Silence.
It wasn’t the kind of silence that meant peace — it was the suffocating kind that followed disaster.
Avery woke to it.
She didn’t remember losing consciousness; one moment she’d been clinging to Kael’s voice inside the collapsing chamber, the next she was here — bound again, suspended upright in a vertical restraint field. The air hummed with containment energy, cool and sharp as ice.
Across the dimly lit hall, Kael was shackled to his own field, scythe confiscated, wrists cuffed with glowing seals. He looked half-drained but very much alive — eyes open, fixed on her.
No words passed between them. The hum of the fields made conversation feel sacrilegious, like speech itself would wake something sleeping beneath the floor.
Then, the doors at the far end of the chamber opened.
