Page 41

"Yours, nominally." I don't look away. "Mine operationally, because nobody else on this planet can read the schematics that say where they'll be tomorrow. Darius for anything below Sublevel Nine, because he knows those tunnels and the enemy has been walking them fifteen years."

Helena signs it at 03:40. Article Nine again — her second in two days, and by now the whole floor understands what she is spending.

Then I go and look at the schematics properly, and the picture gets sharper and much colder.

The Custodian unlocked its distribution layer to us in the Speak chamber and I've been too busy running to read it. Hub One under the Exchange. Two, northern return. Three through Six ringing the Founders' tiers. Seven, water for Districts Eleven to Fourteen. Eight and Nine on the eastern flank. Ten and Eleven deep, near the plant.

And a dependency lattice, which nobody has ever seen, because nobody has ever had it.

The hubs aren't equal. Four of them carry the others. Take One, Two, Seven and Ten and you don't hold four elevenths of Paragon's distribution — you hold seventy percent, because everything else routes through those four to reach the core.

Those are the four they took. In that order, inside two hours, on the first day.

"They have the lattice." The room has gone quiet. "They can't read Precursor glyphs. They can't open a node. But somebody handed them the one document that says which four hubs to hit, and there are two copies of it — one downstairs in a machine, one in my hands."

Nobody says anything.

"Kovic's dissent," Darius says. "He was briefed on the hub structure at the emergency session. Eleven hubs, by number, in my written submission."

"Not the lattice. Nobody had the lattice."

"Somebody worked it out," he says. "Fifteen years of surveying, forty years of cutting hangers, four hundred failure reports of mine to read. Break the same city for four decades and you learn where it hurts."

The most frightening thing anybody has said to me since I landed here, and almost certainly correct.

Six hours of planning. The counteroffensive requires somebody to go underground into tunnels the enemy has mapped since before I finished my degree, with a small team, against people who have already shot at a councilor.

Darius stands up before anyone can ask.

"I'll take it."

"Engineer—" Helena begins.

"Two people on Paragon can wake a hub. If we both go and it turns bad, the city loses everything in an afternoon. If she coordinates from here and I go down, the worst case costs you one engineer." He says it the way he reads a torque figure. "It is also my terrain. They surveyed it. I maintained it. Those are not the same knowledge, and mine is better."

And here is what I live with: he is correct, I know he is correct, the bond is telling me exactly how frightened he is under all that flat competence, and I say yes anyway.

"Agreed," I say. "With conditions. You don't wake anything without me on the link. You take Tomas. And when you're inside four meters of a paired plate you wait, because I will get there."

"Understood."

"Say the rest of it."

Something moves behind his eyes. "I will not spend myself to save you nine minutes."

"Thank you."

What happens next is the part I didn't expect.

The room changes. Forty exhausted engineers who have spent eleven hours watching their city come apart just watched us do that — the argument, the conditions, the flat agreement — and something moves through the floor like a load finding its path.

Because we didn't perform confidence at them. We disagreed in public, in front of everybody, and then resolved it, and no one of us needed to win.

Ovel starts assigning gear unprompted. Two district engineers who have refused to release crews all night release them inside four minutes. Somebody builds a working comms array out of three broken ones. By 10:00 the floor has stopped being forty people and started being one thing, and nobody gave a speech.

Tomas leans over as I mark the first target.

"You know what did that," he says.