Garrick stopped sleeping on day sixteen.
Not entirely — he slept in two-hour segments, woke, ran a perimeter check, slept again. Cael knew because he'd been awake for the same hours, watching the zone's boundary from the eastern edge, and Garrick's perimeter check had passed him three times between midnight and dawn without either of them commenting on it.
On the fourth pass, Garrick sat down.
"The northern approach," he said. "Mira's estimate of twelve days for auxiliary equipment installation — I've been running the timeline against the equipment pattern. Her estimate is probably optimistic."
"How optimistic," Cael said.
"Eight days. Maybe less." He looked at the zone boundary in the dark. "The directorate is constrained by the council review. The Inquisition isn't. They're moving faster than the directorate would."
Eight days until the northern approach was covered. The external panel decision was due in eleven.
The math wasn't good.
"We have a gap," Cael said. "Northern approach covered in eight days. Panel decision in eleven. Three days where the exits are sealed and the institutional cover hasn't arrived yet."
"Assuming the panel's findings help us," Garrick said. "Assuming the doctrinal challenge holds." He paused. "Assumptions I would not advise betting lives on."
Cael looked at him.
In the zone's dark, with the Rift's frequency rising through the substrate and the entity population orienting at the field's periphery, Garrick looked like what he was: a man who'd made too many plans that depended on assumptions and watched those plans become the reason people died.
"Tell me about the team you lost," Cael said.
Garrick was quiet for a moment.
"Floor thirty-two," he said. "Four years ago. Standard retrieval dive — a Corps unit had gone silent below Floor 28 and Garrick's team was tasked with locating survivors." He paused. "There weren't survivors to locate. The unit had been gone for six days before we were sent. Command knew this. They sent us anyway." He paused. "I didn't question the mission parameters. I should have. I didn't because questioning the mission parameters meant questioning command's information, and I trusted command's information more than my instinct."
"Your instinct said the mission was wrong."
"My instinct said the timing was wrong. Six days meant the unit was gone. Retrieval meant confirmation, not rescue." He paused. "There's a difference. Confirmation dives are structured differently. Lower risk profile. We went in as a rescue configuration." He paused. "The entity population at Floor 32 had expanded since the Corps unit's contact. We weren't prepared for the population that was actually there." He paused. "I lost three people who were prepared for the population the mission briefing said would be there."
The zone around them. The dark, the frequency, the patient blink of the warning lights.
"You blamed yourself," Cael said.
"I blamed command," Garrick said. "Then I blamed myself for blaming command instead of questioning the parameters when I had the chance." He paused. "Then I stopped assigning blame and started documenting what went wrong, because blame doesn't change anything and documentation sometimes does."
"Does it."
"The Corps changed the mission classification protocol for retrieval versus confirmation dives six months later," Garrick said. "Because I documented what happened and the documentation went through the review process and eventually someone with authority read it." He paused. "Three people died so that other Corps members would have a better-organized mission classification system." He paused. "I don't know how to feel about that."
Cael didn't know either.
He thought: this is what Garrick carries. Not the grief, not even the guilt. The specific uncertainty about whether the documentation made it worth something. Whether anything made it worth something.
"The panel," he said.
"Yes," Garrick said.
"If the panel's findings change how the directorate operates — if Edrath's challenge changes the doctrinal basis for what the Director was doing—"
"Then some of what happened at Helden's Reach is worth something," Garrick said. Not bitterly. Just accurately. "I know. I've been thinking about it." He paused. "That's not why I'm helping. But I've been thinking about it."
He stood. Dusted his hands against his jacket with the gesture of someone returning from somewhere he didn't visit often.
"Eight days," he said. "You'll know what to do before the window closes."
He started the next perimeter check.
Cael sat with the dark.
---
Lira found the edge case on day eighteen.
She'd been applying the frequency-based healing technique to three of Maret's people — a compound fracture from the move out of the Reach, two cases of Rift-adjacent exposure producing the specific tissue inflammation that standard medicine treated slowly and frequency calibration treated faster. She'd documented each case. She'd been rigorous about the documentation because the methodology needed to be reproducible without her present.
The edge case was different.
