What followed was a strange kind of peace.
If it could be called peace.
No one lowered their guard.
No one trusted the silence yet.
Across the continents, several Keepers still moved after their mission broke. Some fought when touched. Some stared forward with empty eyes. Some had to be sealed three times before their bodies stopped trying to reconnect to a dead array.
Lootwell teams handled them carefully.
Useful did not mean harmless.
The captured Keepers were bound in layered restraints, isolated by formation plates, and moved through shadow routes. No one treated them as trophies. No one treated them as prisoners in the ordinary sense either.
They were enemy instruments.
And Lootwell had uses for enemy instruments.
•••
At the center of the ruined basin, Lucien gathered the recovered Origin Core fragments.
There were dozens.
Each fragment carried a different pressure, as if every stolen piece remembered the part of the world it had been forced to betray.
