Gideon's hand found Zadie’s on the console between them. He said nothing. Just wrapped his fingers around hers and held on.
The chopper passed again. Further east this time. Each pass took it further from their position.
Minutes bled into each other. Five. Ten. Fifteen.
Zadie listened to the forest reclaim itself. First the silence, then small sounds—a branch shifting, something scurrying in the underbrush. Then a bird. One tentative note followed by another.
The chopper was a ghost now. A faint mechanical hum somewhere to the southeast, barely distinguishable from the blood moving through her own ears.
"I think it’s safe to head back to the bunker," Scout said.
"Give it five more minutes," Neve said.
"How about ten," Coulter added.
Gideon squeezed Zadie’s hand. "How’s the ankle?" he asked.
"Present."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting until we're home."
Chapter Fourteen
Gideon leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared at the data spread across the center monitor. His eyes felt like sandpaper every time he blinked. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make the information tell a different story.
Darwin sat in the chair near Zadie’s desk, his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. Coulter stood behind Gideon with his arms folded, the graze on his left arm wrapped in white gauze that Wynn had reapplied the second they'd walked through the bunker door. Zadie was at her desk, cross-legged in her chair, her screens synced to the wall display.
The cipher pattern from the hub had been lifted perfectly. He’d mapped, time-stamped, and overlaid the regeneration cycles against network traffic variables. He'd run the predictive model three times. Each run gave him the same answer, and each time, the answer made his muscles tighten another notch.
"Twenty-six hours," Gideon said. "That's the next activation window. Based on the regeneration pattern, the cipher will be vulnerable for approximately ninety seconds before it cycles and the window closes."
"Ninety seconds," Coulter repeated.
"Give or take."
"Where?" Darwin asked.
Gideon pulled up the network topology on the wall display. The map showed the ETHER infrastructure from the Fraser Valley to the Interior—nodes, hubs, relay paths, all of it rendered in the interconnected grid he'd designed. He tapped a point on the western edge of the map.
"Here. SYN-7."
Darwin studied the location. "That's close."
"Forty minutes from Hyperion's campus." Gideon zoomed in. The hub sat in a narrow valley between two ridgelines, accessible by a single road that branched off the main highway. Remote enough to be unmanned. Close enough that a response team could be on site in under an hour. "It's the only hub in the network where the activation window aligns within the next seventy-two hours. After that, the cipher pattern shifts and I'd have to go back to a node and start reading from scratch."
"So, it's this hub or we start over," Zadie said.
"That's the math." Gideon rotated his chair.
Coulter leaned closer to the screen. "What makes this hub different from the nodes you've been destroying?"
"A node is an endpoint. It collects and transmits field data. A SYNAPSIS hub is a junction point. It aggregates data from multiple nodes and routes it upstream to Hyperion's central servers." Gideon stood and went to the screen. He traced the data path on the map with his finger. "SYN-7 is where I can access the dual-key hardware and activate it during the cipher window. But there's a complication."
"Of course there is," Coulter said.
"SYN-7 is linked to a PNEUMA corridor." Gideon pointed to a line on the map that ran from the hub directly to a cluster of icons representing Hyperion's server farm. "PNM-6C."
