Meanwhile, at the apartment.
It was silent when Owen moved to the window.
Yuki had left for her lunch with Odessa hours ago, and the space felt different in her absence. Smaller, somehow. More confining. The walls pressed in with the accumulated weight of revelations he hadn't shared, truths he was still trying to process.
Owen stood at the window in his humanoid form, his golden eyes tracking the city below.
Nexus Prime stretched in all directions—a sprawling metropolis of steel and glass and humanity's stubborn refusal to let the the warring times define them. Millions of people going about their lives, completely unaware of the forces that shaped their reality.
Completely unaware that the system they relied on, the power that had saved humanity, was itself a leash created by something that viewed them as livestock.
