Sera woke at 2147 to Kang's fingers on her wrist and a headache that had downgraded from creature to weather — still present, still oppressive, but no longer actively trying to eat its way through her skull. More like a low-pressure system parked behind her eyes. Livable. Barely.
"Seventy-two percent," Kang said. He released her wrist. The pulse check — an analog backup to the monitoring array's continuous neural assessment, the physicist's insistence on redundant measurement applied to human biology with the same rigor he applied to mana-reactive instrumentation. "Above threshold. Marginal, but above."
"Marginal is above."
"Marginal is above in the same way that standing on a cliff edge is above the ground. Technically accurate. Positionally precarious."
Sera sat up. The lab assembled itself around her in stages — the workbench first, then the monitoring station, then the containment vial with its 48.2 grams catching fluorescent light, then Shin at her station and Min-su on the primary cot and the rat in its resonance boundary with its luminous eyes open and its channel output at — she checked the display — fifty-one percent. Recovered. Not fully, but enough that the three-component pulse was active again, the persistent signal addressing her with the once-per-second rhythm that had become as much a part of B4's ambient sound as the ventilation.
"Hwang's message," Shin said. The analyst didn't look up from her notebook. "The NIS timeline is no longer the primary constraint. The System's detection of the cascade reaction is. She said —" Shin paused. Read from her notes. "'She gets one shot.'"
One shot. The colonel's operational assessment compressed into three words that carried the full weight of a career officer's judgment: this was it. No second attempt. No revision. No fallback position. The cascade reaction would fire once, and the result — success, failure, or the undefined blank space in [Brew]'s synthesis models — would determine everything that came after.
Sera stood. The floor was steady. Her balance was steady. Her hands, when she held them out, were steady. Seventy-two percent neural output. Not her best. Not close to her best. But the synthesis protocol's fourteen steps didn't require her best — they required her precision, and precision was a different muscle than capacity. She could be precise at seventy-two percent the way a sniper could be accurate with a headache. The fundamentals didn't change. Only the margin for error.
"We start now," she said.
---
Step one: environmental isolation. Sera ground eight grams of formation crystal into powder using the mortar and pestle that B4's original equipment list had included for reasons that the facility's designers probably hadn't imagined. The crystals resisted — the hexagonal lattice structure was hard, harder than quartz, and the grinding required force that her arms complained about after seventeen hours of divine-class processing and two hours of sleep. The powder was fine. Uniform. The particle size that [Brew]'s standard processing specified for maximum attenuation at System infrastructure frequency.
She packed the powder into a ceramic crucible — the reaction vessel, a thick-walled container that she'd selected from the lab's equipment inventory three days ago and that had been sitting on the workbench since, waiting. The powder lined the crucible's interior walls, floor, and lid. Two-millimeter thickness on all surfaces. A shell of formation crystal powder between the reaction's divine-class output and the ambient frequency noise that the System's infrastructure pumped through every cubic centimeter of the planet.
Kang measured the attenuation. "Noise floor inside the vessel: 0.04 microtesla. Below the 0.1 tolerance. The shielding works."
Step two: reagent preparation. The synthetic reagent — the compound that Sera had created on day eighty-seven through a process that had required three attempts and a minor explosion and that [Brew]'s divine-class architecture classified as an A-rank alchemical product with divine-class frequency properties — came out of its storage container in a sealed ampoule. Three milliliters of clear liquid that looked like water and that was, at the molecular level, about as similar to water as a nuclear warhead was similar to a campfire.
She placed the ampoule in the crucible. Centered. The positioning mattered — the cascade reaction's geometry was specific, the spatial relationship between reagent, formation crystal, and resonance source defining the interaction pathways that the sixty-eight seconds would activate.
Step three: formation crystal positioning. Forty grams, minus the eight used for shielding, remained. She'd need to use the forty grams that the reaction required. Wait — she had 48.2 minus 8, which was 40.2 grams. The 0.2-gram excess provided negligible margin, but negligible margin was still margin.
She placed the formation crystals around the ampoule. Not randomly — the recipe framework specified a hexagonal arrangement that mirrored the crystal's own lattice structure, six clusters of approximately 6.7 grams each positioned at the vertices of a hexagon with the ampoule at the center. The positioning tolerance was 0.5 millimeters. She used calipers. Tweezers. The steady hands of a former chemistry PhD student who had spent three years placing samples on analytical instruments and whose muscle memory for precision work predated the System and [Brew] and everything that had happened since.
