The transit cage groaned past the thirty-second sub-level marker, its magnetic rails singing a thin, nasal note that set Reyna Sol's teeth on edge. Below them, through grated flooring, the lower deck unfurled in ribbons of orange light and grey exhaust. Forty million souls moved through the visible strips like blood cells through a capillary, their forms reduced to scale by the altitude. Above, the upper deck was a closed ceiling of brushed alloy and climate-sealed plating, silent and remote as a cathedral roof.
Seren Okafor gripped the cage's handrail with both hands, leaning her torso against the safety webbing. Her breath came quick and shallow, the way it always did when she was excited, which was most of the time.
"You see that?" she said, pointing down. "Every one of those walkways feeds the Lattice strut network. The lower deck isn't just where people live. It is the ship."
Beside her, Kael Vashti stood with her arms folded loosely across her chest. Her dark hair was pinned back with the kind of efficiency that suggested she had done it without thinking. She wore the pale coveralls of a structural analyst, the cuffs ink-stained from a morning spent in the maintenance archives. She did not look down at the lower deck. She looked, instead, at the upper deck's sealed underside, where ventilation grilles vented a faint, sweet-smelling coolant into the cage.
"The Ascended," Kael said. "They breathe different air."
"They breathe purified, temperature-regulated, mineralized air," Seren corrected. She released the handrail just long enough to gesture upward, fingers splayed. "The Council chamber is up there. The stasis suites. The observation promenade that pretends to face a starfield. None of it is real, of course. It's all painted on the bulkhead, the projection maps cycling through a curated sky."
Reyna Sol listened from her position against the cage's far rail, the metal cold through her jacket. She had been assigned to this tour by Councilor Yven Marsh's office, ostensibly as a chaperone for the young auditor's first orientation ride. The truth, she suspected, was that Marsh wanted her eyes on Seren Okafor, the same way he had wanted eyes on Kael Vashti two years ago, when Kael's field reports had begun to name things the Council preferred unnamed.
She said nothing. The cage continued its descent.
"The middle deck is where we are now," Seren said, her voice brightening as though she were a guide on a pleasure tram. "The Enforcement caste. The administrative bureaucracy. The Lattice Authority, which includes me, officially, as of eleven days ago. We are the operational spine of the Vellum. We do the work that keeps the struts tensioned and the resonance harmonics stable. In theory."
Kael unfolded one arm and rested her hand on the rail beside her hip. The movement was unhurried.
"And in practice," Kael said.
Seren's smile flickered. "In practice, we file reports that someone else redacts. Then we file them again."
The cage passed a junction tower. Workers in high-vis coveralls watched them through the mesh, their faces expressionless, their hands gloved and still. One of them lifted a hand in a wave that Seren returned with both palms. Reyna Sol noticed that Kael did not wave back. She watched the workers with the kind of attention that catalogued details without inviting them.
"How many decks have you been down to?" Reyna Sol asked Seren. It was the first thing she had said since boarding.
Seren turned. Her eyes were wide-set, almost too large for her narrow face, and they held the particular alertness of someone who had been raised on a tier with thin air and thinner horizons.
"Three," Seren said. "Lower, middle, and upper. Academy tours. Family visits when I was small. Never further than thirty-two, though. The under-tiers past that are supposed to be service access only."
"Supposed to be," Kael repeated.
The cage shuddered. The magnetic rails emitted a brief, bright chime, and a wall panel near Seren's shoulder lit up with a route schematic. Three decks stacked vertically. The uppermost was rendered in pale blue, the middle in muted grey, the lower in a deep, almost phosphorescent orange. Between each layer, thin red lines pulsed: load-bearing conduits. The Lattice itself.
Seren touched the panel with two fingers, as though greeting it.
"The Lattice is what holds the Vellum together. Forty-two primary struts run the length of the hull, each one under continuous tension. The harmonic resonance has to stay within a tolerance of point-zero-zero-four percent, or the structure begins to sing off-key. When it sings off-key, the struts fatigue. When the struts fatigue..."
She trailed off. Kael finished the sentence.
"The struts fail. The deck plates buckle. Forty million people in the lower tier find out what an unfiltered hull breach sounds like."
