once, and the wrongness of that sensation made her want to pull back, to close the channel, to stop this before—
She held.
The frequency propagated outward from Marcus through the barrier, and where it touched, the barrier responded. The tension between dimensions was releasing along the frequency's path, and the release looked like breathing—like something that had been held rigid for longer than anyone could measure was being allowed to exhale. The rigid separation between what was magic and what was science softened, blurred, and in the blur Sera could see what the barrier had always hidden: they were the same thing. The energy flowing through her dragons and the energy flowing through Prime's circuits and the energy holding atoms together in the deck plating beneath her boots—all of it was the same force, wearing different clothes, speaking different languages, but the same. The same.
The frequency hadn't reached critical threshold. She could feel that in the way it still pulled at her, still demanded her active effort, still required every dragon at full output to sustain its propagation. If she stopped channeling, it would collapse. If Prime's calibration drifted, it would destabilize. If Pip's modifications failed, Marcus would have thinned himself for nothing.
She held. The team held. The frequency built, slow as a tide coming in, and the barrier breathed out along its path, and Marcus became less solid and more present with every passing second.
The sound of it was not a sound. It was felt in bones, in the spaces between thoughts—a hum that was also a question, a vibration that pressed against the inside of her ribs.
She held. And the frequency built. And it was not enough. Not yet.
Too slow. The frequency was building, but the rate was linear when it needed to be exponential, and the team's endurance was finite, and somewhere beyond the dimensional interface the coalition was fighting and dying at the perimeter, buying time that the frequency was spending too carefully.
Then the barrier changed.
The shift was not visible first—through Vexis's truth-sense, through the Bound Court's awareness of the dimensional landscape, through the energy flowing through Sera's body meeting resistance where there had been only passive tension. The barrier, which had been softening under the frequency's touch, hardened. Not everywhere. In patches. In waves. As if something on the other side had noticed what was happening and was pushing back.
Sera's arms shook harder. The energy flow stuttered, caught, resumed at a lower rate. The frequency's hum shifted from a question to something strained, discordant, a note played against an opposing note.
"It knows."
Vexis. The truth-teller's voice cut through the Bound Court bond with the precision of a scalpel through gauze—no warmth, no alarm, just the clean edge of observed reality.
"Whatever built this barrier—it knows what we're doing. And it's afraid."
Afraid. The Architect was reacting, not calculating.
Because the dissolution frequency was proof. Proof that the Architect's entire philosophy—that magic and science must be kept apart, that the barrier was necessary, that separation was the natural state—was wrong. The frequency was letting the two states merge, and the merging was not catastrophic. It was corrective. Water finding its level. A held breath released.
And the Architect was afraid of what that meant.
Through Nyx's void-sense, the barrier's topology was changing. The dimensional landscape warped under the Architect's intervention—the softened patches re-hardening, the permeable zones sealing shut, the frequency's path narrowing as resistance concentrated along its edges. The patchwork of dissolution and opposition turned the interface into a contested map, territory gained and lost in the same breath.
Marcus, at the center of it, bore the counterforce through a body that was less body with each passing moment. The bridge experiencing traffic from both directions. His translucent form flickered as the Architect's resistance passed through him, the golden light of his dissolving consciousness wavering and then steadying, and through the bond she felt him hold. The physicist refusing to let the equation collapse. The father refusing to let his daughter's effort be wasted.
Gold's strategic awareness threaded through the bond—not words but a tactical assessment, a reading of the narrowing window. The frequency needed to reach self-sustaining threshold before the team's endurance failed. The Architect knew this. The Architect was betting on exhaustion.
The counterattack hit.
Not a single strike but a wave—the barrier hardening in a rolling cascade that sent shockwaves back through the frequency path, through Marcus, through the device, through Sera's channeling. The first wave drove her backward, boots scraping deck plating, arms locked in channeling position, body rocking from the force of dimensional energy slamming against the frequency's propagation.
"Calibration compensating," Prime said. His voice was still steady, but the steadiness cost him something now. His blue channels flickered, brightened, flickered again as interference patterns scrambled his readings and he recalculated in real time, a thousand adjustments per second, his processing pushed to the absolute edge of what his architecture could sustain. "Holding."
A second wave. The modulator shrieked—a sound Sera had never heard from Pip's equipment, the protest of components under loads they were never designed for. Energy surges spiked through the device, and Pip's hands flew across controls, compensating for fluctuations that threatened to burn out the modifications they'd built with their own hands. A component sparked, bright and sharp, and Pip patched it mid-surge, one hand rerouting power while the other adjusted frequency shaping, technomancy and engineering fused in the desperate act of keeping Marcus's path open.
