The hub's cooling array activated at thirty-eight-point-one percent power reserves, fourteen hours ahead of Gao Jun's projection.
The projection had been wrong because the conduit line's energy output wasn't constant. The cascade, the network-wide recovery event that Lin Feng had triggered twelve days ago, operated in waves. Steady baseline output punctuated by periodic surges, the infrastructure's dormant systems coming online in clusters rather than individually, each cluster adding its contribution to the grid in a burst that settled into a new, slightly higher baseline. One of those surges hit at noon on day ten, pushing the hub's reserves from thirty-six-point-nine to thirty-eight-point-one in a single jump.
The cooling array didn't announce itself. No activation sequence, no status display, no diagnostic readout. The formation mechanisms embedded in the workshop's floor and walls simply began operating. A network of energy-channeling components drew heat from the ambient air and dissipated it through the hub's stone shell into the surrounding bedrock. The workshop's temperature dropped three degrees in twenty minutes. The stone walls went from room temperature to faintly cool. Lin Feng's routing sense registered the change as a reduction in background thermal noise, the formation-frequency static that heat generated in close proximity to infrastructure.
The effect on his consumed cluster was indirect but measurable. The three cross-connections carrying thermal waste from the cluster to his peripheral channels were dumping heat into an environment that was now actively cooling. The peripheral channels' temperature dropped. The thermal noise in his arms and hands decreased. The signal-to-noise ratio in his recovery channels improved.
His left thumb twitched.
Not the dead hang of the past eighteen hours. A twitch. Fragment twenty-six's motor signal reaching through the reduced thermal noise, finding the thumb's nerve cluster, pushing a command through the degraded pathway. The signal was weak. Intermittent. The thumb twitched again, then went still, then twitched a third time, a sputter like an engine trying to turn over in cold weather.
Lin Feng watched his own hand with the detached attention of a mechanic monitoring a diagnostic readout. The thumb twitched. Paused. Twitched. Each movement was fractionally stronger than the last, the thermal noise in the cross-connection continuing to drop as the cooling array drew heat from the workshop's air, the signal pathway clearing millimeter by millimeter.
On the sixth twitch, the thumb held. Not full extension, not a strong grip. A curl. Weak, trembling, the tendons visibly straining under a signal that was barely above the functional threshold. But the thumb moved on command. Lin Feng closed his left hand. Three fingers curled. Two hung slack. The grip was weaker than it had been before the thermal crisis, the thumb's signal degraded by the residual noise in the cross-connection.
But three was three. He'd lost the finger and gotten it back inside the same day-and-night cycle, and the loss-recovery sequence had taught him something that the research division's theoretical models probably didn't contain: the cross-connections weren't just unplanned pathways. They were thermal infrastructure. Cooling pipes that the Devourer's Path had built into his template during the consumption process. Not by accident, not by random chance, but because the consumed architecture generated heat and the architecture needed somewhere to put it. The cross-connections were there because they needed to be there. The consumption process had built cooling into the design.
The design. As if the Devourer's Path was designing anything. As if the consumption process had an architect.
The substrate-layer conversion continued. The five-pillar scan's passive monitoring updated every twelve seconds, and each update showed the integration buffer's conduit-class lattice structure at slightly higher match confidence. Seventy-one-point-three. Seventy-one-point-five. Seventy-one-point-eight. The numbers climbed at a rate that matched the self-modification's three-tenths of a percent per day, slow, patient, invisible to any perception that couldn't reach the substrate layer.
Something was designing his template. The question was whether the designer was the path itself, an automated process, a set of consumption protocols executing their programming without consciousness or intent, or something else.
---
"The mechanism's defense rating is administrative, not military," Gao Jun said. He'd been working the problem since morning, the analyst's overlay running structural analysis on the hub's entrance mechanism, cross-referencing the authorization gate's formation architecture with the estimated combat output of a fifth-stage practitioner. "But the hub's defense systems aren't limited to the mechanism."
Day ten. Afternoon. The workshop's amber lighting was bright with five pillars operational, the cooling array humming beneath the floor, the power reserves climbing toward thirty-nine percent. Lin Feng sat on the diagnostic platform with his legs crossed and his routing sense mapping the hub's architecture at the highest resolution his degraded perception could manage.
"What else does the hub have?"
