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"If somebody goes down there and takes it by force, it doesn't fight back. It doesn't defend anything. It cuts itself off." My mouth has gone dry. "Permanently. It walls itself in, the city loses its nervous system, and we're back to hammers except now the machine holds its breath forever."

"How long would Paragon last?"

"With the Lung running and nothing maintaining it — forty years. Fifty." I force out the rest. "And nobody at the end would know why the city stopped, because we'd have been the last people who ever spoke to it."

Tomas has stopped enjoying the map.

Then I find the access log, and the afternoon gets considerably worse.

It's a housekeeping function buried in the maintenance layer, tracking presence the way any building system does. Where, when, how long. Ninety centuries of it, mostly zeros since the war.

Not all zeros.

There are entries in the southeastern capillaries. Fourteen occasions over fifteen years, clustered three to nine days apart, the most recent eleven days old, the one before it overlapping the day we opened the gate.

"They didn't come in behind us," I say. "They were already in. They've had a way down for fifteen years and it isn't ours."

Darius reads over my shoulder. "That welded bracket."

"The bracket, the transmitters, the weld — they've been surveying. Fifteen years of coming down in threes and fours to map it, and they've got nowhere because no pair among them can open a node." I overlay their entries. "Look where they keep going. That isn't random. Every cluster sits closer to the thermal plant than the last. They know where the nexus is. They've known for years. They just can't get through the door."

"And now?"

"And now we've published a method twice, shouted about it in a Council chamber, and locked the entire archive in a Founders' Second store with the whole concordance inside it." I stand up. "You don't need to open a paired node if you can take the two people who can."

The hall goes quiet.

"So we go first," I say.

Darius doesn't argue, which frightens me the way it did in that tunnel under Founders' First. Tomas argues eleven minutes, then starts listing gear.

Helena patches through at 16:00. I brief her, and afterward the silence runs on until I check the link.

"Your contract expires in three days," she says.

"I'm aware."

"Kovic has an emergency session tomorrow at nine, and he intends to move for suspension of the expedition pending security review. With Rhyss in a hospital bed he has the votes." A pause. "So I won't ask the Council. I'll authorize a survey descent under Article Nine emergency powers, which I have never used, and which ends my career if you're wrong."

"Helena—"

"You have three days and I have one signature. Use them." The link clicks. "Go and find out what's down there, Architect."

CHAPTER 18

DARIUS

The thermal plant is the worst place I have taken a team, and the facility spends two days making it survivable for us.

We go in at first shift on day forty. Eleven of us: Claire and me, a medic, two Alzohn structural engineers, Tomas plus four of his officers, and one very unhappy atmospheric technician named Ovel, who volunteers and then spends the descent saying so.

The plant powers everything. The archive calls it a thermal tap, which is accurate and useless — a shaft eleven meters across driven three hundred and eighty meters toward the mantle boundary, sleeved in material holding four hundred degrees of differential for ninety centuries without measurable creep. Service tunnels wrap it in a descending spiral, and they are hot.

At the first junction, ambient is fifty-eight.

"Ninety minutes," the medic says. "Then we carry people."

"Then we move for ninety," Tomas says, and we do, and at the fourth turn something stops the line.