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Darius says, "Tell them the rest."

The rest is worse.

"That box can't do the job. Not because it's evil — because it's small. The Custodian doesn't administer the network, it redesigns it, nine years ahead of every failure, rebalancing whenever a district grows. Ninety centuries of accumulated adaptation. That thing holds fourteen months of design and performs one function: distribute according to instruction."

Helena has gone gray. "The adaptive layer⁠—"

"Gone. Unseat the Custodian and ninety centuries of adaptation stops existing, and you can't restore it, because it isn't a file. It's a process running since before humans had writing." I say the last of it anyway. "Paragon becomes fixed. A fixed system in a growing city is what we've had for four centuries, except this time nothing waits underneath to be asked, because we'll have unplugged it and handed the socket to a man who sells oxygen."

Rhyss puts her good hand over her eyes.

"How long would the city last?" Helena asks.

"Longer than isolation. Sixty years, eighty, all of them profitable for whoever owns the box. Then it ends, and worse, because nobody will remember there was ever anything else."

Quiet for a bit.

Then Helena stands, and she doesn't reach for Article Nine, because Article Nine won't cover this.

"Full Council at nine," she says. "Not for authorization. For a declaration of infrastructure emergency — suspends the procurement code, seizes Horizon's license, puts every asset under that district in Authority hands." She writes as she talks. "Kovic will move against it. Councilor, can you carry the chamber?"

"With that drawing up and my arm in this strap," Rhyss says, "I can carry it."

"Then I need one more thing from you both, and I'll ask it badly." Helena looks up. "The declaration buys me the surface. It does nothing underground. Somebody still has to reach that core first, and I can no longer promise you support."

"We know," I say.

"You would go with nine people into a facility where the enemy holds standing, against people eleven days out who might be seven." She sets the pen down. "I have signed two Article Nines and I'm about to spend my career on a Council floor. I won't order this. I'm asking."

I don't look at Darius. I don't need to.

He is simply there, as he has been since that ledge on Fifteen, and what comes across is neither courage nor reassurance. It's a load figure — flat arithmetic, already past the sums on his own survival, filed and moved on to logistics.

"Four days of stores, and Tomas picks eleven," he says.

"Nine," Tomas says from the door, where he has been some time. "Four days is optimistic and eleven is too many for that shaft. I have the list."

Helena signs at 05:20.

We go down at first light.

CHAPTER 28

DARIUS

Eleven of us go down my father's shaft at first light on day sixty-one. The gravitic zones treat us exactly as badly as they did four days ago, and nobody complains.

The core annulus is six concentric layers — six gates, each with paired plates and a challenge in two parts, each opening onto a ring corridor that circles the core at a smaller radius. The first two stand already authenticated. Not by us. The enemy took eleven days over them.

We do layers three, four and five in nine hours.

Not skill. Record that, because there will be an inquiry and somebody will call it skill. The challenges are trade examinations, and Claire and I have sat one together for sixty-one days. She begins calculating before I have read the question; I have the improvisation half-built before she asks. Layer five takes us four minutes.

At the fifth ring, the shooting starts.

Twenty-two of them in that corridor, unaware we are behind them, since they have worked forward from the outside and we came down a shaft sealed since the war. Tomas takes the opening seconds. After that it is a curved corridor with no cover and the worst kind of fighting there is.

We lose Verrin, who held a live bore at Hub Seven under fire and has a daughter at the institute.