Steps four through eleven were subsidiary preparations. Resonance field alignment — positioning the daughter crystal above the crucible at a height that [Brew]'s calculations specified for optimal coupling. Temperature stabilization — bringing the crucible's interior to 22.3 degrees Celsius, the thermal condition that the cascade reaction's kinetics required. Atmospheric control — sealing the crucible's lid and purging the interior with nitrogen from a pressurized canister, because the cascade reaction's chemistry was sensitive to oxygen in ways that the synthesis models showed as branching failure modes at concentrations above 2 percent. Monitoring array configuration — Kang's instruments recalibrated to capture the cascade reaction's output at the resolution that post-synthesis analysis would require.
Each step took time. Each step required precision. The four-hour preparation window that [Brew]'s synthesis timeline specified was not arbitrary — it was the time that fourteen steps of microgram-tolerance setup demanded when performed by a human operator whose hands had to do what machines would do faster but couldn't do at all because no machine in B4 operated at divine-class frequency.
Shin kept time. The analyst's notebook tracked each step's completion against the protocol's schedule, the intelligence operative's documentation instincts producing a real-time log that would, if anyone ever read it, constitute the first procedural record of a divine-class alchemical synthesis performed by a human operator in a military basement using equipment that included a mortar and pestle.
Min-su watched the door. Both doors — the main entrance and the service hatch. The bodyguard had positioned himself at the midpoint between the two exits, his left arm free, his right arm still at his side, his body angled to cover both vectors with the economy of a person who had calculated the geometry of protection in spaces with multiple access points and who had placed himself at the mathematically optimal position for responding to threats from either direction.
At 0130, step twelve complete, Sera paused. Three steps remained. Step thirteen was the resonance field activation — opening [Brew]'s divine-class branches and establishing the processing output that would drive the cascade reaction. Step fourteen was the reaction itself. Sixty-eight seconds.
"Kang. Final measurements."
The physicist ran the pre-synthesis verification. Crucible temperature: 22.3 degrees. Atmospheric oxygen: 1.4 percent. Formation crystal arrangement: within tolerance on all six clusters. Daughter crystal positioning: optimal. Shielding attenuation: 0.04 microtesla noise floor. Reagent volume: 3.0 milliliters, confirmed.
"All parameters within specification." Kang set down his instruments. The glasses-cleaning ritual. Off. Cloth. On. "Dr. Noh. Before you proceed."
"Yes."
"The cascade reaction will produce a divine-class resonance event that the System will detect. Once detected, the System's response will be determined by protocols that we cannot predict or influence. You will be operating at divine-class bandwidth for sixty-eight seconds with no ability to abort the reaction once it begins. If the System responds during the reaction, you will have to maintain processing while managing whatever the response entails."
"I know."
"You know the data. I'm telling you the scenario." Kang's voice had lost its clinical distance. The physicist was speaking not from behind his instruments but from beside them — a colleague addressing a colleague at the moment before an irreversible event. "If the System sends a warning during the cascade, your processing load will increase. The warning's frequency content will add to the bandwidth you're already managing. At seventy-two percent baseline, you have twenty-eight percent headroom. A standard System notification consumes approximately five percent of processing bandwidth. A divine-class warning — the kind triggered by unauthorized creation at this level — may consume significantly more."
"How much more?"
"I don't know. No data exists on the bandwidth cost of divine-class System warnings because no human operator has triggered one under monitored conditions. My estimate, based on the scaling relationship between standard and enhanced warnings documented in your earlier research, is fifteen to twenty-five percent."
Seventy-two percent baseline. Minus the sixty-eight percent that the cascade reaction required for sustained processing. That left four percent headroom. A divine-class warning consuming fifteen to twenty-five percent would blow through that margin like a truck through a paper wall.
"If the warning hits during the reaction," Sera said, "I'll be over capacity."
"You'll be over capacity." Kang didn't soften the statement. Didn't qualify it. The physicist who measured everything to the microgram applied the same precision to the truth. "Over-capacity divine-class processing produces neural overload. The effects are unpredictable. Seizure. Loss of consciousness. Permanent cognitive damage. The models can't narrow it further."
