Third Person POV
The darkness was not silence. It was awareness. For a full second after the system shut down, no one moved. No one spoke. The monitoring room remained frozen in the kind of stillness that only came when something had just crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.
Then the emergency power kicked in. Dim backup lights washed the room in a dull amber glow, but the main screens stayed black. The network map, the city grid, the architecture they had just been staring into… gone.
Lily broke first. "What just happened?" Dr. Ward's hands were already moving across her tablet. "That was not a system crash," she said tightly. "That was a forced disengagement." Alaric's gaze stayed fixed on the central console. "We did not trigger it," he said.
