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"One more thing. Eleven of them are Alzohn and nineteen are human, and none of them asked which, and if this city wants to know how it survives the month, that's the answer. Not me. That."

Then she gets off the platform and comes and takes my arm and says, very quietly, "Sit down before you fall down, you have been standing on a hole in your leg for six hours."

The medic finds it clean. Through and through, nothing structural. I've had worse off a bearing.

What I never had is the walk back through the District Twelve access at 23:00, a crew behind me, past a standpipe queue that turns and goes quiet and then doesn't stay quiet.

I have worked for this city my whole working life and it has never looked at me.

Claire's hand is in mine. My arms are lit and I don't care who sees, and evidently nobody else does either, because a woman in that queue sets her bucket down and starts clapping and the whole street goes with her.

"Ten more hubs," Claire says.

"Ten more hubs."

"Which one hurts them?"

I have been turning that over since the bore came down.

"None of them," I say. "Hubs are the loud part. To hurt Marr we need to know where the money moves, and money does not move through a water main."

CHAPTER 23

CLAIRE

The signals are the mistake. Not the shooting, not the charges, not even the lattice. The signals.

When they forced Hub Seven they used a stolen field emulator to talk to the manifolds — a copy of the protocol capture I made on day twelve, which means somebody has read my filings — and an emulator broadcasts. Badly. Constantly. So on day forty-eight I ask the Custodian a question nobody has thought to ask.

"You logged the intrusions in the southeast. Can you log a transmitter?"

I CAN LOG ANYTHING THAT TOUCHES THE NETWORK.

"How far back?"

ALL OF IT.

So we sit down together, a systems architect and a nine-millennium-old maintenance intelligence, and comb ninety centuries of housekeeping data for four decades of somebody else's radio, and by four the next morning I have a map that makes me want to be sick.

It's under the Exchange.

Forty kilometers of it. A transit network abandoned in the second century after the armistice — ordinary surface infrastructure, war-era, nothing Precursor about it — quietly reopened since before I was born. The cut hangers down there are the oldest we've found, the forty-year ones, and now I know why. They weren't sabotaging those lines. They were shedding load so they could put workshops in.

Pumping stations. Component fabrication. A reactor-parts line. Bonded storage on no customs manifest anywhere. And oxygen — eleven bottling plants under the financial district of a city that has rationed air for four centuries.

"They didn't build a smuggling operation," I tell Darius. "They built a second city. They've had four decades of guaranteed demand and they used the profits to industrialize the basement."

We go in on day fifty, through the front door, because the front door is the one thing nobody watches.

Horizon subcontracts its plant maintenance. Everybody does. Helena's office produces two work permits overnight, and I put on a Horizon coverall with somebody else's name tape on it and hate every second, and Darius pulls on the same, and his doesn't fit because they aren't cut for Alzohn shoulders, and that turns out to be what saves us.

Nobody looks at a man who is visibly uncomfortable in his uniform. They assume he is new.

We are inside four hours and ten minutes.

What I get: the fabrication ledgers. Serial ranges on replacement reactor components, matched against the Authority's emergency procurement records — which lets me prove, on paper, in a hearing, that Horizon built a specific component nine weeks before the failure requiring it. Eleven separate times. Nobody builds a part for a machine that hasn't broken unless they know the date, and nobody knows the date unless they set it.

I also get a hanger requisition, forty years old. Four hundred units of a cast pattern unused on the surface since the armistice, delivered to a service bore under Founders' Second, authorized by a signature I don't recognize and will hand to a prosecutor.