Reyna Sol studied the schematic. The red lines pulsed slower now, each pulse a small, almost inaudible vibration she could feel through the rail beneath her palm. She had been raised on stories of the Vellum. Every child on every tier learned the shape of the ship the way children elsewhere learned the shape of a country. Three decks. Forty-two struts. One hundred and twelve thousand kilometers of lattice cabling. The numbers were repeated in schoolrooms and refectories until they became a kind of music, the way a prayer becomes music even when the worshiper no longer believes in the prayer.
She had stopped believing in the prayer some years ago.
"The rotation," Seren said, turning from the schematic, her voice dropping as though she were sharing a confidence. "You know about the rotation, yes? The labor pool on the lower deck. It is not a permanent population. The Council likes to call it a service population. They are rotated every eighteen months, ostensibly for health and morale. In practice..."
"In practice," Kael said, "no one who goes down comes back up with the same body they had going in. The air is recycled. The protein is synthesized. The work is repetitive. They rotate the bodies so the work does not produce visible damage to any single one of them."
Seren glanced at Reyna Sol. Something flickered behind the bright eyes, a calculation, a request for confirmation.
Reyna Sol said, "The rotation is policy."
Kael's mouth moved at one corner. Not quite a smile. "Policy."
A speaker embedded in the cage ceiling crackled. A recorded voice, female, neutral, asked all passengers to confirm their destination deck and badge credentials before the next transit stop. Seren produced her badge from a pocket and held it against the reader beside the door. The reader blinked green. Kael produced hers. Green. Reyna Sol held hers. Green.
"Lower deck, sub-level forty-one," Seren announced. "The strut maintenance access. I have authorization."
"You have authorization because the Council wanted you to see it," Kael said. "There is a difference."
Seren laughed. It was a small, startled sound. "Always the optimist, Vashti."
"I am not the optimist. I am the archivist. Optimists require hope. Archivists require only accuracy."
The cage began to slow. Through the grated floor, the lower deck's orange light thickened, brightening until it lost all nuance and became simply a wash of warmth. Reyna Sol could hear the deck now, the thrum of machinery, the distant percussion of footsteps in the millions, a sound like rainfall on a metal roof.
The cage door opened onto a platform that smelled of ozone and machine oil. The platform was narrow. A railing divided it from a long drop. Beyond the railing, the lower deck stretched away in tiered terraces, each one stacked above the next in a stepped formation that allowed the residents below to see, if they looked up, only the boots and belt buckles of the residents above.
Seren stepped out first. She inhaled deeply, as though the air here were a kind of perfume.
"Forty million," she said. "And none of them have ever seen a star that was not painted on a bulkhead."
Kael followed. She did not inhale. She watched the terraces with that same steady attention, the one that made her feel less like a person in a place and more like a person cataloguing a place for some future, necessary use.
Reyna Sol was the last to step off the cage. As the door sealed behind her, she caught a glimpse of the platform's far wall. A plaque. Brass. The Lattice Authority seal, with the words ORDER THROUGH HARMONY inscribed beneath it.
The platform trembled faintly under her boots. Somewhere far below, a strut groaned.
Seren turned to face them both, her badge clutched in one hand, her other hand gesturing broadly at the terraces below.
"Welcome to the foundation," she said. "Now I will show you what the Council does not want the auditors to see."
The strut groaned again. Kael's gaze flicked toward the sound, then back to Seren's face.
Reyna Sol said nothing. She reached into her jacket and rested her fingers against the small, leather-bound notebook she carried there. The pages inside were blank. She intended to keep them that way until she understood what she was seeing.
The terraces stretched below them, patient and orange, waiting to be read.
The terraces stretched below them, patient and orange, waiting to be read.
Kael Vashti stood very still. The hum of the Lattice was stronger here than anywhere else above the foundation. It reached her through the soles of her boots, through the bones of her ankles, up into the soft architecture of her inner ear. Forty million people lived in the grid she was supposed to believe in. She had spent nine months cataloguing the lie that held them.
"Kael." Seren's voice came from somewhere behind her. "Kael, we have to move. The assembly summons."
She had forgotten. The summons. The quarterly convocation on the middle deck, mandatory for all credentialed personnel. She had attended three before. Each time she had watched the Councilor and felt the weight of her own complicity settle deeper into her posture.
"Go ahead," Kael said. "I'll follow in a moment."
Seren hesitated. The girl, the prodigy, the youngest resonance-auditor in the Authority's history, studied her with that open, slightly wounded curiosity she had not yet learned to conceal.
"You always do this," Seren said. "You always wait until the last minute."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Kael almost smiled. "Because I like the sound my boots make when I am the only one walking."