"Come on," Pip said. Not a curse. A calculation. "Come ON."
A third wave, harder than the first two, and the frequency wavered. Dropped. The hum that was not a sound became a stutter, a skip, a gap where coherence should have been, and for one terrible second Sera felt the dissolution frequency begin to collapse.
Crimson surged.
Raw power—dragonfire channeled not as flame but as force, the fire dragon burning at maximum output, every reserve committed, the protector who had always answered with fire answering now with everything he had. The energy flow through Sera's left thigh blazed so bright she could feel the heat through the channeling strain, and the frequency caught, held, stabilized at a lower propagation rate but stable, still building, still alive.
"Crimson, more to the left channel," Gold commanded through the bond, the strategist managing resources in real time, reallocating the Court's output to compensate for the Architect's interference pattern. "Azure, hold reserve for medical."
Azure complied. Sera felt the healer dragon pull back a fraction of her output, banking energy against the possibility that someone would break before the frequency did. The clinical precision of it—the healer triaging in the middle of combat—steadied something in Sera that the shockwaves had shaken loose.
Through Vexis, tactical data flowed: the Architect's interference concentrated at the frequency's leading edge, trying to prevent further propagation rather than collapse what had already dissolved. A containment strategy. The Architect couldn't undo the dissolution that had already occurred—the truth, once revealed, could not be unrevealed—but it could try to prevent the frequency from reaching the self-sustaining point.
Marcus endured. The shockwaves passed through him because he was the path, and each wave made him less solid, accelerated the dissolution in ways that weren't controlled, that weren't part of the careful progression the team had planned. He held coherent through will alone—Sera could feel it through the bond, the quality of a consciousness refusing to disperse before its work was done. The bridge refusing to collapse before the road was built.
Beneath the channeling effort, beneath the grief and the strain and the shockwaves, Violet's awakening trial lived in her body—the moment when fire and wisdom and healing and truth had all been stripped away and what remained was will. The refusal to stop. The choice to continue when continuing cost everything.
Nyx's presence in the bond was not words. It was bedrock. The void dragon, whose domain was will and reality, whose silence was heavier than any other dragon's speech, did not speak. She was simply there—the foundation beneath Sera's choice, the ground that did not move when everything else shook. The will that said continue.
Sera continued.
Another wave of interference. Another spike through the modulator. Another flicker in Prime's calibration. Each one absorbed, compensated for, endured. The team held their positions through the assault—not because the assault was survivable but because the alternative was Marcus dying for nothing, and none of them could bear that weight.
The frequency stabilized at a lower propagation rate. Still building toward threshold, but slower now. The Architect's assault continued—wave after wave of dimensional resistance, the barrier hardening and softening in contested pulses. A war of endurance. The team's finite reserves against the Architect's desperate opposition.
Sera held. Prime calibrated. Pip modified. Marcus carried.
The frequency built.
And Marcus thinned.
His presence in the bond had been changing since the frequency began, the point source spreading into something wider and less defined, but the Architect's counterattack had consumed her attention. Now she looked—through the bond, through five books of connection—and the ground shifted beneath her.
He was barely there.
Not his body at the interface—that was still visible, still standing, still carrying the frequency. But through the bond, where she had always felt Marcus as a specific presence, a location in her awareness as precise as a star in a navigation chart, there was no longer a point. There was a field. His consciousness had distributed along the frequency's path, spreading outward through every place the dissolution had touched—a transformation, not a thinning. He was becoming what the barrier was becoming: not a wall between two states but the place where they merged.
Every place the dimensions touched, Marcus was beginning to be there.
Through the bond, the sensation was unlike anything Sera had a framework for. Not death—she knew what death felt like in a bond, had felt the severing when Elena's pendant went cold against her eight-year-old chest. This was not severance. The bond was intact. Marcus was in it. But the Marcus in the bond was no longer a voice she could locate. He was a warmth she could feel everywhere and hold nowhere, a presence that filled the entire bond—undeniable, unlocalizable, impossible to grasp.
His body at the interface was less a body now. Translucent had become transparent. The golden light of source energy was no longer contained by skin or bone or the memory of either—it blazed outward, indistinguishable from the frequency itself, and through the blazing Sera could see the dimensional interface behind him, the two realities merging along the path his dissolution carved. The physicist becoming the proof. The man becoming the theorem.
