Chapter 62: Belgravia

Silas took his pills with airport coffee at Edinburgh's departure gate, and the pills tasted like the future—small, chemical, daily. Sacubitril-valsartan with the first sip. Beta-blocker with the second. Spironolactone with the third. Three medications, three swallows, three concessions to the fact that his heart now required pharmaceutical scaffolding to perform the job it had done unaided for forty-seven years.

Vivian watched him take them. She'd laid them out in a small pill case she'd purchased at the hospital pharmacy—white plastic, seven compartments labeled with days of the week, the kind of object that lived in the medicine cabinets of people whose bodies had moved from self-sufficient to managed. She'd filled Monday through Sunday with the same three pills. The repetition was the point. This was not a course of treatment with an end date. This was a new constant.

"Blood pressure," she said, producing the portable cuff from her medical bag. Not asking. Informing.

"At the gate?"

"At the gate. In the aircraft. At Heathrow. In the taxi. At our destination. At intervals no greater than ninety minutes until I have established a reliable baseline for your response to the medication regimen." She wrapped the cuff around his left arm with the practiced speed of a woman who'd been wrapping cuffs around arms for two decades and who now wrapped this particular arm with an efficiency that was both professional and possessive. "One hundred twenty-two over seventy-six. Adequate. The sacubitril is producing the expected reduction in systemic vascular resistance."

"You're going to do this in front of Crane."

"I am going to do this regardless of who is in the room. Lord Crane's opinion of my medical protocols is not a variable I intend to manage." She removed the cuff. Packed it. Zipped the bag. "If Lord Crane is the sort of man who judges people by the medical equipment their companions carry, then Lord Crane can—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "Then Lord Crane will form an inaccurate impression that I am not interested in correcting."

The flight was ninety minutes. Ghost sat three rows ahead, occupying a window seat that the flight attendants checked twice because it appeared empty. The forgettable effect was stronger in London's orbital space—the ley lines beneath the city reaching up through thirty thousand feet of air and touching whatever it was in Ghost's neural architecture that the Montauk process had rewired, the frequency sensitivity amplified by proximity to one of the world's densest magical convergence networks.

Ghost had said, at the gate: "London will be loud."

They hadn't said anything since.

---

London was loud. Silas felt it stepping off the plane—not the city noise, not the airport's mechanical roar, but the ley line energy that saturated Heathrow's foundations and rose through the terminal floor and pressed against his Null with the insistent hum of a system operating at capacity. Edinburgh had been noticeable. London was a wall of organized magical energy, the accumulated output of centuries of Tower infrastructure layered on top of ley line convergence points that predated the Romans, channeling the entity's output through one of the most architecturally dense magical networks on the planet.

His Null engaged at a low level—not the full-body activation of the cave, not the emergency filtration of the entity's door, but a baseline dampening that his system deployed the way the immune system deployed white blood cells in response to environmental pathogens. Automatic. Constant. And measurably expensive. Each minute of low-level Null engagement cost cardiac capacity—a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point, the slow erosion of a resource he could no longer afford to spend without accounting.

Ghost was worse. They'd gone silent on the plane and the silence continued through the terminal, through customs, through the taxi queue. Their body was present but their attention was elsewhere—inside, processing the frequency input of a city whose ley lines were screaming with the entity's grief at a volume that Ghost's Montauk-calibrated senses couldn't dial down.

In the taxi, Ghost spoke. One sentence. "The grief has texture here. Layered. The old pain underneath—centuries of the entity's output being drained through Tower infrastructure without response. And on top of that, the fresh grief. The new output surge. It is like—" The processing pause, longer than usual. "Hearing someone cry in a room that already smells like tears."

The taxi driver glanced in the rearview mirror at the apparently empty back seat where Ghost's voice had come from. Glanced away. The forgettable effect smoothing over the irregularity, the driver's mind filing the voice under background noise because the alternative—a passenger he couldn't see—was information his brain declined to process.

Belgravia announced itself through architecture. The streets narrowed from commercial to residential, the buildings rising in white stucco terraces that had been expensive when they were built in the 1820s and had spent two centuries becoming more so. Crane's address was a four-story townhouse on a crescent that curved like a parenthesis around a private garden—the kind of garden that required a key, held by the kind of residents who'd been given the key by the kind of families who'd owned the garden since before keys were necessary because everyone who might have walked in already belonged.

