The song carried.
Not through air alone, but through infrastructure—through quantum nodes, beneath concrete veins, along arterial pipelines encoded with denial. It was not melody in any traditional sense. It was resonance layered with grief. Joy. A hundred thousand suppressed sighs uncoiling like smoke beneath the skin of the city.
Cael heard it.
So did Vel.
So did everyone who had ever questioned, even once, why their reflections in official lenses always looked slightly thinner—diminished, incomplete.
"It's not stopping," Vel whispered.
Cael didn't answer. He didn't need to. He could feel the city's hesitation. The gears grinding beneath algorithms designed to suppress irregular sentiment were faltering, staggered by waves of conflicting memory.
The Vault had awakened something that would not be re-contained.
Not by force.
Not by propaganda.
Not by fear.
This was not rebellion.
This was restoration.
