Elara closes her sketchbook and stands up. She walks over to us, her small hands hovering over the interface. "The Prime Node in the Mariana Trench was the central processor. The Anchors are the batteries. But the Third Anchor... the Third Anchor isn't on Earth."
She turns the sketchbook toward me. The drawing is hyper-detailed, terrifyingly precise. It shows the massive, pulsing brain of liquid metal, and at the very top, reaching up into the blackness of space, a single, glowing geometric eye.
"The Moon Goddess didn't just hide the cordon on Earth," Elara whispers. "She put the final lock in the sky. The Third Anchor is in lunar orbit. And the Formless is trying to reach it."
My blood runs cold. The Architects valued perfection. They valued logic. They built the cordon to keep the ult