Silas's Null registered the wards before his conscious mind registered the building. The magical protection around Crane's estate was layered—not Tower-standard institutional warding, which was efficient and impersonal, but older work. Personal. The magical equivalent of hand-laid brick, each ward placed individually over decades, each layer reflecting the specific concerns and style of whoever had cast it. The outermost ward was a simple proximity alert—subtle, nearly invisible to magical perception, the kind of work that announced visitors without announcing that visitors were being announced. Beneath that, a secondary layer that Silas's Null read as something like sound-dampening, except applied to magical signatures rather than audio frequencies. And beneath that, deep in the building's foundations, something old and patient and enormously powerful that his Null registered as organized noise—not a ward but a presence, a maintained magical working that had been active for so long that it had become part of the building's structure the way load-bearing walls became part of an architecture.

They stood at the front door. No appointment. No introduction. Three people—one with a failing heart, one with cracked glasses, one who was intermittently invisible—on the doorstep of a Circle-level Tower authority at eleven in the morning with nothing to offer except the urgency of a planet whose grief was breaking its own infrastructure.

Silas rang the bell.

The door opened thirty seconds later. The man who opened it was in his seventies, dressed in the formal uniform of a private household—dark suit, white shirt, no tie, the sartorial precision of someone whose job description included the word "butler" and who had occupied the role long enough that the role had become indistinguishable from the person. His name tag, small and silver on his lapel, read HARGROVE.

Hargrove looked at Silas. Looked at Vivian. Looked at the space where Ghost stood and where most people's eyes would slide past without catching.

Hargrove's eyes did not slide.

They locked. On the space. On Ghost. On the magical signature that the forgettable effect concealed from visual perception but that could not be concealed from someone who read the world in frequencies rather than features. Hargrove's eyes narrowed—not with hostility, with recognition. The recognition of a man whose career had been spent in proximity to powerful magic and who could identify a specific signature the way a sommelier could identify a specific vintage.

"The Ashford experiment," he said.

Ghost went rigid. Not the processing pause. Not the rerouting. A full-body lock—every muscle static, every system suspended, the organism frozen in the posture of something that had been identified by a classification it had spent its entire recovered existence trying to escape.

"That designation is not accurate." Ghost's voice was flat. Flatter than usual. The flatness of a surface compressed beyond its capacity, the vocal equivalent of a wall bearing more load than its materials could support. "It was never accurate."

"My apologies. The Tower's nomenclature was often unkind." Hargrove's correction was immediate and genuine—not the performative courtesy of a man following social protocol but the real adjustment of someone who recognized that they'd caused pain and chose to address it. "I should have said: you are the person the Tower designated as the Ashford experiment. The designation describes the Tower's actions, not your identity. I regret the conflation."

Ghost did not relax. Ghost's version of processing Hargrove's apology was not visible in the body—it happened in the architecture, the internal rerouting of a response pattern that had been triggered and needed to be redirected before it produced action.

"You recognize my frequency," Ghost said.

"I have served the Crane household for forty-one years. In that time, Lord Crane has received intelligence on every significant Tower research program, including the Montauk project and its outputs. Your frequency signature was included in a briefing document I helped Lord Crane catalog in—" He calculated. "2003. The signature is distinctive. It carries the imprint of the Scottish site's resonance, which is not something one forgets."

"You cataloged me."

"I cataloged the document. The document described a person. The distinction matters, though I understand it may not feel that way." Hargrove stepped aside. The door opened wider. "Lord Crane is in residence. I suspect he has been expecting visitors of your general description, if not your specific identities. Please come in."

---

The sitting room was the ground floor of the Georgian townhouse, furnished with the particular aesthetic of British wealth that had stopped trying to impress and had settled into the quieter project of simply existing. The furniture was old—not antique-as-decoration but old-as-use, sofas and chairs that had held the weight of important people having important conversations for two hundred years and had developed the patina of surfaces that had been sat upon by history. The walls held paintings that Silas's Null registered as magically preserved—not enhanced, not enchanted for effect, simply maintained against the decay of time by small, precise magical workings that kept the canvas and pigment in the state they'd occupied when the paint was first applied.

Vivian sat on the sofa and immediately opened her medical bag. "Blood pressure check. You have been walking and standing for twenty minutes, your Null has been active since Heathrow, and your heart rate was elevated during the exchange at the door."

