Rook makes a noise and puts both hands over his face.
“Chief. Tell Cayzor and the female that it’s the cleanest apprehension I’ve made in four rotations and I’m putting it on the Guild board with all their names on it.”
“He can hear you.”
“Good.” A pause, and the sound of a male four hundred kilometers straight up trying to say something. “That’s…I’m directly over the compound right now. I’ve got it on the scope. I can see the road.”
Nobody says anything for a second.
“Right,” Daxon says, thickly. “I’m taking these two to the Hunter Station. Somebody message me about the human baby, I want to know what name she picked.”
“His name’s Lucas,” I say.
“Lucas.” A pause. “That’s a good name. Tell him his uncle says so.”
Chapter Twenty
Mara
The Illibrium thing doesn’t hit me until that evening.
I’m sitting on the floor of the compound front room with Lucas asleep on my chest and about nine conversations happening over my head, and I’m running the operation back through in my mind because that’s what I do, and something snags.
The fault held for six weeks.
It shouldn’t have. That’s the thing. I built a false load path, and a false load path is alie you tell a system, and every system I have ever worked on in nine years fights a lie — it routes around it, it flags it, it corrects. A grid is not a passive thing. It’s constantly rebalancing itself, and anything that doesn’t belong gets pushed out the way a body pushes out a splinter.
I built that fault expecting to babysit it. I had a whole maintenance schedule. I was going to be down on four hundred twice a week for six weeks, reinforcing a lie.
I went down twice.
Both times it was sitting exactly where I’d left it. Stable. Clean.Undisturbed.
Like something was holding it in place.
And the diagnostic pings came back clean for him. Every single one of them — which means when a House elder reached into that grid with forty rotations of experience and checked whether my lie was true.
I sit up so fast that Lucas complains.
“Cayzor.”
He’s across the room and beside me in about a second and a half, already reaching for the baby, because that’s his default response to any sound I make.
“No, he’s fine. Sit down.” I catch his sleeve. “The grid lied for us.”
He goes very still.
“Say that again.”
“It held the fault. For six weeks. I built a false load path in a live system and the systemmaintainedit — it didn’t route around it, it didn’t flag it, it didn’t correct it, it held it exactly as I built it and it held it for six weeks and four diurnals.” I’m talking too fast and I don’t slow down. “And then when he pinged it, it confirmed the reading. Cayzor, I did not build that part. I couldn’t have. I don’t have that kind of access — nobody does, you’d need write authority on the diagnostic layer and that isn’t a thing that exists.”
The room has gone quiet around us. I hadn’t noticed.
“It let him in,” I say. “It let him all the way in, and it kept the door open until we were ready.”
Cayzor reaches into his chest pocket.
His crystal’s in there. It’s always in there, I’ve watched him move it from one shirt to another for nine months, the way another male might carry a coin. He takes it out and it sits in the palm of his enormous hand and it’s glowing that low, steadyblue. He looks at it for a long moment without saying anything. “I’ve wondered.”
