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"They've been watching the gate," I tell Tomas.

"Since when?"

"Since before we knew there was a gate."

The second is worse. It sits inside, four hundred meters down the spine, and it's nine days old.

Nine days. Which is after we opened it. Which means somebody came in behind us, walked our corridor, and left a device — and the facility, which will not light a panel for Tomas Halek, did not stop them, because the facility is not a security system. It's a workplace. It doesn't care who walks in. It only cares who clocks on.

I brief Helena early on day thirty-seven. She pulls the surface access logs and finds nothing, which is itself the finding.

They come at us that afternoon in the archives, while we are packing out the plates.

Eleven of them. Not soldiers — I want that in the record, because everybody afterward called them soldiers. They move like contractors: good gear, poor discipline, four of them holding a doorway they should have swept first. They come in through a branch we hadn't mapped and they come in for the plates, and they are surprised to find twenty-two people in the chamber.

Tomas gets our people down. Somebody puts three rounds into a lens plate and the plate does not break, and I will be grateful for Precursor tolerances for the rest of my life.

Then it is loud, and my memory of the middle is in pieces.

What I have is pieces. Darius pulling Rhyss behind a plate rack by her collar. Tomas shouting a bearing. One of them close enough that I can see the contractor's badge on his shoulder and the word HORIZON on it under a lot of dust. My own hands stripping cells out of the reader dock because the plates are too heavy to carry and the copies are what matter.

Then Darius has hold of me and is saying something that isn't language, and we are going west.

We go out through the transit corridors.

They don't have them. That's the whole margin. Eleven men with a mapped branch and fifteen years of welding, and they have no idea that the capillary network exists, because the node that guards it needs two people thinking in two directions and they have never had two such people in the same room. We take the western node at a dead run, one hand each, four seconds, and it opens for us and closes behind us and it does not open for them.

Nine hundred meters of clean vaulted corridor, lit the whole way, no sound behind us but our own boots. Rhyss is on Darius's shoulder for the last two hundred. Tomas brings up seventeen of ours and we lose nobody, and I don't understand that until much later — they weren't shooting to clear a room. They were shooting to make us drop the archive.

We surface under Founders' Sixth through an alcove marked as structural fill, and four technicians on shift watch nineteen filthy people climb out of a wall.

We keep everything. Every cell. The bulk copies, the concordance, the custodian signature, the four terminated expeditions, all of it.

Afterward, in a Tier Three corridor with a medic taping my hands, I finally get it, and it lands harder than the running did.

They didn't come to steal the archive. Stealing it does nothing — I have it in three places and they know that, because they have been reading my filings for weeks. They came to make the archive too expensive. Kill the expedition's nerve, hurt a councilor, put a body on a report, and let the Council do the rest, because the Council has closed this file four times in three hundred and thirty years and the mechanism for closing it is not violence. It's a risk assessment.

Somebody up there does not want Paragon fixed. Not slowed. Not managed. Broken, and stayed broken, and profitable.

Darius sits next to me with an unmentioned laceration along his forearm and Rhyss's blood on his jacket, and his markings are so dark they look like ironwork.

"Horizon," he says.

"I saw it too."

"Horizon Resource Consortium holds the emergency component contract for eleven districts. I have signed for their parts four hundred times." Very level. Very quiet. "They have been selling me the components to repair the damage they were paid to cause, and I thanked them for the delivery."

"Darius."

"They shot at you." He looks down at his own hand. "I have spent my whole life being careful, and I am finished being careful about this. I will get you and every plate out of every room they walk into, after that I'm going to find the man who signed the first work order, and hand him all seventeen reports."

I don't tell him to calm down. I'm not sure I've ever wanted anything less.

"Okay," I say. "But we do it with paperwork, because that's what will actually hold in a hearing."

He studies me a moment, and something in him settles.

"Paperwork," he agrees. "And then the other thing."