The second Warrens resident collapsed at the six-hour mark.
Not Seo's dramatic seizure, no involuntary discharge, no consumption pulse radiating through dead stone. This one was quieter. A woman named Dae, whose modifications had turned her skin translucent enough that Raze could see the shadow of her organs through her torso, simply sat down against the tunnel wall and stopped moving. Her consumption-sensing arrays, the biological instruments visible as dark shapes beneath her membrane-thin skin, went dark one by one, like lights in a building shutting off floor by floor.
Mun caught her before she slumped sideways. The scout's black eyes found Raze's across the column, and the look communicated everything the broken speech couldn't.
Two down. Two more close. The dead channel was killing them by inches.
"Forty minutes," Raze said. His palms hadn't left the tunnel walls in hours. The basalt spoke to his material-sensing in physical whispers, density shifts, mineral gradients, the geological language of stone that had been silent for millennia. "The node is forty minutes ahead."
"She won't last forty minutes." Jin's voice, flat with the exhaustion of an empath running on empty in a sensory desert. "Her metabolic reserves are gone. Her body is cannibalizing its own consumption infrastructure to keep her core systems running. When that runs out—"
"I know what happens when that runs out."
Another involuntary discharge. Another signal pinging through the quartz seals into the live flow network. Another breadcrumb for the Ancient One's probing.
Goh appeared from the column's interior. The amber container against her chest had dimmed, the seed's respiratory rhythm slowing again, the living membrane's reserves depleting on the same timeline that was killing her people. She looked at Dae on the tunnel floor, at Mun cradling the translucent woman's head, at the two fighters who were already shifting their grip on Seo to accommodate a second carried body.
"Give me the container," Raze said.
Goh's brown eyes narrowed.
"I run ahead. Same as before. Hit the node, feed the container, come back. Except this time I don't come back. I breach the seal wide enough for ambient mana to bleed into the dead channel. Let it flow back toward the column. Your people get fed, the container gets fed, and I control the breach point."
"The wake—"
"Will be bigger. I know. But Dae's discharge will be bigger than my wake if she collapses the way Seo did. At least at the node I can time it between probe pulses. An involuntary discharge doesn't wait for timing."
Goh processed that. The calculation happened behind the brown eyes, the same rapid, exhaustive analysis that had built a settlement and maintained it for twenty years and made the decision to abandon it in under a minute. She unstrung the sling.
The container was cooler than before. The amber membrane's pulse barely perceptible against his palms. Through the translucent shell, the seed sat dark and fractured, the consumption signature flickering at the edge of viability.
Raze ran.
---
The dead channel narrowed ahead of the column the same way it had before, the fault line compressing, ceiling dropping, the geological feature tightening as it approached the intersection with live stone. His spinal ridge scraped. His scales caught. The container pressed against his chest, its fading rhythm counting down a clock he couldn't see.
Thirty minutes at a sprint through stone that fought him for every meter. The tunnel twisted left where the fault line met a volcanic intrusion, the basalt giving way to darker rock, dolerite, dense, the mineral composition shifting under his material-sensing like a change in the wind. The dead channel followed the intrusion's edge, riding the contact zone between two rock types the way a road follows a river valley.
The node was different from the first one.
He felt it at twenty meters out. The quartz seal was thicker here, not centimeters but nearly half a meter of mineral deposit blocking the intersection between dead channel and live flow. The deposit had crystallized in layers, each layer representing a different epoch of mineral accumulation, the geological record of thousands of years compressed into translucent stone.
But that wasn't the difference.
The difference was temperature.
The basalt around the node was warm. Not hot, not geothermal heat, not volcanic activity. Warm the way a body is warm. The way living tissue radiates the byproduct of metabolism. Raze's material-sensing read the temperature gradient: cool stone transitioning to warm stone in a radius of roughly five meters centered on the quartz seal. The warmth came from the other side. From the live flow.
Something was sitting on the node.
Not in the mana flow. On it. Pressed against the quartz seal from the live side, its metabolic heat bleeding through the mineral barrier into the dead channel. Raze's material-sensing couldn't read through the thick quartz, the deposit blocked consumption data the way a lead wall blocked radiation. But the physical data came through. Temperature. Vibration. The faint, rhythmic pressure of something breathing against the stone.
The Ancient One hadn't sent chimeras.
It had sent something else.
