MORNING
Kai slept for three hours and woke to a dungeon that had rearranged itself.
Not structurally. The survey academy was where it had always been, the walls intact, the eastern
district gate-network running at the same surface topology it had held for six decades. What had
rearranged was the signal — the frequency beneath everything, the Source running at operational
capacity for the first time since before any current classification record, feeding current through the
threading between gates like voltage through copper. The Null Field tasted it the moment he
surfaced from sleep. Not a threat. A fact. The dungeon had a heartbeat now, and the heartbeat was
not his, but it was oriented toward him in the way a compass was oriented toward north: not
conscious, not subservient, but structurally incapable of pointing anywhere else.
He dressed in the dark. The void stat read ninety-one, same as third bell. The Origin Log was quiet.
Orin was already in the corridor.
