Chapter 100: The Catalyst
The silence in the Vault's command center was a brittle thing, fragile as the ice crusting the outer cliffs. Lyra stood before the central holographic display, her hands braced on the cool metal of the console, her gaze unfocused. Before her, two images glowed side-by-side, each a different kind of doom.
On the left, the genetic decay graph. The line, once a gradual slope, had taken a sickening plunge in the last week. Pel's voice, thin with strain, echoed in her memory: "It's not linear decay anymore. It's cascading failure. We have weeks, Keeper. Maybe less. The cellular repair module we extrapolated… it's incomplete. The sequences are too fragmented."
