Chapter 110. The Song That Unnames

The humming darks were not projectiles; they were habits taught to prefer compliance. They pressed their roundness against Aria’s palm the way bureaucracies press their roundness against grief: politely, thoroughly, with that patient insistence that turns reasonable into cruelty. She could feel the dome behind them admiring the shape—clean spheres, tidy sounds, clever lack of heat—and she understood in a snap of bone why Alicia loved this kind of engineering. It silenced the audience, and silence is a delicious counterfeit of consent.

The bench’s cool memory steadied her feet. Jules’s hand steadied her wrist. Seren’s breath steadied her story.

“Witness,” Aria said to the first sphere, not to ask a question, to assign a job. “Sit,” she said to the second, not an order, a chair. The first dimmed half a tone, not defeated, curious; the second sank a fraction as if it had discovered gravity could be loyal to ‘no’ when asked nicely.

Alicia watched with the concentrated