Elara is sitting on the floor beside his cot, her small hands flying across her sketchbook. She isn't looking at Asher. She is drawing the gray ash of the vines. She isn't drawing the geometry of the death; she is drawing the geometry of the soil beneath it, the messy, inefficient reality of decay feeding new life.
He’s going to be okay, Margot’s voice crackles over the comms, tight with clinical anxiety. His core temperature is stabilizing. But Luna, if he interfaces with another anomaly this week, the synaptic shearing will become permanent. He needs to rest. He needs to be a child.
He will, I project to Kade, my mental voice fierce, unyielding. We’re grounding him. No more interfaces until his neural load drops below twenty percent.
Understood, Kade projects back, his mental voice dr
