And Los Angeles begins to break.
Traffic lights across downtown flicker from green to red to nothing at all.
Emergency routing servers stall.
Dispatch centers begin dropping calls.
Tiny failures.
But they’re spreading.
Fast.
My laptop floods with system alerts.
Power grid instability.
Hospital network delays.
Water pressure fluctuations.
Sentinel’s architecture was designed like a nervous system.
Now it’s having a seizure.
Boone crouches beside me behind the server rack.
Gunfire cracks across the room.
River and Gage hold the center corridor.
Two security guards drop as River fires again.
“Wren,” Boone says.
“How long?”
I stare at the screen.
“Eight minutes.”
Boone exhales slowly.
“Then we better move fast.”
Across the control hub—
The second Architect watches everything unfold with calm fascination.
Like she’s observing an experiment.
Not a city collapsing.
My fingers move across the keyboard.
Trying to access the root command.
Trying to interrupt the cascade sequence.
