Chapter 23: Round Five—The Athenaeum's Ghost

The transition arrived without warning, as it always did.

One moment the neutral hub held its false constant temperature around them—scentless, still, performing calm—and then the air changed.

Not dramatically. Not with the visual rupture of the earlier rotations, the megacity's neon bleeding through like a wound in the world, the ballroom materializing in sections of black mirror and cold light. This one was quieter. A smell first, before anything else: ash and scorched stone and beneath it something sweeter and more terrible, the particular char of burning paper, of text turning to nothing.