[POV: Sofia Lanka]

"You look at me and see a monster, Sofia, but I am merely the garden you forgot to tend. While you were up here playing at being a President, building your little greenhouses and pretending the past was buried, I was down there. Deep in the crushing dark of the Pacific trenches, where the Glass City didn't just fall—it festered. I didn't 'grow' in a lab like a common experiment. I was woven together by the ruins themselves, fed by the leaking data of a thousand dead Sovereigns. I am the result of your negligence, and I am the heir to everything you tried to throw away."...