Time stops.
“To think,” Dennis continues, “you had every opportunity to succeed me. And here you are. Playing at revolution. Breaking things you don’t understand.”
My throat closes.
I don’t even look up. I just keep typing.
“You accepted a job built on illusions. You thought if you worked hard enough… followed the rules long enough… you could change things from within. A quaint idea. Almost touching.”
“You don’t get to talk to me,” I say.
“I think I do,” he replies, tone smooth as lacquer. “Because I taught you everything you know. How to analyze. How to adapt.How to bury a lie under seventeen layers of truth. You are what I built.”
I stop.
Finger hovering just aboveexecute.
Then I speak?—
“No,” I say. Steady. “I’m what you never saw coming.”
And I press it.
EXECUTING KILL COMMAND
KILL SCRIPT ROUTED >> GRID OvLd
RELAY FAILURE — 2/2
DISPERSAL NODE OFFLINE
The screen flashes bright—angry, warning red—and flickers back to life. Status updates race down the feed like shattering glass.
For one agonizing second—I think it’s failed.
Then the console flatlines.
PROTOCOL NEUTRALIZED
Above us, one of the emergency sirens dies in the middle of a blast.
Kenron exhales. I don’t hear it. I feel it in the air.
Dennis’s voice cuts off.
I lean on the console, every muscle shaking, the adrenaline crash hitting hard.
Outside, the plaza dims.
Not the soft, golden fade of twilight, not the romantic hush of dusk over Novaria’s spires—this is different. The banners ripple in an unnatural silence. The lights flicker once, twice, then cut out with a mechanical sigh that echoes all the way down to my bones.
For a second, the world seems to hold its breath.
The deployment canisters—lined in a perfect semicircle beneath the platform like teeth in a steel jaw—don’t open.
Instead, they hiss once, then stutter, clicking and cycling like confused machinery.
Above us, the emergency drones, sleek and humming and hungry, begin to drop from the sky.
