CHAPTER XXII - A Call from the Dark

It was a night without sky.

No stars burned beyond the dome of Sector AURORA. No distant orbital shimmer crossed the upper dark. No broken satellites flickered like forgotten eyes above the atmosphere. There was only the vast sealed silence over VIREON, the faint interior glow of the city’s lightstreams moving softly through its crystalline arteries, and the low harmonic breath of thousands of living structures resting within the rhythm of the night.

The world had fallen into a kind of perfect quiet.

Not the dead quiet of NEX.

Not the ruinous silence of abandoned sectors, where every absence seemed sharpened by loss.