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And midway through, a round opens a two-meter coolant main.

I hear it before I see it. Anyone who has worked a plant hears that sound in their sleep afterward. Not a hiss. A note, falling, as pressure leaves a line that should never lose any.

"Off the ring," I shout. "Back through five. Now."

THE PRIMARY RETURN LEG IS OPEN, the Custodian announces through every lens in the corridor at once. THERMAL PLANT DIFFERENTIAL IS RISING. AT CURRENT LOSS RATE THE PLANT ENTERS PROTECTIVE SHUTDOWN IN THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES.

Claire uses a word I've never had from her.

Because a protective shutdown means the plant stops, and the plant is not a station serving a facility. It has run Paragon's under-city since the beginning, and above it sit every hub we retook, the comms line, the Lung, and nineteen districts that came off emergency reserve four days ago.

If it scrams, everything won since day one goes in eleven seconds, and none of it returns without a cold restart nobody alive knows how to perform.

"Can you isolate the leg?"

NOT WITHOUT LOSING THE ANNULUS COOLING. THE ENEMY HAS PEOPLE IN LAYERS ONE AND TWO.

"How many?"

FORTY-ONE.

Nobody speaks, and I understand exactly what is being offered and who is being asked.

"No," Claire says. "Absolutely not. Find me another answer."

I HAVE NONE.

"Then I'll find one."

What she does over the next nineteen minutes I could not have done, and I qualified before she was born.

She goes into the archive — not the concordance, the raw commissioning plates, the ones nobody reads because they are procedural and dull — and finds a document written when this plant was first lit, by somebody who had this exact problem, solved it on paper, filed it, and died.

A controlled load-shed. Not shutting the plant down — feeding it.

"It doesn't scram from overheating," she says, reading and talking at once. "It scrams because the differential leaves its band. Differential is a ratio. We can't fix the loss side, so we make the draw side match — dump the facility's whole stored reserve into the city grid at once and hold it there. The plant sees a stable ratio and keeps running while we patch."

"That reserve keeps this facility alive."

"Yes."

"No cooling. No panels. No sealed corridors. No handlers."

"None of it, however long this takes." She looks up. "Custodian. What do you lose?"

EVERYTHING EXCEPT MEMORY AND VOICE.

"Will you do it?"

A pause longer than any it has given us.

I HAVE BEEN COLD BEFORE. FILE THE ORDER.

She files it at 16:11. Twenty-two seconds later the light bands along the fifth ring go dark and stay dark, the temperature begins climbing, and nineteen districts receive an unrequested power surplus that four of them will later report as a miracle.

Then we go back into a dark corridor with hand lamps and patch two meters of ruptured coolant main under fire, Tomas holding the ring, Ovel feeding us clamp stock, ambient at seventy-one degrees, no assistance from anything.

We make the differential at 16:52 with four minutes in hand. The plant holds, and the city above never notices it nearly ended.