One of Harva's officers — a woman named Pren, who'd been in the zone since before Maret's people arrived, who had a passive Rift exposure profile that was normal but high-end for non-Abyssal individuals — presented with something Lira couldn't immediately categorize.
"She's not sick," Lira said. She and Cael were in the medical space, Pren outside the building on the pretense of taking a break. "Her tissue readings are within normal parameters. But the frequency calibration is — it's interacting with her differently than anyone else." She showed him the instrument readings. "Standard frequency response is an increase in healing rate at the treatment site. Pren's response is an increase in frequency sensitivity across all tissue, not just the treatment site." She paused. "Her body is treating the frequency calibration as an environmental signal, not a medical intervention."
"Like zone adaptation," Cael said.
"Like early zone adaptation. Yes." She paused. "Which shouldn't be possible. Zone adaptation takes years of exposure — it's documented in the Reach survivors. Maret's people who've been in the zone for forty years show zone adaptation profiles. Pren's been in the zone for five weeks." She paused. "My treatment may have accelerated it."
"Is that dangerous."
"It's unknown." She sat with that for a moment. "I don't have enough data on accelerated zone adaptation to know whether it's beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Kavan's documentation doesn't cover it. Nobody's documentation covers it, because it hasn't happened before." She paused. "I need to stop treating her until I understand what's happening. Which means I need to tell her why I'm stopping."
"Tell her," Cael said.
"I know. I'm going to." She looked at the readings. "I'm also going to document it. Fully. Whatever this is — it's going to matter later." She paused. "If the zone-adaptive frequency response can be triggered medically rather than through years of exposure—"
"That's significant," he said.
"Yes," she said. "In ways I haven't fully worked out yet." She set the instruments down. "Go. I'll handle this."
He went.
---
Day twenty.
The northern approach monitoring equipment appeared a day ahead of Garrick's revised estimate.
Mira caught it on the passive array at first light — the auxiliary frequency signature at the northern boundary, two units, positioned at the closest approach points on the northern side of the zone. The perimeter was complete. Every exit from the primary zone now ran through Church auxiliary monitoring capable of detecting the pair bond's specific resonance signature.
The panel decision was in eight days.
Cael stood at the zone's inner depth and looked at the numbers.
Three days of closed exits before the panel decision. Three days where the only way out of the zone was the way he'd told Lyra he wasn't ready for. The way that wasn't outward. The way that was down.
The entity population held its orientation at the field's periphery.
Garrick came to stand beside him.
"Options," Cael said.
"Wait for the panel decision," Garrick said. "If the findings support the challenge, the Inquisition's authority is subject to the same review constraints as the directorate. The auxiliary equipment becomes an unauthorized operation. Eight days."
"And if the panel's findings don't support the challenge."
"Then we have a sealed perimeter, no institutional cover, and the Inquisitor's surveillance operation becomes a prelude to a larger operation." He paused. "Not necessarily immediate. The Inquisition moves carefully. They document. They build cases." He paused. "We'd have days. Not weeks."
"The Inquisitor," Cael said. "He's been at this since the beginning. I've been thinking about how he operates — the locket with his sister's portrait. The way the file described his methodology." He paused. "He doesn't want to destroy me. He wants to stop what he believes I'm going to become."
"That's more dangerous than someone who just wants you dead," Garrick said.
"I know." He paused. "I keep thinking there's a conversation there. Something that doesn't have to end the way he's built toward ending it." He paused. "I might be wrong about that."
"You've been wrong about conversations before," Garrick said. Not cruelly. Accurately.
"Yes," Cael said. "I have."
He looked at the zone's boundary — the invisible perimeter of the entity population's orientation pattern, the zone's ambient frequency, the sealed exits.
Eight days until the panel decision.
Three days where the only way out was down.
He thought: I'm going to have to decide which one I'm using first.
The zone's substrate trembled, faintly, in the specific frequency that Dav had been tracking for two weeks — the deep orientation, the something below, patient, still, pointing upward toward where he stood.
He thought: or maybe the decision has already been made and I'm just catching up to it.
The warning lights blinked.
The frequency rose.
He went back to the shelter cluster to plan.
