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"No."
"Horizon."
"No."
"The city coming down on us."
"Then it comes down on both of us," I say, "and the roster still reads two."
She laughs into my shoulder. The basin along the wall keeps its water warm for people who died nine thousand years ago, and eventually we sleep.
CHAPTER 17
CLAIRE
The Lung changes something none of us predicted, and we don't find it until day thirty-nine.
Power. For six centuries this facility has run on whatever it could scavenge off a network somebody unplugged, which is why so much of it sits dark. Bring the exchanger back on line and the surplus has to go somewhere. Nine days of going somewhere, and the eastern terminus finishes charging and opens.
I walk in first. I get about four steps.
It's a hall, and the hall is empty, and thirty seconds after Darius comes in behind me the empty stops.
Paragon assembles itself in the air ahead of us.
Not a screen. Volume — eighty meters of it, floor to vault, the entire city. Every tier, every district, every riser and conduit and atmospheric line, rendered in blue-white light and turning slowly, with the surface tiers up at the top in pale outline like an afterthought, because to whoever built this room the surface was one. What matters is underneath, and underneath is nine tenths of the model.
Tomas comes in and sits straight down on the floor.
"That's my city."
"That's a third of your city. You've been living in the roof."
It's live. That takes an hour to accept and a week to stop fearing. The Lung is turning in there. I can watch the Fifteen scrubber bank at seventy-one percent and District Nine's processor drawing exactly what the archive predicted. Every system we've touched, and every one we haven't.
The model is also honest, which is harder than I expected. Four centuries of surface patchwork shows up as a rash of small amber flags wherever the modern grid fights the original design, and I stand there understanding that we have been beating this thing with a hammer since well before the armistice.
It takes until early afternoon to find the route.
The nexus has been on the map all along, sitting where anybody with sense would put it: the geometric center of the under-volume, beneath the junction of all four Founders' tiers, three hundred and forty meters down.
Nothing goes there. I check that, and then check it again. No capillary, no branch, no transit run. The lattice routes around the nexus at a respectful distance and connects to it by exactly one path, and the path descends through the thermal plant.
"Reactor tunnels." Darius has gone completely still. "Those aren't in the archive."
"They're in the archive, filed under a job nobody's cracked. I know the job now. Give me two hours."
The warnings turn up while I'm doing that.
They aren't hidden. They're the opposite — every approach carries a standing advisory, repeated at every junction, in a glyph structure so simple it's nearly insulting. The concordance eats it in minutes.
It says, roughly: this system will not accept forced authority. Attempted override without custodian standing initiates protective isolation. Isolation cannot be reversed.
I read it four times.
"Darius."
"I have it."
