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Helena authorizes a forty-eight-hour occupation on the spot, over the annex, in writing, and hands the slate to Rhyss to countersign. I would follow that woman into a reactor.

Then we look properly, and I lose most of the day to being a person rather than an engineer.

Because it's pristine.

I keep reaching for it and it keeps being inadequate. Everything I have restored was an argument with entropy — corrosion, creep, fatigue, the long negotiation between a machine and time, and time wins on points. Down here time appears to have been shown the door. There is a bench in the fourth junction with a surface that has never been scratched, and when I lay my hand flat I can't feel where it joins the wall.

Ten thousand years, and the hardest part isn't the age. It's the tolerances.

"Nothing has drifted," I tell Darius, somewhere in the sixth hour. "That's the part I can't move past. Everything drifts. You build to a tolerance and the universe walks it out of true, and the whole profession is management of that walk. This hasn't walked. Not one micron I can measure."

"It has been maintained."

"By what?"

"That is the question."

The facility goes on answering us and nobody else. A branch corridor stays dark for Tomas and lights for us. A junction lens ignores three Alzohn specialists and stands its column up the moment Darius and I are near it together. I walk a section alone out of pure scientific spite, the panels stay dead the whole way, and when he catches up they come on behind us like something exhaling.

We test it properly, because spite is not method. Twelve trials. Him alone, dark. Me alone, dark. Him with Tomas, dark. Me with Rhyss, dark. Us eleven meters apart, dark. Us at four meters: full response, every time.

"Four meters," Darius says.

"Four and change. Whatever it's reading, it needs us inside one envelope."

He doesn't say the word aloud with twenty people in earshot. He doesn't have to. It sits with us like a third person.

The archives are in the eighth junction, and the archives break me a little.

Nine hundred lens plates in a chamber as big as a transit hall, each holding a glyph structure the concordance chews through in minutes now we know we're reading work orders. Not history. Not philosophy. Maintenance records — ten thousand years of them, unbroken, every environmental system in Paragon logged cycle by cycle — and the reason it breaks me is that the surface holds nine centuries of records with a block excised from the center by somebody holding a lathe and a clearance, while down here it sits intact from the beginning, untouched.

"Everything we lost," I say. "All of it. It was always here, sixty-one meters below the argument."

Darius has a plate in each hand and an expression I have not seen on him before.

"Four centuries of failure analysis," he says. "We have been guessing. Every engineer on this planet, for four hundred years, guessing, and the answers were on file."

We prove the place is functional at 04:00, because I can't sleep and neither can he.

Sublevel Fifteen has a dead scrubber bank serving two thousand residents in Founders' Third — genuinely dead, mechanically dead, I have had my hands inside it. The archive gives us the commissioning record, the original tolerances, and a branch code. We follow the code to a service junction on the spine, set our palms on a paired plate, and give the problem away.

Fifty-one minutes later the scrubber bank on Fifteen comes up to seventy percent and holds there.

We didn't repair it. That's the part. We never touched it. We described it to something, and the something went away and dealt with it, by a route appearing on no schematic ever drawn on the surface.

Two thousand people. A Tuesday. Nobody up there will ever know.

I sit down on the swept floor of a ten-thousand-year-old corridor, back against a wall that has never needed painting, and Darius sits beside me, and for a while neither of us has anything to offer.

"Twenty-nine days ago I took this for a salvage job," I tell him eventually. "Stabilize whatever's left, write a report on which districts to abandon and in what order. Triage. That's the contract."

"I know. I read your brief."

"You did not read my brief."

"I read it the first evening and disliked it."

I laugh, and the laugh comes out cracked, because I've been awake twenty-two hours. "It was a good brief. It was just about a different city." I tip my head back on the wall. "This isn't triage. Paragon isn't dying, it's been unplugged. Somebody pulled it out of the wall six centuries ago, and everyone since has been performing surgery on a machine that was only ever waiting to be spoken to."