"The reaction will complete in sixty-eight seconds. If the System's detection and response occurs after the reaction finishes —"
"Then you'll be fine. The question is response latency. How long between the System detecting the event and the System delivering its response. If the latency is greater than sixty-eight seconds, you clear the window. If the latency is less than sixty-eight seconds —"
"Then I take the hit."
"Then you take the hit and we hope that your brain survives it."
Sera looked at the crucible. At the formation crystals arranged in their hexagonal pattern around the ampoule of synthetic reagent, the daughter crystal suspended above like a small translucent moon, the shielding powder lining the walls like sand in an hourglass that measured something other than time.
She looked at the rat. The organism's luminous eyes tracked the crucible with the focused attention that its self-taught frequency manipulation had refined into environmental awareness. The three-component pulse was active. Once per second. The signal addressing Sera with whatever message the divine-class rodent's neural architecture encoded in its simplest output.
She looked at Min-su. The bodyguard met her gaze. Held it. His left hand flexed — the channel-testing contraction, the blue-white lines pulsing through his forearm with the steady light of architecture that had been built by a potion and adapted by biology and that now operated as something that belonged to Min-su rather than something that had been given to him.
He nodded. Once. The full communication. We're here. Do it.
"Step thirteen," Sera said.
---
[Brew]'s divine-class branches opened.
The lab disappeared. Not physically — the concrete walls and zinc workbench and fluorescent lights remained in the objective reality that Sera's body occupied. But her perception shifted. The divine-class processing at maximum bandwidth replaced her standard sensory input with the enhanced resolution that System infrastructure frequency provided, and the lab transformed from a physical space into a frequency landscape — a three-dimensional map of resonance interactions, mana-reactive signatures, and the deep architectural substrates that ordinary perception couldn't detect.
The crucible became a focal point. The formation crystals' hexagonal resonance blazed in her perception — six nodes of structured frequency output arranged around the reagent's dormant signature, the geometry of the arrangement producing a resonance pattern that [Brew]'s divine-class architecture recognized as the cascade reaction's precursor state. Potential energy. Waiting.
The daughter crystal above pulsed at the frequency that would initiate the cascade. One signal. One activation. The pulse that would couple with the formation crystals' resonance and drive the interaction between crystal and reagent that produced the cascade — the self-sustaining chain reaction that, once started, would complete in sixty-eight seconds or not at all.
Sera positioned her processing in the reaction's control architecture. The operator's role in the cascade was not to drive the reaction — the reaction drove itself, the formation crystals' resonance interacting with the reagent's chemistry through pathways that the divine-class recipe framework had specified. The operator's role was to maintain the resonance field's stability during the sixty-eight seconds of sustained interaction, correcting for frequency drift, compensating for thermal fluctuations, and managing the divine-class energy output that the cascade produced as it progressed through its stages.
Sixty-eight seconds of perfect attention. No lapses. No errors. No distractions.
"Step fourteen," Sera said. "Initiating cascade."
She sent the activation pulse through the daughter crystal. The crystal's resonance output spiked — a sharp, clean signal at the exact frequency that the formation crystals' hexagonal lattice responded to. The signal hit the six crystal clusters simultaneously. The clusters responded. Their resonance output coupled with the daughter crystal's activation pulse and produced the combined frequency that the synthetic reagent was designed to absorb.
The reagent absorbed.
The cascade began.
Second one. The reagent's molecular structure began reorganizing. The divine-class frequency energy from the coupled crystal field penetrated the liquid at the quantum level, and the molecules — the carefully synthesized chemical architecture that Sera had built on day eighty-seven — responded by reconfiguring their bonds. Not breaking. Reconfiguring. The atoms stayed. The connections between them changed. Like origami folding itself into a new shape under the pressure of a hand that knew exactly where to press.
Second four. The reconfiguration produced heat. A byproduct of molecular reorganization at the energy levels the divine-class field provided. The crucible's interior temperature climbed. 22.3 to 23.1. Within tolerance. Sera monitored the thermal gradient through [Brew]'s processing, ready to compensate if the heat distribution became uneven.
Second nine. The reagent's color changed. Clear to pale gold. The molecular reconfiguration had progressed past the first stage, and the new chemical structure absorbed light at a wavelength that the original structure had passed through. The gold deepened as she watched — not uniformly, but in patterns. Swirls. Currents in the liquid that moved without physical agitation, driven by the resonance field's frequency gradients.
