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Varrick touched an audio icon on the traffic analysis. Aarvyd’s voice filled the table, warm and measured.

“The Virelle incident remains an internal personnel matter. Public access continues on schedule. Any director who turns one defection into a visible security panic will explain the cost to me personally.”

Varrick killed the recording. “That’s the chairman containing the scandal. They know Darven defected and the archive took a hit. They don’t know how large it was, and the oldest surviving traces point exactly where she wanted them to point: Soren, the coup files, old executive records. Traffic says the quiet hardening has started: executive comms tightened, the staggered biometric rollout underway, internal reviews multiplying, while the public face stays open.

“Routine staffing is still running its old schedules. If they’d found that layer of her theft, it wouldn’t be. Six days at the outside is what I’d risk on the unchanged schedules. That’s a planning limit, not a promise. But triage ends. Once they reconstruct her full access history, everything she ever touched gets burned.”

Tamsin had been quiet at the navigation end, running approach geometry while the rest of us argued.

“Six days is also our transit limit,” she said.

“Five days at cruise to stage in the Kaddran drift, inside the sensor shadow of the Spire’s traffic lanes. That leaves one day of margin.”

“Then we won’t waste it,” I said.

Six days.

I looked at the schematic still turning above the table. The Spire was no less dangerous than it had been that morning. But now we had a route through the front door, internal paperwork, an archive of its systems, and the person who knew how its staff actually behaved.

I’ve built plans on worse. Not many. And never one that depended this much on a person I’d met only hours ago.

I checked the monitor once. She sat in the chair facing the door, eating the bread at last. She looked straight at the camera and raised the bread an inch.

She knew I was watching.

I closed the feed.

“Wake anyone who’s sleeping,” I said. “Full council in one hour. She has terms and she wants the whole table to hear them, so the whole table will. We have six days to plan and execute the most important job of our lives.”

LIKA

They sent the giant to fetch me, which was either a courtesy or a message, and with these people I was learning it could be both. Zarek, he told me on the way. By the time we reached the war room, he had given me names for the other faces in the landing bay.

The war room held eleven people, one boar, and a cybernetic lynx on a high shelf pretending not to watch the boar. I walked into it the way I’d walked into years of rooms that wanted me to fail, and I did what I always did first. I stood still one full second and let the room look.

Five pairs. I’d noticed that much in the landing bay, and the war room confirmed it.

The pale-haired giant back at the cheerful woman’s side. The tech and his mathematician wired into the same console. The charming one whose smile did the work of a weapon, shoulder to shoulder with a woman who had curator’s hands. The pilot and the navigator. The quiet one by the hatch, a farm-tanned woman half a step behind his flank.

Mated, all of them, in the Vinduthi way if the reports I’d stolen were true. Every one of the ten watched me with suspicion. That I understood. Kindness was harder.

The cheerful woman leaned toward her giant without lowering her voice at all. “This is going to be good.”

Rylos stood at the head of the table with the Spire turning above it. “You wanted the whole table. You have it. Brief them.”

No introduction, no welcome, no chair offered. Correct. I stepped up to the display and went to work.

“The Spire cannot be taken. Start there, because every plan that forgets it dies in the lobby.” I turned the schematic with two fingers.

“It can, however, be entered. The building processes eleven hundred visitors a day. Petitioners, contractors, delegations. Your way in is the front door, wearing paperwork the building recognizes as its own, and your tech has everything he needs to build it. The way in is not the problem. The problem is moving between security zones.”

I lit them. “Public band, floors one through ten. Administrative band, secured. Garrison band. And the sealed floors, where nothing moves without inner-ring biometrics. Four zones, three transitions, and each one has a checkpoint that can end you. My value to this table is that I know what each checkpoint actually does, as opposed to what it’s supposed to do.”

“One complication,” I said. “The Spire uses two numbering systems. Public floors keep the physical count. Beyond the public band, security maps switch to an old internal level index. Security level six is not the sixth floor of the tower.”

“Then let’s test the difference.” Rylos didn’t move from the table’s head. “The security-level-nine armory rotation. Walk us through it.”

“No. There’s no armory on security nine. Security nine is archives; the garrison arsenals are on security fourteen and twenty-two. You know that, because it was in the archive I unlocked for Varrick. Test me on things that exist and we’ll go faster.”