Chapter 26: Seraveth Makes a Unilateral Decision That Surprises Everyone, Including Seraveth

The ash column made eleven revolutions before anyone spoke.

Zero-Nine spread her infrastructure map across the floor of the north lecture hall—not paper, because she did not carry paper, but the schematic she had committed to visual memory in the data node and could reproduce with her left hand's subdermal stylus onto a flat surface, line by line, in three minutes and forty seconds. She had practiced this in Karrath Prime, drawing extraction routes on parking-bay concrete while the targets she was leaving behind were still breathing. The motion was automatic. She did not look at her hand. She watched the room instead.

Elian crouched at the map's edge and immediately began annotating with his pen, copying her node placements into the margin of his notebook with the focused efficiency of someone who needed to understand a thing by redrawing it in his own hand. Cass stood slightly behind and to his left—the position she had occupied, Zero-Nine had noticed, every time Elian was doing something that required concentration and might also be dangerous. Not hovering. Positioned. There was a difference and Cass was clearly aware of it.