"It's a maintenance depot. Maintenance depots service the network's physical infrastructure: conduit repairs, junction recalibration, formation mechanism replacement. The depot's tools include systems designed to work on infrastructure at distance. Projection arrays. Field generators. Formation-frequency emitters capable of reaching through walls and stone to interact with the conduit grid outside the installation." Gao Jun's overlay highlighted a section of the hub's architecture that Lin Feng's routing sense had cataloged but not examined. A formation mechanism cluster in the ceiling, above the entrance corridor. "The conduit maintenance array. Designed to project formation-frequency fields through the hub's walls for external infrastructure repair."
"A tool for fixing pipes."
"A tool that projects high-intensity formation energy through stone. The pre-Abandonment builders designed it to repair conduit lines without excavating. The projection array can reach through twenty meters of bedrock and deliver precisely targeted formation-frequency energy to a specific point in the infrastructure." The overlay rotated, showing the maintenance array's coverage zone. The cone of projection extended from the ceiling mechanism through the entrance corridor's walls and into the surrounding stone. The fissure above the hub fell within the coverage zone. "The projection wasn't designed as a weapon. The energy frequency is calibrated for infrastructure repair, resonant with conduit-class architecture, designed to reinforce rather than damage."
"But?"
"But formation-frequency energy projected at repair intensity through twenty meters of stone into a corridor occupied by human practitioners would interact with their templates. Not lethally. The frequency is wrong for direct template damage. The repair energy is resonant with infrastructure, not with human formation architecture. But the interaction would produce interference. Significant interference. The equivalent of standing inside a formation array that's generating output at a frequency your template can't process."
"Disorientation."
"Severe disorientation. Loss of formation control. Inability to channel energy through their templates for the duration of exposure. A fifth-stage practitioner inside the projection zone would retain physical capability; they could still walk, still swing a sword, still use their bodies. But their formation abilities would be suppressed." Gao Jun withdrew the overlay. "The array requires supervisor-class authorization to activate."
Lin Feng's routing sense found the maintenance array in the ceiling. The mechanism was dormant, power reserves insufficient for activation. The array's operational threshold sat at forty-two percent.
"Three to four days until it activates. If the sect's response team arrives in three to five—"
"The overlap is tight. The array might activate before they reach the mechanism, or after. The uncertainty is the problem." Gao Jun paced. Four steps to the wall, four steps back. The workshop was too small for the analyst's long-legged stride; the pacing was truncated, compressed, the physical expression of a brain that needed more room than the space provided. "But the array is defensive. Passive. It buys time. The real question is whether we need to buy time or whether we need to solve the problem."
"Solve the problem how?"
"The sect is coming because the Barrens are expanding. The cascade is pushing crystal growth westward into their territory. If the expansion could be redirected, slowed on the western front, channeled in a different direction, the sect's urgency decreases. Their farmland stops being consumed. The territorial threat diminishes."
"Can the cascade be redirected?"
"The cascade is a network-wide energy propagation event. Redirecting it would require administrative access to the network's energy distribution system, the same system that controls conduit allocation, hub power distribution, and infrastructure activation priorities." Gao Jun stopped pacing. "You have supervisor-class access to Hub Seven-West. The hub is a node in the distribution system. Through the hub's systems, you can influence the energy allocation in the local conduit grid. Not globally; you can't redirect the entire cascade. But you can adjust the distribution in the grid sectors adjacent to this hub."
"Reduce the energy flow to the western conduit lines. The crystal growth in the west slows because the energy feeding it decreases. The sect's boundary stabilizes."
"While increasing the energy flow to other sectors. The growth shifts direction. North, south, east, wherever the displaced energy goes, the crystal expands faster. The total expansion rate doesn't change. You're not stopping the cascade. You're steering it."
Lin Feng's routing sense reached into the hub's power distribution controls. The mechanisms were similar to the intake valve he'd adjusted on day four: flow regulators on the conduit connections, adjustable with supervisor-class authorization. Hub Seven-West sat at a junction in the local conduit grid. Five conduit lines connected to the hub. The eastern line fed its reserves. The northwestern line continued to downstream nodes. Three smaller distribution lines ran west, southwest, and south into the Barrens' expanding boundary.
The western distribution line was carrying twenty percent of the hub's throughput. That energy fed the conduit segments beneath the western Barrens, the same segments the scouts had detected this morning. The energy in those conduits was driving the crystal growth that was eating the Broken Sword Sect's farmland.
