Chapter 29 Counterattack
Renne caught him before he hit the floor properly.
Her hands found his arm and his shoulder and she took his weight without making it obvious she was taking it, the practiced ease of someone who had been keeping people on their feet in difficult circumstances for six years. She got him to the wall, held him there and looked at his face with the specific attention she gave to things she was assessing rather than feeling.
"Talk," she said.
"I'm here." His vision was still wrong at the edges, the Seam Read fragmented, skills flickering in and out of coherence. "I'm here."
"How bad?"
"Seventy-one percent." He said the number flatly. "Eighteen gone in one hit."
She absorbed that without visible reaction. He watched her do the math the same way he was doing it. Two more hits like that and the System would have enough to run a full purge sequence. Three at most.
Imra appeared at the bottom of the ladder. She had come down fast from wherever she had been positioned upstairs. She looked at Caius against the wall, at the counter Renne had already told her about from the look on her face, and she moved immediately to her papers. Not panicking, working.
"The node hit you through the Seam Read connection," she said. It wasn't a question. She was building the model out loud.
"Yes," Caius said. "I touched its architecture and it tracked the contact back to me."
"Like a return signal." She spread her maintenance cycle data on the floor and crouched over it. "The Purity Nodes have a confirmation loop. A reset cycle, eleven minutes between active verification pulses." She looked up. "If the network node uses similar architecture…"
"It might have a reset cycle too," Caius said.
"The hit you just took was a pulse. One strike. If it follows the same pattern…" She looked at her data. "Eleven minutes before it can fire again."
"You don't know that." Padrin said from the corner
"No," Imra said. "But the design philosophy Caius described. The node thinks like him. He built the Purity Nodes with an eleven minute reset to prevent server overload from sustained purge activity." She looked at Caius. "Would you have built the network node the same way?"
He looked at her. At the question that was also an answer. "Yes," he said. "I would have."
"Then we have eleven minutes," she said.
Renne looked at the room. At Duveth still standing at the terminal, at Padrin in the corner, at Imra on the floor with her papers, at Caius against the wall. She made a decision in the space of one breath.
"Glitch energy," she said to Caius. "Everything in this room. Anything you can absorb. Do it now."
He pushed off the wall. The error handler room was small and its glitch concentration was low, the handler catching and processing errors before they could accumulate significantly. But low was not zero. He moved through the space with his hands out and his awareness pushed into the environment, finding the micro-errors that existed in every rendered space, the small corruptions that the handler's cycle had not yet reached.
He found three in the walls. Two in the floor. One in the terminal's frame where the real-world hardware met the world's render system and the junction produced a permanent low-level conflict.
He absorbed all of them. It burned. Glitch absorption at this intensity and this speed was not clean, the energy arriving faster than his architecture could process it smoothly, each absorption leaving a residue of discomfort that built on the previous one. By the sixth he was breathing through his teeth.
"Keep going," Renne said. She wasn't watching him, she was watching the floor. The space between them and the node below.
He pushed the Seam Read outward through the null space walls, careful, shallow, not touching the node, just reading the adjacent architecture for any glitch concentrations he had not found yet. Two more in the passage outside the room's boundary. He pushed Null Step through the wall, absorbed them through the barrier and came back.
The integrity counter updated. 79%.
He stopped, stood with his hands at his sides and let his architecture settle. The flickering in the Nullwalker's skills smoothed out gradually, the class stabilizing around the restored energy. Not good, not comfortable and functional.
"Seventy-nine," Renne said. She had been watching the counter even while watching the floor.
"Yes."
"Two hits from where you were before. Now closer to three." She looked at him. "The eleven minutes."
"About four left," Imra said without looking up from her data.
The room settled into the specific quiet of people who were in a bad situation and had just finished the immediate part of managing it and were now facing the larger part.
"What do we do when the eleven minutes are up and it fires again?" Padrin said.
"Move," Renne said. "Get Caius out of range before the pulse fires."
"What's the range?" Padrin asked.
Nobody answered that because nobody knew. Duveth spoke from the terminal. He had not moved from it since Caius was hit. "The handler's process noise. The camouflage the node uses." He looked at Caius. "If it can hit you through a Seam Read contact, it can probably find you anywhere in this building. The handler's noise covers the whole structure."
"So moving doesn't help," Padrin said.
"Moving out of the building might," Imra said. She looked at her paper. "Three minutes."
Caius looked at the floor. At the stone, at the null space. At the thing below it that had hit him once and stopped, demonstrating capability, not finishing the job. Padrin had been right about that. It needed him alive. It needed him moving toward the Root, building power, following the path.
It had hit him to tell him something. That it knew. That reading its architecture and thinking he recognized the mind behind it was not an advantage he had taken without cost.
He looked at the floor for a long moment. "I need to go into the node." Cauis muttered.
Renne turned. "No."
"Not touch it from outside. Go in." He looked at her. "Through the floor, null Step into the node's layer."
"No," she said again. Not louder. More certain. "Absolutely not."
"It just hit you through a surface contact," Padrin said from the corner. His voice was flat and practical. "Going inside it is not a plan. It's a way to die faster."
Duveth said nothing. Caius looked at him, at the silence that Duveth wore when he was holding something back. The silence was worse than either of the other two responses because it meant Duveth had thought of the same thing and couldn't find a reason against it.
"Two minutes," Imra said quietly.
Caius looked at all of them.
"The Architect has been in my head since I arrived," he said. "Every move I've made, they've known about. Every fragment I found, they placed. Every skill I've built, they designed the path to." He looked at Renne. "The only advantage I have ever had in this world is knowing things they don't expect me to know." He paused. "The log file, the notation, the error handler. Things I found that weren't on the path." He looked at the floor. "They do not expect me to walk into their house."
Renne looked at him with the expression she wore when she had run the calculation and hated the answer. "You have seventy-nine percent integrity. The node just proved it can hit you from below through a surface contact. Going through the floor with Null Step puts you inside the thing that just attacked you."
"Yes."
"It will hit you again."
"Probably."
"And at seventy-nine percent, two more hits”
"I know the math," he said.
"Then explain to me," she said, very quietly, "what going in gets you that justifies the math."
He looked at her. "Information," he said. "The Architect thinks like me, which means they have the same weaknesses I have. The same blind spots. The same places where the architecture is thin." He paused. "I can read that from inside in ten seconds. I can't read it safely from outside at all." He paused again. "And whatever is in there is information they do not know I have."
"One minute," Imra said.
Renne looked at him for a long moment. At his face, at the counter, at the floor. She stepped aside. Not agreement or approval. The specific movement of someone who had made every argument available and was now getting out of the way because the decision had already been made and blocking it was just wasting the last sixty seconds.
Caius looked at Duveth. Duveth met his eyes, he said one thing.
"Come back."
Caius looked at the floor, at the node below, at the house he was about to walk into uninvited.
"Thirty seconds," Imra said.
He reached for Null Step.