Not the sharp grief of loss but the slow, terrible grief of watching someone become something you cannot follow. He was not leaving. He was expanding. And expansion, she was learning, was its own kind of departure—because the Marcus who could hold her face in warm hands and tell her she had her mother's fire and his stubbornness was dissolving into a Marcus who would be present in every place the dimensions touched but would never again be present in only one place, in the specific, irreplaceable way that a father is present when he stands in front of you and says your name.
The bond stretched. Not breaking—she would have felt a break, would have felt the snap of connection severed. This was different. The bond was changing state—the same substance in a different form, and the new form was something she could feel everywhere and hold nowhere, and the everywhere was the same as nowhere when what she wanted was to hold someone's hand.
Her channeling wavered.
Not from lack of power. The Bound Court was still blazing, five dragons at full output, energy flowing through her in rivers of fire and light and truth and void. The wavering came from somewhere deeper—from the part of her that was not a channeler or a dragon queen or a soldier in a war of dimensions but a daughter, a child, a person who had lost her father once at eight years old and found him again after eighteen years and was now losing him into everything.
The instinct was physical, primal—her hands wanted to close, to pull the power back through the Bound Court. She could stop channeling. She could pull the power back through the Bound Court, close the circuit, let the frequency collapse. Marcus would—
Marcus would what? The thought crashed against the reality of what she was feeling through the bond. He was already distributed. Already spread along the frequency's path. Already less a person and more a presence. She could not gather a field into a point, compress warmth back into a flame.
The operation hung on her choice. The frequency was still short of critical threshold. If she stopped, it failed. If she held, Marcus continued to dissolve. And the cruelty of the math was that both options ended the same way for him—the only difference was whether the ending meant something.
The dimensional interface responded to her wavering. Where her power faltered, the dissolution slowed, the barrier beginning to re-harden in patches, the Architect's resistance gaining ground. Prime's calibration readings shifted—she could hear it in the micro-adjustments of his processing, the blue channels on his chassis flickering faster as he compensated for her inconsistency.
The dragons felt it. Through the bond, Sera sensed the Bound Court destabilize—Crimson's fire dimming in response to her grief, Gold's strategic calculations stuttering as the variable changed, the chorus losing its coherence because the conductor had lost hers. The unified instrument faltering mid-piece.
She was drowning. The grief had no name and no shape and no edges she could grip, and it was pulling her under, and the frequency was dropping, and Marcus was dispersing, and somewhere people were dying at the perimeter, and she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't—
"Child."
Azure.
The voice came through the bond with the gentleness of a hand on a fevered brow—cool, certain, the gentleness reserved for moments where something is about to change and the healer knows it before anyone else does. Azure, who had felt every wound across five books. Azure, who had wept at every loss and healed every hurt and carried the weight of other people's pain because that was what love looked like when love wore the shape of water and wings.
"Child. Listen."
Sera listened. Not because she chose to but because when Azure spoke with that voice—the voice that was not suggestion but authority, the healer's authority that came from having held more dying things than anyone should ever have to hold—you listened. Your body listened. Your grief listened.
"What you're feeling—it isn't ending. It's expanding."
The words entered Sera's awareness the way water enters cracked earth—not all at once but seeping, finding the fractures, filling them.
"He isn't being destroyed. He's becoming present everywhere the barrier was. Every place the dimensions touch, Marcus will be there."
Azure had been monitoring Marcus through the bond with the clinical attention she brought to every patient, every wound, every broken thing she'd ever held together with her own two metaphorical hands. And what Azure was reading was not an ending.
"Distributed."
A pause. The healer reaching for a word that didn't exist.
"Like warmth in a room where a fire burned. The fire is gone. The warmth remains."
Azure wept.
The tears came through the bond—not as moisture but as a trembling in the empathic connection, Azure's signature across every book, every battle, every moment of loss. Azure always wept. The healer dragon's empathy was a constant, as reliable as gravity, as inescapable as the tide. But these tears were different. They were the ache of a healer watching a wound transform into something between loss and wholeness. A new state. Between loss and presence. Between the fire and the warmth it left behind.
Azure didn't have a word for it. Sera could feel that too—the healer's vast vocabulary of suffering and healing and the spaces between, all of it inadequate to name what Marcus was becoming. The absence of the word was its own kind of truth. This was genuinely new. In all of Azure's centuries, in all the wounds she had felt and the healings she had witnessed, nothing had prepared her for the ache of watching a consciousness distribute itself along a frequency and become present everywhere and specific nowhere.
And yet Azure's authority on this point was absolute. If Azure—who had felt every wound, who had wept at every loss, who had held the dying and the dead and the in-between with the same unflinching tenderness—if Azure said this was not ending, then it was not ending. The healer's certainty was a foundation Sera could stand on, even now, even drowning.
