The Sector 3 maps covered most of the table by six in the morning.
Rook had pulled three versions: the original city survey from before the Flora annexation, the corporate overlay from two years ago, and a partial schematic Genara had mapped during her first sprint. They didn't completely agree. He'd circled the gaps in red. Five of them.
Mod sat with the gaps and a cold cup of something that had been coffee. Naomi had her console open beside him, working through the dormant channel index. Aphrodite was cleaning a charge pack at the far end of the table, the way she cleaned things when she was working through something she wasn't ready to say out loud.
The drive's indicator pulsed on the shelf. Cache was asleep in the corner, legs twitching.
At seven forty-one, the indicator pulsed twice. Short and sharp.
"I went back in," Genara said. Her voice through Cache's secondary speaker was clipped, moving fast. "I know you said tomorrow."
Mod didn't say anything.
"The unit in Sector 3 storage. Flora's internal designation is EVA-01. It wasn't decommissioned. It was never used. The neural interface runs both directions at full depth, which means whoever designed it built it to house a consciousness. Not just augment one." A beat. "There's something else. The Sentinel Nexus is under Sector 3. Sub-level four. They built it there six years ago when they expanded the compound. There's a hardware override key in the Nexus core. Physical component. If you get it, it shuts down Sentinel's citywide override capability. Permanently."
Nobody moved.
"Two floors below where you're already going," she said. "Same building."
Rook uncapped the red marker. Added a sixth circle where the sub-level junction would be. Looked at it. Capped the marker.
"How certain are you on the location?" Naomi asked.
"I followed the Sentinel sweep pattern backward. It originates from a fixed point. That point is Sector 3, sub-level four."
"You were supposed to wait," Mod said.
"I know." She didn't apologize. "I can map the exact corridor from storage to the Nexus junction on my next sprint. There's a single security gap in the maintenance access between them. Twelve minutes during the overnight cycle."
"Stay out until we've planned the approach."
A pause. Then: "Understood."
The indicator went steady.
Rook looked at the map for a long moment. "Tonight," he said. "Not tomorrow. Once they know we found the building, that key moves."
Mod nodded. "Tonight."
Rook spread the map flat and started talking.
The entry point was the old storm-sewer line running under the northeast corner of the Sector 3 compound. Pre-Flora construction, city-owned pipe, no corporate sensors. They would come up through the maintenance hatch at the lower substation. From there: cut the relay junction to the secondary grid. That gave them a 90-second window before the backup generators kicked in and the motion sensors came back online. Four people, four roles. Rook on point, Mod on the override key, Naomi on Cache's monitoring equipment, Aphrodite covering egress. He walked them through it twice without notes.
He'd done this before. Not this building, not this mission. But he'd walked other approaches in other basements at other hours of the morning. He had a voice for it. Flat and specific. No unnecessary pauses. He pointed at the map when he needed to and kept his hands still when he didn't.
"Cache," Naomi said, not looking up from her console. "If the override triggers inside the facility."
Nobody needed her to finish the sentence.
"We've run the math," Mod said.
Naomi looked at him. "I ran the math in a clean environment with a degraded signal profile." She pulled up the readout. "80% holds when the Sentinel signal is below a certain threshold. Inside a building with a live Nexus two floors below us, that threshold goes out the window. I can't tell you 80% still means anything."
"So we don't have a number," Rook said.
"We have a number. We just don't know if it's the right number." She closed the readout. "I wanted to say it out loud. Now it's said."
Cache was sitting near the table's edge. His lines were amber. He was listening. He had been listening the whole time. He turned his head toward Naomi when she said the number. Then toward Mod when Mod answered. He didn't move from his spot.
Nobody had a better answer. Rook turned back to the map.
Aphrodite had gone quiet sometime in the middle of the second walkthrough. Not the cleaning-the-charge-pack quiet from earlier. That was a working quiet, things turning over, conclusions forming. This was different. She was still at the table. She was tracking the conversation. But she was somewhere else at the same time.
Rook noticed. He kept talking.
Mod noticed. He kept asking questions.
Neither of them said anything, because they both knew which building was on the map. The original survey was sitting right there. Villanova's name was on the permits, block letters in the lower margin: project architect, Sector 3 compound expansion, authorized signature. Aphrodite had seen it the moment Rook unrolled the paper. She hadn't pointed to it. She hadn't needed to.
She had her hands flat on the table. She wasn't looking at the map and she wasn't looking away from it either. She was just present in a way that took work. Rook had seen that look before, in other rooms, before other buildings. He had the good sense not to name it.
Mod refilled his cup from the cold pot. He asked Rook to walk through the egress sequence again. Rook did. Aphrodite listened. By the time they reached the timing on the secondary hatch, she had pulled the map toward her and was tracing the corridor with one finger, focused, back in it. Nobody marked the moment she returned. That was the only way to do it.
At some point during the second walkthrough, Cache stood up, walked to the shelf, and lay down beside the drive. Not on the floor near the shelf. Beside it, nose close to the indicator light, legs folded under him. His bioluminescent lines stayed amber. He didn't make a sound.
The indicator pulsed once. Cache's ear tilted, just barely.
The planning continued. Rook described the corridor layout from the maintenance hatch to storage. Naomi talked through the equipment loadout. Mod asked about the junction timing. Nobody mentioned what Cache was doing. They just routed the conversation around the fact of it, the way water goes around a stone, not because the stone wasn't there but because that was the only direction available.
