PAPER MILL FOUR — RIVER DISTRICT — NIGHT
The incubator hung in the center of the ruined mill like a second heart.
Too large now to be called a sphere.
Too alive to be mistaken for paper.
Black pages layered over one another in a breathing shell, each sheet flashing with fragments of feeling:
fear
shame
futility
resentment
the sharp humiliation of needing help and not receiving it fast enough
Every bird that flew in dissolved into it.
Every district's first wounded reaction, distilled and fed into a single growing chapter.
The thing pulsed.
And every pulse sent a low pressure through my ribs, like the whole city was being quietly invited to finally give up.
Sera stood just inside the broken production floor, silver eyes fixed on the incubator.
"It's not sentient yet," she said.
"Yet is doing a lot of work there."
She didn't disagree.
Shadow moved silently along the upper catwalks, already tracing the black thread-lines through the mill structure.
