CHAPTER XXVII - When Reality Begins to Fracture

There was no light.

There was no darkness.

Only nothingness beginning to speak without a voice.

At the far edge of Sector 51–A, where the southern route crossed the remains of an old orbital relay perimeter, the world became still in a way that no silence before it had ever been still. Wind ceased first. Then the low breath of the ground. Then the faint background resonance of SYNTARA, which had accompanied them for so long that many no longer noticed it until it weakened. The air did not cool. It did not warm. It simply stopped behaving like air.

The horizon twisted.