Raze stopped five meters from the seal. Put the container down, carefully, the amber shell on flat stone, the seed's weakened pulse ticking against the basalt. He pressed both palms against the tunnel wall and pushed his material-sensing to its limit.
The thing on the other side of the seal was large. Bigger than the tracker, bigger than the combat chimeras. The vibration pattern suggested a body mass of several hundred kilograms, distributed low and wide across the geological surface. It wasn't moving. The breathing rhythm was slow, long intervals between pressure changes, the respiration of an organism in a resting or waiting state.
Waiting.
It was sitting on the node. On the exact point where the dead channel intersected the live flow. The point where Raze needed to breach the seal to feed the container and bleed mana back toward the column.
Coincidence was not a concept that applied to the Ancient One's behavior.
The probe pulses continued on the other side of the seal. Raze could feel them as pressure waves, the Ancient One's consumption signature sweeping through the live flow every forty seconds, washing over the organism pressed against the quartz. The organism didn't react to the probes. It sat in them the way a rock sat in a river. Part of the environment. Integrated.
Not a hunter. Not a combat organism. Something else. Something that had been placed at this node specifically because this node was where the dead channel met the live flow, and the Ancient One had calculated, with three hundred years of patience and the mapping data that covered every geological feature in its territory, that fleeing organisms in the dead channels would eventually need to breach a seal.
A sentinel.
---
Raze went back to the column.
Not running. Walking. The container against his chest, the seed's pulse weakening with each minute, the timeline shrinking. He found Goh at the head of the group, where Dae had been added to the carried, three Warrens residents now bearing a fourth on their shoulders, the mutual support draining their already depleted reserves faster.
"The node's blocked," he said.
He described it. The thick quartz seal, the warm stone, the breathing organism on the other side. Goh listened with the brown eyes fixed on the middle distance, the expression of someone adding variables to an equation that was already unsolvable.
"A watcher," she said. "The Ancient One uses them. Organisms modified for extended dormancy, they can sit on a geological feature for weeks, months, metabolizing at minimal rate, waiting for a stimulus. When the stimulus arrives, they transmit."
"What kind of transmission?"
"Direct. Not through the flows, the watcher itself produces a consumption pulse aimed at the Ancient One's territory. A beacon. Much stronger than the passive wake you've been trying to avoid. The watcher's entire biological purpose is to produce one signal, one time, with enough power to reach the Ancient One across any distance."
One signal. A flare gun made of meat and consumption energy, planted at the node and armed to fire the moment something breached the seal.
"Can I kill it before it transmits?"
"Through half a meter of quartz? You'd need to eat through the seal first. The moment you start, the vibration reaches the watcher. It transmits before you're through."
"What if I breach fast?"
"Define fast."
"Seconds. Devour at full power. The quartz is layered, I can read the weakest points."
Goh's thin mouth compressed. "The watcher's response time is faster than yours. These organisms are built to fire on contact. The vibration of your Devour hitting the quartz is the stimulus. By the time you're through, the beacon has already launched."
The column stood in the dark behind them. A hundred and twenty people, listening to two leaders discuss the trap that blocked their only lifeline. Jin had moved through the group, checking the weakest Warrens residents, monitoring metabolic signatures, counting the hours that each one had left before their bodies started broadcasting distress signals into the live flow network.
"How many nodes between here and the next junction?" Raze asked.
"Based on your mapping, three. This one, one approximately twelve kilometers ahead, and one near the junction itself."
"If the Ancient One put a watcher on this node—"
"It put watchers on all of them. Yes." Goh's voice carried the specific weight of confirmed expectations. "The dead channels were never invisible to the Ancient One. It mapped every geological feature in its territory centuries ago. It knows where the dead channels intersect the live flows. It knows where we'd need to breach. And it prepared."
The silence that followed was the dead channel's silence, total, pressing, the absence of everything that made the underground survivable. A hundred and twenty people breathing in dead stone, their consumption systems starving, their lifelines blocked by organisms designed to betray their position the moment they reached for help.
"There's another option." Mun's voice. The scout had materialized at the edge of the conversation the way Mun materialized everywhere, without warning, without sound, the oversized black eyes catching light that shouldn't exist in a passage this dark. "Not, node. Not seal. Different, way."
Raze turned. "Different way to reach the live flow?"
"Different, flow." Mun's broken speech working overtime, the consonants bitten off, the vowels stretched around concepts that the scout's frequency-language would have communicated in a single pulse. "Dead channels, not all, dead. Some, sleeping. Old flows. Very old. Not, connected. Not, the Ancient One's network. Separate."