"We're in someone's sitting room."

"We are in a room with a sofa and adequate lighting and a patient whose cardiovascular monitoring schedule does not adjust for social context." She applied the cuff. Pumped. Read. "One twenty-eight over eighty-two. Elevated from baseline. The Null engagement is contributing. I am noting this for the medication review I will conduct this evening."

"You're going to check my blood pressure in front of a Circle member."

"I believe I addressed this at the airport. Lord Crane's opinions regarding my protocols are not—"

"A variable you intend to manage. Noted."

Ghost stood at the window. Not looking out—looking through. Reading the ley lines beneath the street the way a person read text on a screen, the body's sensors aimed at the energy flowing through the foundations of Belgravia, the entity's grief detectable even through the building's wards.

"The convergence point is beneath this building. Directly beneath." Ghost's voice carried the compressed quality it had maintained since landing. "Lord Crane's family built their home on a ley line intersection. Not accidentally. The ward structure is integrated with the convergence—it draws power from the ley line system to maintain itself. The building is not just warded. It is connected. Part of the network."

"A Circle member whose house runs on the entity's energy," Silas said.

"All magical homes run on the entity's energy. The difference here is awareness. The Crane family knows where their power comes from."

Forty minutes passed. Deliberate. Silas recognized the tactic—he'd used it himself, in another life, when he'd been the one with institutional authority and the people waiting had been the ones who needed something. The waiting was a message: I know you need me. I am choosing when to respond. The clock is mine.

Vivian used the forty minutes to complete a second blood pressure check, review Silas's medication log, and begin composing notes on her tablet about the effects of sustained low-level Null engagement on cardiac function. She worked with the focused efficiency of a woman who did not waste waiting time because waiting time was time, and time belonged to the work, and the work did not pause for the aristocratic scheduling preferences of Tower officials.

At 11:47, the sitting room door opened.

Lord Aldric Crane was sixty-three years old and looked precisely sixty-three years old, which was itself a statement—a man who could afford the magical cosmetics that kept Victoria Ashford's face decades younger than her age and who had chosen not to use them. He was tall, silver-haired, dressed in a charcoal suit whose tailoring communicated wealth through fit rather than label. His posture was military in its straightness but civilian in its ease, the bearing of a man who'd been born to a position that required standing correctly and who'd spent six decades learning to stand correctly without looking like he was trying.

He carried a monocle. Not worn—carried, in the left hand, the chain looped through his fingers. An affectation, or a tool, or both. The monocle's lens was not glass. Silas's Null registered it as crystalline, resonant, the same mineral composition as the amplifier arrays—a portable version of the Mage Sight technology that the Tower had built into goggles for its Hunters, miniaturized and refined and fitted into a frame that a Victorian gentleman would have recognized and approved of.

"Mr. Kane." Crane's voice matched his posture—British upper-class, the accent of a man who'd been educated at institutions that didn't need to advertise. "Dr. Reese." He looked at the apparently empty space beside the window. Raised the monocle to his right eye. Through the lens, Silas knew, Ghost's frequency signature would be visible—the forgettable effect rendered transparent by the same technology that Hunters used to see magic. "And you. My father's briefings did not do you justice. The Montauk frequency is quite distinct at close range."

"It is not my frequency," Ghost said. "It was done to me."

"Yes. It was." Crane lowered the monocle. His face did something Silas hadn't expected from a Circle member—it registered the correction the way Hargrove had, as information that mattered rather than as an inconvenience to be managed. "I have read my family's records on the Montauk program. Every document. I began reading them when I assumed the Crane seat on the Circle, thirty-one years ago, and I have not finished being horrified by them. The Tower's treatment of—" He paused. Chose words the way he wore suits—carefully, with attention to fit. "The Tower's treatment of you was monstrous. That my family's institution was complicit in that monstrosity is a fact I carry and do not dismiss."

The room held the statement. Ghost did not respond. Crane did not require a response. The acknowledgment existed between them—not a resolution, not an apology, but a piece of the truth placed on a table where both parties could see it.

"Please sit," Crane said, and sat himself—not in the room's dominant chair but in one of the smaller side chairs, the choice of a man who was declining the positional advantage of his own furniture. A gesture. Possibly calculated. Possibly genuine. Silas filed it under both.

"You know why we're here," Silas said.

