Chapter 20 Forty-One Hidden Rooms
"Show me the map," Renne said.
Caius pulled the Seam Read data into a form he could share, sketching the zone locations into Imra's paper with a borrowed piece of charcoal she produced from her pack without being asked. The map took shape in rough marks, forty-seven points across a rough outline of the Surface Tier's geography, six of them circled, the rest marked with a different symbol.
Renne studied it with her arms crossed and her jaw tight. Imra studied it differently, head slightly tilted, running something through her head that wasn't visible on her face but was clearly running.
"Clustering," Imra said after a moment.
"What?" Renne said.
"The hidden zones." She pointed at three groups on the map without touching the paper. "They cluster. Not randomly distributed across the tier. Grouped in three areas with gaps between them." She looked at Caius. "That's not natural accumulation. The error handler quarantines data wherever the System errors originate. If these zones were generated by the handler, they'd be scattered." She paused. "These were placed."
Caius looked at the clusters, she was right. He had been looking at the individual points and she had seen the pattern in the whole.
"Placed and then hidden," he said.
"By someone who knew your early concealment code," she said. "In locations they chose specifically." She looked at him. "Which means there's a logic to the placement. A reason these three areas and not others."
"We can work out the reason later. Right now we need to decide which ones we can reach without getting killed." Renne said.
Imra looked at her. "I have eleven days of System patrol data."
"Good, use it."
Imra pulled out a second piece of paper. Caius had not seen her take it from her pack. It was covered in a notation system that was partly standard and partly something she had developed herself, a hybrid shorthand that compressed a lot of information into small marks. She laid it beside the map.
"The Purity Nodes run patrol circuits," she said. "I've been timing them since day four. The circuits aren't random. They have preferred routes." She traced three lines across the map from memory, not needing to look at her notes to know where they went. "These areas are covered every forty minutes, these areas every two hours, these areas only during the System's active processing peaks."
Renne leaned over the map. "You've been doing this for eleven days."
"I didn't have anything else to do," Imra said. Not defensive, Just accurate.
"And you didn't share this with anyone in the quarter?"
"Nobody asked." She paused. "Also I didn't know what it was for yet."
Renne looked at Caius. Her expression said: I was wrong about her and I am acknowledging that without saying it out loud.
He looked at the two documents side by side. His zone map and her patrol data. Together they told a story that neither told alone.
"These five," he said. He marked them. Three in the nearest cluster, two in the middle one. "The patrol gaps align with their locations. We can move through the windows without triggering a sweep."
"Forty-eight hours?" Renne said.
"If we're efficient. Two today, two tomorrow, one the following morning before dawn."
She nodded. Looking at the map with the focused assessment of someone planning a route through hostile territory, which was exactly what this was. "Extraction paths?"
"I'll run Seam Read as we move. Real-time. I can see the zones before we enter them and map the safest angles."
"Your integrity?"
He checked. "Eighty-nine percent. The Seam Read during the window cost me two percent. I have room."
She nodded again, then she looked at Imra.
Imra looked back at her. Something passed between them, not warmth exactly. The specific acknowledgment of two people who had decided to occupy the same side of a problem.
"You stay out of the zones themselves," Renne said. "You're Level 3."
"I know," Imra said.
"You track the patrol windows from outside. Signal us if a circuit runs early."
"How do I signal you if you're inside a zone and I can't see you?"
Renne thought for a second. She reached into her pack and produced a small smooth stone. She held it out. "Drop it in front of the zone entrance. The ground vibration inside the zone registers differently from outside traffic. He'll feel it."
Imra took the stone and looked at it. Then at Renne. "You've done this before."
"I've improvised under pressure before," Renne said. "It's the same skill."
Imra put the stone in her pocket, she looked back at the map. "The first zone on your list. The nearest one." She pointed. "The patrol gap opens in approximately twenty-two minutes. Closes in thirty-seven."
"Fifteen minute window," Caius said. "How far is the zone from here?"
"Eight minutes on foot," Renne said. She had already calculated it.
"Then we move in six," he said.
He looked at the map. At the five zones they had identified, the ones reachable without triggering a sweep. He thought about what each one might contain. More fragments, more power, more pieces of the Nullwalker that would push the class toward something functional enough to actually threaten the Root's timeline.
He reached out with the Seam Read, not at full range this time. Just far enough to get a closer read on the first zone. Close range showed more detail than the maximum range scan, the compressed data becoming more readable as he narrowed his focus. He looked at the zone and went still.
"What?" Renne said. She had learned to read his silences.
"There's something inside it," he said.
"Something." Her hand moved to her blade. "What kind of something?"
He read it again, carefully. The Seam Read was showing him a signature inside the corrupted zone that didn't match any category he had encountered so far. Not a monster, a corrupted entity or a data fragment.
"A player," he said.
The silence that followed had a specific quality. The kind that comes when a fact arrives that everyone in the room knows cannot be right and cannot be ignored.
"Players can't survive inside corrupted zones." Imran muttered.
"No," Cauis said. "They can't."
"So there's no player inside that zone," she said. "By definition."
"By definition," he said. "And yet."
Renne looked at the direction of the zone. "Could it be a misread? The Seam Read picking up residual player data? Someone who went in and didn't come out?"
"Residual data doesn't have a timestamp." He kept his eyes on the signature. "This does." He paused. "And residual data decays. This is clean. Current and active."
"Active," Renne said. "As in."
"As in whatever is inside that zone is still running," he said. "Still present, registered in the System's base language as a player." He paused. "With a timestamp showing continuous presence inside a space where continuous presence should be impossible." He looked up at her. "For sixty-three years."
Imra sat down on the wall beside him. Not from weakness. From the specific need to be lower when information arrives that is large enough to change the shape of things.
Renne stared at the direction of the zone. "Sixty-three years inside a corrupted zone."
"Yes."
"And still alive."
"Still registering as alive," he said. "Which in this world I'm learning is not always the same thing."
She looked at him. "We're going in."
"Yes."
"Even though someone has been in there for sixty-three years and we don't know what that does to a person."
"Yes."
She looked at the zone's direction. At the fifteen minute window and at the six minutes before they needed to move.
"Alright." She looked at Imra. "Change of plan, you stay here. We don't know what we're walking into."
Imra opened her mouth.
"I'm not asking," Renne said. Not unkind, final.
Imra closed her mouth. She looked at the stone in her pocket and at Caius.
"Come back," she said. Simple and direct.
"That's the plan," he said.
He stood up, looked at the zone's location one more time through the Seam Read, at the player signature sitting inside sixty-three years of corrupted space.
He had the specific feeling, the one that had been developing since the n
otation on the floor of the off-map structure, that whatever was inside that zone had been waiting for exactly as long as it took for him to arrive.