Goh went still.
"Mun," she said. Her voice had changed, the controlled precision acquiring an edge that Raze's beast instinct classified as urgent attention. "Explain."
"Scouting. Years. Deep scouting, beyond the Warrens' range. Found, places. Stone that, remembers. Channels that carried, something. Not mana. Not, consumption energy. Older. The stone is, warm. Like living. But not connected to anything. Isolated, flows. Sealed off, from the network. I thought, dead. But they're, not dead." Mun's black eyes were wide, the oversized irises pulling in every available photon. "They're, sleeping."
Raze's material-sensing had been pressed against the wall throughout Mun's explanation. He'd been reading the stone without thinking about it, the habitual contact of a man who navigated by touch. And now that Mun said it, he felt something he'd been ignoring because it didn't match his map.
Below the dead channel. Deeper. A warmth in the stone that wasn't coming from the node ahead, wasn't coming from the live flow network, wasn't coming from any geological source his material-sensing recognized. A different warmth. Older. The temperature signature of something buried in the basalt's deepest layer, something that predated the mana flow system the way bones predate the circulatory system that feeds them.
His ancient core stirred.
The 147 integrated consciousnesses, silent since the dead channel had cut off their ambient input, reacted to the warmth below. Not recognition. Something deeper than recognition. The ancient core's response to the warmth was physiological, a resonance, a vibration in Raze's chest that synchronized with the temperature pattern in the deep stone the way his core had synchronized with the garden's pre-classification organisms.
Old. The warmth was old. Older than the Ancient One's three-hundred-year occupation. Older than the mana flow system that circulated consumption energy through the deep network. Old enough that the stone around it had adapted, the basalt crystallizing in patterns that accommodated the warmth rather than conducting it away.
"The old ecology," Raze said.
Goh's brown eyes snapped to him.
"The ecology that existed before the cycle broke. The same system that your garden came from. It's not just in the garden, it's in the stone. Underneath us. Underneath the dead channels."
"I know." Two words. Goh's voice was controlled, but the control cost her something. "I've known for years. The garden isn't isolated. It's a surface expression of something deeper, a root system, a network, a substrate ecology that runs through the deep stone like mycelium through soil. The garden grows on the surface of it. The seed connects to it. The whole system is dormant, sleeping, like Mun says. Reduced to minimal metabolism. Has been for centuries, maybe longer."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because knowing about it and using it are different things. The substrate ecology is dormant for a reason. It went to sleep when the consumption cycle broke, when whatever catastrophe disrupted the old world's ecological balance forced the system into conservation mode. Waking it up—"
"Could it provide ambient energy? Enough to sustain your people and the container?"
Goh's thin mouth opened. Closed. The brown eyes calculating at a speed that Raze could almost hear.
"Theoretically. The substrate ecology, at full function, would have provided consumption energy independent of the mana flow network. A parallel system. Older. The mana flows are the deep network's circulatory system, but the substrate ecology is the deep network's nervous system. Different infrastructure. Different energy. If we could tap into the substrate layer without waking it fully—"
"A sip. Not a meal."
The food metaphor came out before he could filter it. Goh's eyes registered it, the unconscious language of a man whose relationship with consumption was transactional, instinctive, built on the architecture of Devour.
"A sip," she agreed. "The substrate ecology's dormant output, the residual warmth that Mun and your core are detecting, represents minimal metabolic function. The system is alive but barely. Drawing energy from it would be like drinking from a sleeping person's IV drip. Possible, but the margin is thin. Take too much, you damage the system. Take too little, and it doesn't help."
"Can you calibrate it? The way you calibrated the container?"
"I've never touched the substrate layer directly. Twenty years of working with the garden, and I've always interacted through the surface organisms. The root system—" She stopped. Her brown eyes went inward, the look of someone consulting a mental model built over two decades. "I don't know. Maybe. The garden's organisms are interfaces, biological access points for the substrate layer. Without the garden, I'd need to access the substrate through the stone itself. Through the geological features that the dormant ecology has integrated with."
"Through the dead channels."
"Through the dead channels. Yes. The dead channels aren't dead because the mana flows abandoned them. They're dead because the substrate ecology that used to feed them went dormant. The mana flow network grew to replace what the old ecology provided. The dead channels are the old ecology's blood vessels, empty because the heart stopped pumping, but still connected to the organs."