"I know that the founding-era amplifier network is reactivating. I know that the cascades are chain-reacting through the ley line system. I know that you have been to Scotland twice and that both visits produced cardiac events." He glanced at the blood pressure cuff that Vivian was replacing in her medical bag. "I have my own monitoring infrastructure. Smaller than yours, better funded, less desperately stretched. I have been watching the cascades since the first one."

"You've been watching."

"Watching, Mr. Kane, is what my family does. We have been watching for three hundred years. My ancestor sealed twenty-five amplifiers and left instructions that have been passed from Crane to Crane for thirteen generations." He placed the monocle on the side table. Folded his hands. "The instruction was this: 'Guard this knowledge until someone who understands the conversation comes asking for it.' Thirteen generations of Cranes have guarded the archive, maintained the records, and waited. Some of us waited with faith. Some with scepticism. I have waited with—" He considered. "Curiosity. And in the last two weeks, with increasing urgency."

"Then give us the archive."

"I intend to. But first, Mr. Kane, I want something that three hundred years of watching has not provided." Crane leaned forward. The movement was small—an inch, perhaps two—but it changed the geometry of the conversation. The aristocrat declining the positional advantage of physical distance. "Tell me about the entity. Not what it does—I know what it does. Not what it powers—I understand the ley line system better than most living mages. Tell me what it is. What it wants. What it feels. My ancestor sealed those amplifiers because he believed a conversation was coming. I have guarded sealed doors my entire life and I have never known what is on the other side."

Silas looked at Vivian. Vivian's expression was the one she wore when a clinical situation had moved outside her area of expertise—attentive, reserved, the face of a woman maintaining her professional role while the conversation entered territory her medical training hadn't prepared her for. She gave a small nod. Not permission—acknowledgment. The acknowledgment that the information Silas carried was not hers to withhold.

"The entity is two million years old," Silas said. "It exists beneath the surface—not in a specific location, but throughout the ley line system. The system is its body. It's a consciousness that processes reality in wavelengths and pressures. When I stood at the door, it communicated in pattern, in frequency, in the mathematics of energy flow."

"And what did it communicate?"

"The first time—broadcast. Its history. Its memory. Too much for a human nervous system. My heart stopped." Silas's voice was the clipped register—the operational tone, each word a tool placed precisely in the structure of the sentence. "The second time, I talked back. I showed it the amplifiers. What the Tower built. What the amplifiers do to it."

"And?"

"It didn't know. Two million years old and it didn't know why parts of its body hurt. The amplifiers—from its perspective—are puncture wounds. Places where its circulation has been pierced and drained. It knew they were there. It understood the damage. What it didn't understand was that the damage was intentional. That something had hurt it on purpose."

Crane was still. The aristocratic composure holding, but holding the way a vessel held liquid—the surface calm, the contents pressing against the walls.

"When it learned the truth—when I showed it what the Tower had done—its response was grief. Not anger. Not retaliation. Grief. The increased output that's been cascading the amplifiers is the entity crying. It's an uncontrolled emotional response to learning that the world it's spent two million years sustaining contains creatures that chose to wound it."

"Grief," Crane repeated. The word sat differently in his voice than it had in Silas's. Silas spoke it as a fact—observed, documented, experienced. Crane spoke it as a weight—the accumulation of thirteen generations of guardianship suddenly given an emotional context that no one in the Crane line had possessed.

"And the guilt surge—the spike that stopped my heart the second time—happened when I showed the entity what its grief was doing to communities. It understood the causal chain. Its output was hurting people. And the guilt of hurting people produced another uncontrolled surge that—"

"That damaged you further." Crane's eyes moved to the medical bag. To the pill case visible in its side pocket. To the blood pressure cuff. The monocle lay on the table but Crane didn't need it—he was reading Silas's condition through the equipment his wife carried, the pharmacological evidence of a body that had been used as a bridge between scales of consciousness and had paid the toll.

"It pulled back," Silas said. "Both times. The entity felt the damage it was causing and it withdrew. It can learn. It can modulate. It just needs—"

"Feedback." Crane finished the sentence. Not an interruption—a completion. The word arrived with the particular energy of a man who'd been waiting for a piece of a puzzle he'd been assembling for thirty-one years. "It needs the feedback channels. The bidirectional system my ancestor preserved. Without feedback, the entity cannot perceive the consequences of its output at the network level. It can modulate the direct interface—the Scottish door—because it can feel you there. But the distributed grief flowing through two million minds and forty-seven amplifiers is—"

"Unconscious. Systemic. It can't stop what it can't see."

