"Collapse is not a thunderclap. It's a whisper passed between hungry mouths."
— Dymos, Unverified Journal Fragment
The air in Sector 9 tasted different now.
Dust and ash had always lingered in the lower corridors—part of life. But this was new. Thicker. Stale, but with a bite. It clung to the back of the throat like guilt.
Selis hadn't said much since the drone was pulled from the sky.
She sat now beneath the rusted shell of a transit loop, where children used to ride magnets like roller coasters. The streetlights above blinked like dying stars. Her knees were drawn up, elbows resting on them. A strip of blood-crusted gauze wrapped her left hand.
The people weren't rioting—not yet.
But they'd stopped lining up.
That was the first sign.
Lines meant hope. Expectation. Even desperation. But when the lines vanished, it meant people no longer believed anything was coming.
They were still gathering, though—in alley corners, under broken overhangs, beside stripped-out food stations. Hushed voices. Side glances. Not planning violence.
Just wondering aloud if it was already too late to matter.
Across from Selis, Mara paced the gravel, chewing a thumbnail to the quick.
"They're doing nothing," she muttered. "No drones. No sweeps. No response at all. It's like the Council wants us to choke on the silence."
"They do," Thom said, hunched over a handheld receiver with a flickering screen. "They want it quiet. They want fear without the noise. Starvation without headlines."
He adjusted the dial. No signal.
"They're suppressing local comms," he added. "I can't even get a channel to spit static."
Selis looked at him. "You're still thinking like this is about food."
Thom raised an eyebrow. "What else is it about?"
Selis stood slowly. Her joints cracked. Every part of her moved like someone carrying too many memories in too few hours of sleep.
"It's about control. About narrative. If we starve quietly, they can blame it on anything. Supply chain stress. Zone mismanagement. Even us."
She turned her gaze to the eastern tower ridge, where smoke drifted up in gentle, unhurried spirals.
"But if we starve together," she said, "it becomes a story they can't write on their own."
Grid Depths — Undisclosed Sublevel
Dymos hadn't slept. Not that it mattered.
Sleep was for people who expected tomorrow to be different.
He sat in a chair with one leg folded over the other, hands still, face unshaven. There was no clock in the room, but he knew it was Day Four. He tracked time the way old agents did—by changes in systems, not sunrises.
By now, the cascade had spread beyond the agricultural sectors. Fuel token redistribution had triggered logistical reroutes. Water-pressure drops in Zone 2. Backup generators in Core-6 were overclocking just to maintain elevator access.
But it was all still quiet.
That's what unnerved him most.
He'd expected panic. Screams. Looters. Fire.
But the system had learned. It knew how to fail gracefully. To disguise a collapse as a technical delay.
And the people?
They weren't fighting.
They were waiting.
Dymos leaned forward. A datapad blinked to life on the table—Council-secure, no uplinks. Just three lines of text.
> ASHAR DELAYING RESPONSE
SECTOR 1 MOBILITY DOWN
EXTERNAL ZONES GOING DARK
He stared at the first line.
Delaying.
That meant Ashar knew. It meant the footage had reached him. The projections. The sealed directives.
Dymos allowed himself a faint smile. Not victory. Just recognition.
Ashar was caught in the truth now. No more plausible denials. No one to hand the guilt off to. The machine had taken a bite out of its own throat, and now the figurehead was bleeding in real-time.
Sector 7 — Refuge Point B, 14:02 Local
Zhen crouched beside a rusted water pump, hands red with cold.
He was young—barely twenty—but he moved like someone decades older. Carefully. Quietly. Like everything could fall apart if he blinked wrong.
Across the plaza, a small girl sat curled up against the wall, eating something that looked like molded bark. Her mother watched her, hands shaking from either cold or hunger—or both.
Zhen couldn't tell anymore. The symptoms were blending.
He turned to Eli, who was scanning biometric readouts from a hand-scanner pointed toward the crowd.
"We're past the dehydration mark in most clusters," Eli said flatly. "Any emergency drone drop now would just be triage."
Zhen nodded. "How long do we have before it breaks open?"
Eli didn't look up. "It already has. We're just waiting for someone to call it what it is."
Capitol Core — Chancellor's Observation Room
Ashar Vale stood with his back to the screen.
He didn't want to see it. Not yet.
Behind him, the footage played anyway. Auto-triggered by a failsafe Mara had rigged into the council broadcast network. It looped every three minutes.
No narration. Just streets. Faces. Abandonment.
The weight of it pressed in around him like gravity. And for the first time in weeks, he felt helpless.
Not politically.
Not strategically.
Just humanly.
He remembered the faces of the council as they'd authorized the trigger protocol. Reen's voice, so flat. Drayen's silence. Tyen's smirk. Arvik's tired eyes. None of them had flinched.
And neither had he.
That was what haunted him.
Not what was happening now.
But how easy it had been to nod.
To let Dymos start something that couldn't be undone.
Sector 9 — Crate Wall, 15:19
Selis watched from atop the stacked freight containers they'd converted into a lookout post.
Below her, people had begun to move differently.
They weren't just scavenging. They were organizing. Sharing. Building improvised kitchens from drone wreckage. Setting watch rotations. Assigning lookouts.
Not soldiers.
Neighbors.
She leaned over the edge as Mara climbed up, breathless and dusty.
"They activated Reconciliation Directive 9-A," Mara said, holding up the cracked node drive. "It's not just sabotage. It's sanctioned."
Selis took the drive. Turned it over once in her fingers.
"This proves it?"
Mara nodded. "Yeah."
A beat of silence passed.
"Then it's time," Selis said.
"For what?" Mara asked.
Selis looked out over the camp—tents, old tarps, broken towers. But people were moving. Talking. Holding each other up.
"Time to stop surviving," she said, "and start showing them what that looks like."