Chapter 9

The air inside the Folding Room tasted of ozone and wet copper, a static charge that made the hair on Aris’s arms stand rigid. In the center of the chamber, Elias hung suspended within a shimmering lattice of hard-light, her body twitching in rhythm with the low-frequency hum vibrating through the floor. She was the anchor. The room wasn’t just a prison; it was a hungry, geometric mouth, siphoning the city’s power grid to maintain the distortion.

"The frequency is spiking," Anya shouted over the drone of the shifting walls. She was hunched over a makeshift terminal, her fingers flying across a cracked screen. "They’ve accelerated the Deletion Protocol. If we don’t break the lock in twelve minutes, the grid won't just reset—it’ll cauterize the entire sector to scrub the evidence of this ritual. Elias won't be a witness anymore. She’ll be a rounding error in their power consumption report."

Aris clutched the brass cylinder in his pocket, the metal burning cold against his palm. He stepped toward the center of the room, watching the way the walls bled into one another, folding reality into impossible, serrated corners. Every step felt like walking through thick oil. If he activated the relic now, he could force a resonance overload, shattering the containment field and dropping Elias from the lattice. But the recoil would be catastrophic. The sudden collapse of the spatial anomaly would act like a vacuum, pulling everything within the radius into the void.

"The Deletion Protocol isn’t just a kill switch," Anya said, her voice tight, devoid of its usual rhythmic cadence. She bypassed a security layer, only for the screen to flash a violent, static-filled red. "It’s a reset. If I push this ledger to the public, the grid doesn’t just block the signal. It initiates a hard wipe of the entire sector’s data history. Every digital footprint, every record o

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