The metaphor chain tangled, but the meaning was clear. The dead channels were infrastructure. Old infrastructure, abandoned when the system it served went to sleep. But still physically connected to the dormant ecology beneath the stone. Still capable of carrying energy, if energy could be coaxed from the sleeping system.
Raze looked at the tunnel floor. Below it, meters, maybe tens of meters, the warmth pulsed its slow, ancient rhythm. His core resonated with it. The 147 integrated consciousnesses hummed a tone he hadn't heard before, something that wasn't a word or an emotion or a survival directive but a recognition. A memory. The ancient organisms that his core had been built from remembered this warmth the way a body remembered the womb.
"Show me," he said to Goh. "Show me how to ask without taking."
---
They worked in the tunnel while the column rested.
Not rest, conservation. Yejun had organized the halt with military efficiency. The Warrens residents clustered at the column's center, the most depleted members surrounded by the least depleted, the biological proximity providing minimal consumption sharing between compatible organisms. The column's members formed the outer ring, their metabolic needs less acute, their modifications shallow enough that the dead channel's silence was uncomfortable rather than lethal.
Dae and Seo lay side by side. Two carried bodies, their consumption systems on emergency function, their modified organs dark and dormant beneath translucent and restructured skin. The two Warrens residents who'd been feeding them directly had stopped, their own reserves insufficient to sustain both themselves and their patients. The math was collapsing. Every hour in the dead channel tightened the equation, reduced the margins, brought the weakest members closer to the involuntary discharge threshold that would announce their position to the predator hunting them.
Goh knelt on the tunnel floor. Pressed her palms flat against the basalt. Closed her brown eyes.
Raze knelt beside her. His hands next to hers. His material-sensing reaching down through the stone, past the dead channel's barren substrate, into the deeper layer where the warmth lived.
"Don't push," Goh said. "Don't reach. Don't try to pull anything toward you. Just, listen. The substrate ecology communicates through the stone the way the garden communicates through its organisms. But the language is slower. Geological. The signals travel through crystal structure and mineral composition, not through mana channels. You need to feel the stone the way the stone feels itself."
Raze tried.
His material-sensing was a tool. A weapon, almost, calibrated for reading structural weaknesses, identifying threats, navigating hostile terrain. He'd used it to crack stone, find passages, detect chimeras. Every application had been extractive. What is this stone? What can I learn from it? What can I take?
Goh was asking him to do something different. To let the stone be the subject instead of the object. To receive instead of take.
He slowed his sensing. Pulled back the active scanning. Reduced the signal his material-sensing projected into the basalt, turning it from a sonar ping into something else. An open frequency. A microphone rather than a speaker.
The stone's own signature emerged. Not the structural data that his material-sensing normally extracted, density, composition, fracture patterns. Something underneath that. The basalt had a temperature gradient that wasn't thermal. A resonance that wasn't vibration. A quality that his scientific mind wanted to call electromagnetic but that his ancient core recognized as something older than electromagnetism, older than the physics that categorized such things.
The dormant ecology's pulse.
Slow. Achingly slow. One cycle every, he counted, four minutes. A rhythm measured in geological time, the heartbeat of a system that had been sleeping for centuries and had slowed its metabolism to the absolute minimum required to maintain structural integrity. The pulse traveled through the deep stone the way tides traveled through ocean basins, vast, patient, carrying information in its frequency that Raze's ancient core could almost decode.
"I feel it," he said.
"Good. Now. Don't feed it. Don't give it your consumption energy. That's what you did to the seed, you pushed your signature into it because that's what Devour does. Devour feeds. But the substrate ecology doesn't need feeding. It needs recognition. It needs to know that something connected to it is here."
"How?"
"Your core. The ancient organisms that your core integrated, they came from this ecology. They're fragments of it. Lost pieces. When you resonated with the garden, the garden recognized the fragments. The substrate ecology will recognize them too. Let your core's signature reach the dormant system. Not consumption energy. Just, identity. Let it know you're here."
Raze let the ancient core lead.
The 147 integrated consciousnesses had been humming since he'd first felt the warmth. Now he stopped trying to interpret the hum and let it propagate. Down through his hands. Into the stone. Through the basalt layers, past the dead channel's barren infrastructure, into the deep substrate where the dormant ecology waited.
