#Chapter 217: David's Final Game

Richard The moment Amelia's voice came through the comm line, I could breathe again. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until the sound of her, shaky, raw, and alive, cut through the static and eased the burn in my chest. Simon looked up from his tablet and shifted slightly, his shoulders unlocking like a man who’d just discovered the wall he’d braced for wasn’t going to fall on him. "Her vitals are stabilizing," he said, loud enough for the entire field unit to hear. "But that pulse she released didn’t just knock out the surrounding sleepers. It destabilized resonance lines across half the city." My jaw tightened. "What does that mean for her?" Simon hesitated, fingers hovering while the screen dimmed. "She pushed too far. Her nervous system isn’t responding the same way. It’s hybrid now, fully integrated to her body. She burned through the conditioning, and she altered something in herself doing it." I didn’t want to hear a list of complications or probabilities.