Second fifteen. The formation crystals began to dissolve. This was expected — the cascade reaction consumed the crystal material as fuel, the hexagonal lattice structure breaking down to release the divine-class resonance energy stored in its molecular bonds. The dissolution was orderly. Controlled. The crystal mass decreasing at a rate that [Brew]'s processing tracked against the reaction's timeline: 0.6 grams per second. On schedule.
Second twenty-two. The System noticed.
It didn't arrive as a warning. Not the formatted notifications that Sera had received throughout her career as an unauthorized creator — the bureaucratic messages with their escalating severity levels and their corporate-memo menace. This was different. A presence. The System's infrastructure frequency — the same frequency that the cascade reaction operated on — shifted. The background hum that permeated the planet's mana-reactive substrate changed pitch. Not everywhere. Not globally. Locally. In this room. In this building. In the specific cubic meters of space that contained a ceramic crucible where a divine-class synthesis was broadcasting on the System's own channel.
The System was listening.
Sera's processing load spiked. Not from a warning — the System hadn't delivered a warning. From the attention. The System's focused monitoring at infrastructure frequency created interference in the divine-class band that Sera was operating in, and the interference added to her processing requirements. Not fifteen percent. Not twenty-five percent. Something subtler. A persistent noise in the frequency spectrum that required continuous compensation, like trying to hold a conversation in a room where someone had turned on a high-pitched whine that you couldn't block because it was coming from the same frequency you were using to talk.
Three percent additional load. Manageable. Barely.
Second thirty. The reagent was fully gold. The swirling patterns had organized into a structure — not random currents anymore but a geometric pattern that echoed the hexagonal arrangement of the dissolving formation crystals. The compound was building its own internal architecture. Self-organizing at the molecular level under the divine-class field's direction, the chemistry following a blueprint that [Brew]'s recipe framework had specified and that the cascade reaction was executing with the self-driving precision of a process that knew what it was building.
Second thirty-five. Half done. The formation crystals had lost 21 grams of their original 40.2-gram mass. The reagent's volume had increased — the dissolved crystal material incorporating into the new compound, adding mass and structure to the liquid that was no longer a liquid in any meaningful chemical sense. It was something between liquid and solid. A phase state that standard chemistry didn't have a name for, the compound existing in a configuration that divine-class energy levels made possible and that would collapse into conventional matter the moment the field was removed.
Unless the cascade reaction completed. If the full sixty-eight seconds elapsed, the compound would stabilize. The divine-class phase state would become permanent. The product would be the first stable divine-class compound ever created by a human alchemist.
Second forty. The System's attention intensified. The interference increased. Five percent now. Sera's total processing load climbed past ninety percent. Her headroom shrank. The margins that Kang had warned about compressing to the millimeter-thin tolerances that separated functional operation from overload.
And then the warning came.
**[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED DIVINE-CLASS CREATION IN PROGRESS]**
The notification hit her processing like a punch to the inside of her forehead. Not the standard format. Not the bureaucratic memo structure. A raw signal — unformatted, high-bandwidth, the System's equivalent of screaming. The warning consumed processing bandwidth not through content but through sheer amplitude, the signal strength overwhelming the standard notification channels and spilling into [Brew]'s operational bandwidth like water overflowing a basin.
Twelve percent. The warning consumed twelve percent of her processing capacity.
Ninety-two plus twelve. One hundred and four percent. Over capacity.
Sera's vision fragmented. The divine-class frequency landscape that her processing had been rendering — the crucible, the crystals, the cascade reaction in progress — shattered into pieces. Like a mirror dropped on a stone floor. The image broke and the fragments scattered and her processing tried to reassemble them and couldn't because the bandwidth wasn't there, the System's warning was sitting in the space where her operational capacity should have been, and the cascade reaction continued without her supervision.
Twenty-eight seconds remaining. The reaction was self-sustaining. It would complete whether she managed it or not. But unmanaged, the frequency drift that accumulated during the cascade's final stages would propagate into the compound's structure, introducing errors that the divine-class architecture would incorporate as permanent features of the finished product. Not failure. Imprecision. The difference between a scalpel and a knife.
She had to choose. Maintain the cascade's frequency stability and accept the neural overload. Or protect her brain and let the reaction finish on its own.