He could reduce the western line to five percent. Redirect the freed energy to the southern and northwestern lines. The western expansion would slow from two meters per day to less than half a meter. The sect's boundary would near-stabilize. The growth would shift south, where the terrain was uninhabited mountain, and northwest, where the next network nodes sat in deep wilderness.
"The redistribution creates a different anomaly pattern," Lin Feng said. "Phase 2 diagnostics will detect the change in energy allocation. A hub adjusting its distribution is—"
"Another flag. Another entry in the network's growing catalog of things that Hub Seven-West is doing that no hub should be doing." Gao Jun sat. The pacing was finished, the options mapped. "But the redistribution is a supervisor-class action using the hub's standard administrative tools. It's unusual, not unauthorized. The Phase 2 diagnostics will flag it for review during Phase 3's anomaly investigation, not for immediate response. That buys thirty-two days."
"Unless Phase 3 activates early because of accumulated anomalies."
"Unless Phase 3 activates early. Which we can't predict and can't prevent." The rod appeared in his hand. Spun once. Stopped. "The choices are: do nothing and the sect arrives with urgency. Redirect the cascade and the sect's urgency decreases but the network's anomaly list grows. Activate the maintenance array when it comes online and suppress the sect's formation abilities if they reach the mechanism. Each option has costs. None are clean."
They never were. Lin Feng had stopped expecting clean options somewhere around the point where the Devourer's Path had started converting his template's substrate into conduit architecture. Clean options belonged to people whose problems had solutions. His problems had trade-offs.
"Redirect the western flow. Reduce to five percent. Send the displaced energy south and northwest." He made the adjustment through the hub's distribution controls. The flow regulators responded to his supervisor-class credentials, the mechanisms shifting, the energy allocation changing, the western conduit line's throughput dropping from twenty percent to five. "The sect's boundary stabilizes. They lose urgency. Their response team still deploys, the scouts already reported active infrastructure, but the immediate territorial crisis is downgraded from emergency to investigation."
"An investigation is easier to manage than a military response."
"An investigation moves slower." Lin Feng checked the distribution. The southern and northwestern lines absorbed the redirected energy, their throughput increasing, the crystal growth in those sectors accelerating. South: uninhabited mountain. Northwest: deep Barrens, no human presence for fifty kilometers. The growth would proceed without threatening anyone. "How long until the redistribution effect is visible on the western boundary?"
Gao Jun calculated. "Crystal growth rate responds to energy input with a lag of approximately twelve to eighteen hours. The western boundary's expansion will slow noticeably by tomorrow morning. The sect's patrol teams will observe the deceleration. Whether they interpret the change as natural fluctuation or deliberate intervention depends on their understanding of formation infrastructure, which, based on the scouts' behavior today, is rudimentary."
"They'll think the dead zone stopped growing on its own."
"They'll report that the expansion rate decreased. Their leadership will decide what that means. If the sect master is receiving counsel from the old man, if the old man is still in contact, then the interpretation may be more informed." The rod spun. "We're making assumptions about the old man's involvement. The visit was a month ago. He may have delivered his warning and left. He may be on the other side of the continent."
"Or he may be in the conduit network listening to us adjust the energy distribution."
"Or that." Gao Jun's mouth pressed into its flat line. "We can't plan for an unknown actor with unknown capabilities. We plan for what we know: a minor sect with predictable response patterns, a research division with documented analytical methods, and a network operating on automated protocols. The old man is a variable we monitor, not a variable we solve."
---
Day eleven. The sixth pillar was seven percentage points away.
Lin Feng spent the morning in the diagnostic station's five-pillar scan, mapping the substrate-layer conversion with the patient attention of a man who had realized that the most important changes in his template were happening in a place he couldn't see and couldn't reach. The conversion was at seventy-two-point-one percent match confidence, the integration buffer's conduit-class lattice growing at its steady pace, the self-modification rate unchanged at three-tenths of a percent per day.
The five-pillar scan revealed additional details that the initial overnight data had missed. The substrate conversion wasn't limited to the integration buffer. The lattice structure was spreading. Thin tendrils of conduit-class architecture extending from the buffer's foundation into the substrate beneath adjacent components: the routing function, the data-layer perception system, the consumed node cluster itself. The tendrils were thin. Nascent. Early-stage growth that had barely begun. But the direction was clear.