The core's signature wasn't consumption energy. It was biological identity, the molecular fingerprint of organisms that had been part of this ecology before Raze consumed them, before they became part of his biology, before Devour had ripped them from their evolutionary context and integrated them into a human predator's body. The fingerprint was old. Older than Raze, older than the deep network's current ecosystem, older than the Ancient One's three-hundred-year reign. The fingerprint belonged to the world before.
It reached the dormant pulse.
The response was not immediate. Not dramatic. Not the sudden awakening of a sleeping giant. The dormant ecology's pulse didn't accelerate, didn't strengthen, didn't change its four-minute rhythm. What changed was the quality. The temperature gradient in the deep stone shifted, not warmer, not cooler. More directed. The ambient warmth that had been radiating uniformly through the substrate focused. Concentrated. Drew toward the point of contact the way a sleeping person's hand might close around a familiar touch without waking.
Energy seeped through the stone.
Not mana. Not the consumption energy that flowed through the live channels. Something different, thinner, older, carrying a frequency that Raze's material-sensing couldn't categorize because it predated the categories. The energy rose through the basalt layers like groundwater seeping through soil. Slow. Barely perceptible. But present.
It entered the dead channel.
The tunnel floor warmed. Not enough to feel through boots, barely enough to register on Raze's material-sensing. But the ancient core felt it like sunlight after winter. The 147 consciousnesses drank. Not Devour-drinking, not the aggressive consumption of a predator extracting resources. A gentler absorption. The way roots drink rain.
Goh's eyes opened. Brown. Wide.
"It's responding," she said. "The substrate layer is feeding into the dead channel. Minimal output, barely a fraction of what the live flows carry. But it's here." She pressed her palm harder against the stone. Her consumption signature, the careful, calibrated frequency she used for maintenance, reached through the warming floor toward the dormant pulse below. "I can work with this."
She could. Raze watched her do it, the same collaborative approach she'd used with the garden, the same patience, the same ecological philosophy that treated the organisms as partners rather than resources. Goh's consumption signature didn't extract the substrate energy. It guided it. Directed the seepage from the dormant ecology through the dead channel's barren infrastructure, coaxing the ancient energy along pathways that hadn't carried anything in centuries.
The warmth spread.
Down the tunnel. Back toward the column. A thin, threadlike flow of pre-classification energy threading through the dead channel's basalt walls, following the old infrastructure that the dormant ecology had built and abandoned. Not enough to fill the channel. Not enough to create the ambient saturation of the Warrens' mana-rich environment. But enough to register. Enough for modified bodies to detect. Enough for consumption systems running on empty to catch a trace of the energy they needed.
Mun felt it first. The scout's black eyes went wider, if that was possible, and a sound came from Mun's throat that wasn't speech and wasn't frequency-language. Something older. An involuntary vocal response to a stimulus that the scout's body recognized at a level beneath conscious processing.
The Warrens residents felt it next. The nineteen, clustered at the column's center, bodies pressed together in conservation mode, their consumption systems dark or dimming, responded to the substrate energy with the collective shudder of organisms receiving what they'd been starving for. Not full recovery. Not rejuvenation. But stabilization. The metabolic free-fall that had been killing Seo and Dae and threatening three more slowed. Stopped. The bodies that had been cannibalizing their own infrastructure found an alternative energy source, thin, insufficient, but present, and switched from self-destruction to minimal sustenance.
Dae's translucent skin brightened. Just slightly. The organs visible through her membrane-thin body flickered, one consumption-sensing array reactivating, then another, the biological instruments powering up on the trickle of ancient energy the way emergency lights power up on a backup generator. Not full function. But alive.
Jin found Raze in the tunnel ahead.
"What is this?" The empath's face had changed, the drawn exhaustion replaced by something Raze couldn't read. Not relief. Not hope. Something more complicated. "The energy in the stone, it's not consumption energy. It's something else. My sensitivity is registering it, but the frequency is wrong. Lower. Slower. Like hearing a song played at half speed."
"The old ecology. The system that existed before the consumption cycle broke. It's dormant in the deep stone. Goh found a way to draw from it."
"Can the Ancient One detect it?"
The question landed like a stone in water.
Raze looked at Jin. Looked at the tunnel walls, where the ancient warmth was seeping through basalt that had been dead for millennia. Looked toward the node ahead, where the thick quartz seal separated their dead channel from the live flow, and where the sentinel organism sat on the other side, waiting for exactly the kind of energy disturbance that they'd just created.
