The air in the Silent Zone tasted like copper and old rain. Cora wiped a smudge of grease onto her cargo pants, her headlamp cutting a weak path through the skeletal remains of the Array—a pre-Shift satellite station that shouldn't have existed.
To the rest of the world, this was cursed ground. To Cora, it was a goldmine of copper wiring and glass capacitors.
"Just one more relay," she whispered, her voice swallowed by the heavy, unnatural quiet of the Deadlands.
She pried open a rusted floor panel. Instead of the usual mess of rotted fiber optics, she found something pulsing. A crystalline coil, glowing with a soft, rhythmic amber light. It looked less like tech and more like a heartbeat.
Cora reached out. The moment her skin brushed the crystal, the silence didn't just break—it shattered.
A high-pitched hum vibrated through her teeth. A surge of heat, violent and dizzying, raced up her arm and settled right behind her eyes. Then came the sound: a heavy, thudding rhythm that wasn't her own.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It was a heartbeat. And then, a voice—raspy, ancient, and thick with a decade of loneliness—echoed directly into her mind.
"...Luna?"
Cora gasped, falling back against the cold metal. The amber glow didn't fade; it bled into her skin, turning her veins into shimmering gold threads for a split second before vanishing beneath her pores.
Five hundred miles away, in the obsidian towers of the Capital, a monster woke up.