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The answer comes too quickly.

Too honestly.

I stare at her.

She realizes what she revealed a heartbeat too late.

Brakk rises behind us with smoke capsules in both hands. “Good news! I have a terrible idea!”

“Wonderful,” Anita mutters without looking away from me.

Brakk hurls the capsules onto the upper bridge. Thick white smoke erupts instantly, swallowing the advancing Choir soldiers.

“Transit controls!” he shouts. “Scholar girl, make the giant evil elevator do something dramatic!”

Anita tears her gaze from mine with visible effort and lunges toward the fractured control node. Her fingers fly across the scanner interface while the transit chamber pulses red around us.

“I can reroute the bridge,” she says rapidly. “Maybe.”

“I dislike that word,” Brakk replies.

“The chamber geometry is unstable!”

“That sentence is worse!”

The upper bridge suddenly folds sideways inside the smoke, carrying two Choir soldiers screaming into the abyss below. Anita’s reroute command has triggered movement throughout the chamber. Suspended walkways begin shifting position rapidly, opening and sealing pathways in unpredictable patterns.

“It worked!” Anita says.

The triumph lasts approximately two seconds.

Then every chamber light turns white.

A deep harmonic tone rolls through the transit system.

Brakk’s eyes widen. “That does not sound like victory.”

The scanner flashes a new translation across Anita’s display.

PRIMARY ARCHIVE DEFENSES ACTIVATING.

“Oh, come on,” Anita groans.

The chamber wakes fully around us.

Walls unfold.

Hidden bridges emerge.

Massive black structures rise slowly from the abyss beneath the transit platforms like the bones of something ancient climbing back into the world. Silver light floods every surface, so bright it hurts my eyes.

And somewhere inside the awakening mechanisms, something notices us.

Not emotionally.

Not personally.

But with the cold awareness of a system identifying movement inside protected territory.