Chapter 183Melissa’s POVAnd then.... i let go.Not of them, not of the connection but of the boundary I had been holding between myself and everything else.For a brief, dangerous moment, I stopped resisting the collective.And stepped into it.The shift was immediate.Not overwhelming. Not chaotic but clear....a terrifyingly clear.The noise Jamal had described was not noise at all.It was order.Layers of awareness moving in perfect coordination, each thread feeding into the next, building something vast and efficient and… incomplete.Because now I could see it.The flaw, the collective wasn’t lacking intelligence.It wasn’t lacking power, it was lacking constraint.Everything it did was correct, every adjustment optimal and every outcome improved.But without limits, improvement had no endpoint and without an endpoint, it would never stop.Amina’s presence flickered beside mine, her balance steady but strained.Leila’s followed, sharp and focused, her forward drive cutting throug
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