The safehouse breathed around them like a lung—expanding and contracting with the distant rhythm of city traffic filtering through concrete walls, the subsonic hum of electrical transformers, the organic creak of ancient monastery timbers settling above their heads. It was, Sophia realized through the haze of her neural fever, the sound of infrastructure persisting despite revelation. The mundane tenacity of civilization continuing its arterial pulse even as the metaphysical architecture of reality had been rezoned.
She lay on the military cot, her body a map of bruised frequencies. Every nerve ending seemed to resonate with ghost harmonics, the aftershock of having channeled the Node's raw dissonance through the fragile analog equipment of her flesh. When she closed her eyes, she did not see darkness but a scrolling waveform of her own consciousness—spiked, jagged, refusing flatline.