The conversion wasn't going to stop at the integration buffer. Given time, weeks or months, the kind of timeline that the second Devourer's command-level progression implied, the conduit-class substrate would spread through his entire template's foundation. Every formation function he possessed would eventually sit on infrastructure-class architecture instead of human-class architecture.
The implications were beyond what Lin Feng could assess and beyond what Gao Jun's overlay could model. The research division's theoretical framework had no category for this. The diagnostic station's database classified it as anomalous because the station had been programmed by builders who apparently hadn't expected the conversion to happen, or who had expected it and hadn't updated the database's classification system to account for it.
Or who had classified it correctly. UNEXPECTED. The self-modification was unexpected even to the people who'd built the system that made it possible.
He shelved the analysis. The substrate conversion was proceeding at a rate he couldn't influence and producing changes he couldn't evaluate. Monitoring it consumed attention that his more immediate problems needed.
The more immediate problems: the Broken Sword Sect's response team was assembling. Gao Jun's morning surface trip had confirmed it. The analyst's network of trade contacts in the western settlements reported increased military activity at the sect's regional headquarters. Practitioners mobilizing. Equipment being distributed. The field report from yesterday's scouts had triggered the expected response.
But the response was measured, not frantic. The redistribution of energy flow had already produced visible effects. The western boundary's expansion rate had dropped from two meters per day to approximately sixty centimeters. The crystal ground was still advancing, but at a pace that reclassified the threat from "emergency" to "ongoing concern." The sect's response team was deploying for investigation, not assault.
"Twelve to fifteen practitioners," Gao Jun reported. "Led by their senior elder. Not the sect master; the sect master is remaining at headquarters, coordinating the overall response. The senior elder is fifth stage, estimated sixty-two to sixty-five fragments. The team includes formation specialists, combat practitioners, and what appears to be a dedicated surveyor, someone with analytical capabilities similar to my overlay, though less sophisticated."
"When do they arrive?"
"They departed this morning. Travel time from the sect headquarters to the Barrens' western boundary is two days on foot. Day thirteen." The rod tapped against his palm. "The redistribution bought us the right kind of response. Investigation instead of assault. But investigation means they'll be thorough. They'll find the conduit lines. They'll follow them. They'll reach the fissure."
"And the mechanism."
"And the mechanism. The question is what happens when their formation specialists examine the mechanism and their surveyor reads its authorization architecture." He paused. The overlay flickered, the processing spike of cross-referencing datasets. "The research division's team got an eighty percent handshake match. The Broken Sword Sect's capabilities are less sophisticated. Their surveyor will get fifty, maybe sixty percent. Not close enough to crack the mechanism. But close enough to understand what the mechanism is: a pre-Abandonment installation with active authorization protocols, which means active power, which means active infrastructure."
"Which means something valuable behind the door."
"Which means something valuable behind the door. Minor sects are territorial. The Broken Sword Sect will claim the installation. Set up camp. Post guards. When the research division returns with their refined handshake, they'll find a sect camp between them and the mechanism. Two groups, both wanting in, neither capable of opening the door."
Two groups fighting over a locked door. Behind which sat a boy with a dead arm and a template that was turning into plumbing.
Lin Feng's routing sense checked the hub's power reserves. Thirty-nine-point-eight percent. Climbing. The maintenance array's activation threshold was forty-two percent, roughly one more day. The sixth pillar's threshold at forty-five percent, two to three days. The correction protocol requiring sixty percent, still over a week.
He couldn't wait for the correction protocol. The sect would arrive before the station was ready. The maintenance array was the viable tool, a formation-frequency projection system that could suppress practitioners' abilities through twenty meters of stone. If the sect's investigation team descended into the fissure and reached the mechanism, the array could deny them the formation capability needed to analyze or assault the door.
But the array was a blunt instrument. Defensive. It could suppress practitioners in the corridor, but it couldn't operate selectively. Anyone in the projection zone would be affected, including Gao Jun if he needed to pass through. And the suppression was temporary. The array consumed power while active. Running it continuously would drain the hub's reserves, delaying every other system's activation timeline.
"The array isn't the answer," Lin Feng said. "It buys hours. We need days."
"What buys days?"
Lin Feng looked at the diagnostic station. Five pillars glowing. Four-pillar data showing his template's surface architecture. Five-pillar data showing the substrate beneath. The sixth pillar, dark, waiting for three more percentage points of power.
"The sixth pillar doesn't just complete the diagnostic station," he said. "What else does full six-pillar operation enable?"