They had been three hours into the approach plan when the console at Naomi's station flickered.
Not the drive indicator. The old relay terminal on the wall, the one they had written off as dead when they moved in. It blinked once. Then text appeared on the screen, breaking apart as it arrived:
MOD? IS ANYONE — SENTINEL — PURGE — HURRY —
C,ORE — OV,RIDE — SENT —
Then nothing. The terminal went dark.
Mod stood with his hands on the dead keyboard.
She had gone back in. A third time, while they were three feet from the drive planning routes. She had found a different output: the relay terminal. Something Sentinel's main sweep wouldn't be watching. She pushed through what she had before the signal broke.
He looked at the indicator light. It was pulsing its slow, steady rhythm.
Still there.
He exhaled.
Aphrodite had set down the charge pack she'd been cleaning at some point. She didn't look at the terminal or at Mod. She looked at the drive on the shelf.
"She went back in a third time," she said. "While we were sitting right here. Because she couldn't tell us she was going without us telling her not to."
Nobody argued with that. It was just the fact of it.
"The relay terminal was smart," Naomi said quietly. "Something off the main sweep. She calculated the gap."
Rook uncapped the red marker. Looked at the map for a long moment. Capped it.
Mod kept his eyes on the indicator light. She had risked everything she still was to push two broken lines through a dead terminal because they were planning and they needed to know. The signal had cost her something. He didn't know what. He knew it had cost her.
"We're going tonight," he said. To Cache, to the room, to the drive on the shelf.
Cache lifted his head from the corner. Lines amber. Ready.
Mod stood up and started packing.
The others moved to the far end of the space, pulling gear. He let them go. Then he crossed to the shelf and stood in front of the drive.
The indicator pulsed its slow, steady rhythm.
He didn't reach for the diagnostic cable. She was either compressed deep or she was saving power for whatever came next. He wasn't going to pull her back for this.
"We're taking the sewer line in," he said. "Northeast corner. Ninety-second window." He paused. "Rook says the hatch is tight. You'd have hated it."
The indicator kept its rhythm. It didn't change.
"Cache found the demo compound. Obviously." He picked up the drive and turned it once in his hand, the way you check a tool you're about to rely on. He set it back down. "We're bringing that too."
He stood there another moment. There wasn't anything else that needed to be said. Or there was, but it wasn't something he knew how to say, and it wouldn't have helped either of them. He was not good at the other kind of talking. She knew that. They had established it, somewhere between the third safe house and the fourth, in a conversation that had also not been about what it was about.
The indicator held its rhythm. Slow. Even.
He picked up his pack. He didn't look back at the drive. He went.
They regrouped at Maintenance Sector 3B an hour later, where Aphrodite had already set up a vantage point using salvaged cameras mounted on the transit pylons. She lowered her rifle when they came up through the service hatch, assessed Cache with the particular look she gave everything with a kill potential, and said nothing.
Naomi ran the diagnostic in under twenty minutes. The corporate override program was still embedded, but partially corrupted from the Sentinel battle. The structure had degraded. "I can't remove it without surgery we don't have tools for," she said, eyes on the readout. "But I can isolate the trigger conditions. Narrow the window for corporate activation by about 80%." She looked up. "It's not a cure. It's a firewall."
Mod put a hand on Cache's plating. The dog was still. "It'll do."
Rook laid out the Nexus approach on the sector's cracked tactical screen: come up through the old storm-sewer line at the lower substation, cause a targeted power disruption, and enter during the 90-second backup generator gap before the secondary sensors kicked in. Four people, precise timing, no margin for improvisation. They ran the sequence twice. Nobody used the word "ready" but by the third walkthrough, they all moved like they were.
Cache, during a break, nosed open an unmarked crate stored against the sector wall and sat back on his haunches with the quiet professional interest he brought to anything that might be explosive.
Inside: three kilos of high-grade demolition compound, wrapped in industrial foam.
Aphrodite looked at him for a long moment. "You knew that was there."
Cache's tail moved once, slowly.
"How did he—" Rook started.
"It doesn't matter," Mod said. He closed the crate and then opened it again. "We're bringing it."
In the gloom, they moved out. Aphrodite took point and held the route under the transit infrastructure the whole way, out of the drone grid's primary coverage. Corporate sensors swept forty meters up. They moved ten meters below that, through the dead corridors and maintenance passages that predated Flora's annexation of this district. Old city. Nobody had updated the maps down here.
The drive was in Mod's inner jacket pocket. He'd put it there before he picked up his pack, without deciding to. It pressed against his ribs as he walked, warm from being inside the building, the indicator light pulsing through the fabric in a rhythm he'd memorized without trying to.
Cache trotted at his heel. Bioluminescent lines dimmed to near-invisible, saving power. If you knew what to look for you could still find the amber: faint, steady, his own rhythm underneath.
The Sentinel Nexus was two floors below where they were going. Genara had traced its sweep pattern from inside the network, followed it backward to the source, and sent everything she had before the signal broke. Three times she'd gone back in. Three times she'd gotten out.
The hatch was an hour ahead. The 90-second window was after that.
Nobody spoke. The plan was in everyone's head now, not on paper, not on a screen. It lived where it needed to live. Rook moved behind Mod with the demo charge on his back and checked the strap without slowing down, the way he checked everything: once, deliberate, then let it go.