Not comfort. Comprehension. Azure was not saying it's okay. Azure was saying this is what it is. The truth of it gave Sera a framework for the grief. Not a cure. A shape.
Her channeling steadied. The frequency stabilized, the propagation rate resuming its slow climb, the dissolution resuming along the path Marcus carried. Not because the grief was gone. The grief was worse than ever—Azure's translation had not diminished it but clarified it, and clarity made the grief sharper, more precise. But Sera could hold the grief and the power simultaneously now. Azure had given her that. The framework to feel everything and function anyway.
Through the bond, the other dragons responded. Crimson's fire steadied, the protective blaze resuming its full output. Gold's strategic calculations resumed, the variable accounted for, the new reality integrated into the tactical assessment. Nyx's presence deepened beneath everything—the void dragon's foundation solidifying under Azure's words, the bedrock acknowledging the healer's truth.
The frequency built. The dimensional interface softened where the Architect's resistance faltered. The dissolution continued.
But Sera hadn't fully committed. She was holding the frequency, maintaining the channel, pouring power through the Bound Court. But her hands hadn't fully committed. Still holding back a fraction of the channel, still leaving room to close the circuit—surely there was a way, surely the math wasn't as final as it looked, surely—
"If you stop now, he disperses anyway."
Vexis.
The truth-teller's voice was a blade. No warmth. No comfort. No softening edge or gentle preamble. Two sentences, delivered with the precision of a scalpel and the mercy of a mathematics proof.
"You've passed the point where he survives. The only question is whether his sacrifice means something or nothing."
Silence in the bond. The kind of silence that follows a door closing.
Sera's calculation collapsed. The exit she'd been searching for—the alternative, the clever solution, the way to save Marcus and complete the mission—didn't exist. It had never existed. Not since the frequency began propagating through his body. The dissolution had progressed past the point of reversal. Marcus was already distributed too far to be gathered back. Stopping the frequency wouldn't save him. It would only waste him. His consciousness would disperse without direction, without purpose, without the coherent path that the frequency provided—dissolving anyway, the only question whether the dissolving built the road or scattered into nothing.
Vexis had not taken something from her. Vexis had shown her it was already gone.
The cruelty of it. The mercy of it. The false choice stripped away, and what remained was raw and bleeding and clear. Vexis's gift was clarity, and clarity right now was the most important thing anyone could give her, and Sera hated it and needed it in a way that had no word, the way Azure's grief-state had no word, the way everything happening in this moment existed beyond the vocabulary anyone had built for it.
Sera committed.
The shift registered in the frequency first. The channeling changed from holding to pushing—from the sustained effort of maintaining a state to the active force of driving toward a destination. The Bound Court responded instantly, five dragons surging in unison, the unified instrument finding its final register. Power flowed through her in a torrent that made everything before feel like a trickle, and the frequency surged, the propagation rate jumping, the dissolution accelerating toward critical threshold with the force of a river that had found its grade.
She had been crying since Azure spoke, or before that, or since Marcus had touched her face in Chapter 12 and told her she had her mother's fire. The tears tracked through the sweat on her face, dropped onto the deck plating, caught the light of the dissolution frequency and glowed for an instant before they were just tears again. She didn't wipe them away. Her hands were locked in channeling position, fingers spread, power flowing, and the tears and the power existed in the same body at the same time and neither diminished the other.
She held. Through tears. Through dragon-fire. Through the worst thing she had ever felt.
The frequency surged, and the Architect's resistance intensified in response—but losing ground now, each wave of opposition weaker against the strengthening frequency, each attempt to re-harden the barrier failing faster as the dissolution proved its premise and the premise reinforced the dissolution. The truth was self-reinforcing. Each increment of dissolution demonstrated that magic and science were the same force, and the demonstration strengthened the frequency, and the stronger frequency dissolved more of the barrier, and the cycle accelerated.
Sera held. Prime calibrated. Pip maintained. Marcus carried.
The sustained effort stretched. Minutes that felt like hours, each second a choice remade—to hold, to pour, to continue, to choose meaning over nothing. The Architect threw wave after wave of disruption, and the team absorbed each one. Prime's calibration bent under interference—she could hear it in the quality of his voice when he reported, the steadiness costing him something now, the blue channels on his chassis flickering in patterns she'd never seen—not failure but strain.
"Calibration holding," he said, and the words were the same as every other time he'd said them, but the spaces between the words were smaller, tighter, the voice of someone who was giving everything to his task and had nothing left for elaboration. He held calibration because she needed him to hold calibration. He held because Marcus had said take care of her and this was what taking care looked like—standing beside her while she channeled through the worst thing she'd ever felt, holding the numbers steady so she could hold everything else.
