#Chapter 172: The Swing Provinces

Amelia The adrenaline from midnight hadn’t faded, but it had thinned into something brittle and stretched tight over nerves already frayed by hours of tension. Screens refreshed in constant loops, each flicker resetting the room’s focus and dragging conversations into another spiral of uncertainty. Nathan stood at the front of the central hub, squared shoulders beneath his headset, commanding the comms team with the same calculated focus he’d once used in combat. "Keep the western relay line clean," he said. "If anything routes through Gate Nine, I want it checked three times before it moves forward. Don't just assume a relay is clean because it passes a sniff test, no weak confirmations, no grey signals. I want hard proof for every single transmission, and I want a timestamped log to match. If someone tries to ghost a signal past us, I want the trail. We need to know what’s real and what’s been touched." Simon, hunched behind him, monitored a spectral map on his tablet. Red ri