"The substrate energy isn't in the live flows," he said. "It's a separate system. The Ancient One's probes scan the mana network, not the dormant ecology."
"But does the Ancient One know about the dormant ecology?"
Another stone. Another ripple.
The Ancient One was three hundred years old. It had consumed organisms connected to the deep network for centuries. Goh had said it, the predator had tasted the ancient world, knew what it was, wanted more. The seed. The garden. The fragments of the old ecology that it recognized and coveted.
If the Ancient One knew about the substrate layer, if its three centuries of consumption had given it even a fragmentary awareness of the dormant system beneath the mana flows, then the energy Goh was drawing through the dead channel wouldn't be invisible. It would be visible on a frequency that the Ancient One was specifically listening for.
The old ecology's energy. The thing the Ancient One wanted. The thing it had sent a tracker to find.
They hadn't bypassed the predator's sensing network. They'd activated the one signal it was most interested in detecting.
"Goh," Raze said. "Stop."
His voice carried down the tunnel. Goh's hands lifted from the stone. The substrate energy flow didn't stop immediately, the dormant ecology's response continued for another full cycle, the four-minute pulse completing its rhythm before the seepage began to fade. The warmth in the tunnel floor cooled by degrees.
But the warmth had been there. The ancient energy had flowed through dead stone. And somewhere in the live flow network, on the other side of the quartz seal, or deeper, or further, or everywhere, the signature of that flow might have already been noticed.
Raze's palms found the wall again. Material-sensing at full extension, reaching through the quartz seal toward the sentinel on the other side.
The breathing rhythm had changed.
The organism that had been resting against the seal in dormant state, slow respiration, minimal metabolism, the patient waiting of a biological alarm system, was awake. The breathing had accelerated. The temperature against the quartz had risen. And beneath the physical data, beneath the vibration and warmth and pressure, Raze's ancient core detected something that turned his stomach cold.
The sentinel was transmitting.
Not through the live flows. Not a probe-detectable wake in the mana network. A direct signal, the powerful, focused consumption pulse that Goh had described. A beacon aimed north-northeast, aimed at the Ancient One's territory, carrying data that Raze couldn't decode but that his beast instinct interpreted with perfect clarity.
Found them.
The signal lasted three seconds. Then the sentinel went quiet. Its breathing slowed. Its temperature dropped. It returned to dormancy, its single biological purpose fulfilled, one signal, one time, fired not because Raze had breached the quartz seal, but because the substrate energy that Goh had drawn through the dead channel had woken it from the other side.
The Ancient One had planted its sentinels not just at the nodes. Not just at the intersections between dead channels and live flows. It had planted them at points where the dormant ecology's infrastructure lay close to the surface. Points where someone who knew about the old system, someone carrying fragments of the ancient ecology in their biology, might try to tap the substrate layer for energy.
Three hundred years of patience. Three hundred years of mapping. Three hundred years of understanding every system, every infrastructure, every possible escape route that the deep network offered.
The Ancient One hadn't just anticipated the dead channel strategy. It had anticipated the alternative to the dead channel strategy. It had anticipated the ancient ecology, the substrate energy, the specific tactic that Raze and Goh had just attempted.
It was always one move ahead because it had spent three centuries studying the board.
Raze pulled his hands from the wall. The dead channel's silence closed around the column like a fist. A hundred and twenty people in dead stone, their lifeline blocked, their alternative betrayed, and somewhere to the north-northeast, a three-hundred-year-old predator receiving a beacon that told it exactly where they were.
He found Goh's eyes in the dark. Brown. Human. The eyes she'd kept for twenty years as a mirror of what they'd all been.
She'd heard the signal too. Felt it through the stone, through the substrate connection she'd just established and severed. Her thin mouth was a line. Not surprise. Not despair. The expression of a woman who'd spent twenty years preparing for the worst and had just discovered that the worst was more prepared than she was.
"How long do we have?" she asked.
Mun answered. The scout had one palm pressed flat against the tunnel wall, the oversized black eyes staring at something beyond the stone. The broken speech was gone. The answer came in a single frequency pulse, a consumption-based transmission aimed at Goh, carrying data that Raze's ancient core caught as an echo.
Distance. Speed. Timeline.
Goh translated. Her voice was even. Almost gentle. The voice of someone delivering a terminal diagnosis.
"Hours," she said. "Not days."
