The morning after the fall of Draven Tower felt too quiet to be real.
For the first time in months, there were no alarms, no gunfire, no screams. The air was cold but clean. The sun came through the smoke like a shy guest, unsure if it was welcome here.
Aria stood by the broken window on the top floor, her hair messy, her skin pale, but her eyes, they were sharp. The light touched her face like it was testing her, as if even the sun wasn't sure what she had become.
Behind her, Elias moved through the wreckage, his laptop open, wires trailing like veins across the floor. "The main servers are dead," he said. "But I found fragments of his system in the lower units. I think we can repurpose the data."
"Repurpose?" Aria turned to him slowly. "You mean rebuild."
He hesitated. "Yes. But differently. We can clean it. Start something new. Something ours."
