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Twenty-one of us coughing on a plant room floor while the city screams overhead.

The technician on shift stares, then looks at the wall his alcove used to be. "That's structural fill."

"It really isn't," Tomas says.

Helena reaches us at 14:00. She doesn't ask how we are. She reads.

Atmospheric failure across the northern tiers. Water pressure collapse in four districts. Two power stations off line in the Exchange. The Lung still turning — they never got to it — but its output going nowhere useful, because the hubs that distribute it are in other hands.

Nine simultaneous incidents inside two hours, across nineteen kilometers, timed to the minute.

"Kovic's emergency session was at nine," Helena says. "He moved to suspend the expedition. The motion failed by one vote and he left the chamber at nine-forty." A pause with a shape to it. "The first charge went off at nine-fifty."

"Whose name is on the Horizon contract?"

"Executive signatory for emergency infrastructure supply, eleven districts." Paper moving. "Elys Marr."

I have countersigned that name four hundred times, written it on requisitions in my own hand, thanked his delivery crews in loading bays at three in the morning.

Claire sits against a compressor housing, soot to the elbows, hands wrapped around a cell holding ninety centuries of maintenance records, and she raises her head, and what arrives through the bond is not fear.

"They've made a mistake," she says.

"Four hubs."

"Nine by tonight, the rest inside a week, and it still doesn't matter." She gets up. "They've cut a machine off from its own city. Fine. They can hold every hub in Paragon, and no two of them can wake a node, none of them can file a work order, and that thing downstairs will not answer them if they ask for a thousand years."

"They don't need an answer. They need it silent."

"Then we take the hubs back," she says, "one at a time, in order of who dies first without them, and we use the only two hands in this city it will listen to."

Tomas stands. Then Ovel, who has never held a tool in anger. Then the rest of them, in the dark, while nineteen districts begin to suffocate overhead.

"Right," Tomas says. "Where first?"

CHAPTER 21

CLAIRE

The city gets eleven hours of honest terror before anybody starts thinking, and I spend nine of them shouting.

Not at people. At a room. The Authority operations floor on Tier Three: forty engineers, all competent, all working an emergency that arrived in their own district, none of them looking up.

That's the design. I see it near 02:00 on day forty-three, standing before a wall of amber, and once seen it won't go away.

"We're being played," I tell Helena. "Look at what's failing. Northern atmospheric, four districts of water, two power stations in the Exchange — three separate systems, nowhere near each other, all inside two hours. That's not sabotage. Sabotage has a target. This is herding."

"Explain herding."

"They break nine things so we split into nine teams. Each team goes to its own emergency, each does good work, and nobody looks at the outline." I put the map up. "All nine incidents sit within a few hundred meters of a synchronization hub. They aren't attacking systems. They're attacking distribution, and they made the failures loud so we'd spend the week with our heads in the pipes."

Helena reads it a while. Then she does the thing that makes me love her.

"Unified command," she says. "All restoration teams under one operational authority. No district responses without central tasking."

"The districts will riot."

"They'll riot either way. This way they riot at me." She is already writing. "Whose authority?"