The city did not wake after the collapse.
It lingered.
Cain stood at the edge of the fractured avenue, boots planted in glassed asphalt and pulverized stone. Towers leaned like broken teeth, their lower floors gutted, their upper skeletons still burning where the Grid's failure had ignited every contingency at once. Sirens wailed without pattern. Not alarms—laments. Systems crying out because no one had told them how to stop.
He breathed slowly, forcing the tremor out of his hands.
This was the cost of cutting too deep.
Behind him, the others moved through the wreckage with grim efficiency. Susan coordinated evac routes with what little infrastructure still answered. Roselle cleared paths, methodical, silent, her weapon always angled toward the dark between ruins. Steve was already half-buried in a terminal ripped from a transport hub, dragging dead data out of scorched cores like organs from a corpse.
Hunter watched the skyline.