Seren made a small, frustrated sound and disappeared down the throat of the access stair. Reyna Sol lingered. The woman with the blank notebook watched Kael the way Kael watched load-path readings, with that slow, unblinking attention that suggested she was building a model of something in her head.
"You should go," Kael said.
"So should you," Reyna Sol replied. Her voice was low, almost hoarse, as though she spoke rarely and only when speech was a form of precision.
They walked together. The middle deck announced itself before they reached it. The air thickened. The orange dimmed. The hum of the Lattice climbed the registers until it lived in the back teeth. Above them, painted onto the curved bulkhead in letters tall enough to be read from the lowest gallery, ran the Lattice motto. ORDER THROUGH HARMONY. The paint had been refreshed recently. Kael could smell it, the chemical sweetness of it, mingling with the ozone that bled off the suppression pylons mounted at every fifth column.
The assembly chamber was a cathedral inverted. Galleries rose in concentric rings from a central floor, each tier narrower than the one beneath it, each tier more crowded. Kael counted the Enforcement officers at the perimeter before she counted anything else. Sixteen. Standard deployment for a quarterly. She counted again. Twenty. Two extra in civilian cover, positioned at the exits marked with the small amber lights.
The suppressor fields were already active. She felt them settle against her skin the way one feels a change in weather, the way one feels a gaze from someone who does not intend to be seen. The fields did not silence. They dampened. They pressed the inner weather of dissent down into a band the monitoring systems could not register. Kael had learned, in the years since Sector 7, to recognize the sensation. A faint cotton-bath around the temples. A softening of the jaw muscles. The small, persistent temptation to agree.
She breathed through her mouth to keep the chemical edge of the fields off her tongue.
Councilor Yven Marsh ascended the central dais. He was a tall man, narrow-shouldered, with the kind of face that the cameras loved and the citizens learned to read as trustworthy. His hair was silver-white, cropped close. His uniform was the formal cut, the one with the high collar that came only out of the cabinet archive for convocations and naming ceremonies. The Lattice insignia at his throat caught the overhead lights and threw them back in pale blue splinters.
The chamber quieted by degrees. The fields tightened. Somewhere near the upper gallery, a child made a small sound and was hushed. Kael located Reyna Sol on the third tier, seated between Seren and a junior auditor whose name Kael did not know. The blank notebook remained in Reyna Sol's jacket. Her hands rested on her knees. She did not look at the Councilor. She looked at the Enforcement officers.
Marsh began.
"Citizens of the Lattice," he said. His voice reached them through the chamber's resonance grid, the same grid Seren had been trained to audit, and it arrived softened, deepened, made larger than the man who produced it. "We gather in the old way. We gather to remember what we are."
Kael let her gaze drift across the tiers. The faces were familiar in their composition. Engineers. Auditors. Maintenance staff in their second-best coveralls. A scattering of teachers from the academies. A row of medics. Two representatives from the deep-tier guilds who had been coached, she knew, in their posture and their applause.
"For nine generations," Marsh continued, "we have lived within the architecture of the Lattice. We have been warmed by its currents. We have been fed by its bounty. We have been carried, every one of us, by the same patient structure."
He paused. The pause was rehearsed. Kael had watched recordings of his convocations until she could time his silences to the heartbeat.
"And we have been afraid."
A murmur moved through the chamber. The suppressor fields caught it, thinned it, smoothed it into something that the monitoring system would register as ambient texture rather than dissent.
"We have been afraid of endings," Marsh said. "Of the small extinctions that visit every living thing. Of the moment when the breath leaves and the name is forgotten. We have feared the dark that gathers between one generation and the next."
He took a step forward on the dais. The lights above the central floor brightened by a calculated increment, throwing his shadow long behind him.
"This fear," he said, "was the inheritance of the old world. The world before the Lattice. The world that scattered itself across dead rock and called the scattering freedom."
Kael's jaw tightened. The cotton-bath pressed against her temples. She made herself unclench. She had learned, in the maintenance archives, that the body's resistance to suppression was partly a matter of deliberate relaxation.
"The Council has considered this fear," Marsh said. "The Council has consulted with the engineers and the resonance-auditors and the keepers of the naming rolls. And we have concluded that the fear is no longer necessary."
He raised one hand. The gesture was small, almost pastoral.
