Chapter 199

Chapter 199 SERAPHINA The tremor in the dome haunted me through the day. Chen dismissed it during our morning briefing—a minor oscillation, she said, likely caused by thermal expansion in the outer shield layers. The diagnostics came back clean. No surge patterns. No cascade signatures. Just a blip in an otherwise stable system. But I'd felt it differently. Not through my implants, though they'd registered the fluctuation clearly enough. No, this was something deeper—a sensation that bypassed technology entirely and went straight to the part of me that had been remade by the cascade. The part that still carried its echoes like phantom limbs. I knew better than to mention that in the briefing. Kael noticed, though. He always did. As the others filed out of the conference room, he lingered near the door, his expression carefully neutral in that way that meant he was worried. "You felt something," he said quietly. Not a question. I gathered my notes, buying time. "The data says it was not