**[UNAUTHORIZED CREATION: DIVINE-CLASS COMPOUND SYNTHESIS DETECTED. CREATOR FLAGGED. IMMEDIATE RESPONSE PROTOCOL ENGAGED.]**
The second warning hit harder. Fifteen percent. Her total load exceeded one hundred fifteen percent of capacity. The overload produced immediate effects — a searing pain behind both eyes, a tremor in her hands that she could feel through the divine-class processing's attenuated proprioceptive feedback, a visual strobe effect that made the frequency landscape pulse like a failing light.
Eighteen seconds.
She couldn't hold both. The cascade management and the System's bandwidth assault were incompatible loads on a neural architecture that had been designed for one and was being attacked by the other. Something had to give. The reaction or her brain.
The rat's signal appeared. Not the three-component pulse. Something new. Something that cut through the System's screaming the way a clear note cut through static — a frequency that existed in the narrow band between the System's warning signal and [Brew]'s operational bandwidth, a channel that neither the System nor the alchemist was using because neither had known it existed.
The rat was broadcasting from its position on the workbench. Not into the crucible. Into Sera. Its channel output — fifty-one percent, recovered from the crystallization exhaustion — was directed at the alchemist's neural architecture through the resonance coupling that seventeen hours of collaborative crystallization had established. The signal didn't add to her processing load. It displaced the System's interference. The rat's frequency output, precisely targeted at the bandwidth range that the System's warning occupied, created destructive interference that cancelled a portion of the warning's amplitude.
The overload dropped. One hundred fifteen to ninety-eight. Still over capacity. But the margin — the catastrophic margin between functioning and seizure — had widened from impossible to survivable.
Twelve seconds.
Sera grabbed the cascade reaction's frequency controls. The stability management that she'd abandoned under the System's assault — the continuous corrections for drift, thermal variation, resonance coupling degradation — she resumed them. Not at full precision. Not at the microgram tolerance that the protocol specified. But at the reduced precision that ninety-eight percent capacity allowed, the corrections adequate if not optimal, the compound's structure forming under guidance that was approximate rather than exact.
Six seconds.
The formation crystals were gone. Forty grams dissolved. Consumed. Converted from solid hexagonal lattice into the energy that the cascade reaction had used to build its product. The crucible contained only the compound — the gold substance in its divine-class phase state, its internal architecture visible to Sera's fragmented perception as a geometric pattern that she couldn't fully resolve because her processing was running on fumes and borrowed bandwidth from a rat that was fighting the System on her behalf.
Three seconds.
The compound's self-organization reached its terminal state. The molecular architecture locked. The divine-class phase state transitioned from dynamic to stable — the energetic configuration that should have collapsed without the sustaining field instead crystallizing into a permanent structure, the compound's chemistry achieving a steady state that didn't require external energy to maintain.
One second.
**[WARNING: DIVINE-CLASS CREATION COMPLETE. PRODUCT CLASSIFICATION: UNAUTHORIZED. CREATOR CLASSIFICATION: ESCALATED.]**
Zero.
Sera closed [Brew]'s divine-class branches. The frequency landscape vanished. The lab returned. Concrete. Zinc. Fluorescent light. The migraine hit with the force of a physical blow — not the low-pressure weather system she'd woken to, but a detonation, a pain that started behind her eyes and expanded outward through her skull and down her spine and into her hands, which were gripping the workbench edge so hard that her knuckles had gone white and the zinc was bending under her fingers.
She didn't fall. Didn't collapse. Stood at the workbench with her eyes shut and her teeth together and the neural overload's aftermath ringing through her like the vibration of a bell struck too hard.
"Dr. Noh." Kang's voice. Close. His hand on her shoulder again. "Neural output: forty-one percent. You need to sit down."
"The compound."
"Sit down first."
"The compound, Kang."
The physicist released her shoulder. She opened her eyes. The lab was blurred — the perceptual distortion from the overload turning edges soft and lights into stars — but the crucible was in front of her, and the crucible's lid was still on, and the monitoring array beside it was producing readings that she couldn't parse through the distortion but that Kang was now studying with the glasses-cleaning frequency that indicated significant data.
He lifted the crucible's lid.
The compound sat in the bottom of the vessel. Gold. The pale gold that had developed during the cascade's early stages, but deeper now — richer — with a quality that Sera's impaired vision could only describe as depth. The substance wasn't reflecting the fluorescent light. It was doing something else with it. Absorbing, processing, re-emitting. The light that entered the compound came back different. Shifted. The fluorescent white going in and coming out as something warmer. Alive.