"The individual consciousness," he said, "is a beautiful thing. A brief, bright, irreplaceable thing. But it is a thing that ends. To resist its ending is the oldest vanity of our species."
Kael felt the chamber lean forward. Forty million people lived in the grid. Perhaps a hundred thousand of them were present in the cathedral. Every one of them had lost someone to the harvest. Every one of them had been promised that the loss was not loss. Every one of them had felt, in the small hours when the Lattice hummed low, the small cold doubt that the promise was a lie.
"The Lattice offers another way," Marsh said. "The neural harvest is not an ending. It is a translation. The patterns that constitute a self, the memories, the loves, the private architecture of a single mind, are not extinguished. They are woven into the larger structure. They become part of the continuity."
He paused again. The chamber exhaled.
"An individual mind, harvested at the appropriate threshold, becomes immortal in the only sense that matters. It becomes a strand in the Lattice. It contributes its small signal to the great signal. It is no longer alone. It is no longer fragile. It endures, so long as the grid endures."
The applause began on the lower tiers and climbed. Kael did not applaud. Reyna Sol did not applaud. Seren, beside her, hesitated, then brought her hands together twice, then stopped, her face caught between the trained reflex and something newer, something less rehearsed.
Marsh waited for the applause to finish. He waited with the patience of a man who understood that the silence after applause was more valuable than the applause itself.
"This is the sacred continuity," he said. "This is what we have built. This is what we have preserved. And this is what we will defend, against the fear that would unmake us, against the doubt that would dissolve the structure, against the small betrayals of those who would tell you that the harvest is a theft rather than a gift."
Kael's breath caught. The word betrayal sat in her mouth like a stone.
Marsh continued. "There are those among us who would weaken your faith. Who would whisper that the structure is failing. Who would tell you that the foundation is unsound. They are wrong. The foundation is sound. The Lattice endures. The Lattice has always endured."
He gestured outward. The lights dimmed on the central floor and rose on the upper galleries, illuminating the crowd for a moment, a single vast body bound together by the architecture above and below.
"Go home," Marsh said. "Return to your duties. Live within the continuity. And when your time comes, give yourselves to it gladly."
The convocation ended. The tiers began to empty in the prescribed order, lower first, upper last. The Enforcement officers moved along the perimeters, their hands on the suppression pylons at their belts, their eyes on the small movements of the crowd. A man on the fifth tier leaned too far toward the railing. An officer adjusted his field. The man straightened. The fields tightened.
Kael descended toward the exit marked by amber lights. She did not look at Marsh. She did not look at the Enforcement officers. She looked at the painted motto on the bulkhead, ORDER THROUGH HARMONY, and she read it, as she had learned to read all the Lattice's promises, as a sentence written by someone who had never trusted the harmony.
Reyna Sol appeared at her elbow. The blank notebook was no longer in her jacket. It was in her hand, open, the first page still empty.
"He said the foundation is sound," Reyna Sol murmured.
"Yes," Kael said.
"And the Enforcement officers have doubled their perimeter."
"Yes."
Reyna Sol wrote the first word on the first page of the notebook. Kael did not see what the word was. She saw only the small, deliberate motion of the pen, the slight pressure of the hand, the way the woman's shoulders settled, as though the act of writing had given her something the chamber had tried to take.
The amber-lit exit loomed ahead. The fields pressed close. Somewhere in the upper galleries, a child began to cry and was not hushed.
The amber-lit corridor swallowed the noise of the chamber the way a lung swallows air, all at once and with a small inward collapse. Reyna Sol kept her hand on the notebook, thumb pressed against the page so the ink would not smear against her sleeve. The corridor smelled of cooled metal and the faint sweet chemical tang of the suppression pylons, a smell she had learned in childhood to associate with the moments after a meal, when Enforcement officers passed the family tables and the air went thin.
Kael Vashti walked half a step ahead. Her posture had the careful looseness of a woman who had learned to move through supervised space without inviting supervision. Her hair was still pinned in the low twist, the recording bug no longer visible. Reyna Sol could not tell whether she had removed it or merely tucked it under.
"The boy," Kael said without turning her head. "He is not his father's ally. He is his father's instrument."
"I know."
"You will write that down."
"Yes."
They passed a pair of Enforcement officers stationed at the corridor's bend. The officers did not speak. One of them touched the pylon at his belt and the air around them shimmered faintly, a heat-haze that was not heat. Reyna Sol felt it against her skin, the way one feels a held breath from across a room. She did not look at the officer. She kept her eyes on the painted line down the center of the floor, the line that the lower tiers were required to walk and the upper tiers were permitted to cross.