"And the feedback channels would give it sight." Crane stood. The movement was deliberate—not urgent, not dramatic, the controlled rising of a man who'd arrived at a decision and whose body was following the mind's conclusion to its physical expression. "Mr. Kane, my family has maintained the Crane Archive for three hundred years. I have personally ensured the preservation of every document, every schematic, every sealing specification that my ancestor recorded. I have done this because I was instructed to, and because the instruction carried the weight of a man who believed—genuinely, not politically—that the conversation between the surface and the entity would be necessary again."

"Will you share it?"

"I will do more than share it. I want to understand it. Not from a distance. Not as a guardian of sealed records. I want to understand the feedback channel system and I want to help rebuild it." He held Silas's gaze. Crane's eyes were gray—pale, steady, the eyes of a man who'd spent his life occupying the complicated position of power held with conscience, authority exercised with doubt. "I am Circle, Mr. Kane. I will not pretend otherwise. I sit at the table that ordered the things you fight against. I have endorsed policies that your coalition exists to oppose. But I am also the thirteenth Crane to guard those doors, and I did not spend thirty-one years maintaining an archive to hand it to someone and walk away. If the conversation is happening, I intend to be in the room."

Vivian spoke. "Lord Crane. If you are proposing to join an operational initiative involving exposure to the entity's resonance frequency, I am obligated to inform you that such exposure carries cardiovascular risks that are—"

"Dr. Reese, I have no intention of standing at the entity's door. My cardiovascular system is sixty-three years old and I treat it with considerably more caution than your husband treats his." The glance he gave Silas was brief, pointed, and edged with the particular humor of a man who'd read the medical situation and found in it both concern and commentary. "I am proposing to share my archive, my resources, and my understanding of the founding-era infrastructure with your coalition. I am also proposing that when you rebuild the feedback channels—because you will, because the crisis demands it—I am part of the team that designs the reconstruction."

He walked to the sitting room door. Opened it. The corridor beyond led to a staircase that descended—not to a basement in the conventional sense but to a space below the building that Silas's Null registered as dense with organized magical energy, the convergence point that Ghost had identified, the ley line intersection that powered the estate's wards and connected the Crane household to the entity's network.

"Come with me," Crane said.

---

The vault occupied the building's entire subterranean level—a space that had been excavated and warded and maintained for three centuries, the stone walls reinforced with the same crystalline structures that appeared in amplifier construction, the air cool and dry and humming with the low, constant vibration of the ley line convergence that passed through the bedrock beneath.

Shelves lined every wall. Not bookshelves—archive shelves. The kind of storage designed for documents that needed to survive centuries: acid-free containers, humidity-controlled enclosures, cataloging systems that had evolved from handwritten indices to printed labels to, in the most recent additions, digital tags.

The documents filled the room. Maps of the global ley line system, drawn and redrawn over three hundred years as the Crane family's understanding of the network evolved. Resonance diagrams showing the founding-era amplifier specifications—the original bidirectional design, the feedback channel architecture, the sealing procedures that Aldric Crane the First had developed and documented and sealed with his own magical signature. Correspondence between the Cranes and other guardians—the Sami practitioners of the Northern Network, who appeared in the archive as early as 1724, two years before the sealing, their relationship with the Crane family a parallel thread of guardianship that had persisted across centuries.

Silas walked the shelves. The scope of the archive was staggering—not the quantity, though that was substantial, but the intentionality. Three hundred years of deliberate, systematic preservation. Thirteen generations of a family maintaining records they couldn't fully use, for a purpose they couldn't fully articulate, because a man three centuries dead had said the conversation would be needed again.

"Every founding-era amplifier site," Crane said, standing at the archive's center. "Twenty-five locations. Coordinates, geological surveys, resonance profiles, sealing specifications unique to each site. My ancestor personalized every seal—no two are identical, because no two amplifiers occupy identical positions in the ley line network. Unsealing them requires site-specific knowledge that exists only in this archive."

"And the procedure itself?"

