The light had a pulse.
That was the first thing the doctor noticed when she woke up face-down in the ash. It wasn't random energy or radiation. It beat like a heart.
She rolled onto her side, coughing through the taste of metal. The ridge above her glowed blue-gold, folding in on itself, and every fold gave off a small shock wave that rattled her bones.
Buzz was somewhere in that chaos. She could see flashes of his silhouette every few seconds—wings, claws, the faint shine of movement—and then the storm swallowed him again.
She fumbled for the scanner clipped to her belt. Its display stuttered between static and numbers that didn't make sense: wavelengths outside the human visible range, frequencies too low to be seismic and too high to be audible.
The readings wrote themselves across the screen faster than she could read them.
The machine was talking back.
"Adaptive resonance," she whispered, half in awe, half in fear. "It's learning the parameters."
