They moved slowly but with the particular firmness of people who understood that hesitation inside a compromised space was not caution but surrender. Mast led from the front, her visor reading the space in its actual condition rather than its presented one, finding the paths of least resistance through the layered geometry the expanding boundary had produced, guiding her team along routes that traded distance for coherence, minimizing contact with the projections that the dissolving organization of the space continued to generate and release into the environment like a wound that had not stopped bleeding.
The first casualty came twelve minutes in. The second followed four minutes after that.
