The Fork was quiet—quieter than Kaito had ever known it to be.
It wasn't the kind of quiet that calms you, like soft rain or the hush of night. This silence was heavy, like the ocean pressing down from all sides. Too deep. Too wide. Too still.
Kaito sat on the edge of a shattered platform, his boots dangling over the empty space below. Far beneath, the streams of data moved in sluggish waves, no longer bright and flowing.
What once shimmered with silver-blue light had dulled to a flat gray. It was as if the whole world had stopped breathing. Maybe it had.
Behind him, just a step or two away, Nyra stood. She didn't say anything. She hadn't said much at all since they'd left the broken archive. She was simply there—quiet, unmoving, like she was listening to the silence itself.
The events of the hours suspended between them like static, unwritten but biting.
They'd lived. Again.
Winning wasn't surviving, though.