Gao Jun's overlay searched the hub's operational documentation, the administrative data accessible through supervisor-class queries, the maintenance depot's capability index.
"Six-pillar operation brings the diagnostic station to full capacity. The correction protocol requires six pillars. But the station isn't the only system gated at forty-five percent." The overlay populated a list. "At forty-five percent power: full diagnostic station operation, emergency beacon system, and—" He stopped.
"And?"
"And the depot's external communication array. Hub Seven-West's long-range formation-frequency transmitter. Designed to send administrative communications to other hubs and to the network's central administrative system." The rod was completely still. "The communication array is a standard maintenance depot component. It allows hub personnel to report status, request support, and—"
"Send network commands."
"Send network commands within the scope of the operator's authorization level. Your supervisor-class access authorizes administrative commands to infrastructure in your registered sector. Hub Seven-West's sector includes the fissure, the surrounding conduit grid, and—" He checked the overlay. "—the Barrens' western boundary."
Lin Feng's routing sense reached for the communication array's mechanism. Found it dormant in the hub's upper level, above the workshop, separated by two meters of stone ceiling. The mechanism was cold. Dark. Waiting for forty-five percent.
"If the communication array activates before the sect arrives," Lin Feng said, "I can send a command through the conduit grid. A supervisor-class directive to the infrastructure in the sect's path."
"What kind of directive?"
"The conduit lines are active. The network's Phase 2 diagnostics confirmed them operational. Active conduit lines respond to supervisor-class commands: routing adjustments, energy allocation, diagnostic pings." He paused. The idea formed in his routing sense before his words caught up, the engineering logic constructing itself from the infrastructure's capabilities, the way a mechanic saw solutions in the tools available. "The conduit lines beneath the fissure corridor can be commanded to generate a localized formation-frequency field. Not a maintenance projection, something simpler. A boundary field. The same kind of energy barrier that the network uses to delineate sector boundaries and restrict unauthorized access to sensitive infrastructure."
"A fence."
"A formation-frequency barrier across the fissure corridor, above the mechanism's entrance. Conduit-powered, network-authorized, supervisor-class security. Any practitioner who reaches the barrier encounters a wall of formation energy that their template can't penetrate without network authorization." Lin Feng's routing sense mapped the conduit segments beneath the fissure. Three conduit lines intersected in the stone beneath the corridor, enough infrastructure to generate a barrier field that would cover the full width of the approach. "The sect's practitioners won't understand what it is. Their formation specialists will analyze it and find network-standard security architecture. Their surveyor will read infrastructure-class authorization gates. They'll know they can't force through it. The barrier draws power directly from the conduit grid, which draws from the cascade, which provides essentially unlimited energy."
"They'll know someone activated it. Someone with network authorization. They'll know someone is inside."
"They already suspect something is inside. Active infrastructure, active power, active authorization mechanisms. The barrier confirms what they already suspect and adds a clear message: this installation is occupied and defended by the network's own systems."
Gao Jun sat with the information. The rod turned slowly, one rotation, two. The analyst's face showed the expression Lin Feng had learned to read over eleven days of close proximity: the look of a man whose training said one thing and whose instincts said something slightly different.
"The barrier is visible," Gao Jun said. "The formation energy will be detectable from the surface. Not just by the sect's investigation team, by anyone with formation-frequency perception within a kilometer. The research division's next team. Passing harvesters. The network's own Phase 2 diagnostics."
"Another flag."
"Another flag. The largest flag yet. Supervisor-class barrier activation in an unoccupied sector is a major administrative event. Phase 2 diagnostics will log it. Phase 3 anomaly investigation will prioritize it." He set the rod down. The decision-making gesture. "You're trading long-term concealment for short-term defense."
"Long-term concealment was already compromised. The intake adjustment. The energy redistribution. The deferral responses. Phase 3 is going to find Hub Seven-West regardless. The question is whether we survive until Phase 3 in a position to deal with it, or whether the sect breaks through the mechanism and finds us before the diagnostic station finishes its work."
The workshop was quiet. Five pillars humming. The cooling array maintaining its steady thermal regulation. The conduit network pulsing beneath the floor with the cascade's energy, the Phase 2 queries cycling, the infrastructure slowly waking.
