LOGINTwelve hours after the symbol flashed across every screen on Earth, Jack Sterling hadn't slept. He sat in the command center of Sterling Tower's sub-level five, surrounded by holographic displays and the quiet hum of quantum processors. The root access filaments in his nervous system pulsed with each heartbeat, feeding him a constant, dizzying stream of cosmic data that he was learning to filter through sheer bloody-minded willpower.
The decrypting file was at thirteen percent now. It haThe first Absence construct reached Jack in less than a second.It did not punch, slash, or bite. It simply existed at him with violent intent. Where its hand passed through the air, the air ceased to be. Molecules of nitrogen and oxygen were not destroyed but un-existed, leaving pockets of absolute vacuum that collapsed with sharp, painful cracks.Jack threw himself sideways, the left gauntlet flaring as he channeled the Utterance's awareness through the Void crystal. The construct's hand passed through the space where his head had been, and the rubble behind him dissolved into grey nothingness."They erase what they touch!" Jack shouted. "Do not let them make contact!"Marcus was already moving. Despite his fractures, the Shield Guardian threw himself between Katherine and two charging constructs, his golden shield deployed at maximum extension. The constructs hit the shield and recoiled. The Guardian's kinetic barrier did not block their erasure, it was not ph
Marcus discharged himself from the medical level against Dr. Miller's explicit and profanity-laden objections, pulled on a set of tactical pants, strapped his battered golden shield to his back, and limped into the command center with the grim determination of a man who had decided that dying on his feet was preferable to healing on his back."Do not even start," Marcus growled when Katherine opened her mouth. "Something just psychically groped my brain through the pack bond. I am not going back in the tank.""You have eleven unhealed fractures.""I have had worse.""When?""Right now."Jack stood at the holotable, both gauntlets glowing, the compass projected in mid-air between them. He had been studying the three-dimensional map of the Engraver's network for forty minutes, cross-referencing it with the Hollowsmith's partial blueprints and the Utterance's fragmented memories of its own prison."The Absence is working on two fronts," Jack announced
Jack burst out of the borehole into the parking garage they had converted into a staging area, the gauntlet smoking on his left hand and the compass vibrating hard enough to blur. Katherine was waiting with two Void Kindred guards and a medical kit she clearly expected to use."Debrief on the move," Jack said, striding past her toward the armored transport. "We have bigger problems than I thought.""I heard the bigger problems. An egg. Under Times Square. Sixty feet across." Katherine fell into step beside him, matching his pace with the long, confident stride of a woman who had been keeping up with cosmic catastrophes for years. "I have already ordered Aaliyah to map the full extent of the Engraver's network using the gauntlet's sonar data. Preliminary results are not encouraging.""How not encouraging?""The network extends beyond Manhattan. It reaches under all five boroughs, into New Jersey, and as far north as Westchester. The Engraver has been carving a gat
Katherine drilled faster.The modified mining laser cut through Manhattan's ancient bedrock at six feet per minute, double its rated capacity, because Katherine Sterling did not believe in manufacturer specifications and had recalibrated the device with the aggressive optimism of a woman who had once shot down a flying fortress with a sniper rifle.Jack descended in the elevator cage, the Hollowsmith's data chip plugged into the gauntlet's analysis port. The partial blueprints for the Source Code's compression partition scrolled across his vision in three-dimensional wireframes, each one more impossibly complex than the last."The partition was not built," the Utterance observed through their shared consciousness. "It was grown. The Weavers seeded it with self-replicating mathematical structures that evolved over billions of years into a living prison. Rebuilding it from forty percent blueprints would be like reconstructing a human brain from a photograph of the skull
The drill was not a drill. It was a repurposed mining laser that Haley had somehow acquired during the chaos of the Mouth crisis, allegedly as a "backup plan" for opening stubborn champagne bottles. Katherine had modified it into a cutting tool that could slice through basalt at three feet per minute, which was both impressive and agonizingly slow when the compass needle was screaming at Jack to go faster."Eight hundred feet is a long way down," Ben Carter observed from the command center, his vampire eyes tracking their descent through a network of hardened cameras that Aaliyah had threaded into the borehole. "At this rate, you will reach the target in approximately four and a half hours.""We do not have four and a half hours," Jack said, standing in the cramped elevator cage they had rigged inside the shaft. Katherine was beside him, her tactical suit sealed, a void-sniper rifle slung across her back. The gauntlet on Jack's left hand pulsed with a steady amber glow, th
The compass burned against Jack Sterling's hip like a coal pulled from a dying fire.He stood in the Obsidian Lab's corridor at six in the morning, three days after fusing the cracked Genesis Coin, the dormant Void crystal, and the shattered dark-gold sword into something he did not yet fully understand. The warm disc pulsed against his thigh through the pocket of his jeans, its needle vibrating with a fine, persistent urgency that matched his heartbeat.Down. It pointed down. Through the reinforced floors of Sterling Tower, through the bedrock of Manhattan, through the geological strata of the planet, all the way to the deepest partition of the Source Code where something ancient and unknown was slowly, patiently decrypting itself.Thirty-two point seven percent. That had been the number three days ago."Thirty-four point nine," Aaliyah reported from her terminal when Jack walked into the command center. The young hacker looked like she had been assembled from s