At the corridor's end, a service door opened onto a maintenance stair. Kael touched Reyna Sol's elbow and steered her left, away from the public egress. The stair smelled of machine oil and old sweat. Somewhere below, a ventilation fan coughed and resumed its cough, a rhythm Reyna Sol recognized from the under-tier dormitories of her childhood.
"Why are we going this way?" Reyna Sol asked.
"Because the public egress has a reader at the threshold. Because anyone who attended the convocation will have their biometric logged on exit. Because I would prefer the next name you write not to be your own."
Kael descended. Reyna Sol followed. The notebook stayed pressed against her ribs, a small weight that grew heavier with each step.
They emerged in a service hall two levels below the convocation chamber. The hall was a long room of riveted plates and exposed conduit, lit by the dull orange of emergency strips. A single workstation occupied one corner, its screen dark. Kael crossed to it, keyed a sequence with the speed of long practice, and waited while the system took her credentials.
Reyna Sol stood at the hall's center and listened. The Lattice thrummed somewhere above them, felt through the plates of the floor, a continuous low note she had grown up inside and had only recently learned to hear as something other than weather. Beneath that note, a second sound, fainter, like a hand dragged along a stringed instrument's body. She had read Kael's reports. She knew what the second sound meant.
"Someone is being moved," Kael said. Her voice was level. Her fingers were not.
Reyna Sol came to stand behind her. On the workstation screen, a reassignment docket scrolled in the small dense print of the Authority's personnel registry. Kael had called it up by searching her own maintenance queue, the way one searches a public index by knowing where the private letters are kept.
"The oxygen-reclaimer shift ended forty minutes ago," Kael said. "Standard rotation would put him back on strut duty in Lower Fourteen. He has been on strut duty in Lower Fourteen for eleven years. He is a foreman there. His crew knows him. The lattice-cable splicers know him. He has been scheduled, every cycle, on the same rotation, because the rotation is built around his hands."
She scrolled. The screen blinked. A new entry appeared, timestamped nine minutes after the convocation had ended.
REASSIGNMENT, PRIORITY ALPHA. FERRIN, DOSS. MAINTENANCE FOREMAN, LOWER FOURTEEN STRUT CREW. NEW ASSIGNMENT: DEEP-HULL REPAIR ROTATION, SECTOR 9 SUBACCESS. DESTINATION FLAG: LATTICE-INTEGRATION PREP. REPORTING WINDOW: 0400, STANDARD CYCLE. APPROVED: OFFICE OF STRUCTURAL CONTINUITY.
Reyna Sol read it twice. The letters did not change. LATTICE-INTEGRATION PREP sat on the screen in the same shade of grey as the words around it, the same size, the same bureaucratic humility.
"What does it mean?" she asked, though she already knew, in the way one knows a thing one has not yet been permitted to say.
"It means they are taking him out of the lattice," Kael said. "It means they are preparing him for the procedure. The procedure removes a worker from the workforce and incorporates them into the structural material of the grid. It is called integration. It is described, in the training manuals I have catalogued in the archives, as a voluntary act of civic devotion. It has not been voluntary, in any case I have been able to verify, since the Lattice was rebuilt after the first collapse."
Reyna Sol's hand tightened on the notebook. The pen pressed against the page beneath her thumb. She could feel the small ridge of the word she had written at the top of the first page, the indent the ink had made in the paper below.
"The procedure requires forty-eight hours of prep," Kael said. "Caloric loading. Sedation calibration. The worker's organs are stabilized so the integration does not trigger an immediate systemic rejection. After integration, the worker is gone. The worker becomes load-bearing material. The worker's name is removed from the personnel registry. The worker's family receives a commendation. The commendation is framed. The commendation is hung in the family quarters. The family is moved, within six months, to upper-tier housing, where the air is cleaner and the lattice cables are thinner and no one asks the children what their father became."
She said this without inflection. She said it the way one recites a measurement, because it was a measurement, because she had measured it across two years of quietly catalogued data and she would not permit the data to become sentimental in her mouth.
"His reporting window is at 0400," Reyna Sol said.
"Yes."
"That is seven hours from now."
"Six, if the convocation ran long. It ran long."
Reyna Sol set the notebook down on the workstation's edge and opened it to the first page. The word she had written at the convocation's end was still there, the ink not yet dry. She read it: BEGINNING.
