The main viewscreen flickered. Static rearranged itself into a woman's silhouette—shoulders, the curve of a jaw, hair that moved like solar wind. Her face wasn't clear, but he didn't need clarity. He knew the tilt of her head. The way she waited, patient as a black hole, before speaking.

"Why now?" he asked.

The heart of the Nexus.

She was everywhere.

Her voice was the same. Low, warm, with that slight digital grain at the edges. Like honey poured over a live wire.

The message hung in the air of the cockpit, translucent and flickering like a half-remembered dream. Kael stared at it, his fingers hovering over the control deck of the Raven's Eye . The transmission was fragmented, routed through seventeen blind relays, and signed with a cipher that had been dead for three decades.