11:10 a.m. — Hong Kong Airspace
The tilt-rotor transport cut north across Victoria Harbour, rotors droning like distant thunder. Aiden stared through the hatch window at reef-blue water. Even in full daylight faint curtains of aurora swayed above the skyscrapers—evidence that the Loom still hummed at a volume the waking world wasn't built for.
Cassie dozed two seats away, head bobbing with each vibration, lantern clasped to her chest like a plush toy. Lin Xi, wrapped in an emergency blanket, meditated with eyes half-open; every few breaths his lips twitched in silent mantras to calm the Qi static still crawling along the aircraft's skin. Maya hunched over a rugged tablet, trying to tame a flood of sensor logs. Nephis sat nearest the door, cloak hood drawn low, as if he could smother the horizon's brightness by will.
Aiden flexed his shoulder—sore but intact. Dawn-Core nestled warm in its sling. The crystal's rhythm had become irregular again, though not from fatigue. It was sampling something new, as though distant transmitters were tickling its facets with unheard music.
Maya snapped her tablet shut. "We have a global problem. The entropy patch worked too well: micro-bursts of creative noise are popping up everywhere—Rome, Lagos, Buenos Aires. Each burst lasts seconds, then collapses into an identical hiss."
"Hiss?" Aiden echoed.
"Spectral density that looks like white noise but chews bandwidth," she said. "My guess—Council remnants hitch-hiked inside the chaos we released and are now auto-assembling a… call it a Static Veil."
Lin Xi frowned. "A veil sewn from meaningless sound that masks meaningful corruption underneath."
Cassie rubbed her eyes. "Like hiding malware in a sea of harmless garbage e-mails."
Nephis raised his head. "Where is the center?"
"There isn't one," Maya answered. "That's the nightmare—it's peer-less. Every burst teaches the next how to evolve. Shanghai this morning spawned a variant already immune to my Berlin code."
Aiden felt Dawn-Core pulse at that moment—tiny electric jab up his sternum. He hissed. "The crystal feels it."
Lin Xi turned to him. "We can listen through the Core. Trace the hiss back to its first heartbeat."
"Dangerous," Cassie warned. "It nearly cracked in Shenzhen."
"Still our best compass," Maya said.
Listening Session — Temporary Safehouse, Quarry Bay
They commandeered a disused telecom bunker built into a hillside. Fluorescent lights buzzed; dust motes drifted like tiny stars. Aiden placed the Dawn-Core on a pedestal of petrified wood. Maya connected a non-networked oscilloscope rig, analog only. Lin Xi painted a containment ring of lotus ink to channel surplus resonance.
"Everyone ground yourselves," Aiden said.
When he touched the Core, visions burst: waterfalls of static, interlaced with orange sparks forming hungry mouths. Behind them lurked a lattice of black runes—the same puppet strings he'd seen in the Glass Forge, now stretched planet-wide.
The others saw only the wall screen, which jittered into a grainy spectrogram. Amid random peaks, a faint repeating valley dropped at exact seven-second intervals. Morse, or heartbeat.
"It's counting," Maya whispered.
Nephis's cloak twitched. "Countdown."
Aiden pulled his hand free. The vision shattered, leaving coppery aftertaste. "Seven-second cadence links every burst—like sub-carrier code waiting for synchrony. When enough nodes align, something big will crawl through."
"Any source direction?" Cassie asked.
Maya overlaid geolocation guesses. Each burst's timestamp formed an expanding spiral centered near the equator—longitude hovering over the mid-Pacific. "Null island," she said. "Open ocean. No infrastructure."
Lin Xi adjusted his ring. "Not physical. A corridor—like the Fractal Chapel, but sea-bound."
"Then we sail into the eye," Aiden concluded. He felt fatigue settle deeper than bone but squared his shoulders. "Prepare the Pioneer. We head for zero-zero coordinates."
Maya met his gaze. "If the Council seeds an entire ocean-scale corridor, we'll face more than drones."
"We'll face our own static," Aiden replied. "We taught the world to improvise. Now we must conduct the storm."
Cassie stood, lantern flaring, a weary grin on her lips. "Let's make some noise."
Nephis pulled his hood back, revealing a rare smile razor-thin as moonlight. "Chaos is art. Time to paint."
And in the bunker's stale air the Dawn-Core answered with a soft, syncopated glow—as if tapping a conductor's baton on the edge of dawn.