For a week, Mosaic City was quiet.
It was a suspicious kind of quiet. The kind that comes after a thunderstorm, when the air is still charged with static, and the birds haven't started singing yet.
The Syndicate had retreated into the shadows of the Rust Sprawl. The Clockmaker was gone rebooting in some digital void, presumably sorting through a terabyte of human emotions.
In the Chronos Institute, Arden sat in the simulation room, testing her arm.
She held a sphere of solid steel in her ghost hand.
Squeeze, she thought.
The violet light flared. The steel groaned, then crumpled like paper. Arden didn't just crush it; she compressed it. The atoms were forced into a space too small for them, fusing into a dense, superheated nugget.
She dropped it on the floor. It clanged heavily, glowing red.