"The communication array activates at forty-five percent," Gao Jun said. "Two to three days. The sect arrives in two days. The timing—"
"Is the same kind of timing everything on this path has. Close enough to matter. Tight enough to hurt." Lin Feng flexed his left hand. Three fingers gripped. Two hung dead. The thumb's signal was fragile, the cross-connection's thermal noise reduced but not eliminated, fragment twenty-six pushing commands through a channel that wavered between functional and marginal. "If the array activates before the sect reaches the fissure, we deploy the barrier. If it doesn't—"
"If it doesn't, we have the maintenance array at forty-two percent. Formation suppression in the approach corridor. Eight to twelve hours of delay while we wait for the communication array to catch up."
Layered defense. Multiple systems. Each one gated by power thresholds that the cascade was climbing toward at a rate that Lin Feng couldn't accelerate without creating more anomalies that the network would eventually investigate. The math of survival, always tight, always close, always dependent on systems he didn't fully control reaching readiness at times he couldn't precisely predict.
This was what the path demanded. Not power. Patience. And the willingness to make imperfect decisions with incomplete information, knowing that every choice created a new problem that would need its own imperfect solution.
Gao Jun's stick tapped against the workbench. Twice.
"I need to be on the surface when the sect arrives," he said. "I'm the research division's field analyst for this sector. If the Broken Sword Sect's investigation team encounters a known division representative in the field, it changes their behavior. They defer to institutional authority. The research division's reputation, earned through three centuries of Barrens expertise, carries weight with minor sects. I can delay them. Redirect their approach. Buy hours that the power reserves need."
"You'll reveal your presence. The research division will know their field analyst was at the fissure during the investigation."
"The research division already knows I'm in the field. My last status report placed me in the western Barrens conducting routine survey work. A field analyst present at a site during a sect investigation is normal, expected, even. The division will want their person on site." He picked up the rod. Held it like a compass needle, pointing toward a direction he'd already chosen. "I can't stop the sect from reaching the fissure. I can control how they approach it. A research division representative requesting cooperation is different from an empty corridor with a locked door."
Lin Feng looked at the analyst. The thick body, the flat expression, the overlay running continuous probability assessments behind eyes that showed nothing but professional calculation. Eleven days of shared space. The man who had found the deferral option. The man who had guided the thermal fix. The man who had recognized that the Devourer's Path required cooperation before Lin Feng had been willing to admit it.
Gao Jun was offering to stand between Lin Feng and a sect investigation team with nothing but institutional authority and a crystal blade, because the alternative was letting the sect reach the mechanism without interference.
"Go," Lin Feng said.
Gao Jun nodded. Stowed the rod. Checked his pack. The movement was practiced, field-ready, the routine of a man who'd been walking into dangerous territory for four years.
He paused at the workshop's exit corridor.
"The sixth pillar," he said. "When it activates. Run the correction protocol immediately. Don't wait for sixty percent. The station can run at reduced capacity with six pillars at forty-five percent. The correction will be slower. Less thorough. It won't reach eighty percent efficiency. But it will close the backdoor."
"The station's documentation says sixty percent for full correction."
"Full correction. You don't need full correction. You need the backdoor closed before the network sends a probe through it. Close the backdoor. Optimize later. Survive first." He turned to the corridor. Stopped again. "The substrate conversion."
"What about it?"
"If the Devourer's Path is converting your template's foundation into infrastructure-class architecture, and if that conversion is what created the old man's infrastructure-signature template, then the conversion is part of the path's design. Intended. The builders knew it would happen." His thick fingers adjusted the pack's strap. "The builders also built the diagnostic stations to flag it as unexpected. Which means they knew it would happen and were still surprised when it did." His boots echoed in the corridor. "Think about why."
Then he was gone. The rope creaked. Boots on stone, then on crystal, then silence.
Lin Feng sat alone in the five-pillar glow of a maintenance depot that was becoming, incrementally, the most important room in the Barrens. The power reserves climbed. The substrate converted. The cascade pulsed through the conduit network, carrying energy and data and possibly the awareness of a man who had walked this path ten thousand years ago and become something that gate guards couldn't classify and diagnostic stations couldn't explain.
Two days until the sect arrived. Two to three days until the communication array gave him the tools to respond.
He closed his eyes and listened to the network hum. Somewhere in the data-layer traffic, in the Phase 2 queries, in the steady pulse of infrastructure waking after its long sleep, he caught a rhythm that didn't match the twelve-minute diagnostic cycle.