"The compound is stable," Kang said. He was reading his instruments with the rapid eye movements of a physicist processing data that challenged his framework. "Divine-class phase state, confirmed stable. No degradation. No energy requirement. The product is self-sustaining."
"That's expected. What's not expected?"
Kang cleaned his glasses. Twice. "The compound is producing a resonance output."
Sera's hands were shaking. The overload's aftereffect. She gripped the workbench harder and focused on Kang's face and waited for the physicist to tell her what the instruments were showing.
"The product of the cascade reaction — the divine-class compound — is producing a structured mana-reactive signal at System infrastructure frequency. The signal is organized. Patterned. It resembles —" He paused. Looked at the rat. Looked at the compound. Looked at the rat again. "It resembles the rat's channel output. Three frequency components. Repeating pattern. Once per second."
The compound was pulsing. The same three-component signal that the rat transmitted. The same frequency. The same pattern. The same once-per-second rhythm that the divine-class rodent had been broadcasting since its channels matured, directed at whatever external target its System-frequency perception had identified and that Sera had never been able to determine.
The rat's luminous eyes were fixed on the crucible. Its channel output had climbed during the cascade reaction — from fifty-one percent to sixty-seven, the increase coinciding with the System's warning assault and the interference cancellation that had saved Sera's neural architecture. Now, post-cascade, the rat's output was reorganizing. The three-component pulse was still active, but a new element had been added. A fourth component. The same fourth component that had appeared during the crystallization session — the frequency at the boundary between the rat's operational range and the System's core infrastructure band.
The rat wasn't looking at the compound the way it had looked at the formation crystals. It wasn't evaluating a material for environmental manipulation. It was looking at the compound the way Min-su had looked at Sera's channel potion on the day she'd offered it — with the focused attention of an organism recognizing something that was made of the same stuff it was.
"The compound is alive," Shin said.
Everyone turned. The analyst had left her station and was standing beside the crucible, looking down at the gold substance with an expression that broke the intelligence operative's trained neutrality for the first time in Sera's memory. Not surprise. Not awe. Recognition. The expression of a person who had been processing data for weeks and who had just seen the conclusion that the data had been pointing toward.
"The compound isn't a product. It's not a chemical. It's not a weapon component. It's exhibiting the same behavioral signatures as the rat — structured output, self-organization, environmental responsiveness." Shin looked at Sera. "You didn't brew a reagent for the Elixir of Ruin. You brewed something that's doing what the rat does. What Min-su's channels do. What every divine-class system in this lab does when you give it time and substrate."
"A platform," Sera said. The word from two days ago. The concept that had surfaced during the rat's crystallization breakthrough and that she'd pushed down because the Elixir's framework demanded a weapon, not a theory.
The compound pulsed. Three components. Once per second. The signal matching the rat's output with the precision of two instruments tuned to the same frequency, the divine-class product and the divine-class organism producing identical structured transmissions aimed at the same target that neither Sera's perception nor Kang's instruments could identify.
The Elixir of Ruin's recipe framework had specified a weapon component. A targeted compound designed to interact with divine-class entities at the resonance level that their fundamental architecture operated on. What sat in the crucible was not that. What sat in the crucible was something that operated at divine-class frequency the way the rat operated at divine-class frequency — not as a tool, but as a participant. Not as a weapon, but as a living system that had emerged from the intersection of chemistry and resonance and sixty-eight seconds of cascade reaction managed by an alchemist whose neural architecture had been supplemented by a rat that fought the System to keep her conscious.
The recipe had specified a product. The cascade had produced a process. And the process was running, pulse by pulse, in the bottom of a ceramic crucible in a military basement while the System's response protocols engaged somewhere above and the NIS investigation continued somewhere beyond and the approaching entity moved closer at a speed that fourteen months of countdown could not slow.
Sera sat down on the floor. Not because Kang told her to. Because her legs decided, independent of her conscious will, that standing was a luxury that forty-one percent neural output could no longer afford. She sat on the cold concrete and looked up at the crucible on the workbench above her and listened to the compound pulse at the same frequency as the rat and thought about platforms and weapons and the sixty-eight seconds that had produced something she didn't have a name for yet.
"Kang," she said from the floor. "The compound's signal. Is it getting stronger?"
The physicist checked his instruments. Cleaned his glasses. Checked again.
"Yes," he said. "0.3 percent per minute. It's growing."
