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“Left flank!” Brakk shouts.

I turn in time to see three more Choir soldiers emerging from a side fold that should have led into empty geometry. Reality twists behind them like wet glass. They stumble as the floor reorients, but they recover too quickly.

Trained.

Not merely zealots. Veterans, at least some of them. Rolaev has not brought believers to die. She has brought believers who know how to kill first.

“Sira,” I call. “Shield the interface.”

“I am trying,” she says, voice strained.

Silver-white light blooms around her as she stands beside Anita, both hands lifted into the projection storm. Precursor script circles her wrists and throat like luminous vines. She is shaking badly, but she does not step away. The active archive field keeps trying to pull open around Anita’s shard, and Sira keeps binding the access layer before the whole system either releases too much truth or collapses into erasure.

Brakk scrambles along the lower terrace, dragging cable through smoke and sparks. “Escape corridor is anchored, for a very generous definition of anchored. It may lead to the shuttle path, a collapsed maintenance duct, or a tiny private hell where all the tools are metric.”

“Can it take evacuees?” Anita asks.

“Probably!”

“Brakk.”

“Fine, yes, if everyone moves quickly and nobody weighs as much as an armored building.”

I shoot another Choir soldier before he can answer his own death with a grenade. “I heard that.”

“You were meant to!”

“Sira, the archive is trying to push the full origin layer back into the active shard,” Anita cries.

“I see it.”

“Do not let it.”

“I am aware that would be bad.”

“That was not me being patronizing. That was me panicking with vocabulary.”

Sira’s mouth tightens with effort. “Then continue panicking precisely.”

Rolaev stands beyond the central hollow, framed in archive light and collapsing stone. Her destruction key spins above her palm, not as a simple weapon now but as a parasite inside the archive’s logic. Threads of black-blue code lance from it into the lower rings, forcing ancient preservation systems into conflict with themselves. She is bleeding from a cut along her temple, blue fur darkened at the edge, but her face remains terrifyingly composed.

“You cannot hold both,” she calls. “The chamber or the fragment. Choose before the system chooses for you.”

Anita does not look at her. “I’m very busy disappointing you.”

“You confuse defiance with stewardship.”

“And you confuse trauma with moral authority!”

Rolaev ’s key flares.

The chamber answers with a scream.

A ring above us tilts out of alignment, and the space between terraces warps violently. For an instant, the soldiers at the breach stretch into thin shadows, then snap back into shape with cries of pain. One vanishes halfway through a step and reappears several meters above the floor. He falls screaming into a gap where the distance below has become a sky full of dead stars.

Brakk freezes. “Nope. No, thank you. I formally decline whatever physics is doing over there.”

“Keep moving,” I order.