She wrote, beneath it, in her careful apprentice hand: FERRIN, DOSS. LOWER FOURTEEN. REASSIGNMENT 22:47 STANDARD CYCLE. LATTICE-INTEGRATION PREP. REPORTING 0400.
She did not write what the words meant. She wrote the words themselves. The notebook was not a place for what the words meant. The notebook was a place for the words to exist outside the bodies that had chosen them.
"What do we do?" Reyna Sol asked.
Kael was quiet for a moment. The orange emergency strip threw a faint band of light across her jaw. Her eyes stayed on the screen.
"I have a maintenance credential that will admit one person to the subaccess corridor on Sector 9," she said. "I have used it twice before. Once to retrieve a splicer who had been flagged for prep after he reported a cable anomaly the Council wanted suppressed. Once to retrieve a courier who had carried a message I should not have received. Both retrievals were successful. Both of those workers are no longer in the lattice. One of them is in a tier above the under-levels, under a different name, working in a water reclamation plant. The other is not in any tier I can locate."
She turned from the screen and looked at Reyna Sol directly.
"I cannot retrieve Doss Ferrin alone. The corridor has a reader at its midpoint that requires two credentials, registered to different departments, to pass without alerting the monitoring station. I am registered to structural analysis. I require a second credential registered to a public-facing function. A resonance-auditor credential, for instance, would suffice. A resonance-auditor credential, however, would be traceable. A resonance-auditor who used her credential to enter a subaccess corridor seven hours before her first audit would have questions to answer that no training has prepared her to answer."
Reyna Sol looked down at the notebook. BEGINNING. FERRIN, DOSS. The ink was dry now. She touched the page with her thumb and felt the slight texture of the dried line.
"You are asking me to go with you," she said.
"I am asking you to decide what the first word of that notebook is for."
Reyna Sol thought of the convocation chamber. She thought of Pell, his eyes on his father's hands. She thought of Marsh, his palm against the lectern, his voice on the word foundation. She thought of the painted motto on the bulkhead, ORDER THROUGH HARMONY, and of the way the motto had looked, from where she stood, like a sentence written across the mouth of a door.
She thought of the lower tiers. She thought of the lattice cables, thick and dark, and the men who climbed them, and the men who did not come down from them, and the framed commendations that hung in the family quarters where the children did not ask.
"Yes," she said.
Kael nodded once. She reached into the inner pocket of her jacket and produced a small grey tablet, no larger than a man's palm, its surface scuffed with use. She set it on the workstation beside the notebook.
"This is Doss's dead-drop tablet," she said. "He has been smuggling structural reports to me through this for two years. He does not know I have understood the pattern of his reports. He does not know I have been cataloguing them. He will know, in approximately seven hours, that I have understood. He will, I suspect, be unsurprised. He is a blunt man. Blunt men tend to be unsurprised when the things they have done in private are understood in public."
Reyna Sol looked at the tablet. She looked at the notebook. She looked at the screen, where the reassignment docket still glowed in its small dense print.
"What will he say," she asked, "when we find him?"
Kael's mouth moved, faintly, at one corner. It was not quite a smile. It was the place a smile would have been, in a woman who had not permitted herself one in some time.
"He will say, 'About time,'" she said. "And then he will say, 'Are you bringing the girl.' And I will say yes. And he will say, 'Good. The girl can carry the splicer kit.' And then he will climb down off whatever strut he is sitting on, and we will go."
Reyna Sol closed the notebook. She did not close it on the word BEGINNING. She closed it on the word FERRIN, so that when she opened it again, in the subaccess corridor, in the orange light, with the credential at her belt and the pen in her hand, the first thing she would see would be the name of the man she had come to help.
Kael took the dead-drop tablet and slipped it back into her jacket. She took the maintenance credential from her other pocket and held it out to Reyna Sol, who took it, and felt its weight, which was nothing, and understood that its weight was not the point.
They went toward the door that led down. The Lattice thrummed above them. Beneath the thrum, the second sound continued, the sound of a string being drawn slowly across a body that could not bear the string. Reyna Sol wrote nothing more. She kept her hand on the credential at her belt and walked beside Kael Vashti into the lower dark, where a blunt man waited on a strut, and the notebook waited in her jacket, and the word BEGINNING waited at the top of the first page, patient as a held breath, ready to become what came after.