Pip's hands never stopped. The modulator absorbed surge after surge, components flexing under loads that would have destroyed lesser engineering, and Pip compensated for each one with the fluency of someone who had built every circuit and understood the tolerance of every connection. Their wings stayed folded, their body tense, not a single muscle relaxed since the frequency began. The data crystal pressed against their side—Marcus's work, Marcus's legacy, the four years of observations that had led to this moment—and Pip's hands kept that legacy functional through sheer force of precision and will.
Marcus—what remained of Marcus as a coherent presence—carried the frequency forward. His consciousness was almost entirely distributed now, spread along the dissolution's path like light through fiber, present everywhere the barrier had softened and specific nowhere. Through the bond, Sera felt him as a vast thin warmth spread across the dimensional boundary. Not a thought. The quality of a room where someone you loved had been standing a moment ago—the air still shaped by their presence, the warmth still lingering where their body had been.
She held the bond open. Not because holding it served the operation, not because the frequency required it, but because closing the bond would mean letting go, and she was not ready to let go even though what she was holding had changed beyond recognition. The bond was a thread stretched across an ocean, and the ocean was Marcus, and the thread was the last filament of connection between the man he had been and the daughter who had loved him.
She held.
In the trial, everything had been stripped away. Fire had not been enough. Wisdom had not been enough. Healing and truth had not been enough. What remained, when all of it was gone, was will. The choice to continue. Nyx's domain. The void that was not empty but full of everything that could be, if you chose it, if you willed it, if you refused to stop.
Nyx did not speak.
The void dragon's presence in the bond was not language. It was the ground Sera stood on. The foundation beneath her choice. The bedrock that did not argue or comfort or analyze but simply held—the way stone holds, the way the deep earth holds, the way the bottom of the ocean holds everything that sinks to it. Nyx was the will beneath Sera's will. Not commanding. Not encouraging. Present. The void dragon whose domain was what could be, whose silence was heavier than any other dragon's speech, whose single contribution to this moment was the absolute, immovable certainty that Sera had chosen and the choice was being honored and the holding was enough.
"Hold."
Sera held.
The frequency built. Each wave of the Architect's disruption was weaker than the last—not because the Architect was weakening but because the frequency was strengthening, approaching the self-sustaining point where the dissolution would become its own engine. The truth it revealed was self-reinforcing: magic and science unified, the barrier's imposed separation proven false, the ground state of connection reasserting itself against the anomaly of division. The barrier had never been natural. It had been held in place by will and fear and the Architect's conviction that separation was necessary. And now a different will—Sera's will, the team's will, Marcus's will expressed as the frequency itself—was proving that conviction wrong.
Crimson burned at maximum. The fire dragon had nothing left to hold in reserve, every ember committed, the protector who had always answered with flame giving his last flame to this. Gold managed the Court's energy allocation with the precision of a conductor who knew the orchestra was playing its final movement—no wasted output, no redundant channels, every thread of power directed where it would do the most good. Azure wept and held space and monitored the team's limits with the clinical attention of a healer who knew that the limits were being exceeded and that exceeding them was the only option. Vexis read the frequency's progress toward threshold and fed the data to Sera in clean, unsentimental packets—seventy percent, seventy-five, eighty—the truth-teller measuring the distance to the end with the same precision she brought to every truth she'd ever told.
The Bound Court performed as a unified instrument. Five voices, one purpose. The chorus Sera had spent five books learning to conduct, performing its most important piece.
And the frequency approached critical threshold.
The frequency built as a wave builds beneath a boat—the gathering, the accumulation, something massive assembling itself from countless small increments. The dissolution had been building since Marcus first carried the frequency into the barrier, and every second of channeling, every compensated surge, every endured shockwave had added to it, and now the addition was approaching a sum that would sustain itself.
Marcus's presence in the bond was almost gone. Not gone—everywhere, which was the same as gone when what she needed was a hand to hold. The last coherent thread of him-as-individual was thinning toward something that was not a thread but a field, not a presence but a quality, not a father but a warmth. The moment approached—the point where the thread would complete its transformation and Marcus-as-person would become Marcus-as-everywhere—and she held the bond open and she held the channel open and she held herself open to the grief and the power and the terrible beauty of what was happening, because this was what she had chosen and she would not look away.
The frequency reached the edge.
Ninety percent. Ninety-five. The Architect's disruption was failing—each wave of resistance weaker, each attempt to re-harden the barrier lasting seconds instead of minutes. The truth was winning. Not through force but through accuracy. You