"Documented. Tested in principle, never in practice. The sealing was designed to be reversible by an Archmage-level practitioner working with the specific resonance data for each site. The reversal requires physical presence—the practitioner must be at the amplifier location, must establish resonance with the sealed feedback channel, and must apply a counter-frequency that matches the original sealing pattern. My ancestor estimated the procedure at approximately four hours per site for a skilled practitioner."

"Four hours per site. Twenty-five sites."

"Which is why you'll need more than one practitioner. More than one team." Crane's gaze was level. "The Sami network covers seven Arctic sites. That leaves eighteen. I have contacts—practitioners within the Tower's structure who are sympathetic to reform. Not rebels. Not coalition members. People who believe the Tower can change from within. I can mobilize six to eight Archmage-level practitioners within a week."

"Tower mages. Working with the coalition."

"Tower mages working on a project that the Tower's founding principles support, even if the Tower's current administration does not. The feedback channels were part of the original design. Rebuilding them is restoration, not revolution. That distinction matters to the people I'd be asking to participate."

In the center of the archive, on a pedestal of the same crystalline material that composed the amplifier arrays, sat a sealed case. The case was old—wood and metal, the joinery hand-finished, the metalwork showing the marks of a craftsman who'd worked before machine tools existed. The sealing on the case was magical—a single ward, simple, elegant, bearing the signature of a casting style three centuries old.

Crane opened it.

Inside, on a bed of material that looked like silk but registered to Silas's Null as something more complex—a magical insulation, a frequency barrier designed to contain rather than block—sat a piece of stone.

It was small. The size of a fist. Dark granite, rough-hewn, the surface showing the same molecular restructuring that characterized the Scottish cave's passage walls. The stone was not cut from ordinary rock. It had been reshaped at the atomic level by a consciousness that worked in wavelengths, the crystalline structure reorganized into a geometry that resonated at a specific frequency.

7.83 hertz. The Schumann resonance. The entity's frequency. The stone vibrated with it—not visibly, not audibly, but perceptibly. Silas's Null registered the vibration as a small, warm, constant pulse. The heartbeat of the entity, captured in a fragment of its own architecture, maintained for three hundred years in a sealed case in a Belgravia basement.

"The First Telephone," Crane said. "My ancestor removed it from the Scottish site in 1722, during his visit. A fragment of the passage wall—the entity's own construction. It has been resonating at this frequency since the day it was placed in this case. Three hundred years. It has never stopped."

Silas reached for it. Stopped. Looked at Crane.

"May I?"

Crane nodded.

Silas picked up the stone.

It was warm. Not hot—warm. The temperature of a living thing, of skin, of the hand of a person you'd been sitting beside long enough for their body heat to become familiar. The stone hummed against his palm, the 7.83 hertz vibration entering through his skin and traveling his nervous system the way the entity's communication traveled the ley lines—not as sound but as presence. The stone carried a fragment of the entity's awareness, a splinter of a consciousness that had been separated from its source for three centuries and had not, in all that time, stopped broadcasting. Stop trying to be heard.

His Null didn't engage. The stone's output was too small, too gentle, too precisely calibrated to the frequency that his Null recognized as the entity's fundamental signal. The dampener didn't filter it. It accepted it. The way the body accepted the warmth of a hand that belonged to someone trusted.

"It's been waiting," Silas said. "Three hundred years in a box and it's been waiting."

"Yes." Crane's voice was different now. Not the aristocrat. Not the Circle member. The guardian. The thirteenth in a line of people who'd held a door shut and listened for the knock on the other side. "And now someone has come to answer."

Ghost stood at the archive's entrance. They had not entered the room. They stood at the threshold, their body in the corridor, their attention in the space where the stone's frequency met the entity's output through the ley line convergence beneath the building, the two signals touching across three hundred years of separation.

"Warm," Ghost said. The single word. The confirmation. The recognition of a quality they'd identified in the Scottish cave, in the passage walls, in the original signal that the Montauk copies had tried and failed to replicate.

The stone hummed in Silas's hand. The archive surrounded them—three hundred years of preparation for a moment that was arriving faster than anyone had planned and slower than anyone had hoped. Above them, London carried on. Below them, the entity's grief flowed through the ley lines, and somewhere in the frequency, muffled by sealed channels and three centuries of silence, the entity was still knocking.

Silas set the stone down. Looked at Crane. "Show me the unsealing procedures. All twenty-five sites. We start tonight."